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
Category: Long COVID
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
2021-11-23 General
Mitigation Measures I have heard that it is critically important for masks to fit well to be useful, yet most of the people I see wearing masks have big obvious gaps in them. How could these possibly work? And yet, clearly they do. In addition to multiple studies showing mask-wearing reduces cases, pretty much every… Continue reading 2021-11-23 General
2021-11-20/21/22 General
Pathology This article says that people with mental illnesses are at much higher risk of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death. I gather that it’s not the mental illness per se, but the consequences of mental illness that put them at risk. Mitigation Measures This article reports that the Government of Canada has ended its COVID-era… Continue reading 2021-11-20/21/22 General
2021-11-16 General
Long COVID This preprint says that they found a chemical signature (elevated IL-1ß, IL-6 and TNF-α) associated with Long COVID. This is good for two reasons: it can help “prove” to doctors that the patients really have Long COVID and aren’t just lazy and it can suggest what the problem is and hence how to… Continue reading 2021-11-16 General