2026-11-14 General

COVID-19

Long COVID

❓This paper from USA (2026-10-27), like this paper (2026-11-05) which I mentioned last week and this paper (2026-10-27) from the week before, reports that if you change which control group you use, the apparent incidence of Long COVID symptoms attributable to Long COVID drops dramatically. I know I promised to dig into last week’s paper in this post, but I’ve decided that what I’m going to do is write a special post on measuring Long COVID rates (or “Why Doesn’t The Literature Match What I See?”). Watch for that.

😢 This paper from USA (2026-11-05) reports that people with Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) are nearly three times more likely to develop Long COVID than people without hEDS.

AGAIN This paper from USA (2026-11-05) reports that among people with Type 2 diabetes, those who were given metformin at the beginning of a COVID-19 infection were ~40% less likely to get Long COVID than those who got DPP4i (a different drug for controlling Type 2 diabetes).

This older paper from Singapore (2025-11-19), in addition to enumerating different risks for Long COVID of different types, reports that the risk of Long COVID symptoms was worse for the second infection than the first: “An excess number of around 5 diagnoses of new-incident conditions per 1000 is expected in reinfections and 3 diagnoses of new-incident conditions per 1000 is expected in 1st infections.”

Transmission

🍆 This paper from Brazil (2026-11-10) reports that COVID-19 was detectable in the semen of 55% of participants who had recovered from mild-to-moderate COVID-19 infections — at least six months later. (Or, as this post said, “Viral gunk! / infects your spunk!”)

Pathology

🤧🐁 This paper (2026-11-12) reports that PLpro, a protein/protease made by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (as a side effect of other things it does) makes mice sneeze, cough, and ache. This might give clues to how to treat the annoying symptoms of respiratory illnesses!

PLpro combines with a human-made protein, and TRPA1, and it’s that combo which plugs into the receptors which cause sneezing etc. So blocking either PLpro (with a protease inhibitor) or TRPA1 might suppress cold symptoms.

Now, there is a question of whether we should block cold symptoms or not. Maybe cold symptoms keep people home and keep them from spreading their germs. But maybe people don’t spread as many germs if they aren’t coughing and sneezing? It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.

(Incidentally, the authors of the paper also had to prove that mice sneeze! At 1x speed, you can’t really see mice sneeze, but you can when it is slowed down, as the video in this article (2026-11-12) about the paper shows.)

Recommended Reading

This blog post (2026-10-31) shares a letter from someone with really bad Long COVID who describes how his Long COVID made it difficult to even think.

Influenza

Vaccines

💉 This article (2026-11-09), about research which hasn’t been published yet, reports that injecting flu vaccine into melanoma tumours made them shrink!

This is very early research, practically anecdata — small number of participants, no controls — but I thought it was really interesting!

RSV

Vaccines

💉 AGAIN This paper from USA (2026-10-28) reports that the effectiveness of Moderna’s mRNA RSV vaccine (mResvia) is quite effective at 24 weeks. Compared to a control arm that didn’t get any vaccinations, the RSV vax had these effectivenesses:

  • 60.3% against documented infection;
  • 60.2% against Emergency or Urgent Care visits;
  • 81.8% against RSV-associated hospitalizations.

To guard against there being a difference between people who sought treatment and those who did not, they also calculated effectiveness using a control arm of people who got flu shots but not RSV shots. The effectiveness was actually slightly better than with a no-vax comparison group:

  • 67.0% against documented infection;
  • 69.5% against Emergency or Urgent Care visits;
  • 86.9% against RSV-associated hospitalizations.

The effectiveness declined with age:

  • 82.9% for people age 50-59;
  • 66.3% for people age 60-69;
  • 64.0% for people age 70-79;
  • 28.6% for people 80 and over.

(I didn’t see in the paper anywhere that it said if the age effectiveness used the no-vax control group or the flu-vax control group, but I’m not sure it really matters. The takeaways are that RSV VAX GOOD and BEING MORE OLD MORE DANGEROUS.)

Measles

Transmission

🎉 According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2026-11-09), in the week ending 31 October 2026, there were zero new measles cases in Canada.