Vaccines In yesterday’s General blog post, I pointed to a study from Israel that said that Pfizer was only 64% effective. This thread does a takedown of that study. This preprint also says that AZ+Pfizer is a lot better (in test tubes, anyway) than AZ+AZ, and even a bit better than Pfizer+Pfizer. Disease This article… Continue reading 2021-07-06 General
Author: Ducky
2021-07-03/04/05 General
Seroprevalence This study from 18 June 2021 found that at the end of the second wave, between 5 and 6% of Canadians had antibodies to COVID-19, up from 2% after the first wave. Vaccines This study (done in Ontario) says that Moderna scores best against all the variants, and that Moderna does well against Delta… Continue reading 2021-07-03/04/05 General
2021-07-03/04/05 BC
Mitigation Measures The province has announced that universities and colleges are going back to in-person in the fall. Vaccine Clinics Fraser Health has said you can walk in to any of their clinics for your first dose. I heard from someone that VCH — or at least the West End Community Clinic — is doing… Continue reading 2021-07-03/04/05 BC
2021-07-02 BC
Heat This is not COVID-19, but it’s important. The BC Coroner said that there were 719 deaths in the past week, three times as many as would be expected. That means there were about 480 excess deaths, or as many as there were COVID-19 deaths as there were from 12 Feb to now. Statistics Wed/Thu:… Continue reading 2021-07-02 BC
2021-07-02 General
Mitigation Measures Trudeau put in writing that the border stays closed to foreign nationals entering from anywhere but the United States until 75% of the population (not the adults, not the eligible) are fully vaxxed. The “anywhere but the United States” is interesting, I think it basically bans air travel. Foreign nationals entering from the… Continue reading 2021-07-02 General
2021-07-01 General
Testing You might have heard of “Lateral Flow Tests”. They are a type of rapid test which has been deployed widely in the UK. This study evaluated six different brands of lateral flow tests and found that they are less sensitive than PCR tests, but most of them are still pretty good. Long COVID This… Continue reading 2021-07-01 General
2021-06-30 BC
Vaccination Clinics All vax clinics in BC now welcome drop-ins for first doses. Statistics Today: +44 cases, +0 deaths (second day in a row, yay!), +8,079 first doses, +53,042 second doses (of which 1283 were AZ). Currently 108 in hospital / 34 in ICU, 816 active cases, 145,032 recovered. first doses second doses of adults… Continue reading 2021-06-30 BC
2021-06-30 General
Vaccines/Innoculation This paper poses an interesting idea: maybe masks and distancing help not just in preventing spread but also from lowering the number of virus that one is exposed to to a level where people got micro-innoculations from sick people! They base it on the observation that many countries in Europe had increased cases without… Continue reading 2021-06-30 General
2021-06-29 BC
Note: It was hot again today, so today’s postings are going to be short. I’ll try to catch up in the next few days. Mitigation Measures/Press Briefing The headline today, the major, blinking, 72-point font headline is that BC has moved to Step 3 of the Restart Plan, which takes away most of the restrictions… Continue reading 2021-06-29 BC
2021-06-29 General
Note: It was hot again today, so today’s postings are going to be short. I’ll try to catch up in the next few days Deaths This report suggests that COVID-19 deaths in Canada were wickedly undercounted. NB: I haven’t had time to do a deep dive into it yet, but I would like to. So… Continue reading 2021-06-29 General