Long COVID This preprint and this lay article report on a big US study of mental health effects after COVID-19 which found that people who had had COVID-19 had (compared to controls): 1.35x risk of anxiety disorders; 1.39x risk of depressive disorders; 1.38x risk of stress and adjustment disorders; 1.55x risk of antidepressant use; 1.65x… Continue reading 2022-02-16 General
Category: Long COVID
2022-02-09 General
Vaccines You know how the mRNA vaccines are f amazing? I want to take a moment to say that I think the next generation of vaccines are going to be even more effective. There have been a rash of papers recently which indicate that we humans still have tricks up our sleeves: Multiple targets: All… Continue reading 2022-02-09 General
2022-02-05/06/07 General
Long COVID This paper and this preprint says that people who have recovered from a COVID-19 infection are at greater risk from heart complications afterwards. The first study followed patients for the next year and found that patients had the following elevated risk of any heart issue in the following year compared to non-infected controls:… Continue reading 2022-02-05/06/07 General
2022-01-29/30/31 General
Vaccines There’s a great, long Twitter thread which looks at the effect of vaccines. (It summarizes a paywalled article, if you want to see the whole thing.) One of the elements which I found striking was how the risk of COVID-19 relative to the flu has dropped over time. In mid 2020, the infection fatality… Continue reading 2022-01-29/30/31 General
2022-01-28 General
Variants I don’t like to warn about variants before there’s data. (I didn’t sound alarms about Mu, for example.) Well, I think it’s time to talk about BA.2 — an Omicron variant. (The Omicron variant which sprouted up first is BA.1.) BA.2 doesn’t look like it is lot worse than BA.1 — not like Delta… Continue reading 2022-01-28 General
2022-01-27 General
Pathology This study found that pregnant women were 1.77x as likely to develop preeclampsia if they got COVID-19; women who had not given birth before were 1.89x as likely. They found the risk of a preterm birth for all pregnant women with both COVID-19 and preeclampsia was 4.05x (and 6.26x for women who had never… Continue reading 2022-01-27 General
2022-01-26 General
Mitigation Measures This preprint looked at high-risk exposures and said that the risk of catching COVID-19 was: 3.02x higher if the infected person was part of your household (versus not), 2.1x higher if the transmission was indoors (versus outdoors), 2.15x higher if the interaction lasted 3 hrs or more (vs. shorter) among unvaccinated and partially-vaccinated… Continue reading 2022-01-26 General
2022-01-25 General
Long COVID This preprint says that they found four predictors which are strongly correlated with Long COVID: type 2 diabetes, SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the blood, Epstein-Barr virus in the blood, and specific autoantibodies. (Here’s an article translating the subject into lay-speak. Paywalled, sorry.) This paper also found a Long COVID signature/diagnostic, this time in age,… Continue reading 2022-01-25 General
2022-01-20 General
Transmission I found this article interesting. They modelled two air flights and got pretty good agreement with reality. On the first flight, early enough in the pandemic that people weren’t wearing masks, one infected passenger on a 12-hour flight in business class got 12 people sick. On the second flight, four infected passengers on a… Continue reading 2022-01-20 General
2022-01-19 General
Vaccines This preprint says that there were zero children in France who had been fully vaccinated and went on to develop MIS-C. Pathology This preprint says that kids recover pretty well from MIS-C. This speculative preprint wonders if maybe the reason kids have milder symptoms and MIS-C after a delay is because their bodies make… Continue reading 2022-01-19 General