Vaccines I see a lot of anxiety about vaccines decreasing in effectiveness. In the US, Biden announced that third-dose-boosters would start being delivered on 20 August, never mind that the FDA has not yet approved boosters. Here is an example of someone showing the waning effectiveness of the vaccines: But some of the studies have… Continue reading 2021-08-19 General
Category: Transmission
2021-08-18 General
Vaccines There has been a lot of discussing recently about waning effectiveness of vaccines. I want to editorialize for a moment: you expect vaccine effectiveness against infection to appear worse in real life than in the studies, and to appear worse over time. More time to get infected. If the vaccine is 95% effective over… Continue reading 2021-08-18 General
2021-08-17 General
Variants This article talks about a lot of things, but says: Breakthrough cases appear to be increasing for Delta. However, they don’t give any “before” numbers, and it’s not clear if it’s just because the number of vaccinated people is increasing. The absolute number of breakthrough cases is still low. The average age of a… Continue reading 2021-08-17 General
2021-08-16 General
Vaccines In this preprint, they found antibody levels post-vax were (slightly) higher in women, younger people, Moderna vaccinees (vs. Pfizer), people who had prior COVID-19, and those who had significant side-effects. If I understand this table correctly, you are more likely to have significant side effects after dose 1 if you were over 60, female,… Continue reading 2021-08-16 General
2021-08-13 General
Hospitalizations An independent statistician pulled together this graph: Why does Quebec have such a fall-off in hospitalizations/confirmed case and ICU admissions/confirmed case when the other provinces do not? Because Quebec does a better job testing/finding cases, so the denominator is bigger. Note that the most recent data is excluded because the episode date is when… Continue reading 2021-08-13 General
2021-08-11/12 General
Testing Three dogs have been trained in Vancouver to sniff out COVID-19 with very high accuracy! Transmission Yow! This preprint says that 6.8% of COVID-19 patients in England caught it in the hospital. Vaccines Good news! Adolescents tolerated two doses of Moderna, and the vax arm had no cases vs. four in the placebo arm.… Continue reading 2021-08-11/12 General
2021-08-09 General
Transmission This study took COVID patients and counted the virus particles they emitted (well, RNA pieces). They found four interesting things: Being quiet keeps most of your viruses to yourself. A few people were more dangerous when talking than singing. Most of the viral load came from fine aerosol particles. There was a huge variation… Continue reading 2021-08-09 General
2021-07-29 General
Transmission This article says that, starting today, COVID-positive people (basically) in Alberta will need to stay in their home, but the household members will not be required to quarantine as well. Contact tracers also will not notify the contacts of the positive people: the infect are now responsible for telling them. Starting on 16 August,… Continue reading 2021-07-29 General
2021-07-28 General
Vaccines On 21 July’s General blog post, I reported a study which suggested that vaccine effectiveness waned over time. This tweet thread (by one of the original authors) says they don’t think that’s accurate: that they got the denominator wrong. The vaccines still work well. Pfizer has released six-month data. Tl;dr: the vaccine works really… Continue reading 2021-07-28 General
2021-07-23 General
Vaccines This article says that data from Israel shows that the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against infection (not against severe disease!) might be waning. Take that with a big grain of salt, however. There are a number of reasons why this should not be scary to you, even if you got the Pfizer vax.… Continue reading 2021-07-23 General