2025-04-11 General

Measles

A reader pointed out that you can get a blood test to tell you how good your measles immunity is, so you know if you need another shot. The someone said that it might be useful for people who got a (possibly ineffective) vaccine in the 1960s.

This is absolutely true, however, the cost/hassle of getting a blood test is comparable* to the cost/hassle of getting a measles vaccination! (The cost might even be higher to you; that will vary with your local jurisdiction/insurance.) And if the blood test says that you don’t have measles antibodies, well, then you’re going to have to go through the cost/hassle of also getting a measles vaccination.

If you were born in the 1960s, just get the shot.

*Here’s a site which gives costs of measles antibody tests in the USA as USD$28 to USD$259. This page gives the cost of a measles vaccination as USD$90 to USD$125. I would be really surprised if there’s an insurance company which doesn’t cover measles vaccination (especially right now!), but I would not be surprised if there are insurance companies which do not cover measles antibody tests. Meanwhile, in Canada, the vax is free and I don’t know what you have to do to get an antibody test.

COVID-19

Long COVID

💊😢 This paper from USA (2025-04-03) reports that a 15-day course of Paxlovid doesn’t help Long COVID any more than placebo does. 🙁

I had been really hopeful that it would. There is really really strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 hides out in the body, and it was reasonable to think that Paxlovid might kill off some or all of the hiding SARS-CoV-2. 😢

This paper from UK (2025-04-03) reports that about 55% of kids with Long COVID who were referred to a Long COVID clinic improved, which is good! However, this means that 45% did not get better. 😢 School attendance after treatment fared better: attendance improved for 64% of kids.

The paper also mentioned that 10% of the patients referred to the service were autistic, above the 2% national prevalence. I was surprised because it’s been my impression that autistic people are over-represented in the COVID-cautious cohort. Maybe being COVID-cautious isn’t enough to avoid COVID in a school setting. 🙁

😬 This paper from Netherlands (2025-04-06) reports (based on survey results) that only 12% of patients who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 had recovered after three months, but 24% had fully recovered after three years. Note that this means that 76% had not recovered fully after three years.

They also found that on a number of measures, especially cognitive measures, the participants actually got worse between their two-year and three-year followups.

COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness

🚗💥 Back in October, I teased a paper which found that the incidence of car crashes was related to the COVID-19 infection rate. The final version (2025-04-08) gave more details. They collected car crash data from 2020 to 2023 from seven diverse US states, and looked at COVID-19 positivity rates from the US CDC and cross-checked with wastewater data. They built a model (a Poisson regression model for you modelling nerds) and found that a concurrent COVID-19 infection increased the risk of a car crash by 25%. They commented that an increased risk of 25% is approximately comparable to a blood alcohol level of 0.08%.

They did not find that higher Long COVID rates (as measured by the US CDC) were associated with a higher risk of car crashes. Maybe that’s because people who had bad Long COVID were home in bed?

This other paper from USA (2025-01-23) looked at the same issue (also with a Poisson regression model, but with more variables, including daily maximum temperatures, truck registrations and gasoline prices) from 2020 to 2021, and that paper found that car crashes correlated with accumulated COVID-19 cases, not concurrent COVID-19 cases. The author of the second paper told me that gas prices (which the first paper didn’t adjust for) make a big difference, I’m guessing because it affects the number of miles driven. 🤷‍♀️

AGAIN ❤️ This paper from USA (2025-04-11) reports that children with COVID-19 had a much higher risk of subsequent cardiovascular issues:

CHD = Congenital Heart Disease. Table of relative risk for later cardiovascular bad things for kids with COVID infections, stratified by whether the kid had congenital heart disease or not.

Note that the risk of pericarditis is 266% higher if a kid had COVID-19 than if they didn’t (if the kid did not have congenital heart disease); the risk of cardiogenic shock is 215% higher. Overall, kids with COVID-19 have a 63% higher risk of any bad cardiovascular thing and a 192% higher risk of heart inflammation.

Transmission

💨🤧 This paper from Northern Ontario (2025-03-04) reports that COVID-19 spread inside an apartment building in Feb 2021, with ~29% of the building’s residents getting sick. It turned out that the building HVAC system pulled fresh air in from the roof, but bathroom/kitchen fans exhausted four times as much room air. The negative pressure ended up sucking air in from other units, and COVID-19 along with it. Yet another reason to keep your windows open as much as you can!

This spreadsheet of unknown provenance has a list of other alleged multi-tenant-building outbreaks in Ontario; this old news article (2021-05-06) describes two apartment outbreaks.

AGAIN 💨🤧 This paper (2025-04-01) reported that COVID-19 is transmitted through the air. They put hamsters in the exhaust stream of a COVID-19 ward, and found that 58% of the hamsters had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies after three weeks.

💨🤧 This paper (2025-04-09) also reported that COVID-19 is transmitted through the air, and that air filters work really well: “air viral load in the COVID room with an air cleaner showed a reduction of up to 98.1%.”

Pathology

🤰☠️ This paper from USA (2025-04-09) reports that pregnancy-related death rose by 27% between 2018 and 2022.

Do you remember back in 2022, there was an alarming increase in pediatric hepatitis and nobody could figure out what was causing it? The consensus eventually, back then, was that it was adenovirus. Well, this paper (2025-04-05) says that there is a suspiciously strong link to COVID-19.

🫁👃🤧 This review paper from Germany (2025-04-04) references to a metric ton of studies showing long-term bad effects from respiratory illnesses (in general, not just COVID-19). I have a gripe with the paper in that it doesn’t always make clear distinctions between which statistics related to severe (hospitalized) cases and which to mild cases, and doesn’t talk about age as a co-factor. However, even if all of the ambiguous studies are severe, it’s still a damning list, and there are studies it references which explicitly look at mild cases. For example, the risk of stroke or heart attack doubles in the 14 days after a mild bout of the flu!

Viruses are bad!

Treatments

💊😢 As described above in the Long COVID section, Paxlovid for 15 days doesn’t help Long COVID any more than placebo does. 😢

💊👧 There have been a number of studies which say that Paxlovid doesn’t help non-elderly, vaccinated people much. This preprint from USA (2025-04-04), however, seems to say that Paxlovid helps children. The looked at electronic records from 2022-04-01 to 2023-12-31 and found that young people (aged 12 to 20) who had positive COVID tests and got Paxlovid had lower risks during the acute period than young people who did not get Paxlovid:

  • hospitalization: 52% lower risk;
  • moderate/severe acute illness: 14% lower risk;
  • chest pain: 59% lower risk;
  • fatigue and malaise: 51% lower risk;
  • generalized pain: 45% lower risk;
  • headage: 40% lower risk;
  • mental health symptoms: 44% lower risk;
  • musculoskeletal signs and symptoms: 39% lower risk;
  • resipratory signs and symptoms: 39% lower risk.

While there were lower risks of all those things during the acute phase, they did not find any lower risk of Long COVID.

They did say that vaccinated participants got a lot less sick, but didn’t provide numbers for how chidren-vaccinated-plus-Paxlovid did relative to children-vaccinated-without-Paxlovid did. 🤷‍♀️

H5N1

Transmission

👶🐦‍⬛🤧☠️ This press release from Mexico (2025-04-04) reports that they verified their first human case of H5N1, in a young girl. They don’t know how she caught it, and didn’t mention which clade it was. This article (2025-04-08) reports that she died. 🙁

🧀 This preprint from Switzerland (2025-03-21) reported on how long H5N1 remained infectious in cheese at varying pH and temperatures.

  • H5N1 was still infectious in raw milk kept at 4°C (fridge temperature) for four weeks, but decreased slowly at 21°C and was completely inactivated at 37°C after four weeks (but… gross!).
  • H5N1 was still active after 30 minutes at 50°C but inactivated at higher temperatures:
    • 10 minutes at 55°C,
    • 1 minute at 60°C, or
    • 30 seconds at 72°C.
  • At pH levels between 6 and 10, the virus remained stable but was partially inactivated at pH 5.0 and completely inactivated at pH 4.0.
  • Yoghurt was completely inactivated. (This article says that the pH of yoghurt is between 4.3 and 4.4.)

🐄 This article (2025-04-09) reports that there have now been over 1005 dairy herds in the USA infected with H5N1, with 759 in California.

This article (2025-04-08) mentions that all 11 infected herds in Nevada are infected with clade D1.1 — the 🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🤧 bird bird flu and not the 🐄🐦‍⬛🤧 cow bird flu (clade B3.13) that all the other herds have.