Variants The current data, while confusing and somewhat contradictory, at least shows that our wave is not getting lots worse, and might even be going down. This seems really strange, when compared to how many other jurisdictions have gotten hammered. According to this blog post, the US had large shares of BA.2.12.1 — which shares… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-04 General
Category: Variants
week ending 2022-07-28 General
Transmission Here’s another preprint (from the UK) which says that the “you don’t have to isolate longer than five days” guidance is bullshit. It says that the median person was infectious — even if asymptomatic — for 7 to ten days. This paper from the USA found that while adults who were not exposed to… Continue reading week ending 2022-07-28 General
week ending 2022-07-21 General
You might have noticed that I now frequently put the country where the research was carried out next to the link. I do think because different countries have different demographic profiles, different vaccination programs/history, different wave histories, etc. Sometimes this matters, and I am not clever enough to figure out when. If work is done… Continue reading week ending 2022-07-21 General
week ending 2022-07-07 General
Long COVID This paper says that they have found a really good blood marker (IL-2 release) for Long COVID. This paper from Italy found that risk of Long COVID decreased as the number of vaccines increase. (It was still 16% with three vaccines, however, still not good.) It found that things that decreased your risk… Continue reading week ending 2022-07-07 General
week ending 2022-06-23 General
Sorry this was late. Life happened. Pathology This article summarizes this paper which says that the chances of bad COVID outcomes are cumulative with exposures. Getting COVID-19 twice is worse than once, three times is worse than two, etc. (Here’s a blog post which talks about this paper more.) As you can see, you are… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-23 General
week ending 2022-06-16 General
Long COVID This article about Long COVID in the US is interesting. It says that a lot of the indicators which you would expect to see Long COVID shift (e.g. number of disability claims, health care expenditures), have not in fact shifted. The article gives a number of possiblities: A lot of disabled people died… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-16 General
week ending 2022-06-09 General
Vaccines This article reports that Moderna got really good results with a clinical trial of a booster with half COVID Classic-based plus Omicron-based vax. Moderna says they think it will be available in late summer/fall. According to this tweet, it is better to get vaccines in the morning than in the afternoon. This paper is… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-09 General
week ending 2022-06-02 General
Long COVID I was puzzled for a long time: all the statistics I saw said that Long COVID was really common — from 5% to 50%, depending on which study you looked at — but I didn’t know anybody with Long COVID! How could this be? I thought maybe it was because my echo chamber… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-02 General
week ending 2022-05-19 General
Testing This paper found that dogs could be trained to recognize COVID-19 patients by smelling skin swabs with an accuracy of over 90%. This report says that: The percentage of all Canadian blood donors who have been infected with COVID-19 was about 28.7%, with 44.3% among the 17-24-year-olds. 99.57% of Canadian donors had evidence of… Continue reading week ending 2022-05-19 General
week ending 2022-05-05 General
Mitigation Measures This site has links to a boatload of studies on masking. 21 of 24 studies found masks to be effective; one was inconclusive and one found that masks were not effective. Ten of the studies date from Dec 2021 or more recently. Long COVID There were three studies I found last week which… Continue reading week ending 2022-05-05 General