COVID-19

Treatments

🎉 This paper from Israel (2026-03-25) reports that they’ve isolated a monoclonal antibody from recovered COVID-19 patients which works against all variants known so far! The antibody works against a highly-conserved area, and makes the top part of the spike fall off prematurely. Without the top part, the virus can’t dock with the host cell. 🎉

To the best of my understanding, this is great news for several reasons:

The monoclonal antibody could be given as an infusion or injection. Monoclonal antibodies tend to be expensive, but not as expensive as a long hospital stay. (The cost of monoclonal antibodies seems to vary a lot — some cancer monoclonal antibodies are like USD$200K, but apparently the RSV monoclonal antibody for babies is only about USD$500 per dose.)
Depending on how long the antibodies stay around, it could be used like a vaccine for vulnerable people.
Knowledge of the antibody location and shape could lead to vaccines which only have particles of the shape that the antibodies attach to, stimulating the human body to make the antibodies itself.

Long COVID

🎉💊 This paper from Brazil (2026-03-31) reports that fluvoxamine — a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor — reduces chronic fatigue from ME/CFS-ish Long COVID significantly!

This is fantastic news, but please be a bit cautious before celebrating too much. While this is the first time I’ve seen a study on fluvoxamine for Long COVID fatigue, there have been quite a few of studies on fluvoxamine as a treatment for acute COVID, a preventative for getting COVID-19, and a preventative for Long COVID. Those studies have had wildly different results, so much so that I have to wonder if there is a hidden local environmental variable. Maybe fluvoxamine only works if there is a lot of sunlight, or there’s a high proportion of a certain allele, or a certain food in the diet, or low air pollution, or something like that.

So while it’s great that fluvoxamine helped a lot in this study, be prepared for it to not help in all cases. Fluvoxamine is flakey.

🫀 This paper from Sweden (2026-04-01) reports that people with Long COVID have a higher risk of cardiovascular events, with women usually having a higher risk compared to people without Long COVID:

coronary artery disease women: +211% higher risk; men: 61% higher risk;
cardiac arrhythmia women: +25%; men: +26%;
Heart failure incidence women: +25%; men: no elevated risk;
peripheral artery disease women: +25%; men: no elevated risk;
stroke no elevated risk for either men or women.

COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness

💊 This paper from USA (2026-03-24) reports that across all age groups, Paxlovid doesn’t statistically significantly lower the risk of long-term effects. It does reduce the risk of gastrointestinal disorders by 37%, but it increases the risk of eye and ear-related disorders.

Paxlovid did show a 16.8% reduction in lingering symptoms in people between 65 and 75.

I want to point out again that while cancer rates are going up in young adults, that is not because of COVID-19. The rates have been going up steadily since long before the pandemic. From the US’ National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Stats Page:

Cancer diagnoses actually went down in 2020. (It’s believed that people avoided screening appointments because they were avoiding healthcare settings.)

Variants

There is more evidence accumulating — mostly from volunteers who watch the genome data — that BA.3.2 hits kids harder than other variants have. For example, see this image from this post (2026-03-31) shows that kids are getting more BA.3.2 (darker blue) than older people:

(Yes, you have to be careful that it’s not just that kids get tested more, they looked at that.)

This post (2026-03-26) has some ideas on why (at the genome level) that might be.

Part of why people are getting freaked out about BA.3.2 is because it has a lot of mutations and is descended from a line that never had a vax based on it. This post (2026-04-01) has a nice graphic to explain that:

Influenza

Transmission

💊 This paper from USA (2026-03-30) reports that giving more than 70% of nursing home patients antivirals dropped the risk of hospitalization (compared to giving fewer than 70% of the residents antivirals) slightly, by 4%, but dropped hospitalization by 21%.

Vaccines

💉 This paper from USA (2026-04-01) reports that seniors who got the high-dose influenza vaccine had a 17% lower risk of getting Alzheimer’s Disease than those who got the standard-dose influenza vaccine.

Shingles

Pathology

This paper (2026-03-27) reports that people between 30 and 39 were more likely to get shingles if they had comorbitities, compared to immunocompetent 50-59 year-olds without those comorbidities. The increased risk was different for different comorbidities:

+19% for asthma;
+31% for COPD;
+31% for depression;
+18% for diabetes;
+28% for stress;
+25% for trauma.

For people 50 to 59 years old, chronic kidney disease raised the risk of shingles by 50%.

Reminder: 1 in 3 unvaccinated people get shingles in their lifetime. It doesn’t usually kill people, but it is really unpleasant, and can leave lingering pain. Give your kids the chickenpox vaccine, and get the shingles vaccine when you are old enough! (If you are young and lucky enough that you got a chickenpox vax yourself, I think you don’t need another one.)

Mpox

Transmission

🎉 This article (2026-04-02) reports that the Democratic Republic of Congo has declared their mpox epidemic over!

🎉 The National Wastewater Monitoring of Pathogens Page shows no mpox detections at any of its six sites for the week ending 2026-04-02. (Five of the sites usually don’t, but Toronto usually has “sporadic” detections. I believe that this is the second time since they started watching mpox in Toronto that it’s had no detections.)

Measles

Transmission

✝️ Measles numbers did not get updated this week, presumably because of the Good Friday stat holiday.

COVID-19

Treatments

Long COVID

COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness

Variants

Recommended Reading

Influenza

Transmission

Vaccines

Shingles

Pathology

Mpox

Measles

Transmission