Covid 19 CRISIS

CureVac brutally flunks interim analysis at 47% efficacy, blames it on variants. I must confess I kinda saw that coming when they put such a PR effort behind their second gen covid shot going into early stage testing.
 
CureVac brutally flunks interim analysis at 47% efficacy, blames it on variants. I must confess I kinda saw that coming when they put such a PR effort behind their second gen covid shot going into early stage testing.


CureVac Plunges After Covid Vaccine Falls Short on Efficacy​

The work with Glaxo on second-generation candidates continues, with the goal of introducing a vaccine next year. Those products “have a different, enhanced mRNA backbone” and early data suggests their ability to boost immunity could be much stronger
 
Science may be awesome, but what is really crazy great is the human immune system.

As mentioned in January, the immune response against "immune escape" covid variants like the South Africa one gets better over time due to adaptive B-cell memory. A new paper catches up on this and also looks at vaccinated individuals. Findings are positive:
The data suggest that immunity in convalescent individuals will be very long lasting and that convalescent individuals who receive available mRNA vaccines will produce antibodies and memory B cells that should be protective against circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Furthermore, bone marrow plasma memory cells provide long-lasting immunity in most recovered patients:
Overall, our results indicate that mild infection with SARS-CoV-2 induces robust antigen-specific, long-lived humoral immune memory in humans.

Here's a good overview article on both new publications.

In a related note, BioNTech's partner lab in Texas says the vaccine continues to work against VoCs.

This means that once everybody has antibodies, the pandemic effectively is over. We already know that newborns get antibodies from vaccinated or recovered mothers. So we have to continue to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate and not worry so much about variants, but about getting shots in arms first place.
 
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I’ve got a nice little anecdote to share:

Last Wednesday, I returned home from another courier trip to the UK, which the German authorities currently list as a COVID high risk area due to the delta variant. That usually means a mandatory 14 day quarantine without the option to “test to release”.

But since transporting human cells from one place to another is considered essential work, couriers like myself get a bunch of exemption letters from various sources with the paperwork for every transport. Basically, they all say “let this person through and leave them alone” with varying degrees of detail and urgency. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the one from the German Red Cross leads in both categories.

It is therefore this document that I return to the county health authority if and when they ask me to provide proof of the quarantine exemption that I claim in the entry form for Germany. A few quick e-mails and hey presto, I am officially allowed to go out and about. This time, it was all done on Thursday before the afternoon.

However, the people in charge of actually enforcing quarantines are not from the health authority, but from the “office for public order”, i.e. the people who deal with the things the police can’t be bothered with. Not necessarily the ones you would have over for a nice relaxed evening of barbecue, drinks and joy.

So imagine my reaction when one of them called me on Friday morning, after I had just woken up next to my wife in a hotel room on the French Channel coast. “We’re at the door and need to deliver your quarantine order! And what about all those documents you still need to provide?”

:mrgreen:

“It’s all done and dusted. The documents in question have been provided to the health authority and they have released me from quarantine.”

“So…… who did you speak to?”

“Hang on… his name is Mr. G, at the county health authority. He released me from quarantine yesterday.”

“Yesterday, you say?”

“Yes.”

What followed was one of those blissful moments where someone in a uniform and perhaps a position slightly above their capacity is left completely outgunned and briefly speechless.

It might have been the carrier pigeon (or perhaps a fax in case we’re being optimistic) getting lost on the way from one office to another.

I haven’t heard from either authority since.
 
I’ve got a nice little anecdote to share:

Last Wednesday, I returned home from another courier trip to the UK, which the German authorities currently list as a COVID high risk area due to the delta variant. That usually means a mandatory 14 day quarantine without the option to “test to release”.

But since transporting human cells from one place to another is considered essential work, couriers like myself get a bunch of exemption letters from various sources with the paperwork for every transport. Basically, they all say “let this person through and leave them alone” with varying degrees of detail and urgency. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the one from the German Red Cross leads in both categories.

It is therefore this document that I return to the county health authority if and when they ask me to provide proof of the quarantine exemption that I claim in the entry form for Germany. A few quick e-mails and hey presto, I am officially allowed to go out and about. This time, it was all done on Thursday before the afternoon.

However, the people in charge of actually enforcing quarantines are not from the health authority, but from the “office for public order”, i.e. the people who deal with the things the police can’t be bothered with. Not necessarily the ones you would have over for a nice relaxed evening of barbecue, drinks and joy.

So imagine my reaction when one of them called me on Friday morning, after I had just woken up next to my wife in a hotel room on the French Channel coast. “We’re at the door and need to deliver your quarantine order! And what about all those documents you still need to provide?”

:mrgreen:

“It’s all done and dusted. The documents in question have been provided to the health authority and they have released me from quarantine.”

“So…… who did you speak to?”

“Hang on… his name is Mr. G, at the county health authority. He released me from quarantine yesterday.”

“Yesterday, you say?”

“Yes.”

What followed was one of those blissful moments where someone in a uniform and perhaps a position slightly above their capacity is left completely outgunned and briefly speechless.

It might have been the carrier pigeon (or perhaps a fax in case we’re being optimistic) getting lost on the way from one office to another.

I haven’t heard from either authority since.
Surprised the… not cops were accepting of that. Not a “sorry, we have to follow protocol and until we know for sure, you’ll have to come back and quarantine.”

Not that I’d expect that to happen here if we cared. No sir-eee.

—————

still on the down which is good.

8D742C1F-6612-4F64-A345-489EA83EB209.jpeg
 
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The chart towards the end of the article:

The Delta Variant Could Create “Two Americas” Of COVID, Experts Warn​


If you are fully vaccinated, you are most likely to be safe. But in parts of the US where few people have gotten COVID vaccine shots, the Delta variant could trigger renewed deadly surges.
Vaccine rollout data at the county level also shows a strong relationship to voting in the 2020 presidential election.
 
*sigh*

The chart towards the end of the article hinges on the assumption that all counties are equal with regards to size and demographics and doesn't take into account other factors such as level of education and population density. As such, the chart is more than a bit useless. Very nice, but doesn't tell us anything. It rather more seems like data misconstrued to fit a viewpoint.

Never forget: "Correlation is not causation"

Great closer to the article if you get your news from Buzzfeed though. Yes, I am completely aware that Buzzfeed news is an overall more serious arm to the one telling me trivia bits of (insert show here). And at least this time it wasn't a dump of alarmist newspaper covers, so that is nice.
 
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Do well to listen Prof. Peter Hotez MD PhD
 
Second verse, or more like 338th verse, same as the first. https://www.kmov.com/news/missouri-...2-11eb-98e9-ffbd69c5cacd.html?block_id=990844

"On a scale of 1-10, right now from a public health perspective, I am at a seven," said Dr. Faisal Khan, St. Louis County's Director of Health. "It is only a matter of time, perhaps a week or two at most, before we begin to see a rise in hospitalizations across the St. Louis region."
 
A few month ago @Momentum57 predicted a vaccine escape variant wreaking havoc in the US. I wish he would not have been wrong this way - huge pockets of the US civilization refusing the vaccine leading to covid without any vaccine escape to speak of, "only" with slightly higher (not even double) transmissibility, wreaking havoc.

What I find equally sad is that millions of people in the EU and billions in Africa want to get a covid shot right now and the US is hoarding hundreds of millions of doses their people obviously don't want instead of exporting them.
 
Around May I spoke about an in-law cousin that wasn't getting vaccinated because of the illuminati. Currently the US is about 45% vaccinated. I also suggested that this could keep alive covid and mutations of covid. I still would put money on us all needing boosters. It is possible that a covid variant out last this vaccination effort.


It will be a decade before we are able to say that we have worked out all the lingering issues: financial, social, health, policy....
 
What I find equally sad is that millions of people in the EU and billions in Africa want to get a covid shot right now and the US is hoarding hundreds of millions of doses their people obviously don't want instead of exporting them.
Apparently they'd rather futz with the expiration date than share: https://apnews.com/article/joe-bide...mic-business-6d04574617b35c56e7ca2c711cc5585f

Meanwhile, Germany's #impfdestaster is about to pass the US in first shot coverage next week ish.
 
Second verse, or more like 338th verse, same as the first. https://www.kmov.com/news/missouri-...2-11eb-98e9-ffbd69c5cacd.html?block_id=990844

"On a scale of 1-10, right now from a public health perspective, I am at a seven," said Dr. Faisal Khan, St. Louis County's Director of Health. "It is only a matter of time, perhaps a week or two at most, before we begin to see a rise in hospitalizations across the St. Louis region."

Same story here on the other side of the state. I've copy and pasted an article from the Joplin Globe, because I have had trouble in the past with others being able to read anything on their site.

Joplin Globe said:
Local health officials have seen a steady increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations over the last few weeks with a significant spike in new admitted patients over the weekend.

Cases throughout the Joplin region are at near peak levels experienced last winter.

“We’ve definitely seen an increase in our COVID patients over the last three weeks,” said Jeanee Kennedy, Freeman chief nursing officer. “We’re having admissions almost every single day to our COVID-19 units. We’ve got both of our COVID units open fully and full (capacity) at this time with patients.”



Missouri now leads the nation with the highest rate of new COVID-19 infections as vaccination rates remain low and the delta variant continues to spread more rapidly. One person in every 1,349 people in the state was diagnosed with COVID-19 from June 13 to Sunday, new data shows.

Donna Stokes, Mercy infection preventionist, said they also began noticing an increase in COVID-19 patients who are needing to be hospitalized and outpatients testing positive for the illness about two weeks ago. Mercy’s COVID-19 unit can house approximately 26 beds, which can overflow into other units as needed.

“We’re having to look at this several times a day just to be sure that we don’t exceed what we can manage,” Stokes said. “I don’t want to say that we’re there, but we’re certainly inching toward that. With the evaluation of our patients who are being discharged and requiring admissions, that’s going to be ongoing with these higher numbers of COVID-19 patients that we’re experiencing.”

On Friday, Mercy had about 20 hospitalized patients and 20 outpatients who tested positive for the illness. But it rose to approximately 33 inpatients and 45 outpatients within a couple of days, officials said.

“Over the weekend, we definitely had an increase in both our (hospital) admissions and outpatient positive tests, so there’s been a significant rise in the last 72 hours,” Stokes said. “At this point, we’re keeping up with being able to discharge patients at about the same rate as our admissions. The vast majority of patients are not vaccinated.”

On Monday, 80 people were currently admitted in Joplin hospital systems — Freeman, Mercy and Landmark — and included residents from outside of Joplin city limits, according to the city’s COVID-19 dashboard. At least 15 of the 80 patients are confirmed cases among Joplin residents.

Health officials at both Mercy and Freeman hospitals in Joplin told the Globe on Monday that they’re starting to see hospitalization rates inch closer to peak levels that haven’t occurred locally since late last year or early this year.

“We were seeing numbers around this caliber in November, December, January when we were at the peak of that surge, so this is about equivalent to that time frame,” Stokes said.

On Dec. 1, shortly after the city of Joplin had reinstated its mask mandate, 95 were people hospitalized locally. That number had topped 100 sometime in November, which was partly what prompted area hospitals to publicly call for the return of the mask mandate.




“Right now, we’re trending on par with where we were in January as far as rates are concerned,” Kennedy said. “I think we started to see the jump really after graduation season, when people were getting together, and then Memorial Day, it just kind of compounded there.”

Freeman’s second COVID-19 unit, which had closed in mid-March as virus numbers dropped, was reopened about two weeks ago due to the growing need, according to Kennedy. As of Monday at Freeman Hospital in Joplin, 48 COVID-19 patients being treated, up from 31 patients Friday, according to officials.

So what’s new?

Random testing of virus samples have determined that the delta variant, which is more infectious and potentially more deadly than other variants, has become dominant around Springfield and in much of Southwest Missouri, Kendra Findley, administrator of community health and epidemiology with Greene County, said last week.

More local patients in Joplin are exhibiting gastrointestinal-related symptoms like nausea, vomiting or diarrhea, which could be attributed to the delta variant, said Kennedy.

“The delta variant is more contagious, and it has the same kind of symptoms you would have with the stomach flu, but also blood clots and hearing loss have been associated with that variant,” she said. “We’re mostly seeing people who have not been vaccinated or have only had one of the shots in the series being hospitalized.”

While 53.3% of the population of Americans have initiated vaccination, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most southern and northern Missouri counties are well short of 40%. In Jasper County, only 20.1% of the population have received their full vaccinations, according to the state’s COVID-19 dashboard.

“Those who have been vaccinated, at least up to this point, we’re seeing mild to no COVID symptoms, so there’s a push for anyone who has that hesitancy for receiving vaccinations, now is the time to really contemplate their concerns versus the positive effects that we’re seeing from the vaccine for those who have gotten it,” Stokes said.

Another large difference is the change in demographics among positive COVID-19 patients at local hospitals. Last year’s admitted patients were mainly 70 to 90 years old, but currently there are more patients in their 20s to 50s who are being hospitalized. Kennedy said they’ve seen a 75% decrease in the hospitalizations of those who are 70 to 80 years old.

“What they’re being hospitalized for has really stayed the same — they need fluids, oxygen support,” she said. “A lot of these things are very similar, and a lot of these patients look similar to what we saw before, but it’s just a different age bracket of individuals. I think we’ll be surprised to see how things unfold moving forward and what we don’t know every time we go through these surges is how many people, how long it’s going to last.”

With the July 4 holiday weekend approaching, Kennedy and Stokes encouraged people to continue wearing masks if not vaccinated, and practice social distancing and hand hygiene.

“But the most important thing we can do is get vaccinated,” Kennedy said. “We’ve seen the vaccines working against these strains of COVID-19, and we know that it helps us prevent spreading.”
 
Wearing masks and 4 of July holiday are 2 things I'm sure will go hand in hand. Absolutely. Nope, can't see a problem here.

Continue the "you can't travel internationally until you prove you're not contagious," fuck these shit bags. I don't care what they say if they're churchgoers in this. You don't care about anyone else but yourself and you're so fucking vain that covering your nose and mouth is apparently a problem for you. Eat a dick.
 
So that statement made me curious.

As with anything nowadays, there seems to be fuckery by people wanting to move the image the data presents one or other way. However, data from the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Travel and Tourism Office (paywalled as most papers, unfortunately) says that "...the number of U.S. citizens traveling outside the country for business and leisure jumped by 6 percent as of 2018, reaching a total of 93 million." The data was accessible through an article posted by Marketing Company Skift and suggests the trend was upwards.

Of those, 45%, or approximately 41.8 million (rounded up) flew to destinations not directly bordering the United States. A breakdown of these, plus a percentage change with 2017 is displayed on the table below. Please excuse the crudity of this table, I worked with the styling that pasting it in gave me.

MarketTravelers in 2018% Change
Europe17,742,25812.3%
Caribbean8,702,2174.6%
Asia6,252,9038.4%
Central America3,236,7336.8%
Middle East2,443,2915.9%
South America2,104,1079.3%
Oceania860,55410.8%
Africa431,7457.1%
Overseas Total41,773,8089%

The population of the United states at of 2018 was estimated to be 327,167,434 people (source). Using the population age 18 or older is tempting, as it reduces the population to 253,768,092. But the Skift figures do not seem to be broken down in that fashion so I will not. This means that the 93,038,257 citizens who traveled outside of the US in 2018 represent approximately 28.43% of the population. or 12.77% of people that have traveled somewhere other than Canada or Mexico. I have collected these figures on the assumption that their sources counted every U.S citizen only one time a year and, by extension, they only traveled once a year. We can also assume that they thought that their landing destination was the only place they visited (since they are breaking down by continent, this is more reasonable than the former point)

At any rate. We can interpret this on several ways. 28.43% of the population does not sound like a lot. However, 93 million people does. An article in Newsweek using data from a travel insurance company suggests that this has been an upward trend since the 90s, since "In 1990, only 4 percent of Americans had one. By 1997, that had ticked up to 15 percent, and last year the number reached more than 42 percent." They also pointed out that the US is second only to China in terms of Tourism Expenditure though the percentage of American passports is still lower than other countries, citing the UK (76%) and Canada (66%) as examples. Please note that those percentages still mean there are More Americans with passports than there are UK and Canadian citizens, full stop.

TL ; DR. Yes. More and more every year (except this and last year, presumably).

I swear I will have a Honduran COVID update eventually, but I want to get some decent statistics first. At present it's just weird gaps in vaccination schedules, corruption cases for overpaid, useless mobile hospitals, and 10-hour vaccination queues.
 
:nod: in my book that's low considering it's leisure and business combined. For comparison, over here leisure alone already gets you almost 60% of the population traveling internationally, plus a nonzero number that only traveled internationally for business.

On the topic at hand, if a quarter-ish travels internationally, easing travel for vaccinated people is not going to be a huge boost to the vaccination rate... even before you go into "does international travel already correlate with likelihood to get vaccinated on your own?" territory.
 
:nod: in my book that's low considering it's leisure and business combined. For comparison, over here leisure alone already gets you almost 60% of the population traveling internationally, plus a nonzero number that only traveled internationally for business.

On the topic at hand, if a quarter-ish travels internationally, easing travel for vaccinated people is not going to be a huge boost to the vaccination rate... even before you go into "does international travel already correlate with likelihood to get vaccinated on your own?" territory.
Yes, but you could consider Norway, and Switzerland as international travel and that’s like comparing if I went to Toronto, which to me is like going to any other Midwestern major city. Except for the CN tower.

Back on topic.

 
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