Corona-zona

As of last Friday, Johns Hopkins University pulled the plug on its popular Coronavirus Resource Center . The site ran for just over three years, and was an interdisciplinary collaboration between JHU's Applied Physics Laboratory, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Center for Systems Science and Engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering, the School of Medicine, Sheridan Libraries, and the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence. The World Economic Forum called the site "One of the most vital and trusted resources in the fight against the spread of COVID-19." Astonishingly, it was viewed more than  2.5 billion times . This blog accounted for a few of those visits, and you'll find it linked several times in previous posts. It was an important resource for my reporting. They are closing the site because vaccines have reduced the risk of death, and because reliable public health data was becoming increasingly hard to get at the global scale the dashboa...

  On Tuesday NY Times Columnist Bret Stephens ran an op-ed  where he dripped contempt for people who said masks work. He thinks we all owe him and other anti-maskers a big fat apology. He cites a new review of scientific literature as evidence that masks really don't work. He quotes one of the study's authors (an epidemiologist who I suppose he interviewed) as saying there is no evidence that masks work, and no evidence that hand washing and air filtration work either. He then whines about how badly the anti-maskers were treated when they were right all along. No mention of poor treatment of pro-maskers. I guess it's OK since they were wrong all along? Here's the thing. Look at the "plain language summary" written by the authors of the   actual study :  We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed. Hand hygiene programmes may help to slow the spread of respiratory ...

  For previous waves, the pattern has been that just as a wave crests and starts dissipating, a new variant comes along to take up the slack. It happened with beta, delta, omicron and sons of omicron.  I foolishly thought this time might be different, because the current BA.4/5 wave is bottoming out. To date I have not heard about any new variants coming along that would spoil the party. Until today, that is, when I saw this article in the NY Times. They describe a new Omicron subvariant called BA.2.75.2.  As with other sons of Omicron it has tricks for avoiding natural and vaccine-induced immune response, including from the current bivalent booster.  In lab tests it evaded all but one of 13 monoclonal antibodies currently in use. It also did much better at evading antibodies derived from recent Swedish blood donors than did previous Omicron sub-variants. This from a preprint study  entitled "Omicron sublineage BA.2.75.2 exhibits extensive escape from neut...

  News reports and breathless opinion pieces on both the right and left have painted a pretty bleak picture of social conflict during the pandemic. This seems to have subsided by now, but man, in 2020 and 2021 things were hot. We heard about people being attacked with hammers for wearing masks and others being confronted while shopping for not wearing masks. Workers at vaccine clinics have been attacked and called murderers . Workers asking for proof of vaccination have been attacked too. With all of this attacking going on, you'd be forgiven for thinking there is nowhere to hide from pressure to follow—or not follow—pandemic mitigation protocols. But there is new data suggesting that this impression is not a true picture of how things are, in Arizona anyway. CoVHORT is a research project on COVID-19 being conducted by the University of Arizona. It is longitudinal, meaning it collects data at multiple points over a long period, using the same participants. CoVHORT has just over...

  A couple of days ago Nature Medicine published results of a " challenge study " where they deliberately infected healthy people with the OG strain of SARS-CoV-2. The purpose of the study was to learn more about the course of an infection with the virus. Researchers recruited 36 volunteers aged between 18 and 30, who had no known risk factors for severe disease. There was extensive informed consent to make sure participants knew what they were getting into. They also had supplies of antibody treatments available in case anyone got seriously ill. Participants were then given a tiny drop of fluid containing the virus—an amount comparable to what you might get from an aerosol droplet expelled by an infected person. They were then monitored around the clock for two weeks in a hospital setting. The results are very interesting. None of the participants developed severe disease, and only half of them even became infected. So either getting infected once exposed is a 50/50 propos...

About two months ago, I blogged about COVIDiots taking ivermectin horse paste for their COVID-19. In that post I noted that there was a clinical trial underway in Brazil to test its effectiveness. The study, called the Together Trial was an international effort to test ivermectin, along with hydroxychloroquine and an antidepressant called fluvoxamine. The implication at the time was that they were seeing good preliminary results for the latter, but not the former two. This week a study published in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that fluvoxamine is indeed effective at preventing hospitalizations. It was a randomized trial with a placebo as the control conducted among people who tested positive for the virus.  Results showed that 11% of the people who got the drug were hospitalized, versus 16% of the people who got the placebo. That's a 5% reduction in absolute risk, and a relative reduction of 32%. Nothing to sneeze at. Fluvoxamine is a cheap drug that is widely avail...

  I was asked to help recruit participants for a study focused on children and teens’ experiences with the pandemic, called CoVHORT Children and Teens Study (CATS) . So that's the purpose of this post.   The study is currently open to those aged 12-17, regardless of current or previous COVID-19 status . Our study asks about having COVID-19, feelings and worries, school experience, racism, and what has helped them throughout the pandemic. Parent or guardian consent is required to enroll young people in the study. Please click this link  https://redcap.link/UAcovhortcats , if there are children in your home who may be interested in learning more about and enrolling in the study. You may also forward this link to anyone you feel may be interested in participating in the study. If you have any questions about the study, please visit https://covhort.arizona.edu/covhort-cats/about ,  email covhort-cats@arizona.edu or call (520) 626-0431.