COVID-19
Variants
🦠🧬 NB.1.8.1 is still causing a lot of cases in Asia and Australia. It has acquired two nicknames: “NimBus” (from the two letters in its designation) and “Razor Blade Throat” because it apparently feels like you’ve been swallowing razor blades.
Long COVID
🩸‼️ This preprint using UK participants (2025-05-26) has a potential explanation for post-exertional malaise (PEM, the inability to exercise without “crashing”)! They found that exercise broke large microclots into small microclots, and the small microclots wreaked havoc!
This paper from USA (2025-05-27) found that ~15% of children under about 5 y/o had probable Long COVID based on observed symptoms like dry cough, trouble sleeping, etc.
COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness
☠️❤️🩹 This paper from USA (2025-05-30) found that the number of excess deaths from cardiac issues rose significantly after the start of the pandemic:
Mitigation Measures
💨 This paper from Finland (2024-09-26) reports that improving the airflow in four daycare centres reduced the number of infections per child per month by 18%.
Vaccines
💉 This article from USA (2025-05-31) reports that the US FDA has approved Moderna’s second-generation COVID-19 vaccine, named mNexspike. This is a bit of a win, as the MAHA crowd generally thinks that mRNA vaccines are a tool of the devil. However, it’s not a slam-dunk win for Moderna, as the FDA restricts it to people over 65 or people over 12 with at least one medical conditions that puts them at risk of severe infection.
I fully expect that Health Canada will approve mNexspike. It uses 1/5th of the amount of mRNA, generated higher antibody levels, is fridge-stable, and it comes in pre-filled syringes. It ought to be better, safer, and have a lower total cost to deploy.
Treatments
💊 This paper using data from USA (2025-05-27) reports that for non-hospitalized high-risk adults with COVID-19 during a period when Omicron JN.1 was dominant, Paxlovid and molnupiravir were still very useful. People who got one of the antivirals were less likely than controls to have various outcomes:
- 22% less likely to go to the Emergency Department;
- 14% less likely to be hospitalized;
- 83% less likely to die.
Transmission
🚍 This Working Paper from USA (2025-05) estimates that going from 0% to 100% mandated masking in schools reduces COVID-19 deaths in the country by 5.7 deaths per million people. It’s not that the kids or teachers die as much as the kids help spread it, which leads to more vulnerable people dying.
BC
Wastewater
💩 COVID-19 levels in the wastewater are still noisy, but definitely going up, especially in Fraser Health. From Jeff’s wastewater spreadsheet:
H5N1
Vaccines
💉 Two things related to H5N1 vaccines happened on 28 May 2025:
- 🇺🇸 This article reports that the US Department of Health and Human Services cancelled a contract with Moderna to develop an mRNA H5N1 vaccine.
- This press release from Moderna says that their mRNA H5N1 vaccine did really well in the Phase 1/2 trials: 97.8% of participants had antibody levels which were high enough to (probably) confer immunity.
BC/Transmission
🐦⬛🤧 I haven’t been reporting on it, because it’s politics more than pandemics, but there’s an ostrich farm which had some bird flu deaths, and was told to cull the herd. The family which owns the herd is resisting, saying that the birds which are still alive are healthy and should be studied, not killed. They have gotten a bunch of supporters (mostly right-wingers) to protest against the government, and they have even gotten support from high-ranking people in the US government.
Well. This article (2025-05-30) says that the ostriches have a different strain of the bird flu than the standard poultry bird flu, but doesn’t give the exact clade.
Measles
We keep having measles. The federal measles page says that there have been a total of 2,515 measles cases in Canada since October 2024. In the week ending 17 May, there were these new cases:
- +354 cases in Canada
- +194 in Ontario
- +135 in Alberta
- +15 in Manitoba
- +8 in Saskatchewan
- +2 in BC
Meanwhile, this article says that the US has had a total of 1,088 measles cases in 2025. It’s kind of embarrassing that we have more measles cases with a tenth of the population. 😳 (Yes, our data goes back farther, including Oct and Dec 2024, but Canada only had 147 measles cases in all of 2024, so we can’t use that excuse.)