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
Category: Transmission
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
2023-12-08 General
This week’s post is a little short because I performed a rapid unscheduled cranio-planetary docking maneuver while on a bike ride. (I’m fine — helmets are awesome! — but I’m taking it easy for a few days.) Long COVID Two weeks ago, I reported on a case studies paper which found that nicotine patches helped… Continue reading 2023-12-08 General
2023-11-10 General
Long COVID This paper from Italy found that people continue to recover taste and smell for at least three years after losing it due to COVID-19 infection. This paper from USA said that children under 5 years old who had been infected with COVID-19 were 40% more likely to get RSV than controls. Vaccines Intranasal… Continue reading 2023-11-10 General
2023-10-27 General
Long COVID This preprint from USA says they used PET scans to look at inflammation in the brains of long haulers, and found more inflammation in long haulers than in controls. This preprint from many places says that they found evidence of reactivation of herpesvirus type 6 in long haulers (mostly a childhood disease, where… Continue reading 2023-10-27 General
2023-10-13 General
Vaccines This paper from Italy reports on Novavax Classic effectiveness during the early Omicron period. In people who had no vaccination previously, after about two weeks post-dose, they found vaccine effectiveness to be: Against infection symptomaticinfection 1 dose 23% 31% 2 doses 31% 50% You might look at this and think, “wow, that’s pretty crappy”,… Continue reading 2023-10-13 General