I am travelling and yesterday my ISP had some problem, so this week’s posts are late and will also be light.
Vaccines
This article reports that Medicago, the only manufacturer of COVID-19 vaxes in Canada, is shutting down. 😞 This article says that the governments of Quebec and Canada are trying to help find a buyer.
This paper from the US says that, while the death rate for doctors is always lower than for the general population, there were excess deaths for doctors early in the pandemic (although much lower than the general US level). There stopped being a significantly significant number of excess deaths after April 2021 — which I take as a sign that almost all doctors get vaccinated and that vaccines work.
This paper from USA says that people were about 2.3 times as likely to get a vaccine in April 2021 if they knew someone who got sick or died from COVID-19.
Consequences
This paper from Taiwan found that Canadian men lost ~6.4 per 1000 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and Canadian women lost ~5.3 DALYs per 1000. It also estimated that Canada’s GDP took a COVID-19 hit of about 0.5% of the GDP in 2019.
Long COVID
This paper from USA says that people who had more healthy lifestyle habits were less likely to get Long COVID. The healthy lifestyle habits which they counted were:
- Body mass index betwee 18.5 and 24.9;
- never smoking;
- at least 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity;
- 5 to 15 g/day of alcohol;
- high quality diet;
- 7 to 9 hours of sleep/day.
People who had five or six healthy factors had half the risk of Long COVID.
This preprint from Germany found that people who got COVID-19 infections were at a 43% higher risk of developing an auto-immune disease. The list of autoimmune diseases that they were at higher risk for was very long, and included Hashimoto’s disease, diabetes, MS, Behcet’s disease, scaroidosis, Wegener’s disease, and vitiligo.
Mitigation Measures
This paper from South Korea found that people’s intention to keep wearing masks after the pandemic correlated with how physically attractive they thought they were.