COVID-19

Really really long COVID

🍆 This paper (2025-10-11) says that COVID-19 won’t just f you up, it’ll f your children up if you are male. They infected male mice with COVID-19 and then looked at their offspring. All of their children were exhibited more anxious behaviours than children of uninfected daddy mice. (Fortunately, the grandbabies didn’t show anxious behaviours.)

Long COVID

🎉😭 This article from USA (2025-10-10) is written by a group of 53 long haulers who made up about a quarter of a clinical trial for Vyvgart and were helped enormously by it, only to have Vyvgart yanked away from them. Vyvgart is a drug approved in the USA to treat myasthenia gravis.

All 53 had Long COVID with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). Many of them were helped enormously by Vyvgart, but the clinical trial used metrics for success which did not capture the successes that the patients were having, so the trial was cancelled and the drug withdrawn from these people. Most of them relapsed.

🤧 This paper from USA (2025-10-10) reports that the US workforce has a lot more absenteeism than before the pandemic. Compared to pre-pandemic levels:

health-related absences from work were 12.9% higher;
health-related absences were 8.1% higher for workers in low work-from-home occupations and 12.5% higher for workers in high physical proximity occupations;
the number of people leaving the workforce after a health-related absence were 13.1% higher.

💉 This paper from China (2025-10-10) reports that letting your vaccination get stale is a bad idea. Compared to participants who had been vaccinated within three months, participants who hadn’t been vaccinated for at least 12 months had higher risks for various things:

decreased smelling ability: +91% higher risk;
palpitations: +125%;
chest distress: +65%;
decreased tasting ability: +66%;
fatigue: +45%;
eye pain and fatigue: +103%;
full body soreness: +45%;
gastrointestinal discomfort: +148%;
headache dizziness: +37%;
fever: +46%.

This paper from Spain (2025-10-06) reports that 23.7% of working adult participants who had a previous COVID-19 infection got Long COVID. There were a number of factors which increased the risk:

being female: +45%;
having low educational attainment: +31%;
obesity: +19%;
having more than three disease co-morbidities: +132%;
having a mild symptomatic infection (vs. asymptomatic): +232%;
having a severe or critical infection: +860%;

I found it interesting that a number of job-related things also raised one’s risk, especially things that increased the likelihood of catching COVID-19 also raised the risk of Long COVID. Maybe being in a riskier situation made them more likely to get a higher dose of COVID-19? These things gave a higher risk:

close contact with colleagues and the public: up to +50% higher risk;
no social distance at the workplace: up to +47%;
not wearing a mask: +41%;
commuting via public transportation: +56%;
night shift work: +88%;

COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness

This paper from Brazil (2025-10-02) reports that young adults who had COVID-19 infections had long-term consequences. In addition to the well-known fatigue and smell/taste issues, participants who had COVID-19 infections also had lower heart rate variability (which shows impaired autonomic heart rate control) and increased body fat compared to controls. (NB: I don’t know if the increased body fat is because their fatigue made it harder for them to exercise.)

This paper using UK Biobank data (2025-10-01) reports that people with respiratory infections are at risk of new-onset dementia diagnoses. People who had COVID-19 infections had a 58% increased risk of all-cause dementia and a 105% increased risk of vascular dementia compared to healthy controls. However, they found that people with other respiratory illnesses had similar increased risk. (I guess they never looked before.) People with pre-existing mental health issues had significantly higher risks of vascular dementia.

It’s almost like viruses are bad for you.

Variants

This paper from Spain (2025-09-24) reports that the distribution of genetic variants of COVID-19 in individual people (the “mutant spectrum”) has changed over time. At the beginning of the pandemic, individual people had very diverse collections of COVID-19 variations inside their bodies, but as time passed — especially after Omicron hit — the diversity of the viruses in each infected person dropped significantly. In other words, the diversity of the mutant spectrum dropped over time.

Interestingly, the diversity of virus variants which they saw when they infected Vero E6 cells (derived from green monkey kidneys) in test tubes did not change over time. The authors said that they thought that was because SARS-CoV-2 evolved to preferentially preserve genetic features which were useful for infecting humans. When that was put into Vero cells, preserving the thing that was useful in humans wasn’t useful, so those variants didn’t replicate as well as ones that didn’t, so the diversity went up.

As my spouse put it: “It’s like the Omicron variant produces a class full of new viruses, and in the monkeys, the class idiot who always just fucked around turns out to be the one who succeeds. If that class were in humans, the class idiot would fuck up and not replicate well.”

What are the implications? Uh, I haven’t figured that out.

One of the things that I hope is that SARS-CoV-2 has gotten essentially as powerful as it is going to get — that further mutations that make a variant more contagious make it harder to replicate and vice versa. I don’t if that has happened, but a girl can dream.

Measles

Transmission

According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2025-10-06), in the week ending 27 September, the following jurisdictions had the following number of cases:

Canada: 36;
BC: 15;
Alberta: 12;
Manitoba: 8;
Ontario: 1.