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
Category: Transmission
week ending 2022-06-02 General
Long COVID I was puzzled for a long time: all the statistics I saw said that Long COVID was really common — from 5% to 50%, depending on which study you looked at — but I didn’t know anybody with Long COVID! How could this be? I thought maybe it was because my echo chamber… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-02 General
week ending 2022-04-28 General
Vaccines This article says that Moderna has formally filed a request that the US FDA approve their vax for children between 6 months and 5 years, yay! Moderna says the two-dose regime is 51% effective against infection. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is compared to kids without vax (who don’t get sick as… Continue reading week ending 2022-04-28 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
2022-03-17/18 General
Mitigation Measures Yep, they did it. On Wednesday I said that the government planned to drop the testing requirement to enter Canada. This article reports that it happened. This article says that as more restrictions are being lifted, a hospital in Montreal reports seeing an increase in “normal” child trauma: broken legs, scrapes, stomach flu,… Continue reading 2022-03-17/18 General
2022-03-11 General
Note: I am going to reduce how often I post. I already don’t post on weekends; I plan to drop to Mondays and Fridays and maybe Wednesdays. Today was a light news day. I guess partly people are distracted with Ukraine, partly they are bored with COVID-19? Mitigation Measures This article reports that two federal… Continue reading 2022-03-11 General
2022-03-03 General
Vaccines You might be wondering what the holdup is with shots for toddlers and babies. After all, the Pfizer shots were effective (during the Delta regime) for the under-two babies, just not for the toddlers (presumably because the dose:weight ratio was high enough for the babies but not the toddlers). This article about the approval… Continue reading 2022-03-03 General
2022-02-26/27/28 General
Transmission This preprint looked at COVID-19 in some white-tailed deer killed by hunters in Ontario. It found COVID-19 in ~6% of the deer, and the whole-genome sequencing found that the viruses have mutated a lot. (“Highly divergent” was the language in the preprint.) Furthermore, they found one human from the same geographic area with known… Continue reading 2022-02-26/27/28 General
2022-02-19/20/21/22 General
This post might look like it has a fair amount of stuff in it, but it’s four days’ worth (because of the Canadian stat holiday yesterday). I have noticed a big drop in the amount of content to pull from. I’m not even seeing a lot of “how do we transition to post-pandemic” articles now.… Continue reading 2022-02-19/20/21/22 General
2022-02-16 General
Long COVID This preprint and this lay article report on a big US study of mental health effects after COVID-19 which found that people who had had COVID-19 had (compared to controls): 1.35x risk of anxiety disorders; 1.39x risk of depressive disorders; 1.38x risk of stress and adjustment disorders; 1.55x risk of antidepressant use; 1.65x… Continue reading 2022-02-16 General