COVID-19

Long COVID

🪧 This article (2025-03-15) says that there was a Long COVID protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery on 15 March. I’m bummed that I didn’t know about it ahead of time.

🐕‍🦺🤧 This older paper (2025-06-15) reports that dogs could be trained to detect Long COVID with high accuracy! They could distinguish between Long COVID patients and people who were in the midst of an acute infection with a sensitivity of over 85% and a specificity of over 95%. When distinguishing between healthy controls and Long COVID patients, they had a sensitivity of over 94% and a specificity of over 96%!

💉 This paper from Sweden (2025-03-12) reports that Long COVID risks were much lower in vaccinated people compared to unvaccinated people:

19% lower with one dose;
58% lower with two doses;
63% lower with three doses.

This paper from China (2025-03-13) reports on a large cohort who were infected with Omicron.

7.8% had Long COVID in the first year.
- 60.1% of those had fatigue;
- 36.9% had post-exertional malaise;
- 4.2% had brain fog;
- they had about half as much muscle strength in their legs;
- they had worse lung function by several measures.
5.1% had “persistent symptoms”. (I don’t know what that means; isn’t Long COVID persistent? Maybe they mean “lasting longer than one year”?)
Re-infections were bad. Compared to people with only the original infection:
- people with one re-infection were ~160% more likely to get Long COVID;
- people with two re-infections were ~520% more likely to get Long COVID.

🩸In my 2025-03-07 General post, I summarized this paper (2024-03-01) which reports that Long COVID patients have messed up iron metabolism. A reader (CST) asked if that was why premenopausal women got Long COVID more than any other demographic, so I looked into it. This paper from USA (2025-01-25) found:

The cohort with the biggest risk is woman between 40 to 54 years old.
There was only a very small difference between pre- and post-menopausal women’s rates of Long COVID in women between 40 and 54. (1.45 times higher than men for pre-menopausal woman and 1.42 times higher than men for post-menopausal woman.)
There is no difference in the Long COVID rate between men and women aged 18 to 39.

HOWEVER, CST then sent me this article (2022-10-21) which led me to this paper (2016-11-15) that reports that woman have the highest risk of anemia between ages 40 to 49, and between ages 80 to 85, and during pregnancy.

Meanwhile, this paper from Australia (2024-05-25) says that women with endometriosis had a 46% higher risk of anemia, and this paper from Italy (2025-03-08) reports that women with diagnosed endometriosis were 2.5 times more likely to get Long COVID! (The Wikipedia article on endometriosis says that about 10% of women are affected by endometriosis, ow!)

So maybe there is something going on with iron and Long COVID. WOMEN! TAKE YOUR IRON SUPPLEMENTS!

Note: someone on the socials alerted me (thank you, reader!) that sometimes the body sequesters iron to starve out bacteria, who need the iron even more than you do. This article (2011-03) says that this particularly happens with Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, Salmonella, Yersinia, Listeria, and Staphylococcus bacteria; and Haemophilus influenzae. So if you already aren’t feeling good, maybe you should see a doctor before going on the iron. However, it seems to me like you don’t want either of anemia or an infection with one of those, so if the anemia is masking the bacterial infection, then maybe taking supplements will show the infection so that you can get it treated.

This paper from USA (2025-03-10) was supposed to be about how HIV changed the Long COVID risk. In fact, the risk of Long COVID was only slightly higher in people with HIV than those without; there was a much bigger difference between people who had a Long COVID diagnostic code and those who were found by electronic record searches for Long COVID symptoms! In other words, (surprise, surprise!) Long COVID is way under-diagnosed.

🫁🏃 This paper from China (2025-03-13) reports that Long COVID patients who had pulmonary rehabilitation (which I think is like physiotherapy for the lungs) saw significant improvements in both lung function and quality of life measures.

Vaccines

💉 A friend of mine sent me this paper (2024-04-02) which looked at adverse vaccination events across eight countries, saying that a friend of hers showed it with the commentary that mainstream media wasn’t telling about all the dangers of vaccines. It is true that they found that the risk of certain things was elevated after vaccination. Absolutely true. However that’s an incomplete picture.

The paper reports that the risk of acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADE) is higher after a COVID vaccination. True, but it’s really rare. Let’s look at this in context:
- The Wikipedia article on ADE reports that the risk of ADE is approximately 8 per million people per year.
- This page says that in Canada about 182 people are hit by lightning per year, or about 4.4 per million or about twice the rate of getting hit by lightning.
- That means that if you get a COVID-19 vaccination, your risk of ADE is going to be about 17 times the risk of getting hit by lightning in a given year. So it’s like the risk of getting hit by lighting once in 17 years.
- I’m more than three times 17 years old. Not only have I never been hit by lightning, but I don’t know anybody who has ever been hit by lightning.
- Even if you learned that, say, wearing a metal bracelet tripled your risk of getting hit by lightning, I am confident that you wouldn’t. (How do I know? Your risk of getting Long COVID-19 is probably ten or twenty times higher if you don’t wear an N95 or other respirator, and I bet you won’t wear a respirator.)
The paper my friend sent says Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is ~2.5 times higher after mRNA vaccination. I don’t doubt it, as GBS is higher after all vaccinations. GBS is awful, but it also is extremely rare.
This paper (2022-08-22) says that the risk of myocarditis is 52% higher after a Pfizer vaccination, but 1014% higher after a COVID-19 infection.

(Furthermore, the mainstream media did talk about the risks of vaccines. My friend’s contact just wasn’t paying attention.)

💉🦀 This study using data from USA, Canada, and Mexico (2025-03-06) reports that people who had cancer and COVID-19 infections did better if they got vaccinated. Compared to unvaccinated cancer patients, cancer patients who had at least two doses of mRNA vaccine before the COVID-19 infection had:

36% lower risk of cardiac complications;
24% lower risk of cardiovascular events.

The vaccines protected strongly regardless of the SARS-CoV-2 strain or anticoagulant use.

Variants

I’ve been seeing some chatter about COVID-19 variant LP.8.1. It appears to be quickly making up a larger and larger fraction of COVID-19 cases in a number of places but it doesn’t seem to cause more severe illness. The World Health Organization has labelled it a Variant Under Monitoring, but not a Variant of Concern yet.

Treatments

👶🏥 This paper from Italy (2025-03-14) reports that children who visited the ER with upper respiratory tract illnesses and fevers did better when given probiotics. Children who got a commercial mixture of Bifidobacterium breve M-16V, Bifidobacterium lactis HN019, and Lactobacillus rhamnosus HN001 broke their fevers about two days (36%) earlier than those who got placebo.

Mitigation Measures

😷 This paper from USA (2025-03-12) reports that for every 10% rise observed in masking observed at a K-12 school in San Diego, the odds of detecting SARS-CoV-2 in school wastewater decreased by nearly 10%.

MERS

🐪🤧 This press release (2025-03-13) says that there were four laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS in Saudi Arabia — all men — from September 2024 to February 2025, with two fatalities. One of the people caught it in a healthcare facility 🏥 😢, but they didn’t find any other human-to-human transmission.

H5N1/Bird Flu

Transmission

🐈‍⬛☠️🐦‍⬛🤧 This press release from New York City (2025-03-15) reports that three cats got sick and two died. Two of the cats ate raw poultry from Savage Cat Food poultry lot 11152026 and got sick; one died and the other recovered. The other cat who died did not eat any of the raw food, but it was exposed to the sick cat who did not die. The recovered cat did not get H5N1 testing (and it’s too late now), but two cats who died had positive tests for H5N1.

🐄🐦‍⬛🤧 This article (2025-03-19) reports that there have now been 989 H5N1 infected dairy herds in 17 states, with six outbreaks in Idaho since the end of February.

🥛☠️🤦‍♀️ This report on a survey of Americans (2025-03-14) says that 25% of American adults think that raw milk is just as safe to drink or safer than pasteurized milk.

People have wondered if there is something special about the 🐄🐦‍⬛🤧 dairy cow bird flu that makes it more infectious than other influenza strains when it gets in through the eye. This paper (2025-03-17) reports that no, it’s not special, other influenza strains can go through the eye just as easily.

Variants

🐓🐦‍⬛🤧This article (2025-03-12) reports that a poultry flock was hit by H7N9. That’s not the first time the USA has seen H7N9, but they hadn’t seen it since 2017. From the information I listed on the 2025-01-03 General post, H7 is related to H3, and H3N2 has been one of the dominant human flu strains for a long time.

Unfortunately, the image below from this paper (2021-08-02) says to me that N9 isn’t related to influenza strains that we humans have a lot of experience with. I’ve read that the H is what gets the virus into the cells, and the N is what gets the virus out of the cells, so hopefully human immune systems select more strongly for H7-targeting antibodies than N9-targeting antibodies.

🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🤧 This update (2025-03-18) on the H7N9 case clarified that H7N9 is a strictly North American disease. Always before, it had been a low-pathogenicity strain, but the recent Mississippi outbreak was high-pathogenicity. In otherwords, not as many birds used to die from it. 😬

🐄🐦‍⬛🤧☠️🐁 This paper (2025-03-14) reports that the 🐄🐦‍⬛🤧 bird flu in a Texas cow was significantly nastier than an older 🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🤧 bird bird flu strain. The 🐄🐦‍⬛🤧 cow bird flu reproduced much more easily and rapidly than the 🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🤧 bird bird flu in human lung cells in test tubes, and was much deadlier☠️🐁 to mice. 😬

🐓🐦‍⬛🤧 This article (2025-03-20) reports that an Ohio poultry worker has a slightly different variant than we’ve seen before. It’s still clade 2.3.4.4b, but D1.3 genotype instead of D1.1. 🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🤧 D1.1 is the one that has been infecting birds, while 🐄🐦‍⬛🤧 B3.13 is what the cows usually had. I don’t know how significant that is.

Treatments

This blog post (2025-02-22) says, basically, that all the nasal-spray-vs-COVID papers are bunk.

💊 This paper (2025-03-17) reports that baloxavir (brand name Xofluza) works better in mice against 🐄🐦‍⬛🤧 cow bird flu than oseltamivir (brand name Tamiflu).

💰 This press release (2025-03-20) says that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is giving US$43.5 million to AstraZeneca plc to develop funky antibodies against multiple strains of influenza. They are going to develop a type of heavy-chain-only antibodies, which are a form that animals in the camel family have that is missing a piece which, in humans, binds to pieces of the immune system. With heavy-chain-only antibodies, I think they only gum up the gears of the viruses, as opposed to gumming up and binding them to a piece of the immune system to kill and/or get rid of them.

Having fewer pieces makes the antibodies smaller, which makes them cheaper. The expense of traditional monoclonal antibodies makes them less accessible. Them being small also might mean that they could get at more hard-to-reach areas of a virus.

I presume that these heavy-chain-only antibodies could be used as a treatment once an infection has taken hold, but they can also be used to prevent viruses from getting into cells in the first place. As such, they can be used sort of like fast-acting vaccines (which unfortunately wane fast too).

The grant is to target hemagglutinins of four different influenza strains — H1, H3, H5 and H7. That would make pretty much a pan-influenza vaccine-like thing, and that would be awesome.

Mpox

Vaccines

🎉🎉🎉🎉 This paper from Germany (2025-03-18) reports that Jynnos’ mpox vaccine was 84.1% effective in people without HIV. It was lower in people with HIV, but still it was 34.9% effective.

🎉 I don’t know if this was because of the vaccine results, but this update from the UK Health Security Agency (2025-03-19) says that they are no longer classifying Clade Ia and Ib mpox as “high consequence infectious diseases (HCIDs)”. They are very clear that mpox is still a problem, but the definition of HCIDs is that they have high mortality and no good treatment options, but they say mortality isn’t that high and they now have vaccines.

Measles

Yep, measles is still spreading around, especially in the USA. I haven’t said much because I figure:

The mass media is probably doing a good enough job of spreading the news.
We know how to prevent measles with almost 100% certainty.
It’s hella depressing.