Covid 19 CRISIS

Some more good news among variant scares:
Business Insider said:
Updated results from Pfizer's late-stage study of the coronavirus vaccine it developed with BioNTech indicate that the two-dose shot's overwhelming protection is holding up six months after the second dose.

The study has tallied 927 symptomatic cases of COVID-19 among the more than 46,000 trial volunteers. People who got placebo shots accounted for 850 of those cases, compared with 77 illnesses among those who received the vaccine. That translates to 91.3% efficacy, Pfizer and BioNTech said in a statement Thursday.
[...]
The trial also provides the first clinical data suggesting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine works against B.1.351, a variant first identified in South Africa that has caused some concern among virologists. [...] Pfizer's study enrolled 800 participants in South Africa, and nine of them came down with COVID-19. All nine of the cases happened in the placebo group. Researchers sequenced those strains and found six of the nine were the B.1.351 strain.


At the same time, Nature reports that:
Nature said:
Antibodies from people infected with the 501Y.V2 coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa are also effective against previously circulating variants, suggesting that vaccines against 501Y.V2 might work against a range of coronavirus variants. [...]
The scientists also found that second-wave plasma could neutralize first-wave variants with an effectiveness similar to that of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine. This implies that updated vaccines against 501Y.V2 could also protect against earlier coronavirus variants.

Remark: "B.1351" and "501Y.V2" both refer to the same partial immune escape variant carrying the E484K mutation.
 
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Given that Q1 is almost over, time to take stock of deliveries... comparing actual deliveries so far plus planned deliveries for the rest of March with the plans from end of 2020 https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/corona-impfstoff-lieferung-prognose-100.html
AZ is looking to under-deliver by 32% (there is a massive KW13 shipment still on the books which would account for most of that, but as of now I'm not believing that)
BioNTech is looking to over-deliver by 2%
Moderna is looking to match the planned amount [though over 60% of the total Q1 amount is planned for the last third of March, so we'll see if it materializes...].

tl;dr: everything's going according to plan, roughly.
Q1 *is* over, allegedly.

Biontech over-delivered by 0.7M.
Moderna matched the expectations two days late on April 2nd.
AZ matched the expectations three days late on April 3rd... that massive KW13 shipment apparently materialized at the end of said calendar week.


Also, next week we'll get the first batch of over 250k J&J "double-doses" :dance: 700k by the end of the month. Combined with the roughly 15M regular doses are scheduled for April that's about as much as all of Q1 in a single month. Ramp up is ramping up.
 
What I find interesting is that our health minister, Jens Spahn, obviously has a new PR person/agency - since a week ago, he's on twitter about every percent of vaccination progress, and he finally learned the old motto "underpromise and overdeliver": At a point where 60% of the population do not belive we'll be able to vaccinate all that want until September, the "20% of Germans got at least one shot until end of April" goal he set looks wildly ambitious, while to us data nerds it looks very conservative. I, personally, will be disappointed by any number below 25%. In any case, 20% should be an easy target to meet even if we don't match the pace of the last weeks.

And for those who follow the US celebrations about "everyone over 16 being eligible soon/now": It seems the CDC set the bar to remove vaccination priorities at 33%. With 50% of the population on a priority list of some kind at least in Germany,a 35%-ish figure ties in with 70% vaccine uptake, so it looks like a sensible point for the crossover.
I stand by my estimate of the US being around six weeks ahead - between 30 and 35 percent is where I see the EU by mid-May. So everyone, be ready to roll up your sleeve by late May latest.

In general vaccination / Dr_Grip hates the press news: As demanded by talking heads (and common sense) any vaccine we have is being used immediately. Yesterday, a shipment of 81.000 BioNTech doses to Berlin got delayed. Mind you, not by a week or so, by half a day. As a result of that, two vaccination centers in Berlin had to close shortly after lunch yesterday. All appointments for yesterday afternoon are rescheduled for the rest of the week, the vaccine doses have reached Berlin later yesterday (from what little info there is, the truck they were on broke down), all is well.
But this is not celebrated as a sign of a highly-efficient vaccination campaign, but seen as another sign of inability and failure...

EDIT: For the general tonality, see this "Business Insider" article on Moderna (I will not link it, they shall not make money of it):
  • Rumor has it that a moderna shipment in the last week of April may not arrive as scheduled
  • As @narf pointed out, so far Moderna have kept up their commitments, albeit with some delays here and there
  • There is no reason to assume the doses won't reach Germany a week or two later than planned, so this is a minor inconvenience at most. A single shipment by a supplier getting delayed, with two weeks lead time even, is day to day business in large scale logistics, hardly newsworthy.
fucking assholes said:
Herber Rückschlag für die deutsche Impfkampagne: Wie Business Insider aus Regierungskreisen erfuhr, fällt eine für Ende April geplante Lieferung von mehreren Hunderttausend Impfdosen der Firma Moderna aus.

Laut einer Übersicht des Bundesgesundheitsministeriums wurden für die 17. Kalenderwoche (26. April bis 2. Mai) konkret zwischen 627.600 und 878.400 Dosen des Unternehmens erwartet. Daraus wird es nun offenbar nichts.

Für die Impfkampagne in Deutschland hat der Ausfall womöglich gravierende Folgen. [...] „Da wir kaum Reserven haben, zugleich aber dutzende Impftermine bereits für die nächsten Wochen gebucht sind, kommen wir in Schwierigkeiten“, so ein Regierungsvertreter zu Business Insider. Im Klartext: Womöglich müssen nun Impftermine storniert werden.

Der Grund für den Lieferausfall war am späten Dienstagabend noch unklar. [...] Bereits im März war eine Sendung kurzfristig ausgefallen. Der Ausfall kommt nun zur Unzeit, sollte es nach Aussage von Bundesgesundheitsminister Jens Spahn (CDU) doch nun endlich schneller gehen mit dem Impfen.

Translation said:
Sour setback for Germany's vaccination campaign: As BI came to learn from government cirles, a planned late April delivery of hundreds of thousands of vaccine doeses got cancelled.

According to a Ministry of Health overview, between 627.600 and 878.400 doses were expected for the 17th calendar week. They now obviously won't arrive.

This has grave consequences for Germany's vaccination campaign. [...] "Since we have little reserves, but already have set appointments for the next weeks, we get into trouble here", a government representative told BI. In plain English: There is a possibility that vaccination appointments will be cancelled.

The reason for the washout is unclear as for now. Another shipment already got cancelled in March [remark: as @narf points out above, it arrived in the first week of April]. This cancellation comes at the worst of times, since according to health minister Jens Spahn vaccination speed was finally supposed to pick up pace now.
So what Business Insider does here (and gets linked and quoted on all "covid live tickers" in other media is:
  • Without any evidence imply the shipment is not delayed, but will not happen
  • By putting a quote from an unnamed goverment person "into plain English" they claim vaccination appointments may get cancelled (the phrase "to put it in plain english" here has the function to cancel out the "there is a possibility" part and leave the reader with the impression of certain cancellations.
  • A shipment delay of not even 5% of April's vaccine doses is presented as putting Germany's overall vaccination effort in peril, probably danger of failure.
 
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What I find interesting is that our health minister, Jens Spahn, obviously has a new PR person/agency
If so, they should have kept them from throwing the “fewer restrictions for the fully vaccinated” idea into the room at this point.

We’ve got literally tens of millions of people who have adhered (with many going a lot further than what was decreed) to the restrictions since they started, all in the name of protecting themselves and others, with most of those “others” being the elderly.

They/we are 100% willing to get vaccinated, have been under immense amounts of stress for months for a variety of individual reasons, do not even have an idea when the stars will align for them/us to be vaccinated and yet, the fuckwit-in-chief is already out there pushing for more rights for the vaccinated, i.e. mostly the elderly loyal voters of his party.

If I see seniors without masks enjoying themselves in reopened public swimming pools while my mentally exhausted wife still can’t go back to her gym classes and I have to worry about becoming an international superspreader due to my work, I will never again vote for any party involved in the decision to open up prematurely. Hell, I might even become a “protest voter” of some sort.
 
If so, they should have kept them from throwing the “fewer restrictions for the fully vaccinated” idea into the room at this point.

We’ve got literally tens of millions of people who have adhered (with many going a lot further than what was decreed) to the restrictions since they started, all in the name of protecting themselves and others, with most of those “others” being the elderly.

They/we are 100% willing to get vaccinated, have been under immense amounts of stress for months for a variety of individual reasons, do not even have an idea when the stars will align for them/us to be vaccinated and yet, the fuckwit-in-chief is already out there pushing for more rights for the vaccinated, i.e. mostly the elderly loyal voters of his party.

If I see seniors without masks enjoying themselves in reopened public swimming pools while my mentally exhausted wife still can’t go back to her gym classes and I have to worry about becoming an international superspreader due to my work, I will never again vote for any party involved in the decision to open up prematurely. Hell, I might even become a “protest voter” of some sort.
I have to disagree. Keeping up restrictions for those vaccinated (i.e. those not posing a risk to themselves and others any longer) is blatantly unconstitutional. We have to keep in mind that having your civil rights intact is the norm, and we deviate from it harshly in the name of public health. So returning as many people as possible to the normal state as quickly as possible is mandatory.

Does this mean we can re-open anything right now? No, given the current third wave. And Spahn made that clear. But once we are out of it, at significantly below 50 7-day incidences (and significantly above 40% vaccinated, which will probably happen around the same time), having a conditional return to normal for those vaccinated is the only logical (and constitutionally legal) way forward. We can't allow vaccine refusers to hold society hostage.

Regarding the "do not even have an idea when the stars will align for them/us to be vaccinated" - the political communication is clear - there will be enough vaccine available and enough logistics to inject it for 100% of the eligible populace (76 or so million if we assume kids over 12 will be eligible by then) before the end of Summer (i.e. last week of September).

For those 70% of over-18s that want a shot right now (approx 49 Mio), a first dose will be availabe before July is over - all AstraZeneca debacles notwithstanding*. Then the really hard work begins: Convincing as many as possible of the 25% who are vaccine sceptics, but not hardcore anti-vaxxers, to roll up their sleeves. Making vaccination a requirement to go to the gym/pub/Mallorca is a good instrument here.

As much as there are plenty of very good reasons for criticizing our "fuckwit in chief" (and the Ministerpräsidenten, and Frau Merkel), this is not one.

*Assuming from your rant that neither you nor your wife are in one of the three priority groups: There are over 40 Mio people in there, roughly half of Germany. As mentioned above, if we assume 70% immediate vaccine uptake in these groups as well, non-priority people like you will be in line for vaccination during the second half of May, as we cross the 35% vaccination threshold.
Hang in there, it's only a few more weeks! (eventhough, at around 4 percent newly vaccinated per week from May onwards, it will take some time for those 22%/17 mio waiting in line to get their shots).
 
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I can't find an English language source for this but the Finnish government is planning to get rid of most restrictions by July, it seems, provided that things go as planned. Restrictions on gatherings would be gone by May.

Also this. I honestly would never have thunk it:
 
I know I shall not complain that much, but with Germany administering almost 2 Million doses of vaccine per week currently, why is 10.000 less shipped than planned this week national news? This is the kind of minor inconveniences that just come with a project of this size. As @narf mentioned above, we are 700K doses ahead of delivery schedule so far, so neither the 10K less reported today nor the 900K that Moderna may or may not deliver later in the second half of April will put us massively behind schedule. It may well be that another BioNTech overdelivery will bail us out completely. This is non-news.
 
I know I shall not complain that much, but with Germany administering almost 2 Million doses of vaccine per week currently, why is 10.000 less shipped than planned this week national news? This is the kind of minor inconveniences that just come with a project of this size. As @narf mentioned above, we are 700K doses ahead of delivery schedule so far, so neither the 10K less reported today nor the 900K that Moderna may or may not deliver later in the second half of April will put us massively behind schedule. It may well be that another BioNTech overdelivery will bail us out completely. This is non-news.
Slow day, just trying to ruffle feathers.
 
If so, they should have kept them from throwing the “fewer restrictions for the fully vaccinated” idea into the room at this point.

We’ve got literally tens of millions of people who have adhered (with many going a lot further than what was decreed) to the restrictions since they started, all in the name of protecting themselves and others, with most of those “others” being the elderly.

They/we are 100% willing to get vaccinated, have been under immense amounts of stress for months for a variety of individual reasons, do not even have an idea when the stars will align for them/us to be vaccinated and yet, the fuckwit-in-chief is already out there pushing for more rights for the vaccinated, i.e. mostly the elderly loyal voters of his party.

If I see seniors without masks enjoying themselves in reopened public swimming pools while my mentally exhausted wife still can’t go back to her gym classes and I have to worry about becoming an international superspreader due to my work, I will never again vote for any party involved in the decision to open up prematurely. Hell, I might even become a “protest voter” of some sort.
That's not what is planned, at all. The idea is to treat proof of two-week-old full vaccination the same as proof of a recent negative rapid test... so if your local rules state you need a fresh negative test to get a haircut, two stickers in your Impfpass can replace that test.

Which makes a lot of sense - someone recently tested negative in a rapid test has a very low risk of spreading covid, and so does a fully vaccinated person. Giving them one of the free tests to get that haircut is just a waste of test resources.
 
I know I shall not complain that much, but with Germany administering almost 2 Million doses of vaccine per week currently, why is 10.000 less shipped than planned this week national news? This is the kind of minor inconveniences that just come with a project of this size. As @narf mentioned above, we are 700K doses ahead of delivery schedule so far, so neither the 10K less reported today nor the 900K that Moderna may or may not deliver later in the second half of April will put us massively behind schedule. It may well be that another BioNTech overdelivery will bail us out completely. This is non-news.
BnT alone is scheduled to deliver over 2.5M doses a week in April. Those 10k don't matter, and the 900k are an annoyance - if they actually happen delayed or not at all.

What's way more interesting in this context: All day every day there is complaint about those millions of doses we have in stock, and suddenly there is complaint about not having enough doses in stock. Sheesh. "in stock" doesn't necessarily means "at the vaccination site, in the syringe, waiting to be deployed". It could be "arriving at a central distribution hub", could be "in transit to a local hub", "in transit to a vaccination site", "unpacking", "defrosting", "prepping", etc. - this is a wide and long pipeline, so a lot of stuff is in the pipeline while it flows. Hickups like that RLP case show that we don't have insane amounts of vaccine just sitting around, we are using it.
As another data point, we have over 6M first-shot-only people right now. Even including the entire pipeline mentioned above, we never had 6M doses "in stock" at any point in time, ever. It's just hogwash to claim there's tons of vaccine sitting around in our custody. [AZ production facilities, US AZ stockpile, etc. may be a different story]


Oh, almost forgot to update this: Before the Easter holidays, Germany peaked at over 3.4Hz 24/7 average ?
 
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No word as to weather we will get some vaccinations here yet. Last week was Holy Week, which means that an unholy amount of idiots decided to go to the beach and water parks and generally just have all of the fun they were unable to have last year because of the pandemic. We expect rather an alarming spike of cases over the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile, some mobile hospitals that were purchased last year never really went into operation because of interdepartmental fights. Several triages have closed because there is no longer any budget allocated to them.

Today, private enterprise will sign a deal that will allow them to purchase and import vaccinations for their employees. They intend to purchase something in the range of a million vaccines from J&J. No word on the purported deal to purchase Sputnik V vaccines or the delivery date of the supposed 92k COVAX ones.

If you are keeping score, it means we're still on 2,500 vaccinated people.
 
Keeping up restrictions for those vaccinated (i.e. those not posing a risk to themselves and others any longer) is blatantly unconstitutional.
Then so is keeping everything closed even to people who have recent negative tests. I’ve been tested over two dozen times, but still have to adhere to the same set of rules as irresponsible cunts attending clandestine gatherings. And let’s spare a thought for the hospital staff working for actual COVID patients, they can’t go anywhere to unwind either and not just because they probably couldn’t afford it anyway.
We can't allow vaccine refusers to hold society hostage.
We also cannot allow blind luck to determine who gets vaccinated and who doesn’t, but that is exactly what’s happening: I have just (ten minutes ago) met a colleague who lives in Hesse and he has been vaccinated because that state has a better online tool for appointments than NRW, where I live.

He was able to select the priority group (group 2) and had to provide proof before he got the shot, which is easily done. Me? NRW goes strictly by age and there is no option to provide any additional info via the portal. So I called the service hotline, only to receive the same answer. So I called the county health authority (Kreisgesundheitsamt), who weren’t able to help either. So I called some other authority at the state level who gave me an e-mail address back at the county level. I wrote to them and explained my situation, only to be put (wrongly) in group 3. To top it all off, said colleague recently had a pickup at a Red Cross blood donation site in NRW and told me that they were asking anyone who was present if they wanted a shot.

Are you starting to see why I am livid?
As much as there are plenty of very good reasons for criticizing our "fuckwit in chief" (and the Ministerpräsidenten, and Frau Merkel), this is not one.
Sorry, but between the kickbacks, their mismanagement and their ingrained resistance to anything out of this millennium that might actually be helpful (like a properly functional warning app), there is no criticism that the CDU/CSU and increasingly the SPD do not deserve.

I could go on and mention the situation in schools or point out the insanity of allowing bosses to force their subjects into offices without frequent testing, but I feel like I’ve gone on long enough.
 
That's not what is planned, at all. The idea is to treat proof of two-week-old full vaccination the same as proof of a recent negative rapid test... so if your local rules state you need a fresh negative test to get a haircut, two stickers in your Impfpass can replace that test.
Simple question: Whose plan?

Recent experience tells us that there will be at least 17 different plans with various and varying numbers of stages, countermeasures and triggers that will be changed at short notice.
 
Simple question: Whose plan?

Recent experience tells us that there will be at least 17 different plans with various and varying numbers of stages, countermeasures and triggers that will be changed at short notice.
Going off the thing you ranted about, Spahn's recent proposal.
 
Please do not link to live newsfrenzy feeds. Link to actual, static-ish articles if you must.

Breaking news, wasn't finished article there. Probably should have link to EMA in the first place.

Probably good the the UK's blind faith in AZ is being questioned.

What do I need to know about the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine?​



AstraZeneca jab ‘course correction’ could dent confidence outside UK​



AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine: EMA finds possible link to very rare cases of unusual blood clots with low blood platelets​

 
hmph.


That said, Biden hasn't changed course on it either.


Towards the end of the summer there surely should be enough spare to start shipping.

NY is on target for 85% by May 1st. Some other states maybe in Q4.


All Adults Can Have A Covid Shot By April 19​

 
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