Covid 19 CRISIS

I happy to see the US's roll-out has been accelerating nicely, with a 7-day average over 3 million shots per day, with 4 million in a single day on Saturday. Granted, those aren't all full-vaccinations (some are, since many are the J&J one-shot version). I'm hoping to go home for (hopefully) a party for my dad's retirement in mid-June.

My parents are still in the "we just don't know what the long-term effects are yet" path, and I can't entirely blame them. But they are both in their mid-60s, and neither are super healthy. Neither have respiratory issues, thankfully, but still.
 
Are you starting to see why I am livid?
You are livid because you feel you deserve to get vaccinated right now and are jealous of people who are. So from your point of view, giving those more freedom is adding insult to injury.
 
You are livid because you feel you deserve to get vaccinated right now and are jealous of people who are. So from your point of view, giving those more freedom is adding insult to injury.
That’s an extremely insulting oversimplification. I think it’s best if I don’t reply.
 
That’s an extremely insulting oversimplification. I think it’s best if I don’t reply.
We are on the same page here - Knowing you from FG for ages, I was shocked by the tonality and self-centeredness of your earlier post, so let's either leave it at this or take it to DMs.
 
 
We are on the same page here - Knowing you from FG for ages, I was shocked by the tonality and self-centeredness of your earlier post, so let's either leave it at this or take it to DMs.
The tonality is because I am so shocked by the behaviour of our governments. I expect diligence, but we’re getting incompetence and chaos. And I am speaking from personal experience, so of course my posts sound self-centered.

If I went into stories from friends and relatives, I would be filling pages of this thread all by myself.

The few things I do still read or listen to on this issue (mostly the Drosten/Ciesek podcast) are all in German, so I would have to translate them before referring to them.

As for getting vaccinated myself, it’s not a selfish thing. I am fairly certain that I caught the virus a little over a year ago (when tests were unavailable) and spent the required two weeks in quarantine, so I’m operating under the reasonable assumption that I am at least partially immune. But bone marrow doesn’t hand carry itself from one point to another, so my worries are that a) I won’t be able to do that without a vaccination in the near future and b) my assumption of immunity is wrong, I might get infected and end up spreading it to lots of others.
 
@calvinhobbes - I, too, am shocked by a government that among other things:
  • Basked in the glory of "gold standard first wave response" without doing any preparation for a second wave
  • Continued re-opening in Summer with cases on the rise
  • Enjoyed listening to attention-hungry hotshot scientists claiming "we can easily deal with 10K cases a day" until we reached 20K a day
  • Wasted time from late October until Christmas, with cases on the rise
  • Re-opened at a higher caseload than at any point during the first wave
  • And now for two weeks are debating whether to shut down again, with cases and deaths rising
This, again, is not a complete list of how our government is actively optimizing the pandemic response towards killing as many people as possible.

But mostly, since Easter last year, there's a distinct lack of a plan, of a goal, of anything to unite the people.

What pisses me off, though, is how media and public opinion shit on the one thing that is working, which is the vaccine rollout. Did our government buy too little vaccine doses? Yes. Definitly. But for what we have, we are doing remarkably well. You will receive a shot within the next six weeks as well, even if only in group three. It is working! Look at the data from Israel embedded above (Israel has more or less 10% of Germany's population, so their 350 cases would equal 3500 in Germany, a sixth of what we have today. We will be there by late June. That's not even three months from now. And this is why your anger is so misplaced and comes across as very much self-serving.

Also - Israel basically is done with it's vaccination campaign. If what I read is correct and 30% of Isrealis are below 16, the 56% vaccination rate equals 80% of adults.
 
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This, again, is not a complete list of how our government is actively optimizing the pandemic response towards killing as many people as possible.
Which is the very thing that's causing my, as you put it, tonality. ;) It accounts for the biggest part of my anger.

What pisses me off, though, is how media and public opinion shit on the one thing that is working, which is the vaccine rollout.
Perhaps you thought I was part of this group, but I am not criticising the professionals doing their best to roll the vaccines out as quickly as possible, i.e. just about everyone apart from the AstraZeneca planning and sales departments. Even with my very limited knowledge, I can appreciate that it is a herculean task.

What's angering me is the politics, first of all the "Kompetenzgerangel" (fighting for the right to appear decisive) between the state and federal governments. Enough has been said about this, I believe. Then, there's the time squandered during last summer, the profiteering (a.k.a. CDU kickbacks), the pandering to narcissistic bosses (still no requirement for as much work-from-home as possible), the bone-headed discussions of "opening up" when we should be in a "hard lockdown"... I think we're actually very much on the same page, just expressing it very differently.

And this is why your anger is so misplaced and comes across as very much self-serving.
I think you misunderstood what I'm angry about.
 
Vaccination in Quebec is being extended to everyone over 60 throughout the province, and people under 60 with chronic disease and essential workers in the Montreal region.

Today they also started vaccination of anyone over 55 in Montreal in AZ specific vaccination clinics. No appointment needed.


The company I work for as been at the forefront of an initiative to have the private sector help with the vaccination effort. They will vaccinate the local population, and their employees and their families.

Hopefully, all of that combined will lead to an increase of the speed of the vaccination effort. I'm still hopeful I can get my family and myself vaccinated before the end of the month.

Vaccination-21-04-08-cumul.png
 
I'm scheduled for my first stage of 5G upgrade this coming Tuesday. The Moderna is what I went for, hope that was the right plan. Gena will also be getting hers, but she ended up with the last appointment in Joplin, so I'll have to drive to the county health department in Carthage later that same day. There were a ton of appointments left there. Sort of surprising as it's the first day it's available to all residents of Missouri.
 
Got my first shot on Tuesday morning, which is weird... ?

Three and a bit weeks ago I sent a Mail to our vaccination coordination center asking, as a close contact of a pregnant wife, what friggin priority group I belong to and how I would prove my part (what sort of documents to I need to provide?). It was a purely honest and innocent question... no expectation...

Monday afternoon I get a response: you can now schedule appointments to be vaccinated. Nothing about how to prove anything, could’ve made the whole thing up. Checked the available appointments and was shocked: any day of the week, any time of day - all available. I hope because they’re focusing on dumping AZ stocks to 60+ people, but I was still astonished. So i basically went for the first option, got my biontech jab, again nobody alle about any proof/documents (they got better things to do there). The vaccination center is very well done and very well managed and easily capable of handling a lot more than currently going through it.
 
I'm scheduled for my first stage of 5G upgrade this coming Tuesday. The Moderna is what I went for, hope that was the right plan. Gena will also be getting hers, but she ended up with the last appointment in Joplin, so I'll have to drive to the county health department in Carthage later that same day. There were a ton of appointments left there. Sort of surprising as it's the first day it's available to all residents of Missouri.

I had to check how long of a drive that is and realized it's about 1/20th of what I would be willing to drive if someone offered me a jab right now. :p
 
For those who wondered how 15 Million (!) J&J vaccine doeses can be accidentally spoiled by AstraZeneca ingredients, Derek Lowe has the story:

tl;dr - contract manufacturer plays fast and loose with hygiene to increase output and thus profits. Management does not only tolerate, but actively encourage not adhering to minimal standards.
 
In more positive vaccination news, Germany administered 656.357 shots on Wednesday, more than twice the earlier all time high. Adjusted for population size, this equals 2.3 million in the US.
This number probably is a blip due to not all vaccination sites operating during the four day Easter weekend, and thus some overstock being used up. Fellow data nerd @narf says we can't sustain the pace for the whole month on the supply side. But it shows how effortlessly our infrastructure can and will handle the ever-growing supply over the next three months.
For now, I would be content with an average between 450K and 500K shots administered daily (1.6 million US). We'll see how that works out as more data is coming in.
By the end of April, we should have scaled up the pace to 800-900K daily shots (3.5 million US). In line with my "six weeks behind the US" estimate, we should be able to have a record-setting 1.1 million (4 mio US) day within the first half of May. We are getting there...
 
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This number probably is a blip due to not all vaccination sites operating during the four day Easter weekend, and thus some overstock being used up. Fellow data nerd @narf says we can't sustain the pace for the whole month on the supply side. But it shows how effortlessly our infrastructure can and will handle the ever-growing supply over the next three months.
:nod: based purely on the current published data, we're at *negative* a few hundred k Biontech doses in stock, because deliveries are only updated once a week these days... over the last two days we've administered over 1.1M Biontech doses, and their April delivery schedule is 2.5M a week. If we kept that pace we'd have gone through the week's supply in less than all five working days, leaving zero for the (slower but nonzero) weekends.
On the other hand we could truly put the hammer down on AZ, those last two days were only 220k AZ doses with 2M still in stock.

I expect much more shaky daily figures now that GPs are in the mix. If they get a weekly shipment I expect them to administer their entire shipment in one afternoon dedicated to covid vaccinations, leading to very bouncy per-day numbers. As an April average we are planned to have supply for over 3.5M weekly doses. As of today we're at 2.6M, including both slow Easter holidays and the massive last two days... so, we're on track, as we have been for the past four months despite the constant negative press covfefe



PS: those two days are really throwing off my purely-past-looking statistical prediction :lmao:

1618002068916.png

Will need way more data points at the new pace to be reliable... but, it has the infamous "end of summer" September 30th set at 140M aggregated doses.
It's pointless though, because the algorithms used are very sensitive to latest-data repeated outliers.

Same approach but using 7-day periods ending yesterday puts us at 147M aggregated doses by September 30th.
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If I had to guess what the reality will look like, we'll probably see steps up like this week, then a plateau at that level, then another step up when the next supply pace increase happens, then a plateau again, then probably a decline by June or July when we run out of eager first-dose-recipients and have to start convincing people.
 
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Meanwhile, I had some drinks tonight with friends who are convinced they will not receive their shot before well into the autumn, if this year at all. Accordingly, at least one of them, who usually is a very level-headed person, basically exploded at the thought of giving vaccinated people their basic rights back while he is still on lockdown for another few months. *sigh*
I tried to convince them that they're overly pessimistic, but had to settle for "well, at least you'll be positively surprised"...
 
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