Long COVID This paper from the UK says that people who have had COVID-19 infections are five times as likely to die in the 18 months post-infection than controls. This paper says that people who were unvaccinated were more likely to have lingering illness for at 28 to 89 days than the vaccinated, and that… Continue reading 2023-01-19 General
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Wastewater From Jeff’s spreadsheet: Jeff also just made individual charts, with nine-day rolling averages. (Why nine-day? It worked better.) From those charts, you can see that there was a definite rising trend for a while in Vancouver and the north shore, but levels now falling. He suspects that we’re seeing the end of a post-holiday… Continue reading 2023-01-13 BC small
2023-01-12 BC
Provincial Guidance Last week I said that the public health guidance on masks changed briefly, then changed back. This article says that was a mistake, that an old stale version accidentally got pushed. (Sounds like they need a better publishing workflow.) Hospitals This article says that Pub Health was going to open twenty surge centres… Continue reading 2023-01-12 BC
2023-01-12 General
Mitigation Measures This article says that the US has put in a new rule that air travellers must be fully vaccinated before getting on a plane to the US. (Confirmed at this US CDC page.) This paper from Ontario (from August) found that parents, in addition to everything else they were dealing with, had a… Continue reading 2023-01-12 General
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Wastewater From Jeff’s spreadsheet, with data from MetroVan through 2 Jan: There’s so much noise, it’s hard to tell if the amount of COVID-19 in the wastewater is going up or going down. Non-COVID Respiratory Illnesses I might not do any more reporting on non-COVID respiratory illnesses. The levels of illness are dropping pretty fast,… Continue reading 2023-01-06 BC small
2023-01-05 BC
Pub Health Advice This tweet thread says that the BC CDC web site changed from masking being a personal choice, to “Public health recommends wearing masks in all public indoor spaces”, back to personal choice, all in the space of not very much time. Hmmm. Sounds like there is some internal politics going on there.… Continue reading 2023-01-05 BC
2023-01-05 General
Long COVID Even people who don’t have classic “Long COVID”, getting COVID-19 is bad for you long-term. This paper from Florida reports that people who had COVID-19 have all-cause-mortality rates in the year after their acute phase at much higher than those who did not get COVID-19. Compared to people who were not infected with… Continue reading 2023-01-05 General
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Non-COVID Respiratory Diseases This article reports that BC CDC says that this year’s flu shot is about 50% effective. That sounds bad compared to like the measles vax or the first results for the mRNA vax, but half is still a big fraction! In addition to not updating their COVID-19 statistics (which is why there… Continue reading 2022-12-30 BC tiny
2022-12-29 General
Mitigation Measures This article says that $14.8 million in quarantine fines have been given in BC, MB, ON, and Atlantic Canada. The article hints that most of that money will not be collected, but doesn’t really explain why. This article says that 54% of Canadians would be okay with a mask mandate if cases rise.… Continue reading 2022-12-29 General
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Charts The wastewater data has not been updated, and maybe because of snow and holidays, it won’t. Non-COVID Respiratory Diseases I showed the BC CDC flu chart yesterday; here’s the US CDC flu graph for the Pacific Northwest region, also heading downwards: This article says that the various times associated with different diseases is as… Continue reading 2022-12-23 BC small