Mitigation Measures This article says that the federal government is going to drop the COVID-19 test for travellers entering Canada, for both land and air crossings, for fully vaxxed travellers. Rumour has it that the requirement will be dropped on 1 April. Vaccines Remember J&J? The lame-ass one-shot vax that nobody wants? This article says… Continue reading 2022-03-15/16 General
Category: Vaccines
2022-03-12/13/14 General
Long COVID This preprint says that people with Type O blood are 4.2x as likely to get Long COVID as non-O people. From this Twitter thread: Treatments This preprint looked at effectiveness of monoclonal antibodies against BA.1 and BA.2. It is striking to me how well a monoclonal antibody works against one of the strains… Continue reading 2022-03-12/13/14 General
2022-03-10 General
Mitigation Measures This paper reports on a big study in the US which compared school districts which had mask mandates with those that did not. For every 100 community-acquired cases, districts with universal mask mandates had 7.3 infections, while districts with optionally masks had 26.4. Don’t let anybody tell you that masks don’t work Testing… Continue reading 2022-03-10 General
2022-03-09 General
Vaccines This letter to the editor reports on the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines against various things for various variants: against variant # doses VE hospitalization alpha 2 85% hospitalization delta 2 85% hospitalization delta 3 94% hospitalization omicron 2 65% hospitalization omicron 3 86% ventilation alpha 2 or 3 76% ventilation delta 2 or 3… Continue reading 2022-03-09 General
2022-03-04 General
Long COVID As a reminder that Long COVID is a real problem, this report says that 2.4% of people in the UK report Long COVID symptoms more than four weeks after infection. Not 2.4% of the people who got Long COVID, 2.4% of ALL the people. Of that 2.4%, 45% (i.e. 1.08% of the total… Continue reading 2022-03-04 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
2022-03-02 General
Pathology This preprint says that they used immuno–positron emission tomography to see SARS-CoV-2 infection in cells, and found it kind of all over the male genital tract of macaques. Here’s a lay article on the subject, which added that 10-20% of men who get COVID-19 have problems with their genitals. Men, don’t get COVID-19, it’s… Continue reading 2022-03-02 General
2022-03-01 General
Pathology This article reports that a team can predict with 83% accuracy the severity of COVID-19 by looking at three components of blood (mostly TH17, a helper T cell, and immune system cells IL-17 and IFNG). Vaccines Yesterday I referenced a preprint which said that vaccine effectiveness in kidlets was awful. Today, there’s a different… Continue reading 2022-03-01 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
2022-02-24 General
Vaccines This article reports that Health Canada approved Medicago’s Covifenz, a plant-derived protein subunit vaccine. In trials, Covifenz had 71% effectiveness against Delta infection, and 100% effective against hospitalization. According to their product monograph, it is fridge-stable, but needs to be handled gently. Medicago’s vax is a virus-like particle, what I generally call a “spikey… Continue reading 2022-02-24 General