Hospitalizations An independent statistician pulled together this graph: Why does Quebec have such a fall-off in hospitalizations/confirmed case and ICU admissions/confirmed case when the other provinces do not? Because Quebec does a better job testing/finding cases, so the denominator is bigger. Note that the most recent data is excluded because the episode date is when… Continue reading 2021-08-13 General
Category: General
2021-08-11/12 General
Testing Three dogs have been trained in Vancouver to sniff out COVID-19 with very high accuracy! Transmission Yow! This preprint says that 6.8% of COVID-19 patients in England caught it in the hospital. Vaccines Good news! Adolescents tolerated two doses of Moderna, and the vax arm had no cases vs. four in the placebo arm.… Continue reading 2021-08-11/12 General
2021-08-10 General
Vaccines Sigh. Yesterday I showed a graph from Israel which looked a little funny, and repeated the explanations that were given. (BTW, I had heard before that Israel’s cases looked funny because the outbreak started in areas that were highly vaxxed and social separate from the unvaxxed places.) Today, one of the authors of the… Continue reading 2021-08-10 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
2021-08-07/08 General
Vaccines This preprint says that getting a vaccine makes antibodies that you can detect in saliva (and I presume thus in the rest of the upper respiratory system). Recommended Reading This blog post does a very good job of explaining why we still need masks and distancing. Spoiler: fear the Delta strain. This Twitter thread… Continue reading 2021-08-07/08 General
2021-08-06 General
Vaccines Novavax is having such trouble manufacturing that the US has paused funding. This study looked at mixing and matching AZ and Pfizer. It found that side effects were similar for all the combinations. It found that AZ first then Pfizer was about the same as Pfizer+Pfizer in terms of antibodies; it found that AZ+Pfizer… Continue reading 2021-08-06 General
2021-08-05 General
Vaccines This study out of the Netherlandsfound that the vaccine effectiveness against transmission to household members was: 58% for AZ 70% for Pfizer 88% for Moderna 77% for J&J Moderna says their vaccine’s effectiveness does not wane in six months, only dropping from 94% to 93% effectiveness. According to the Moderna Q2 Investor’s Report, the… Continue reading 2021-08-05 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