Side Effects This paper says that cloth masks are the worst for speech intelligibility. Use a medical mask. Long COVID This preprint from China says that: The proportion of previously hospitalized patients with COVID who had symptoms dropped from 68% at six months to 49% at 12 months. The proportion with fatigue increased slightly, from… Continue reading 2021-08-26 General
Category: Long COVID
2021-08-25 General
Vaccines This preprint says that giving solid organ transplant patients a fourth booster increases antibody levels. I have to wonder when it stops: do we give them five? six? twenty? when the rest of the world is clamoring for their first? This study found that there were three cases of myocarditis per 100K COVID-19 vaccinations,… Continue reading 2021-08-25 General
2021-08-24 General
Vaccines This thread gives a more general discussion of this preprint and says that while antibody levels in the blood, yeah, do go down for six months, the memory B cells totally rock at ramping up antibodies when needed. This thread gives a more general discussion of this preprint about waning vaccine effectiveness in Israel.… Continue reading 2021-08-24 General
2021-08-16 General
Vaccines In this preprint, they found antibody levels post-vax were (slightly) higher in women, younger people, Moderna vaccinees (vs. Pfizer), people who had prior COVID-19, and those who had significant side-effects. If I understand this table correctly, you are more likely to have significant side effects after dose 1 if you were over 60, female,… Continue reading 2021-08-16 General
2021-08-09 General
Transmission This study took COVID patients and counted the virus particles they emitted (well, RNA pieces). They found four interesting things: Being quiet keeps most of your viruses to yourself. A few people were more dangerous when talking than singing. Most of the viral load came from fine aerosol particles. There was a huge variation… Continue reading 2021-08-09 General
2021-08-04 General
Treatments This preprint says that injecting REGEN-COV (a monoclonal antibody treatment that you might know by the name of the company, Regeneron) into people who have been exposed to COVID-19 prevents developing a symptomatic infection with efficacy of 92.6%. This is a BFD. Before, they had to give it as an infusion i.e. the patients… Continue reading 2021-08-04 General
2021-07-31/08-01/02 General
Okay, I’ve been gone for a few days. First there wasn’t much news, then I was busy. Some general trends in articles I have noticed recently: There have recently been a number of articles expressing frustration and/or sadness that we thought we had the pandemic licked, and now Delta comes to get us. I have… Continue reading 2021-07-31/08-01/02 General
2021-07-30 General
Variants The US CDC changed its advice about masks, advising people to wear them more, because of what they’ve found about Delta. They were particularly shook by info from a big outbreak (~900 people) in Providencetown, MA. The study looked at 469 cases in more detail. (Here is the US CDC’s report on it, if… Continue reading 2021-07-30 General
2021-07-28 General
Vaccines On 21 July’s General blog post, I reported a study which suggested that vaccine effectiveness waned over time. This tweet thread (by one of the original authors) says they don’t think that’s accurate: that they got the denominator wrong. The vaccines still work well. Pfizer has released six-month data. Tl;dr: the vaccine works really… Continue reading 2021-07-28 General
2021-07-24/25/26 General
Vaccines If someone you know says that mRNA vaccines are too new and/or got rushed into production, point them at this article from 2018 which shows that there were five mRNA vaccines which had already completed trials, with five more in progress: — This is a really nice graphic showing the value of vaccinations (from… Continue reading 2021-07-24/25/26 General