I’m going to split blog postings into COVID-19 sections and H5N1 sections for now. I might someday split them into separate postings. Psychology Many years ago, I heard this George Carlin joke: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” It… Continue reading 2024-05-04 General
Category: Testing
2024-04-26 General
This article reports that BC’s Ministry of Health will switch to monthly COVID reports after the May 2 update. I will obviously cut back on BC posts in the summer; I haven’t decided how much I will cut back on the General posts. H5N1 H5N1 is starting to hit the news, and I will post… Continue reading 2024-04-26 General
2024-03-22 General
I was out of town for a few days this week, so this post is short. I’ll catch up next week. Long COVID This paper from USA (2024-01-09) found that patients treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) had a 21-29% lower rate of Long COVID than controls. (The variability comes from which class of… Continue reading 2024-03-22 General
2024-02-16 General
Government This post says there is a rumour that Dr. Teresa Tam is going to step down, with Dr. Bonnie Henry a leading contender to replace her. This article reports that the Auditor General had some very not nice things to say about ArriveCan. She said that it cost at least CAD$59.5M to produce, wasn’t… Continue reading 2024-02-16 General
2024-02-09 General
Long COVID This paper from UK (2024-02-07) found that the REGAIN intervention — an eight-week rehab program — helped people with Long COVID more than the usual care (one 30 min session). The REGAIN intervention had roughly one hour per week of light physical exercise and one hour per week most (six) weeks of psychotherapy,… Continue reading 2024-02-09 General
2024-02-03 General
Long COVID Very interesting news! My hand-wavy metaphor of what this paper from USA (2024-02-02) found is that the body gets allergic to COVID shrapnel. They found that pieces of dead SARS-CoV-2 viruses can recombine with double-strand DNA (dsDNA) to form things that look like antimicrobial peptides — proteins in the native immune system which… Continue reading 2024-02-03 General
2024-01-12 General
In my little corner of the COVID-cautious world, there’s a real sense of bafflement as to why the whole world stopped caring. There’s a faction which is very bitter and angry at the government for deliberately misleading people in order to get us to be good little automatons and go back to economy-boosting (i.e. stock… Continue reading 2024-01-12 General
2024-01-05 General
Someone in the US tooted that there are 1000 COVID-19 deaths per week there, and is kind of incredulous that people don’t take it more seriously. “If I were to tell you that 5 to 10 airliners would fall from the sky every week, half of the US wouldn’t set foot in a plane.” I… Continue reading 2024-01-05 General
2023-12-22 General
British Columbia is not going to release provincial COVID-19 data next week, so I’m not going to publish a BC post next week. I haven’t decided if I’m going to publish a General post next week or not. This week, I felt like I didn’t have much material to work with. Partly, it might be… Continue reading 2023-12-22 General
2023-12-15 General
Long COVID This (long) report from StatCan says that people who reported two COVID-19 infections were 1.7 times more likely to have Long COVID than people who only had one infection; people who had more than two were 2.6 times more likely to have Long COVID than those who had one infection. COVID-19 is not… Continue reading 2023-12-15 General