I was out of town for a few days this week, so this post is short. I’ll catch up next week. Long COVID This paper from USA (2024-01-09) found that patients treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) had a 21-29% lower rate of Long COVID than controls. (The variability comes from which class of… Continue reading 2024-03-22 General
Category: Treatments
2024-03-15 General
Long COVID Today is International Long COVID Awareness Day. Yeah, I wouldn’t have known either if I didn’t actively seek out COVID-19 information. It got almost no media coverage. Ironically, the thing that did get media coverage today was a presentation which found that Long COVID wasn’t all that different from what people got after… Continue reading 2024-03-15 General
2024-03-08 General
Long COVID This paper from UK (2024-03-01) found that the blood of people who just had a COVID-19 infection was measurably different between those that developed/did not develop Long COVID later. Specifically, the ones who later developed Long COVID showed lower levels of blood iron and more inflammation. It’s not that they weren’t eating enough… Continue reading 2024-03-08 General
2024-03-01 General
Pathology This paper from USA (2024-02-07) found that vapes with propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin — with or without nicotine — increased the risk of COVID-19. However, vapes with benzoic acid added didn’t give any higher risk than not vaping. This preprint from China (2024-02-23) found SARS-CoV-2 virus in fluid in the middle ear. (Fluid… Continue reading 2024-03-01 General
2024-02-24 General
Pathology This paper from UK (2024-02-21) found, with careful genetic sequencing of samples of every sample, that a small but surprisingly high number of people had COVID-19 infections for long periods: about 1-3% had infections lasting ~30 days, and 1-5 out of 1000 for ~60 days. They even found one patient who was infected for… Continue reading 2024-02-24 General
2024-02-16 General
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
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
2024-01-27 General
Last week, when I was working on this post, I accidentally edited the previous week’s post. I think that I have untangled the two posts properly, I do not guarantee that I got everything from this week properly moved from last week to this week. Treatments I have been wondering if Paxlovid is pronounced with… Continue reading 2024-01-27 General
2024-01-19 General
I accidentally updated this post when I meant to work on the 2024-01-26 post. I have deleted the things that were supposed to go into next week’s post. Long COVID This preprint from USA (2024-01-12) found that, in a small study of 16 previously unvaccinated long-haulers, ten got better, five had no or small change,… Continue reading 2024-01-19 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