Evolving to milder illness is wishful thinking. Smallpox, polio, measles, etc. never did. What they do is seek vulnerable prey, which means generally becoming diseases of the very young and very old. Especially in diseases with relatively low mortality rates this is the case. Coronaviruses as a family seem to have a trick for not leaving durable immunity very well, and mutating rapidly, so it may become more influenza-like, but will still hit the very old and very young the hardest. MIS-C is very much still a thing, although much less common with increasing levels of immunity. Of course it may also just do it’s own thing. It’s really good at that. But milder? No. I do not expect that at all.
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Wow. That is really boggling my mind.
It has a big in mice written all over it, BUT I haven’t seen such a thorough in mice in a long time.
I learned a LOT from this study alone, and it makes my nerves tingle. I want to know more. Thanks for posting!
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A cost-effectiveness analysis last year determined the value of Paxlovid at between $563 and $906 per treatment course, according to non-profit drug-pricing watchdog The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review.
Like a broken record, but DAMN IT ALL!!!
PROFIT MOTIVE HAS NO PLACE IN HEALTHCARE!!!
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Hell, they probably make a pretty nice profit on Paxlovid at the original, lower price already. This is just gouging.
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So… we’re putting HEPA air filters in all classrooms and offices, right?
… right?
… or Corsi-Rosenthal boxes?
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Hopeful. Not ready for primetime, but hopeful. I will take hope at this point.
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Similarly, we estimate that India’s death toll is actually in the millions, rather than the hundreds of thousands
yep, I thought so.
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Earlier this week, I was in a doctor’s office with a very crowded waiting room. I was the only one wearing a mask and two people kept coughing. 
None of the nurses or doctors were masked, which was new (and disturbing).
Watched Stephen Colbert last night talking about recovering from his third case of COVID. Meanwhile, I’m looking for nasal filters to use in case eating at a restaurant can’t be done outside or on a balcony. They’re not ideal, but better than nothing. 
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This weeks masking-on-planes report:
I observed the most masks on a plane in well over a year this week between San Francisco and Portland. At least a third of passengers both ways wore masks!
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My wife and I have been going out, for the first few times in a long time, patronizing a local place which has gone all in on air filters.
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… all hail the @OBJ
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In the province of New Brunswick 
, 1 in 10 people currently have COVID.
The number is estimated to be 1 in 20 nationally. The news story pointed me to a site with some familiar names on the team, but which I hadn’t seen before. As usual, they are struggling with partial data. I’ll agree that the excess death figures are down from the start of the year. We might even be on the mend in Ontario. However… wait for it…
There was a tidbit on a note at the top of page 2 (this took a moment to sink in):
In 2023, the best predictor of excess mortality compared to 2022 is % population infected
I keep bumping into people whose lives have been scourged with Long COVID. The number of anecdotal discussions,at two conferences recently, about colleagues who “had a stroke”, are “out of commission”, “super-fit but suddenly had a heart attack”, was alarming.
Edit: Another tidbit from the COVID-19 Resource Canada page:
However, preliminary data from a large population study conducted among Quebec healthcare workers who developed long COVID (primarily during Omicron) found that the likelihood of developing long COVID did NOT decline with subsequent reinfections.
They refer to a May 2022 NHS study reporting 9.1% Long COVID with Omicron BA.2, and take the Quebec data to indicate a 2.3% chance of “reinfections [with] Omicron [that] led to activity-limiting symptoms lasting at least 12 weeks.”
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