Vaccines Studies of the effectiveness of boosters against Omicron in humans (as opposed to test tubes) are starting to come out, and they are not as encouraging as one would like. This preprint from the UK says in people who got AZ, a Pfizer booster is 89.1% effective against symptomatic infection and for those who… Continue reading 2022-01-05 General
Category: Vaccines
2022-01-01/02/03/04 General
Happy New Year! Measures In the USA, the US CDC decided that five days was enough time to isolate. Per this tweet, five days later, the number of COVID-19 transmissions in hospitals went up: In BC, we just dropped to five-day isolation (as long as you have no symptoms). It would be interesting to see… Continue reading 2022-01-01/02/03/04 General
2021-12-25/26/27/28 General
Variants There has been difficulty figuring out how badly Omicron is going to hit the hospital system first because it is a lagging indicator, second because Omicron affects vaccinated and unvaccinated people so differently, and third because of poor-quality data around the holidays. Still, there are hints that, as this tweet from New York says,… Continue reading 2021-12-25/26/27/28 General
2021-12-21 General
Variants More qualified good news: this preprint out of South Africa says that Omicron is only 70% as likely to send someone to the hospital as Delta. All the same caveats I’ve made previously apply, though. This Twitter thread does an estimate of the Case Hospitalization Rate (CHR) in New South Wales, Australia. This is… Continue reading 2021-12-21 General
2021-12-18 General
I knew this was coming. I knew this was coming. I knew this would be bad. I predicted that the health care system might collapse in multiple jurisdictions in the West. I’m still somewhat shocked at the ferocity and this wave. There are lots of people saying that Omicron is milder than previous variants (see… Continue reading 2021-12-18 General
2021-12-17 General
I remember thinking it was really strange that more people died in the second year of the Spanish Flu pandemic than the first. I’m not surprised any more. Vaccines Someone asked me today, “would Omicron still have arisen if we’d had equitable and effective vaccine distribution globally? At first I hedged, and said we couldn’t… Continue reading 2021-12-17 General
2021-12-16 General
I’m tired and kind of depressed. I (and many other people) saw Omicron coming weeks ago, and now it’s here. It’s just as bad as I feared, and perhaps even worse. 🙁 Omicron is dominating the news, but … it’s not really news. There’s a lot of people saying “OH SHIT! WE ARE FUCKED!”, but… Continue reading 2021-12-16 General
2021-12-15 General
Mitigation Measures This article says that the federal government is advising against international travel. (If you go to the travel advisory page, for every country, it says you shouldn’t go there.) This article says that the Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland committed a whole bunch of money to fight COVID-19 . Variants There were a ton… Continue reading 2021-12-15 General
2021-12-14 General
Variants According to this Twitter thread, which reported on a press conference in South Africa, Omicron now accounts for 90% of the cases in South Africa. (Note: it might not be displacing Delta, there might still be just as many Delta cases as before — I don’t now — but a huge number of Omicron… Continue reading 2021-12-14 General
2021-12-08/09/10 General
I was out of town for a few days. I think this mostly catches up. Variants This press release from Pfizer says that three doses of Pfizer will give reasonable protection against infection with Omicron, but two doses isn’t enough. Two doses should still protect against severe disease. This Twitter thread on a report from… Continue reading 2021-12-08/09/10 General