COVID-19 Treatments 🎉 This paper from Israel (2026-03-25) reports that they’ve isolated a monoclonal antibody from recovered COVID-19 patients which works against all variants known so far! The antibody works against a highly-conserved area, and makes the top part of the spike fall off prematurely. Without the top part, the virus can’t dock with the… Continue reading 2026-04-03 General
Category: Influenza (non-bird)
2026-03-13 General
COVID-19 Long COVID A question that I get asked surprisingly frequently is, “but hasn’t Long COVID decreased a lot?” and I surprisingly didn’t have really good evidence either way to point to. Well, now I have something: this review paper (2026-03-10) reports that Long COVID prevalence was 35.5% in the pre-Omicron era and is 22.8%… Continue reading 2026-03-13 General
2026-02-20 General
Multiple Pathogens This report from Spain (2026-02-19) says that 8.8% of hospitalized patients got a hospital-acquired infection (HAI) and they were about twice as likely to die as patients who did not get an HAI. The authors think at least half of those are preventable. The authors note that there are three times as many… Continue reading 2026-02-20 General
2026-02-13 General
I’ve got almost nothing on COVID-19 this week. There have been some extremely technical, boring, non-actionable papers; there have been news stories about the (*sigh*) normal fecal tornadoes in the US health administration, there have been stories about people convicted of defrauding various other governments of COVID-19 relief funds, stories of Olympians *gasp* wearing masks,… Continue reading 2026-02-13 General
2026-01-23 General
COVID-19 Long COVID 👧 There has been a lot of hand-wringing about high absentee rates among children, with very little mention of the fact that maybe, y’know, children are sick more than were before everybody started collecting COVID-19 infections like they were baseball cards. Finally, a paper from USA (2026-01-16) does something that starts to… Continue reading 2026-01-23 General
2026-01-16 General
COVID-19 COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness There have been a fair number of articles and post on teh socials wringing hands about how cancer rates in young people were risking — with the implication that it was because of COVID-19 infections or vaccines. However, the data for that hand-wringing had been pre-pancemic. Good news! We… Continue reading 2026-01-16 General
2026-01-09 BC
COVID-19 COVID-19 is going up slightly, but from a very low base. Influenza is still a much bigger deal right now. Charts From the Viral Pathogen Characterization page: As I suspected, the slight drop in various respiratory illness levels in the last provincial report was in fact an artifact of the holidays. Flu has not… Continue reading 2026-01-09 BC
2026-01-09 General
COVID-19 COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness 🤰 This paper from USA (2025-01-01) reports babies who were exposed to COVID-19 while in the womb had neurological developmental issues compared to babies who were not exposed. Compared to controls, exposed children: 🤰 This paper from China (2025-12-23) reports that eggs for IVF which are taken while the… Continue reading 2026-01-09 General
2026-01-02 General
This is a short posting because there wasn’t much news over the holidays. The province didn’t release any data this week, so there’s no BC-specific posting. (The province says they will release data next Thursday.) COVID-19 COVID-Related Excess Sickness and Death This paper from USA (2025-12-23) reports that people hospitalized for COVID-19 had a 2.11… Continue reading 2026-01-02 General
2025-12-26 General
Influenza Transmission 🤧 I just had influenza, so spent some time looking up information about incubation periods and contagiousness to figure out how to keep Spouse from getting sick. O. My. Word. There is so much information that is just plain wrong out there! Almost every web page I visited said that influenza was passed… Continue reading 2025-12-26 General