It was kind of slow over the weekend, so I’m doing three days at once. Mitigation Measures The police cleared out a crowd at English Bay beach on Friday at 10p when the beaches officially closed. Police turned back about 100 cars and fined two at travel-denying checkpoints. Those two just… didn’t stop. Vaccination I… Continue reading 2021-05-22/23/24 BC
2021-05-22/23 General
Yesterday was a bit of a slow news day, plus I uh forgot to hit the Publish button, so today you get a 2-for-1 post! Schools A US CDC report says that schools that required teachers and staff to use masks had 37% lower rates of COVID-19. Schools which improved ventilation had 39% lower rates… Continue reading 2021-05-22/23 General
2021-05-21 General
Vaccines New data from a UK study of Novavax is out, and it looks really good: 96.4% against COVID Classic and 86.3% against B.1.1.7, with fewer side effects than Pfizer/Moderna/AZ. (No sign of blood clots, either, but rare events like that are unlikely to show up in a trial.) Meanwhile, a Novavax trial in South… Continue reading 2021-05-21 General
2021-05-21 BC
Vaccination clinics A milestone day: 50% of the total population of BC and 62% of adults have gotten at least one dose of vax! Here’s the breakdown by age: Statistics +420 cases, +6 deaths, +53,160 first doses, +3,500 second doses. Currently 319 in hospital / 107 in ICU, 4,507 active cases, 135,068 recovered. NB: I’m… Continue reading 2021-05-21 BC
2021-05-20 General
Vaccines SinoVac/CoronaVac did a clinical trial in kids down to age 3. They found that compared to adults, the kids had better immune responses and fewer side-effects. They also tested full-doses vs. half-doses, and while a half-dose might be enough for the smallest kids, it interestingly didn’t make the side-effects any better. That surprised me:… Continue reading 2021-05-20 General
2021-05-20 BC
Vaccines There is a vaccine mix&match study that you can participate in, here, in BC! The clinical trial details are: 1 or 4 months between doses BNT-Pfizer, Moderna, AZ Matched vax for each schedule change (but AZ will only be 4 months) Alternating for each combo (except AZ will only ever be dose 1) Press… Continue reading 2021-05-20 BC
2021-05-19 BC
Vaccinations It looks likely that the 12-16 year-olds will be vaccinated at the mass vaccination clinics — apparently it is now technically possible to now register them online. However, we won’t really know what’s up until tomorrow’s press briefing at 2pm tomorrow. The BCCDC Weekly Data Summary has a nice graph of the vaccination progress:… Continue reading 2021-05-19 BC
2021-05-19 General
Disease This preprint found that patients with COVID-19 made a bunch of antibodies which attacked their own innate immune system. Putting those antibodies into mice with a human ACE2 receptor made them more susceptible to COVID-19. Remember yesterday, how I talked at length about how live attenuated virus vaccines (LAVs) appear to rev up the… Continue reading 2021-05-19 General
2021-05-18 General
Vaccines I took a look at a paper about a South African trial of AstraZeneca — I think this is the final paper of the preprint I’d seen before — and it says that AZ is really crappy against B.1.351. I knew that, I preach that. HOWEVER, something I hadn’t noticed before is that there were no… Continue reading 2021-05-18 General
2021-05-18 BC
Testing Some North Shore school districts are going to use home gargle tests for schoolkids. You’ll still have to drop them off at a LifeLabs, so they aren’t quite rapid tests, but they are still relatively speedy. (Plus you don’t have to get the back of your sinuses assaulted.) Statistics +411 cases, +2 deaths, +38,538… Continue reading 2021-05-18 BC