Category: Testing

week ending 2022-11-10 General

Mitigation Measures This article reports that a poll found that 69% of Canadians would either support or “somewhat support” a mask mandate for indoor public spaces if there are rising case counts. In BC, 72% said they supported or “somewhat supported” such a mandate. Long COVID This paper from Germany lays at least part of… Continue reading week ending 2022-11-10 General

week ending 2022-09-29 General

Mitigation Measures This press release from the Government of Canada says that all border restrictions — ALL — are dropped as of 1 October 2022. They are also dropping mask requirements on planes and trains. This paper tells how to do mask fit-testing at home. This paper from Nov 2021 says that the death rate… Continue reading week ending 2022-09-29 General

week ending 2022-09-15 General

Pathology This paper from the USA says that what gut microbes you have affects how badly COVD-19 hits you. (That’s a slight simplification — they looked at population-level frequency of various gut bacteria and compared it to population-level hospitalization rate.) This article from July 2020 says that the amount of fermented food that people eat… Continue reading week ending 2022-09-15 General

week ending 2022-08-11 General

Mitigation Measures This paper from eastern Massachusetts found that school districts which dropped mask mandates right away had 44 cases of COVID-19 per 1000 students/staff (accounting for 30% of cases) compared to schools which kept masks. (Before they were allowed to drop mask mandates, the case rates were similar.) Here’s a Twitter thread with an… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-11 General

week ending 2022-06-23 General

Sorry this was late. Life happened. Pathology This article summarizes this paper which says that the chances of bad COVID outcomes are cumulative with exposures. Getting COVID-19 twice is worse than once, three times is worse than two, etc. (Here’s a blog post which talks about this paper more.) As you can see, you are… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-23 General

week ending 2022-06-16 General

Long COVID This article about Long COVID in the US is interesting. It says that a lot of the indicators which you would expect to see Long COVID shift (e.g. number of disability claims, health care expenditures), have not in fact shifted. The article gives a number of possiblities: A lot of disabled people died… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-16 General

week ending 2022-05-19 General

Testing This paper found that dogs could be trained to recognize COVID-19 patients by smelling skin swabs with an accuracy of over 90%. This report says that: The percentage of all Canadian blood donors who have been infected with COVID-19 was about 28.7%, with 44.3% among the 17-24-year-olds. 99.57% of Canadian donors had evidence of… Continue reading week ending 2022-05-19 General

Week ending 2022-04-14 General

Because the rest of the world has decided that COVID doesn’t exist any more, I am dropping down to one post per week. I am going to stop posting articles which are repetitive, especially ones of the form “Oh look! {Vaccines, boosters, treatments} still work against {Omicron, older variants}”; “Oh look! Vaccines wane in effectiveness!”;… Continue reading Week ending 2022-04-14 General