What to expect for long-haul flights CLINICAL MATTERS On April 7, 2022, I took a long-delayed trip to Vancouver, Canada as my first international trip in two years. The trip had originally been scheduled in 2020 when I received a senior fellowship at TED. Most people are familiar with TED Talks but...
Understanding XD, XE and XF CLINICAL MATTERS There has been a recent flurry of news articles on the latest twist in the Covid-19 saga—recombinant SARS-CoV-2 viruses. XD and XF, both recombinants of Omicron and Delta, have been unceremoniously dubbed “Deltacron” by the media. XE, a recombinant...
Are yearly shots in the works? CLINICAL MATTERS Do you need a fourth shot? When should you get one? What about a fifth shot? Is this going to be a yearly thing? The resurgence of Covid-19 as a result of breakthrough infections by the variants of concern has tempered expectations on the ability of...
Getting five or six Covid-19 shots can run the risk of losing the vaccines' overall effectiveness, or worse, might render the person ineligible to get upgraded or multivalent vaccines against variants of concern (VOC) in the future. A medic prepares a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19...
Are we endemic yet? CLINICAL MATTERS Six hundred thousand new Covid-19 cases in one day in South Korea! Nearly 300,000 in Germany! Almost 200,000 in Vietnam! These numbers almost sound made up. Unimaginable. While many people were apoplectic at the nearly 39,000 cases we had in January 2022, the...
Variant Alphabet Soup: Deltacron redux, AY.4/BA.1, BA.2.2 nightmare in Hong Kong, and the truth about BA.2.3 CLINICAL MATTER Deltacron! As if Delta or Omicron wasn’t bad enough on its own, this hodge-podge of a virus is now a thing. Or is it? The initial report of a “Deltacron” virus came...
An infectious disease expert said on Monday, March 21, that herd immunity against Covid-19 cannot be achieved with the vaccines that are currently available. (UNSPLASH / MANILA BULLETIN) During the Laging Handa public briefing, Infectious disease expert Dr. Edsel Salvana said that the "herd...
It’s finally Alert Level 1, and we have vaccines to thank CLINICAL MATTERS The transition to Alert Level 1 has been a long time coming. After one year of the nationwide rollout of vaccines, Covid-19 has been tamed. But we would not have gotten to this point so quickly if not for the...
Persons who are asymptomatic and have been fully-vaccinated against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) are no longer required to undergo quarantine should they be exposed to a COVID-19 positive individuals, the Department of Health (DOH) said on Tuesday, March 1. (Jansen Romero / MANILA BULLETIN)...
Can we now throw away the masks? CLINICAL MATTERS Lockdowns have been a major feature of the pandemic since the first city-wide lockdown in Wuhan. Faced with a novel coronavirus for which there was no pre-existing immunity and no known treatment, the world had little choice but to drastically limit...
How do we live with COVID? CLINICAL MATTERS As deaths from COVID-19 continue to drop globally as a result of increasing vaccination coverage, the question of when things will get back to a semblance of normalcy is foremost on everyone’s minds. Having gotten used to the routine of masking,...
Since the benefits it can provide have not yet been validated as well as its potential side effects, an infectious disease expert advised on Friday, Feb. 18, against taking a fourth dose of a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at this point in time. People waiting for their booster shot in Muntinlupa....
