The hyperinfectious Omicron subvariant called EG.5 has been designated a variant of interest by the World Health Organization (WHO).
EG.5 has been circulating in Canada since at least May, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). The subvariant and its offshoots are estimated to have made up 36 per cent of cases in Canada between July 30 and August 5, according to PHAC.
Comments closedWith students returning to B.C. classrooms in four weeks, an open letter to the province is outlining five things the signatories say must be addressed to ensure “a safe return to school.”
Comments closedA new SARS-CoV-2 variant has emerged, serving as a reminder that the pandemic is not over. The World Health Organization (WHO) has added EG.5 (includes EG.5.1) to the list of variants under monitoring (VUMs).
Comments closed“It’s not public health to go around pretending everyone has access to the same protections and treatments, when they’re reserved for the rich. It’s not public health to tell anyone they can ignore a virus that disables 20 percent of those infected.”
Comments closedComments closedWith this test, there are no nasal swabs and no waiting 15 minutes for results, as with home tests. A person simply blows into a tube in the device, and an electrochemical biosensor detects whether the virus is there. Results are available in about a minute.
The National Institutes of Health in the United States have begun a series of studies to test possible treatments for long COVID, a step eagerly awaited in the efforts of the United States to fight this mysterious disease that affects millions of people.
Comments closedWastewater surveillance became an important tool for detecting COVID-19 outbreaks in communities throughout the pandemic, and it continues to be used in search for coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 as well as other pathogens.
But it’s unclear whether current levels of government funding to monitor wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 will continue beyond next year. Experts are calling on the federal government to create a standardized system for wastewater surveillance to bolster and replace the patchwork being used today.
Comments closedThe chances of becoming infected with COVID-19 while hospitalized increased as the pandemic progressed, according to recent Canadian research.
In fact, significantly more Canadians became infected with hospital-acquired COVID-19 during the fifth and sixth waves of the pandemic — the first two Omicron waves from late 2021 until the spring of 2022 — than during earlier waves, according to the study published in the journal JAMA Network Open. Researchers looked at cases of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 between March 2020 and May 2022.
Comments closedEveryday tiredness is nothing like the depleting symptom that people with long COVID and ME/CFS experience.
Comments closedA British Columbia judge has sentenced a Vancouver Island woman to 18 months of probation for deliberately coughing in the face of a grocery store employee and shoving her shopping cart into another worker during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Comments closedComments closedCovid is causing waves of brain damage, heart disease, organ failure, and chronic illness. It’s doing this damage in mild and asymptomatic cases. It doesn’t matter how sick you feel or how fast you recover.
Comments closedIt was thought at first that the pediatric population was relatively spared from the long-term effects of COVID-19 after infection. But this changed rapidly with increasing reports and studies of pediatric patients not fully recovering from acute COVID-19.
Yet we may have disastrously underestimated one of the most serious sequelae: infection of the brain and nervous system. And we may have missed the neurological damage done to children and young adults who seem to have recovered from COVID-19.
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