Devon McDonald
mcdevonmd.bsky.social
Devon McDonald
@mcdevonmd.bsky.social
Lucky husband and dad. Internist/ICU. Views are my own. Not medical advice.
April 3, 2025 at 3:37 PM
April 3, 2025 at 3:37 PM
It’s also worth making explicit, since I believe their seasonality is frequently conflated, that COVID (in this figure SARS-CoV-2) *does not conform to a respiratory virus season* in the same way that influenza or RSV do.

One of these things is not like the others:
March 29, 2025 at 8:16 PM
BC was at 15.5% test positivity for the most recent week presented, ending March 22.
March 29, 2025 at 8:16 PM
If the epidemic threshold for influenza is 5% test positivity, would it not make sense for that to also be the threshold below which the epidemic could be declared over? Right now Canada is at 18.6%.
March 29, 2025 at 8:16 PM
The majority of Canadian provinces give second doses at 18mo, and longstanding advice for travel outside Canada for those >=12mo is to receive two doses (minimum interval between doses is 4 weeks for MMR).

I’ve been hoping to see proactive discussion of this issue for a while.
February 14, 2025 at 6:31 PM
In exactly the same situation right now. This is our first COVID illness in the family, most likely acquired during lunch at school.
January 26, 2025 at 11:23 PM
I’m not aware of culture or plaque assay work to confirm/quantify replication competent infectious virus… but this would potentially be like drinking a nice tall glass of someone else’s snot in the first few days of their influenza illness.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
November 28, 2024 at 3:07 PM
It's been four long years now, and school boards are still seating kids three to a seat on school buses breathing air like this, at a time when an estimated 1 in 13 Canadians is currently infected with SARS-CoV-2.

At 4408ppm, the equivalent of 1 in 10 breaths were recently in someone else's lungs.
January 22, 2024 at 8:19 PM
Masks required at Peterborough Public Health Vaccine clinics.

Not so at some other health units, incredibly.

👏👏👏Dr. Piggott & PPH🙏🙏🙏
October 3, 2023 at 9:46 PM
For context, this was an accounting of student absences due to illness at DDSB in Fall 2019 vs. Fall 2022, presented by board staff at a board meeting last year.

Elementary students absent due to illness at ~2-fold to >3.6-fold the pre-pandemic rate.
h/t @sueinnovates.bsky.social
September 15, 2023 at 7:07 PM
DDSB was the only school board in Ontario that provided transparent absence reporting last year. This is % absent due to illness:
September 15, 2023 at 7:05 PM
Moderna's bivalent BA.4/5 vaccine for 6mo-5yo has been available in the US since around the new year, under review in Canada since April a little over 4 months ago, and still hasn't been approved as of today's date.
www.canada.ca/en/health-ca...
August 30, 2023 at 4:57 PM