Covid 19 CRISIS

We also have to keep in mind that the 85% efficacy against severe disease is due to trial design more than the vaccine itself - the trial observes from twentysomething days after injection, while the vaccine only works at full strength after fifty-ish days. If you discount the first month, efficacy against severe disease is 100% even in South Africa.

Interesting to see if SA use J&J, or give it away like the AZ.
I still think AZ's "disappointing" result is due to including mild cases in the "fail" category, unlike J&J did.
 
Good news / bad news:
Reuters said:
Israel’s largest healthcare provider on Sunday reported a 94% drop in symptomatic COVID-19 infections among 600,000 people who received two doses of the Pfizer’s vaccine in the country’s biggest study to date.

Health maintenance organization (HMO) Clalit, which covers more than half of all Israelis, said the same group was also 92% less likely to develop severe illness from the virus.

The comparison was against a group of the same size, with matching medical histories, who had not received the vaccine.

Stat said:
In the new study, which was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from Pfizer, BioNTech, and the University of Texas Medical Branch examined how well blood taken from people who had received the companies’ shot fought off a virus engineered to have the key mutations found in B.1.351. They reported that there was about a two-thirds drop in neutralization power against the variant compared to other forms of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

What does this mean in practice? With the level of antibodies created by Pfizer's vaccine being several times the amount created by natural immunity, probably a drop, but not a big drop, in preventing infections. And from all we've seen from J&J and other studies, probably still no one has to go to the hospital - but it is time to work on getting these booster shots produced!

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Great article at The Atlantic:
The role of COVID-19 vaccines may ultimately be more akin to that of the flu shot: reducing hospitalizations and deaths by mitigating the disease’s severity. The COVID-19 vaccines as a whole are excellent at preventing severe disease, and this level of protection so far seems to hold even against a new coronavirus variant found in South Africa that is causing reinfections. This, rather than herd immunity, is a more achievable goal for the vaccines. “My picture of the endgame is we will, as fast as we can, start taking people out of harm’s way” through vaccination, says Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard. The virus still circulates, but fewer people die.

At the same time, we don’t need to hit the herd-immunity threshold before transmission begins to slow. With less transmission, fewer people will get exposed, and if those who do are vaccinated, even fewer will become seriously sick or die. The pandemic will slowly fade as hospitalizations and deaths inch down.

We likely won’t cross the threshold of herd immunity. We won’t have zero COVID-19 in the U.S. And global eradication is basically a pipe dream. But life with the coronavirus will look a lot more normal.
[...]
It’s helpful to think of the collective immunity in a community as a dampener rather than an on-off switch, too. Even if the herd-immunity threshold is not reached, every additional person vaccinated is a person who would generally be spreading less virus than if they were not vaccinated. A person exposed to less virus is also a person less likely to get sick, to go to the hospital, or to die.

In the analogy of the campfire, our current pandemic is a big, raging one. We might not have enough water to douse it completely, and we might not prevent future sparks from catching, but the water we do have will still help. The fire will burn slower and cooler. Every drop of water matters.
 
And now for something completely different:

 
60+ folks are starting to get it now. Bloke at work turned it down, because govt conspiracy/fake news/method of control/big pharma, etc.

At current rate I should be looking at getting the first jab sometime in early summer.
My super-ego condemns these twats for being gullible fools, my id screams “the more there are of them, the faster I get vaccinated” and my ego is confused. :unsure:
 
My super-ego condemns these twats for being gullible fools, my id screams “the more there are of them, the faster I get vaccinated” and my ego is confused. :unsure:

Some like 30% of the US Army refused!
 
Some like 30% of the US Army refused!

If it's optional, I don't entirely blame them after the battery of vaccines many of them had to get when they enlisted if they weren't already current on many that need boosters, plus additional ones depending on their immunity and where they might be dispatched, etc. I've heard several enlisted members say they had a rough time gettting a bunch of vaccines in-a-row/at-a-time.
 
Got an email tonight about my mom getting hers, so that's good. What's not so good is that all the currently available appoint slots between now and the 2nd are already taken. Basically the email said "just keep checking" if there are no open appointments, so I don't know if that means I'll just have to keep refreshing the page like I'm trying to score a new 3080 or if this is the window she was given and if she can't get an opening she goes to the back of the line.

As I mentioned recently, they opened a mass vaccination site here a few weeks ago and served over 1000 people in a single day. But that's not where my mom is being directed to go, this place according to the website can only serve 45 people per day. I don't know why she's being directed to a different location or why it's serving so few people.

At least it's something.
 
Employed finns are served by commercial healthcare companies for basic care like flu shots and whatnot. So far I don't think these companies are doing covid jabs, but I hope that will change. It would surely make things easier if our healthcare professional came out and gave the shots in our breakroom like with the normal flu shot every year.
 
Employed finns are served by commercial healthcare companies for basic care like flu shots and whatnot. So far I don't think these companies are doing covid jabs, but I hope that will change. It would surely make things easier if our healthcare professional came out and gave the shots in our breakroom like with the normal flu shot every year.
For updates/boosters I am 100% sure that will happen, probably/possibly/hopefully as a combined covid/flu shot.

For now, let's see. Our government wants to ramp up seriously now, talking about vaccinating 5 million people next week. If we can get to that pace the goal of a shot for everyone by end of summer is firmly in sight.
 
For now, let's see. Our government wants to ramp up seriously now, talking about vaccinating 5 million people next week. If we can get to that pace the goal of a shot for everyone by end of summer is firmly in sight.
I'm hopeful, but need a lot of convincing to believe 5M next week. Two reasons:
- By today we'll have distributed about 5M doses over eight weeks, the best seven-day period was 881k doses, we're ramping up by 100k doses a week every week so far. Such a significant additional push in terms of scaling up doesn't sound like a thing our system can do.
- Current stockpile of unused doses is 2-2.5M, so we'd need some sizeable deliveries very soon to even have enough juice to go around 5M for people... and no such larger-scale deliveries are in the published plans.
 
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Wasn't it around April time when the production really takes off?
 
Our government wants to ramp up seriously now, talking about vaccinating 5 million people next week.
That would be our entire population not including most of the kids. One can dream...
 
As of writing this, the WHO has confirmed that Honduras is the only country in the region that has not begun experiencing a decline in COVID cases, presumably attributed to out lax law enforcement, concept of personal space, and the fact that the local authorities have now spent about $400m or thereabouts without securing a single vaccine.
 
As I mentioned recently, they opened a mass vaccination site here a few weeks ago and served over 1000 people in a single day. But that's not where my mom is being directed to go, this place according to the website can only serve 45 people per day. I don't know why she's being directed to a different location or why it's serving so few people.

At least it's something.
It might be that they are doing elderly people in a more clinical setting, as a precaution.

Wasn't it around April time when the production really takes off?
And hopefully more approved
 
Welp, it looks like it's actually going to be even harder than scoring a 30 series graphics card. A slot opened up tonight for the 2nd and by the time I clicked on it, it was already gone. I forgot to mention above that they're doing doing this 3 days per week as well.

So I'm stuck refreshing the page at least once per hour. And this is the two part vaccine as well, so I'll probably have to go through this again for the second shot.
 
Meanwhile, my dad got his first dose on Thursday. And at least over here in Berlin the second highest priority group (over-70s) is being enrolled starting today. We are getting somewhere. Too slow, but we are.
 
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