2021-10-26 General

Pathology/Treatment A really puzzling and important question has been: why do some people get really really sick from COVID-19 while others breeze through? This preprint reports on measuring the hell out of three groups of people — healthy, hospitalized, and ICE — to figure out what was different between them. They found: At least 10%… Continue reading 2021-10-26 General

2021-10-21 General

Mitigation Measures This article talks about $7.4B in relief spending that the Government of Canada has announced. All three of these programs will go until 7 May 2022. Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) will be replaced by the Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit and will provide $300 a week to eligible people. The Tourism and Hospitality Recovery… Continue reading 2021-10-21 General

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

2021-10-01 General

Vaccines Today, during a BC Ministry of Health press conference about something else, Dr. Henry got a question about when little kids’ vaccinations (ages 5-11). Dr. Henry said that Pfizer had submitted (or was about to submit?) data for the study, which had a new formulation: 1/3 of the adult active ingredient (10 mg vs.… Continue reading 2021-10-01 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

2021-09-28 General

Treatments It’s been observed often that obesity raises the risk of COVID-19. This preprint looked into it more closely, and found that the anti-obesity drug orlistat blocks COVID-19 in mice. Mitigation Measures This report from England looked how behaviour correlated with risk of getting COVID-19. People who reported that never wore masks were slightly over… Continue reading 2021-09-28 General

2021-09-23 General

Vaccines This long and highly technical preprint also says that the MMR vaccine gives some protection against and that the Tdap (Tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis) vaccine does. The authors did two things: They took T cells from blood which had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (either from infection or vaccination) and added either MMR or Tdap vaccines, and… Continue reading 2021-09-23 General