Covid 19 CRISIS

It turns out when he was a detective, he was involved in a shooting. Two (probably guilty...but still) people, on the ground, on their bellies, shot 22 times in the backs and sides. Bullet fragments in the floors and entrance wounds confirm. Both dead. Just before the trial went to the jury, the city settled for $1.1 million. He continued to finish his career, and still gets his pension.

So I guess if you need an expert on what could drive a man to snap and use their gun to take multiple lives like that, he's your guy.
 
My town opened vaccinations for 30+ yesterday, with only a handful of slots. I got lucky and saw the news just after the local paper published the story. I dropped everything I was doing and managed to secure a slot on Saturday afternoon.

This is cause for celebration.
 
My state is opening a lottery for everyone vaccinated, and if I read correctly, small pay-outs of some sort to encourage those who haven't yet. The pharmacy chain I used is also giving away prizes. Although hilariously, one of the prizes is a cruise.
 
Went to my public healthcare station 15 minutes before my slot. Checked in, took a seat and got called in about five minutes early. Had a pleasant chat with the healthcare worker about the fact that I haven't had as much as the sniffles since the pandemic started, and that I haven't even had to take a single covid test or had to be in quarantine even once or anything. Got the jab of Moderna and that was that.

Oh, and I had two bars of 5G while waiting for my jab and full bars directly after.

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Got my second shot of Biontech on friday, was under the weather saturday but all fine sunday.

Very glad my work trip to Vietnam got cancelled, since apparantly they have a new airborne variant that is a combination of the Indian and British variant. A commonwealth best of, so to say.
 
You're already on your second shot? Cool. August 21st here...
 
Very glad my work trip to Vietnam got cancelled, since apparantly they have a new airborne variant that is a combination of the Indian and British variant. A commonwealth best of, so to say.
While I am also glad you are not in Vietnam, I do take their claims with a grain of salt - the UK mutation is less infectious than the Indian one, so gaining a "UK" mutation will not necessarily turn the Indian variant even worse.
With very little cases, no vaccination to speak of, few covid rules, and a dense population, there was little to no evolutionary pressure on the variants, so the "combined" variant may well become dominant without being inherently worse than the Indian or British one*.

Why am I so skeptical of these claims? Because the full might of UK's prime researchers (and they are among the world's best, with the most experience in covid lab tests and population spread modeling) still can't put a number behind how much more infective the Indian variant is than the UK one, and why that's the case. It just seems a bit implausible that Vietnam, with zero experience in covid research (due to a lack of covid cases so far) should have all these answers the second their variant pops up.
Finally, the "airborne" part sounds worse than it is: A spike protein mutation can't make the virus more or less airborne. Like UK researchers theorize (but don't know yet) about the Indian variant, the Vietnamese present as a fact that a higher viral load in the upper airways compared to vanilla covid means infected people exhale more virus with every breath, so it can infect people through aerosols more efficiently.
This may be even worse than the Indian one, but it might also turn out like the Danish Mink variant that looked scary at first glace but then fizzled out. Or it may come in somewhere in the middle - more infectious than UK covid, but less than Indian. We'll see. I refuse to worry before actual data comes in.

Also, second shot on the 9th. Can't wait.

*Imagine you have three people - one infected with UK covid, one with Indian covid, one with newly-fanged Vietnam covid. India covid guy goes home, infects his wife. UK covid guy goes to a restaurant, then home. Infects the waiter, a person he stood next to at the pissioir, and his wife. Vietnam variant guy goes to a night of partying, infects 20 people. In this scenario, both UK covid and Vietnam covid have an advantage before Indian covid since infection chains will he harder to trace and there are more spreaders for the variant from the get go. And this is what makes modeling spread even at the tens of thousands of Indian variant cases the British have so super complicated.

EDIT: In other news, despite the Indian variant having made it's way there, Israel reported a record low four(!) new covid infections yesterday, the lowest since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. At least for their case, 50-something percent fully and 60 percent one-time vaccinated seems to be enough to drive covid to a halt. Since the UK predominantly uses AZ which has a slightly lower efficacy against transmission, they'll need approx. 75% vaccine coverage to achieve the same effect.
 
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I’m seeing neighbors put up signs in protest to schools requiring masks still. Guess which of these neighbors also flew a certain flag for a certain TV game show host?

EDIT

What I don’t get is, why now? Schools are basically all but finished for the season and most likely by late summer early autumn, we won’t have requirements anymore so, why? Just to cause a fuss? It’s not like these were up all year, just this past week they went up...
 
I’m seeing neighbors put up signs in protest to schools requiring masks still. Guess which of these neighbors also flew a certain flag for a certain TV game show host?

EDIT

What I don’t get is, why now? Schools are basically all but finished for the season and most likely by late summer early autumn, we won’t have requirements anymore so, why? Just to cause a fuss? It’s not like these were up all year, just this past week they went up...

Must be one of those well crafted hot button issues Fox likes to push.

You know these type of folk rarely can think for themselves. They get their thoughts spoon fed to them through that cable tv line.
 
Mostly the same as D-Fence here: second shot done on Friday, a mild fever on Saturday, vanished in a couple of hours on the evening, tiredness on Sunday and ok yesterday.

Italy as a whole has 20% of the population fully vaccinated and another 18% who has been given the first shot.
 
Meanwhile, German media still paints scenarios of a collapsing vaccination campaign.

I ran some real-world numbers (and if I made a mistake, @narf surely will point it out). We are getting there. Slowly, probably a month or two behind UK/US, but we are getting there:
  • As of Friday night 7,2 Mio/8,7% of the German populace have been vaccinated
  • That's more than 10% of those eligible (which is the number we should be reporting first place - but I will work from population percentage below anyways)
  • Currently (before the AZ stoppage) we run at 900K/1,1% first shots per week
  • So we can assume we will end March at 10-11% of the populace vaccinated.

  • Premise 1: 50% of all vaccines available go to first shots. That's pessimistic twice since it neither accounts for the 12-week AstraZeneca window nor the J&J vaccine only needing one shot. But it makes the math easier.
  • Premise 2: Infrastructure scale-up both in vaccination hubs and GP practices will work as planned
  • Premise 3: The pessimism in Premise 1 will compensate for missed AZ deliveries
  • Premise 4: For the sake of simplicity, we assume a similar vaccine uptake and distribution speed nationwide.

  1. The plan for April assumes 2,25 Mio doses per week in the vaccination hubs. Here, we'll be able to give first shots to roughly 5 Mio/6% of the populace.
  2. GPs will join with 1 Mio shots in the first week of April, ramping up to 3.2 Mio in the last. Let's assume they'll provide first shots to another 4 Mio/5% of the populace.
  3. This means in April alone we will vaccinate as many people as in all of Q1. We will end the month between 20% and 25% of the populace vaccinated.
  4. The last week of April will see 2.7 mio first shots. Scaled to a month that's a good 12 Mio, so 15% of the populace.
  5. If we only are able to keep this pace, without scaling up more (again, a pessimistic assumption) we will have reached between 50 and 55% of the populace vacinated by end of June, that's around 45 million people.
  6. This means during July we will reach the approx. 50Mio/70% eligible for a shot that are waiting for one. From then onwards, the game changes to convincing those unsure or sceptic.
As mentioned in Premise 2, the supply side is the huge question mark here - while we are expecting enough doses for 53 Mio people until the end of Q2, no one knows whether especially AZ and Moderna will keep up with their contractual obligations. But as you can see, my reasonable worst case above already accounts for 8mio less.
But as a more positive spanner thrown into this timeline, maybe we will see a BioNTech approval for kids over 12 before summer - that would of course add another 10 million eligible persons to the line, pushing us back two weeks or so.
Another month behind us, another update.

In our internal betting round, @D-Fence takes the win, having one-upped my 42% and @narf 's 41% first shot prediction to 43% out of pure spite.

Germany by now has first shots in the arms of 43.3% of the populace, that's 36 million people. This means we are less than five weeks behind the US in terms of first shots given, two months behind the UK, and outpacing both in terms of vaccination rate. I stand by my prediction that the EU will soon (during the first half of July, I'd guesstimate) overtake the US.

Another 10 million first shots within June look easy, 15 million are definitly in the cards, depending on how much J&J will deliver within Q2 - due to US export restrictions, they had to push a not-yet-quantified part of their Q2 delivery commitment to H2...

But then again, we moved the goalpost: Since BioNTech's vaccine now is approved for ages from 12 upwards, our eligible populace has jumped from 70 to 78 or so million.

tl;dr - we are on track, and I am looking forward to @narf giving an end of June percentage forecast.
 
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Also, in case anyone wants to debate which is more effective, this video explains how and why test results are the way they are.

 
I've now been pumped full of Moderna, my 5G reception is great.

I'm 29 and healthy so the vaccination program must be doing fairly well if they've got round to me. I haven't been keeping up with it in the news as it's largely depressing fear mongering...
 
Update - The WHO says Vietnam super covid indeed is only the Indian variant.
 
Quebec government just reduced the minimum suggested spacing between mRNA doses from 16 to 8 weeks (AZ was already reduced to 8 weeks a few days ago).

It means I might be eligible for my second shot 2 days before I fly to Germany for work later this summer. I say might, because we are still supposed to follow the age/health/essential group priority.

We have now passed the milestone of 70% of the eligible population (12+) having received at least one dose.

We are down to the level of daily new cases of June 2020 (at the end of the first wave) and September 2020 (at the beginning of the second wave).

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The curfew was ended last week, and a bunch restrictions are being removed. While it's nice to see some liberties brought back, I am quite scared that might reverse the current downward trend we are seeing. I guess we will know in a few weeks.
 
Quebec government just reduced the minimum suggested spacing between mRNA doses from 16 to 8 weeks (AZ was already reduced to 8 weeks a few days ago).

It means I might be eligible for my second shot 2 days before I fly to Germany for work later this summer. I say might, because we are still supposed to follow the age/health/essential group priority.

We have now passed the milestone of 70% of the eligible population (12+) having received at least one dose.

We are down to the level of daily new cases of June 2020 (at the end of the first wave) and September 2020 (at the beginning of the second wave).

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The curfew was ended last week, and a bunch restrictions are being removed. While it's nice to see some liberties brought back, I am quite scared that might reverse the current downward trend we are seeing. I guess we will know in a few weeks.

Well, mask restrictions have been all but totally removed here 2 weeks ago and it seems to be of no different. Vaccines were opened to everybody on April 12th as well...

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I'm trying not wearing a mask if the store doesn't require it. I'm fully vaccinated at this point and it's been a about 3-4 weeks since the second one so I don't see the risk factor as extreme as it was before. At this point I'll wear a mask if required, but otherwise I won't. I've spent hours in boiler rooms and food plants sweating and fogging up my glasses and I'm over it.
 
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Mixed bag update.

Reuters is pointing out that we're on 60% of our contagion peak and decreasing. This is good, and attributable to vaccination (good) and underreporting (bad). The state is also reporting 6403 casualties throughout the entire pandemic. Taking into account that 1000 of those happened last month alone, I am left with several assumptions for which I have insufficient evidence and therefore will not entertain on this thread.

We have now applied 317,527 doses (up 93% since the May 24th update). 265,412 of these were first doses (94% increase) and 51,845 for a second dose (89%). Still no breakdown for vaccines needing a single or a double dose. These numbers represent approximately 4.7% of the population has been vaccinated.

The media is focusing on the 73,000 people who boarded a US-Bound plane since the beginning of the year, implying all of them went to do vaccine tourism. That the government is asking the US for about five million more vaccines (were they not just saying they had enough for the entire population already?). And assorted other non-vaccine related nonsense.

EDIT: Busy day on COVID honduran news, a lot of things have happened. Though it is not the five million that Honduras requested, the Biden administration seems poised to send six million vaccines to Latin America as part of the COVAX initiative. These will be divided between Brasil, Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Perú, Ecuador, Paraguay, Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. On "enh" news, we have approved and requested SOBERANA 02 vaccines. These are Cuban Developed. I seem to be unable to find a study regarding its effectiveness, but my gut reaction would be to avoid those if possible. which it may not be because we're not a restaurant. When the time comes, we will get whichever vaccine we can.

On union news, because the health sector got vaccines, the transport sector has decided to block roads and burn tires demanding vaccines, bonus payments from the government, and the ban of Uber. Though this is clearly not strictly COVID related, it's addition means it is here. Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, has also authorized the donation of more vaccines for select honduran areas. He's quoted as saying that this will not affect his country's vaccination rate, as they literally cannot vaccinate any faster than they are and the donations are surplus vaccines (!)
 
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New data from an experiment in Brasil comes in: If you vaccinate enough people, the pandemic ends. I am so surprised.

EDIT: This was done in a region where P.1 aka Gamma aka immune-escape Brazilian super covid is dominant. So even with that variant, vaccinating enough people will end the pandemic. Same holds true for the Indian variant. Get your shots people!
 
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So, another #Impfdebakel discussion in Germany: The federal government is withholding 1.5 mio BioNTech doses delivered this week in order to "ensure second shot availability". Of course the usual interest group representatives who like to see their names in the press are now claiming this is irresponsible, unacceptable, plain wrong.
So, what's going on here? After all, getting these 1.5 million doses into arms would equal roughly 2% of the populace getting a first shot this week.

But 1.5 million are also the amount of doses BioNTech has shifted from the coming two weeks (calendar week 23/24) towards calendar week 25. And from Monday onwards, the priority group system will be ended, meaning even more demand for vaccines. Also, this week is the last "short week" with a public holiday during the early stages of the vaccination campaign.
So in a way it makes sense to front-load the delayed 1.5 million doses to a "short week" in order to keep ramp-up plans intact. Is this worth 2% of the populace being vaccinated one to two weeks later? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know, but it's not as easy as the talking heads make it out to be.
 
Ensuring 2nd shot availability is a Good Thing, in line with the spirit of the prioritization scheme. Remember, those 2nd shots go to people on the line between groups 2 and 3, so giving them more protection feels like the correct choice over protecting more group 4 people a bit earlier.
Additionally, removing the rescheduling risk is a good goal in and of itself.


I'll get to a prediction for end of June soon(tm), just got back from sailing vacay ?
 
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