week ending 2022-09-01 General

Vaccines This article says that Health Canada approved a BA.1 booster from Moderna today for adults and immunocompromised children over 12. 780K are supposed to arrive in-country tomorrow, with another 10.5M at the end of September. There isn’t good data from random clinical trials in humans yet for the new bivalent vaccines. This preprint from… Continue reading week ending 2022-09-01 General

week ending 2022-08-25 General

Long COVID This article reports on this (difficult-for-lay-people-to-understand) research report which says that Long COVID patients had an imbalance in the clot-promoting and clot-removing proteins in the blood. (Note: in the Recommended Reading section, there’s a link to a long article on clotting and Long COVID.) Pathology This paper says that physical exercise makes your… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-25 General

week ending 2022-08-18 General

Live Attenuated Virus Vaccines This paper from Massachusetts found that vaccination with the tuberculosis BCG vaccine gave a 92% efficacy against COVID-19. (Also see this mass media article, which talks about other studies too.) BCG is a live attenuated virus vaccine (LAV); I’ve talked about LAVs before and how they appear to boost the innate… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-18 General

week ending 2022-08-11 General

Mitigation Measures This paper from eastern Massachusetts found that school districts which dropped mask mandates right away had 44 cases of COVID-19 per 1000 students/staff (accounting for 30% of cases) compared to schools which kept masks. (Before they were allowed to drop mask mandates, the case rates were similar.) Here’s a Twitter thread with an… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-11 General

week ending 2022-08-04 General

Variants The current data, while confusing and somewhat contradictory, at least shows that our wave is not getting lots worse, and might even be going down. This seems really strange, when compared to how many other jurisdictions have gotten hammered. According to this blog post, the US had large shares of BA.2.12.1 — which shares… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-04 General

week ending 2022-07-21 General

You might have noticed that I now frequently put the country where the research was carried out next to the link. I do think because different countries have different demographic profiles, different vaccination programs/history, different wave histories, etc. Sometimes this matters, and I am not clever enough to figure out when. If work is done… Continue reading week ending 2022-07-21 General

week ending 2022-07-14 General

Vaccines This article reports that Moderna has been approved in Canada for kiddies between six months and five years old. This article reports that an Alberta judge ruled that it was okay to require transplant patients to get a COVID vax, given the scarcity of organs and the much higher likelihood that unvaxxed organ recipients… Continue reading week ending 2022-07-14 General

week ending 2022-07-07 General

Long COVID This paper says that they have found a really good blood marker (IL-2 release) for Long COVID. This paper from Italy found that risk of Long COVID decreased as the number of vaccines increase. (It was still 16% with three vaccines, however, still not good.) It found that things that decreased your risk… Continue reading week ending 2022-07-07 General

week ending 2022-06-30 General

Folks, BA.5 is coming and it’s going to be bad. Mentally prepare yourself for a big wave this summer. I don’t know where to put it, but this paper says that compared to peer countries, Canada: Did really well on per capita vaccinated, cases, and deaths. (You could argue that we’re fudging the numbers, but… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-30 General