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
Category: Transmission
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
2010-10-09/10/11/12 General
Mitigation Measures This article says that the US will allow fully-vaccinated Canadians to enter, starting sometime in November. “Fully-vaccinated” has not been clearly defined yet. Vaccines Novavax has published data from their Phase 3 trials in the USA and Mexico in this preprint. I wanted to be snarky and say that maybe this means that… Continue reading 2010-10-09/10/11/12 General
2021-10-06 General
Mitigation Measures This article says that the Government of Canada has come out with new vaccine mandates. All federal employees — including those who work from home or in a different country — have until 29 October to get vaccinated. Everyone over 12 must be vaccinated to take a plane or train inside Canada. Transmission… Continue reading 2021-10-06 General
2021-09-29 General
Testing/Diagnostics In this study, they put a wristwatch-like thing on the wrists of people who willingly allowed themselves to be infected with either rhinovirus, flu, or placebo. The wristwatch thingie was able to predict illness about a day before symptoms showed up. This could be really useful for diagnosing other respiratory infections (like ahem COVID-19).… Continue reading 2021-09-29 General
2021-09-22 General
Vaccines In this study, the authors made pseudoviruses — things which have SARS-CoV-2 spikes on them but which can’t infect people, and “mutated” the spikes. They were able to find a mutant spike that were almost completely resistant to antibodies from either people who had had COVID-19 and had not been vaccinated or who had… Continue reading 2021-09-22 General
2021-09-15 General
Vaccines I mentioned a study from England yesterday which looked at waning immunity. This tweet thread looks more closely, and there’s good stuff in the report that I missed. First, here’s the original study. Yes, it looks you’ve got a significant loss in effectiveness against infection if you look at the over-sixteens, but if you… Continue reading 2021-09-15 General
2021-09-14 General
Vaccines This article has a graph of AZ and Pfizer’s effectiveness over time for old folks. It’s not pretty (but remember that they used a short dose interval, and Canada mostly used a long interval). Even for younger people, it’s not great news: This preprint says that people who have a spare tire around their… Continue reading 2021-09-14 General
2021-09-11/12/13 General
Transmission This report says that seroprevalence of COVID-19 antibodies from infection in Canadian blood donors went up to 4.5%, up from 4.0% in May. (How can they tell the difference? Vaccines only make antibodies to the spike protein, so if there are antibodies to some other part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, then it was acquired… Continue reading 2021-09-11/12/13 General