2026-05-29 General

Note: there is no BC post this week. Metro Vancouver did not publish the wastewater data, and there’s not any other BC-specific news. The province is supposed to release case/hospitalization/death data next week, so there should be a BC post next week.

This General blog post is also very short today. There is a huge amount of news on Bundibugyo Ebola and to a lesser extent Andes Hantavirus (which I did slog through) because they are scary and awful. This week, however, almost all of that news has been somewhere else. Yes, things are awful in DR Congo (and to a lesser extent Uganda). Yes, there is nonsense going on in the US, with echos in Europe and Kenya.

There’s also been the distressingly normal amount of stupid and counterproductive things that the USA is doing taking up attention in the news, but most of that is not germane to Canada.

COVID-19

Long COVID

🫀 This paper from Taiwan (2026-05-28) reports that people with Long COVID have much higher risks of cardiovascular problems compared to people who do not have Long COVID:

  • 4.48 times the risk of a major adverse cardiovascular event;
  • 6.48 times the risk of coronary artery disease;
  • 3.46 times the risk of a stroke;
  • 53% higher risk of death.

Vaccines

💉 This paper from USA (2026-05-28) reports that the vaccine effectiveness of Pfizer’s LP.8.1 vaccine (the 2025/2026 vaccine) was 57% effective against emergency/urgent care visits and 54% against outpatient visits for COVID-19, compared to people who did not get the LP.8.1 booster.

💉 This article from USA (2026-05-29) reports that the FDA has decided that it wants the 2026/2027 COVID-19 vaccines to be based on the XFG strain. To the best of my knowledge, PHAC has not decided yet. (I put this USA-centric news here because in the past, Canada has tended to follow the USA pretty closely. I’m not sure if Canada will still do so this year, especially since this press release (2026-05-16) says that WHO recommends staying with LP.8.1.)

Treatments

💊 This case studies paper from Japan (2026-04-23) says that a woman had viral rebound after taking Ensitrelvir (brand name Xocova, not yet approved in Canada but I expect it will be). This suggests that rebound is a COVID-19 thing more than a Paxlovid thing.

Pathology

👂 I mentioned a couple of years ago this paper from Korea (2024-07-29) which found that young adults had a much higher risk of hearing loss if they got a COVID-19 infection.

This paper from China (2026-04-04) investigated how COVID-19 caused hearing loss, and they found that SARS-CoV-2 in infected lab animals migrated to spiral ganglion neurons — important in hearing — and killed them off.

Transmission

COVID-19 levels continue to be really low, kind of everywhere. Not only that, I haven’t seen any signs of a summer wave starting here. From the Government of Canada Respiratory Virus Surveillance page:

Meanwhile, Singapore is the only place where I’ve seen any reporting (like this article (2026-05-22) talking about an increase of COVID-19 positivity.

Singapore’s positivity rise is associated with “Nimbus”, NB.1.8.1. Nimbus is a descendant of XDV, which is a recombination of XDE and JN.1. It’s been around for more than a year.

Recommended Reading

This post (2026-05-29) says that a recent paper which said that 1 in 6 people had Long COVID was stupid. He rips apart that paper’s methodology, and then says he’s not going to bother calculating the current Long COVID rate per infection because cases are so low it doesn’t matter. He shows this graph of wastewater from the Netherlands (2026 is in red):

Bundibugyo

Mitigation Measures

✈️ This article (2026-05-26) reports that Canada is banning residents from Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda ‌and South Sudan from entering Canada for 90 days.

Influenza

Transmission

Influenza B has been hanging on at a higher level than it has in the past. It’s low in absolute levels, but still higher than it usually is this late in the year. It looks like its decline is speeding up, however.

The 2025/2026 line (blue) has been majority Flu B since Epi-Week 8

Epstein-Barr Virus

Vaccines

💉 This article (2026-05-26) says that Eli Lilly bought a small company making an Epstein-Barr virus vaccine (and paid a bunch of money for it). I don’t normally comment on commercial transactions, but I have a particular hatred for EBV and want it to die a slow painful death. (I admit I would graciously settle for a quick painless death.) They don’t currently know of an animal reservoir for it, so maybe we humans could stamp it out like we did smallpox.

(Why do I hate EBV so much? Only because it’s known to cause a large bucket of different cancers plus multiple sclerosis plus mononucleosis plus lupus and a bunch of rare conditions; it might be involved in rheumatoid arthritis, ALS, ME/CFS, Long COVID, MIS-C, and additional rare conditions. EBV is really really bad for humans, it’s a herpesvirus (so stays with you forever), and almost everybody has had it (and so still has it).)

Ahem. Anyway, I think the fact that a large powerful drug company paid a shipton of money for rights to an EBV vaccine means that it’s more likely that we’ll see an EBV vaccine in the next ten years. 🎉

Measles

Transmission

According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2026-05-25), in the week ending 16 May 2025, the following jurisdictions had the following number of new measles cases:

  • Canada: 24;
  • Manitoba: 21;
  • Ontario: 1;
  • Alberta: 2.