COVID-19

Vaccines

😲💉 This preprint from USA (2025-08-27) reports that vaccine-only immunity with a KP.2 vaccine (as tested in blood) is better against LP.8.1, LF.7.1, NB.1.8.1, XFG, and BA.3.2 than hybrid immunity with the KP.2 vaccine!

I find it a bit suspicious that they were able to find sixteen people who had gotten a KP.2 vaccine (which was not approved in the US until 2024-08-22) but attest that they have never gotten COVID-19. I only know personally three people who I would credibly believe that they have never gotten COVID-19: me, my spouse, and one friend. (And Spouse and I might have gotten COVID-19 in February 2020 in London, we did both have mild colds then, and there was (very limited) circulation there.)

Maybe those 16 people are genetically immune/resistant, which would mean that of course their blood would show better resistance. Maybe the article should have said that “people who avoided getting COVID-19 had better immunity than people who weren’t able to avoid COVID-19”.

🇺🇸💉There is absolute, utter chaos going on in the USA right now regarding vaccines. The question of “can Americans get COVID vaccines in Canada” has become very interesting to some Americans, possibly even some of my loyal readers.

It varies by province. From what information I could gather:

No: BC, AB, SK, MB. I found information that these provinces only give vaccinations to residents.
Yes: ON, QC. This web page says that in Ontario, you do not need to have any legal status in Canada to get a vaccine. This article (2025-05-21) said that Americans can get a vax in Quebec, subject to availability, and that it costs up to CAD$200.

Maybe: PEI, NL, NB, NS. This page says you do not need a PEI health card to get a vaccination there, but it is not clear if you have to be a resident. For NL, NB, and NS, I couldn’t find any definitive information.

Note that Canada has restrictions on what vax Canadians can get. I just talked to an Ontario pharmacist who says that a) there is no vax until October, and b) Americans would be subject to the same health-eligibility restrictions as Canadians (i.e. over 65 or at risk). The pharmacist said that not everybody could get a vax now, “not like they used to”, so now I am wondering if the rule (or what pharmacists actually do, regardless of what the rule actually is) is that “anybody can get one in the spring but only high-risk people can get them in the fall” and not “anybody can get one per year, only high-risk people can get two”.

💉 This paper from USA (2025-08-23) reports that, among people who got a COVID-19 infection, those who had been vaccinated recently had a lower risk of having most symptoms, especially:

61% lower risk of losing the sense of smell or taste;
51% lower risk of muscle pain.

Vaccines don’t just help you avoid catching COVID-19, they also make your infections milder.

Long COVID

💊 This preprint from USA (2025-08-12) reports somewhat ambiguous results from a study of metformin against Long COVID. Because Long COVID is sometimes under-diagnosed, they had two different criteria for whether a patient had Long COVID or not:

a doctor told the patient that they had Long COVID or
a model they had based on reported symptoms said they had Long COVID.

At six months, there wasn’t a statistically significant difference between the group that took metformin and the controls based on the model’s opinion of reported symptoms. (This doesn’t mean it didn’t help, it means they didn’t have enough data.)

However, at six months, there was a significant difference between the metformin group and controls based on the doctors’ opinions: the control group was twice as likely to have Long COVID as the metformin cohort.

Also, the median time between symptom onset and receipt of metformin was five days. Someone on teh socials wonders if that means metformin is like Paxlovid in that you have to start taking it RIGHT AWAY?

💉 This paper from Hong Kong (2025-08-21) reports that COVID-19 vaccines are good for people who have exactly one chronic condition. Compared to people with one chronic condition with who never got a COVID-19 infection:

people with one chronic condition who got COVID-19 and were unvaccinated had a 26% higher risk of developing two or more chronic conditions;
people with one chronic condition who got COVID-19 and were vaccinated had a 8% higher risk of developing two or more chronic conditions.

🧠 This paper from Brazil (2025-08-20) reports that long haulers who got transcranial direct current stimulation treatment (tDCS) plus cognitive therapy (with the Posit Science BrainHQ program) did better on some cognitive measures than those who got cognitive therapy plus fake tDCS. The people who got real tDCS did significantly better on inhibitory control, processing speed, and divided attention tests. There wasn’t an difference on other tests (including depression and anxiety symptoms).

🧠⚡️ This paper from Hong Kong (2025-08-22) reports that women with migraine had an 87% higher chance of getting Long COVID compared to women without migraine.

COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness

👩‍⚕️ This preprint from Norway (2025-07-30) reports that there were 5.1% more primary healthcare consultations in 2024 than would have been expected from pre-pandemic trends, with some reasons for the medical visit being much higher than pre-pandemic:

respiratory infections: +16% more consultations than expected;
fatigue: +63%;
pyschological symptoms: +79%;
acute stress reaction: +68%;
depression: +125%;
hyperkinetic disorder: +106%;
abdominal pain/cramps: +26%;
memory disturbance: +59%;
conjunctivitis: +54%;
infections disease/other: +73.

A most of those symptoms look like Long COVID symptoms to me.

Mental Health

🌳 This paper from Canada (2025-08-20) found that green space was good for mental health during the initial pandemic. Among people who were not depressed before the pandemic, people who lived in postal codes one quartile higher on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) had a 9% lower risk of becoming depressed than people in the lower quartile of NDVI. (People who were depressed before were only 4% per NDVI quartile less likely to be depressed.) The effect was more pronounced for people in lower socio-economic brackets.

⛈ Being sick sometimes leads to depression, and this older mass-market article (2021-08-23) has an explanation: inflammation causes histamine levels to rise, and histamines inhibit serotonin. Serotonin makes you happier; losing serotonin makes you sadder!

Treatments

🎉🎉‼️ This paper from Australia (2025-08-28) reports that cancer patients who sprayed a Interferon-α mixture up their nose once per day for 90 days had a 42% lower risk of catching COVID-19 than cancer patients who sprayed saline up their nose.

If you look at only patients who completed the study (which I think is nice way of saying “who kept with it/followed directions” and not “who didn’t die”, as each comparably-sized cohort had one death):

the Interferon-α cohort had a 50% lower risk of catching COVID-19 compared to the saline cohort;
people who were under 65 who were in the Interferon-α cohort had a 64% lower risk of catching COVID-19 compared to people under 65 in the saline cohort.
people who were 65 or over who were in the Interferon-α cohort only had a 21% lower risk 🙁 of catching COVID-19 compared to people 65 or over in the saline cohort;
women who were in the Interferon-α cohort had a 64% lower risk of catching COVID-19 compared to women in the saline cohort;
men who were in the in the Interferon-α cohort only had a 18% lower risk 🙁 of catching COVID-19 compared to men in the saline cohort;
people who were vaccinated and the Interferon-α cohort had a 51% lower risk of catching COVID-19 compared to vaccinted people in the saline cohort.

It would be nice if the Interferon-α spray worked against all respiratory infections, but alas, the Interferon-α cohort and the saline cohort had about the same levels of other respiratory infections. (Note, however, that the data collection period was from the end of 2020 through most of 2022, and Australia had almost no influenza in 2021 and low levels in 2022. This study might not tell us if the Interferon-α nasal spray works against influenza.)

This was a Phase 3 study, so I presume they will seek a license from the Australian government for use with cancer patients very soon.

🥛🥩🍳🥦 This paper from Korea (2025-08-22) reports that Vitamin B2 / riboflavin (in test tubes of cells taken from humans) was a potent anti-viral if it was administered at the time of infection. (Giving the B2 two hours before or two hours after did no good.)

I don’t know if the concentration of B2 that they used in this paper is achievable by eating reasonable doses of B2, or if it needs an injection. They also said that it didn’t work as well as remdesivir, so it’s not a panecea.

Pathology

This paper from Singapore (2025-08-20) investigated why some men did not catch COVID-19, despite being repeatedly highly exposed in tightly locked-down, high-density, closely-monitored workers’ dormitories. There was a lot of spread in the worker dorms, but despite that, there were some men who never got sick and never showed COVID-19 antibodies in their blood.

This paper found that men who never got COVID-19 in the dorms had higher CD4+ T cell responses to some specific proteins produced by the SARS-CoV-2 viruses than their infected counterparts. They also found that the men who didn’t catch COVID-19 in the dorms were 53% less likely to catch COVID-19 in the community (after their lockdown was lifted).

This is not just interesting, but could conceivably lead to new treatments!

🧠⚡️ This paper from Hong Kong (2025-08-22) reports that women with migraine have “significantly greater COVID-19 burden” compared to women without. They even give numbers, like 30% for “mild”… without explaining what the 30% higher risk was of.

They also found that women who caught COVID-19 had a 35% average increase in their migraine attack frequency. 😢

Testing

BC Wastewater

💩💧 From Jeff’s wastewater spreadsheet:

Measles

Transmission

According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2025-08-25), in the week ending 16 August, the following jurisdictions had the following number of cases:

Canada: 81;
Alberta: 47;
BC: 24;
Manitoba: 6;
Ontario: 3;
Saskatchewan: 1.

This is down from the previous week.

2025-08-31 General