Pathology/Treatment A really puzzling and important question has been: why do some people get really really sick from COVID-19 while others breeze through? This preprint reports on measuring the hell out of three groups of people — healthy, hospitalized, and ICE — to figure out what was different between them. They found: At least 10%… Continue reading 2021-10-26 General
Category: General
2021-10-23/24/25 General
Transmission In this small study of Italian health-care workers who were tested regularly, all of the people who tested positive but were asymptomatic tested negative the very next day. The mean time for the symptomatic patients to test negative was 11 days. Pathology This preprint says they found SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the cerebrospinal fluid of… Continue reading 2021-10-23/24/25 General
2021-10-22 General
Vaccines This article reports that pediatric Pfizer is 90.7% effective against infection in children. Long COVID This preprint says that various forms of cognitive impairment are pretty common several months after “getting over” COVID-19. People who went the ER are more likely to have cognitive impairment than people who were treated as outpatients. Recommended Reading… Continue reading 2021-10-22 General
2021-10-21 General
Mitigation Measures This article talks about $7.4B in relief spending that the Government of Canada has announced. All three of these programs will go until 7 May 2022. Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) will be replaced by the Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit and will provide $300 a week to eligible people. The Tourism and Hospitality Recovery… Continue reading 2021-10-21 General
2021-10-20 General
Variants As this article says, they are starting to see a new variant in England called AY.4.2 or “Delta plus”. It is gaining ground on Delta, although slowly. It might be a little bit more contagious than Delta, but not hugely. It’s not like the huge advantage over Alpha that Delta had. Recommended Reading This… Continue reading 2021-10-20 General
2021-10-19 General
Vaccines This preprint is yet another study showing that infection+vaccination gives a stronger and more durable response that vaccination alone or infection alone. There have been so many studies showing that result that I am getting tired and bored with them, and probably will not post any more. This preprint about vaccines and pregnancy found:… Continue reading 2021-10-19 General
2021-10-16/17/18 General
Vaccines This study in Sweden of mix&match effectiveness against symptomatic infection found that a second dose of mRNA was better after a first of AZ than a second dose of AZ: 1st Dose 2nd Dose Effectiveness AZ AZ 50% AZ Pfizer 67% AZ Moderna 79% Pfizer Pfizer 78% Moderna Moderna 87% This article says that… Continue reading 2021-10-16/17/18 General
2021-10-15 General
A friend kept ragging on me about using the trade names for various vaccines. I held firm because it was more correct and accurate. He complained that nobody knew the names, but I pointed out that people got used to Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. I now give up. Nobody and I mean nobody but… Continue reading 2021-10-15 General
2021-10-14 General
Vaccines Someone is live-tweeting the La Jolla Immunology Conference, and during a panel about an important paper from May that I’ve already talked about, they said something which I missed: that inter-individual variations in antibody responses are larger than the variations between responses to different variants. I’ve talked about the two-proline (2P) and six-proline (6P)… Continue reading 2021-10-14 General
2021-10-13 General
Diagnosis / Equity This Twitter thread suggests that the reason darker-skinned people have higher fatality rates from COVID-19 is because, well, they have darker skin: pulse oximeters, which are used to judge how serious a case is, don’t work on dark-skinned people. Economic effects This video from January 2021 makes the economic case — not… Continue reading 2021-10-13 General