Vaccines
This article reports that Moderna got really good results with a clinical trial of a booster with half COVID Classic-based plus Omicron-based vax. Moderna says they think it will be available in late summer/fall.
According to this tweet, it is better to get vaccines in the morning than in the afternoon.
This paper is yet another which says that nasal vaccines are more effective at preventing infection than intramuscular vaccines (in mice).
Long COVID
This preprint from Austria and Italy says that they found different Long COVID subgroups, and found a cohort of young, female, comorbidity-free Long COVID patients who had f’ed up smell/taste but did not have some of the other more devastating physical effects like fatigue and muscle pain.
This paper from France says that they found 19 kids from 12 hospitals between January 1, 2020, and July, 1, 2021 with neurological diseases post-COVID. They found an antibody co-trigger in 4 kids. All of them were treated successfully.
Treatments
This preprint from Denmark reports that they did an experiment to see if COVID-19 would spontaneously develop resistance to Paxlovid in the lab. The bad news: it did. The good news is that remdesivir was quite effective against it. They think that remdesivir plus Paxlovid is a good combo.
This preprint from Belgium and California also found that COVID-19 developed resistance to Paxlovid in the lab.
Both teams did simulations in addition to the bench work.
This paper found that patients with a positive COVID-19 test who were given Evusheld injections pretty quickly had about half of the chance of severe infection or dying as the regular population.
Variants
This large study from Southern California found that Omicron was legit milder than Delta. The likelihood of various outcomes for Omicron compared to Delta (after a positive PCR test) was:
| everyone | unvaxed | |
| any hospital admission | 59% | 40% |
| symptomatic hospital admission | 59% | 40% |
| intensive care unit admission | 50% | 34% |
| mechanical ventilation | 36% | 24% |
| death | 21% | 14% |
I can imagine that this might actually understate how much milder Omicron was than Delta because the USA had already started to use rapid tests by the time Omicron showed up, but they weren’t around for Delta. Mild cases might have been self-diagnosed with rapid tests instead of with PCR tests, and so some mild cases which did not make it to the hospital would not have been counted.
This paper says that BA.4 and BA.5 are more immune-evasive than BA.1, and that BA.1 infection doesn’t actually help you that much against BA.4/5. (Multiple sources say that BA.4/5 is to be more closely related to BA.2 than to BA.1.)
Recommended Reading
This blog post talks about why non-COVID upper respiratory infections (“colds” and flu) are happening now, when they are usually winter infections.