Treatments HOORAY!!! As this article reports, Health Canada approved Paxlovid (an oral treatment for COVID-19 which cuts hospitalizations by almost 90%) today! Not only that, there are already about 30K doses in-country! Supplies are going to be limited for a while. Until then, Health Canada recommends prioritizing severely immune-compromised patients, people over 80 who don’t… Continue reading 2022-01-15/16/17 General
Category: Long COVID
2022-01-13 General
Variants Everybody knows by now that Omicron appears to be more mild, but how much of that is because lots of people have partial immunity? This preprint looked at South African Omicron infections and found that when you controlled for vaccination status, Omicron is about 25% as severe. Vaccines This article says that inactivated virus… Continue reading 2022-01-13 General
2022-01-12 General
Transmission Yesterday in the BC blog post, I gave a bunch of evidence for Omicron being a very “pointy” wave, fast up and fast down. Wastewater evidence from the eastern USA is also pointing to fast-up/fast-down. From this tweet, the wastewater SARS-CoV-2 surveillance in Boston: And from this tweet, the surveillance in New Haven, CT:… Continue reading 2022-01-12 General
2022-01-11 General
Variants This preprint says that Omicron is less virulent than Delta: ~50% less likely to get admitted to hospital from the emergency room; ~75% less likely to go to the ICU; ~70% shorter hospital stay. Note that something I’m seeing is people not seeing a shorter hospital stay in the UK, e.g. in this tweet.… Continue reading 2022-01-11 General
2022-01-08/09/10 General
Pathology There has been a lot of discussion of Omicron being more mild, and there being a “decoupling” of case rate and hospitalization/death rate, but it was hard to tell because hospitalizations and deaths lagged. It also varies by the demographics of the local population and how much prior (partial) immunity the population has. One… Continue reading 2022-01-08/09/10 General
2022-01-07 General
Vaccines This preprint from the UK found that boosters help against symptomatic infection, but also wane: dose1&2 dose3 VE at 2-4 weeks VE at 5-9 weeks VE at >10 weeks AZ+AZ Pfizer 62-65% 48% 32% AZ+AZ Moderna 62-65% 56% N/A Pfizer+Pfizer Pfizer 65% 49% 31% Pfizer+Pfizer Moderna 70% 57% N/A However, protection against severe disease… Continue reading 2022-01-07 General
2022-01-06 General
Variants This preprint looks at the effectiveness of a COVID-19 infection (as opposed to a vaccination) against future COVID unpleasantness: Variant against infection against hospitalization or death Alpha 90.2% 69.4% Beta 84.8% 88.0% Delta 92.0% 100% Omicron 56.0% 87.8% This preprint says that most people have a quite good T-cell response to Omicron after a… Continue reading 2022-01-06 General
2022-01-01/02/03/04 General
Happy New Year! Measures In the USA, the US CDC decided that five days was enough time to isolate. Per this tweet, five days later, the number of COVID-19 transmissions in hospitals went up: In BC, we just dropped to five-day isolation (as long as you have no symptoms). It would be interesting to see… Continue reading 2022-01-01/02/03/04 General
2021-12-25/26/27/28 General
Variants There has been difficulty figuring out how badly Omicron is going to hit the hospital system first because it is a lagging indicator, second because Omicron affects vaccinated and unvaccinated people so differently, and third because of poor-quality data around the holidays. Still, there are hints that, as this tweet from New York says,… Continue reading 2021-12-25/26/27/28 General
2021-12-11/12/13 General
Testing This report says that rapid tests are really inaccurate (they compared to PCR). This Twitter thread summarizes, but the brand I just picked up in the US misses half of symptomatic cases and a quarter of asymptomatic cases. (They say you should test multiple times, which if the failures are randomly distributed, should drop… Continue reading 2021-12-11/12/13 General