Deaths/Demographics In addition to just “numbers of deaths”, you can also estimate “years of life lost” to describe how bad an epidemic is. For example, HIV had a huuuuge number of years of life lost because the people who died from it were unusually young. This article looked at years of life lost to COVID-19… Continue reading 2021-11-03 General
Category: Treatments
2021-11-02 General
Vaccines This article says that vaccine effectiveness in England was only about 50-60% against infection in the June/July 2021 period. There’s a stat called the number needed to vaccinate (NNV), which is a measure of how many people you would need to vaccinate to prevent some outcome. The NNV for 80 year olds to prevent… Continue reading 2021-11-02 General
2021-10-28 General
Treatment This paper says that a single infusion of a new-to-me polyclonal antibody — sotrovimab — is 85% effective at preventing hospitalization when given early to high-risk COVID-19 patients. The FDA already gave an EUA to sotrovimab on 26 May; Canada gave interim approval on 30 July (and bought 10,000 doses on 4 October), so… Continue reading 2021-10-28 General
2021-10-27 General
Treatments Yay! This article says that Merck has licensed molnupiravir such that ~100 developing countries can manufacture it at low cost! This is awesome. (It hasn’t been approved by any countries yet, but it will be soon, I’m sure.) Yay yay! This article reports that a cheap mature drug for depression — fluvoxamine — reduces… Continue reading 2021-10-27 General
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
2021-10-15 General
A friend kept ragging on me about using the trade names for various vaccines. I held firm because it was more correct and accurate. He complained that nobody knew the names, but I pointed out that people got used to Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. I now give up. Nobody and I mean nobody but… Continue reading 2021-10-15 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