COVID-19 | Coronavirus January 2021

Friendly Frog · Jan 1, 2021

I'm sorry, Liv.

I have become increasingly disgruntled with neighbours and family friends who are not following the one-close-contact-rule. I know it is wearying after so many months but... but pandemic! My parents constantly defend their friends (even if they at least keep to the rules themselves albeit grumbling) but it's them that are in the risk categories and not me. It should not be just me who's upset about this.

At least one bit of good news, my granddad is getting his first vaccination in January! I am very happy for him. But I'm also somewhat worried because the government is discussing spreading the vaccinations by postponing the second dose for months which I think is a really bad, bad idea and none of the vaccines my country ordered has tested for such long periods between doses. I suspect it is mostly to stop the vaccinated from stopping to adhere to the safety protocols before the rest of the populace can and while I can understand the sentiment, I really think it is a baaad idea and I hope they come off it soon. Not the time to start gambling with people's health to make governing easier.

mccardey · Jan 1, 2021

Roxxsmom said:
This speaks well of you. To be fair to us, many Americans are also devastated by the approximately 1/1000 people who have died of Covid-19 thus far here. Some of us are even heartbroken about the people who have died all over the world--folks that didn't have to die when and how they died.

But then there are those who still insist the virus is trivial "except for those who were about to die anyway." Because A. They assume everyone over 70, everyone with diabetes, or heart conditions, or COPD, or asthma, or obesity already has one foot in the grave and will die very soon (never mind that most can live for years, even decades, with these conditions), and 2 they simply think people with these conditions have no value to society, so their loss isn't anything to fuss about. Maybe it will just make it easier to get parking places or something, right?

And somehow they can just ignore the data that show the covid deaths are above the "normal" background death rate. And they ignore the effect all these vulnerable people in ICUs at once has on our health care system.

I have a hard time not yelling "F*** You!!!" at all those folks who think the months or years my mom (who has a heart condition and is in her eighties) has left, time that could easily be stolen by Covid, mean nothing. And are they really so heartless to think the time that we can't spend with our vulnerable family members right now has no value either. What if my mom does die this year of something besides Covid, and we haven't been able to visit her since last January?

I read an article the other day, back when I was trying to check if I'd understood MaEze's numbers correctly, that put forward a theory that made so much sense to me. In times of war, or natural disaster, or civic crisis the numbers of dead can reach a point at which they can no longer be experienced as People Lost and can only be processed by the human brain as one single event. Thus we survive the huge catastrophes, and thus, also, we look back later and say "Why didn't people care?"

I will try to find that link, after coffee. It answered my knee-jerk to MaEze's numbers, which was - "That can't be correct, because America would erupt with rage or collapse into weeping." It is correct, but the brain can't handle it, and reprocesses the awfulness into something less personal, and survival into something more emotionally manageable.

I'm sure Australia will do exactly the same, if we end up with figures like yours. Which we could do.

Mr Trump, and the Trump-enablers have a terrible lot to answer for. And the Tea-Partiers before them, and the Republican party once it went off the rails.

lizmonster · Jan 1, 2021

It answered my knee-jerk to MaEze's numbers, which was - "That can't be correct, because America would erupt with rage or collapse into weeping."

Speaking only for myself - I can't grasp it, not now. Now I'm in getting-through-it mode. As we come out of this (if we come out of this), I have a pretty big well of rage that's going to overflow into the rest of my life. It's how I've always reacted to crises: I get dispassionate when there's coping to be done, to the point that I'm sure I seem callous to some people.

*rump and the GOP have straight-up murdered people. I'm not quite sure how to handle that, so for now, I don't.

MaeZe · Jan 1, 2021

mccardy said:
Mr Trump, and the Trump-enablers have a terrible lot to answer for. And the Tea-Partiers before them, and the Republican party once it went off the rails.

I hope to hell that after Trump is out of here the cult followers he left behind him in Congress get the full blame for all the COVID deaths. Right now they are preoccupied with Trump mania. But when the dust settles those hundreds of thousands deaths are going to be sticking up like the remnants of a bombed-out city after the war is over.

That needs to be a shrieking campaign issue which follows them into 2022.

Unimportant · Jan 1, 2021

The idea that 1 in 1000 Americans have already died, and that yet more will die, is both horrifying and incomprehensible. And, as many here have noted, it's not 'just' elderly people. Frontline workers are more likely to catch it, and thus more likely to die. People of colour are more likely to be frontline workers and therefore to catch it and therefore die. I saw somewhere that Black and Latinx have a mortality rate more than twice that of Caucasians, and Native/Indigenous people about three times that of Caucasians -- partly due to them being frontline workers, partly due to comorbidities, and partly due to racial disparity in health care quality.

I also read that up to half of healthcare workers in some areas, including those in nursing homes, are refusing to get the vaccine. This is just unbelievable on so many fronts, and it's terrifying to speculate on what the long term outcomes of that may be. Even here in New Zealand I have friends -- who are liberal, intelligent, and realistic -- asking me daily if I think the vaccines will be safe and effective. The long arm of the anti-vaxxers has tainted every corner of the world.

My mother in Michigan has COPD and is 94. She wasn't able to be with my father during the last two months of his life; she was in lockdown in her flat and he was in nursing care. She remains as active as she can (while obeying local health recommendations/requirements) in her church, her golf league, her bridge league, her local music group, and her exercise groups. She enjoys life. She is high risk, for sure, but she's neither disposable nor willing to die of COVID so that some yobbo can go maskless because of freedumbs.

MaeZe · Jan 1, 2021

It's so sad to hear how many people didn't get to see their loved ones and some time during the last year they died.

BenPanced · Jan 2, 2021

Speaking of the flatulent screaming turd's NYE party he didn't attend, word has gotten out that maskless guests who attended maskless were entertained by maskless Vanilla Ice and maskless Terri Nunn from the group Berlin (the article above just mentions Berlin but other sources are saying she performed a solo set. Either way, she owns the name of the band). Other sources are saying Nunn, days after eulogizing Dawn Wells and her passing away from COVID-19, is taking a mature, honest approach to questions such as "WHY, FFS?!" or "WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!" on Twitter by blocking the users who ask. Rob Van Winkle hisself is experiencing some backlash on the Book of Face, as well. Might as well, since he moved a date he was to perform from July of 2020 to November 2021 and is expected to be congratulated or some bullshit.

CWatts · Jan 2, 2021

I assume Ms. Nunn performed her 1986 hit "Take My Breath Away" at this superspreader shindig. Ah the ironies that would be just too on the nose for fiction...

cbenoi1 · Jan 2, 2021

Here's the run-up to yet another Trump-made clusterfuck.

Because the Pfizer vaccine is not guaranteed to be constantly flowing out its manufacturing plant (this is not uncommon in any mass manufacturing endeavor), Pfizer has put in their contract a clause that says enough doses had to be put aside for the second shot if the vaccine is to be effective as certified by the FDA. Again, not uncommon and understandable in the circumstances. That's why everybody in the World getting Pfizer vaccine have planned for this. From freezers to scheduling the second shots to making personnel assignments to distribution.

Basic logistics.

We Came All This Way to Let Vaccines Go Bad in the Freezer?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/opinion/coronavirus-vaccines-expiring.html

It’s been two weeks since U.S. officials launched what ought to be the largest vaccination campaign in the nation’s history. So far, things are going poorly.
How poorly? Untold numbers of vaccine doses will expire before they can be injected into American arms, while communities around the country are reporting more corpses than their mortuaries can handle. Operation Warp Speed has failed to come anywhere close to its original goal of vaccinating 20 million people against the coronavirus by the end of 2020. Of the 14 million vaccine doses that have been produced and delivered to hospitals and health departments across the country, just an estimated three million people have been vaccinated. The rest of the lifesaving doses, presumably, remain stored in deep freezers — where several million of them could well expire before they can be put to use.
{...}
The federal tracking system that monitors vaccine shipments and whereabouts and the chain of communication among federal, state and local health officials have been disorganized.

The Trump administration. Still learning on the job. The hard way.

-cb

Bufty · Jan 2, 2021

Numbers on this side of the pond continue to rise. To vaccinate more people we appear to be lengthening the gap between the two necessary Pfizer injections from 21 days to 12 weeks despite Pfizer claiming there is no evidence to support extended efficacy of the first injection beyond 21 days on its own.

I hope this decision doesn't backfire for any of those who have the first injection with no subsequent one within the stipulated time frame.

cbenoi1 · Jan 2, 2021

Quebec and Ontario are re-negotiating the terms of the contract to avoid stockpiling doses for the second shots, shots that would otherwise be put in the arms of people right now. We are rolling out the Moderna vaccine in parallel.

Basic logistics...

-cb

MaeZe · Jan 2, 2021

I wonder what the reasons were for the clause?

1) To guarantee more sales (like they would need that).

2) Or, more likely someone worded the contract poorly, or someone reading it doesn't understand the way these things are written to cover a failure of the product to protect people.

cbenoi1 · Jan 2, 2021

MaeZe said:
I wonder what the reasons were for the clause?

The Pfizer vaccine is a two-shot dosage. The vaccine is made in Ohio and when the contracts were signed we didn't know if Trump would not cut off our supplies by requiring by executive order that everything that comes out the Ohio plant is for the US's exclusive use. This combined with the uncertainty of the manufacturing and logistical chain. As manufacturing is getting more stable and cases are rising, this is no longer a suitable requirement. And to offset any Trump temper tantrum we have procured from a variety of vaccine manufacturers.

-cb

Roxxsmom · Jan 2, 2021

cbenoi1 said:
The Trump administration. Still learning on the job. The hard way.

-cb

Or not learning on the job.

Friendly Frog · Jan 3, 2021

Millions of vaccines left in the freeze to just expire? Gah! I otherwise have a very active imagination and they still surpise me every time they find a new low to go... *angry curses*

Here it seems the discussion to postpone the second dose has finally been concluded and dropped, it seems and much to my relief. Common sense prevailed and they'll be following the vaccine schedule as suggested by the manufacturer. For my part, I am happy enough to wait my turn, even if it takes longer if that means my grandad and parents will get their two doses and the greater immunity they can get that comes with them.

Roxxsmom · Jan 3, 2021

I think some of the issues with the vaccines being left to expire is there are policies aimed at vaccines with longer shelf lives being applied here? They have to make sure there are enough doses "set aside" for when people need their second dose, so they can't use all the doses they currently have "on hand" to give the first dose. But by the time the first batch of people need their second dose, some of the vaccines will be expired.

I imagine there would also be a lot of anger if they use all the doses they have now for first vaccines but can't get more, so there aren't enough available when people are in the time window where they need their second dose.

Not sure why this vaccine has such a crappy shelf life, though. Seems it should last longer than a month or two if stored under the right conditions. It's possible they simply don't have enough data yet to know for sure how long it lasts, so they are erring on the side of caution? And of course there's that issue with not every facility having deep freezers that can store the Pfizer vaccine at -70 for long-term storage, either.

I'm afraid we're seeing some of the effects of pushing vaccines to market at unprecedented speed. It's really frustrating, and of course we don't have much in the way of leadership from the Feds right now, so everything is worse.

cbenoi1 · Jan 3, 2021

Roxxsmom said:
I think some of the issues with the vaccines being left to expire is there are policies aimed at vaccines with longer shelf lives being applied here?

It seems like not all states had the required number of people to put needles in arms. There was some federal funding for that coming but that got nixed recently for some odd reason. Then again, there are federal resources that could also put to good use right now - *cough* *cough* military medics *cough* cough* American Red Cross *cough* cough* - but nothing comes out of DC nowadays.

Roxxsmom said:
Not sure why this vaccine has such a crappy shelf life, though.

Many medications have short shelf lives and are only available at hospitals. Anything that has to do with PET scanning (when you have to inject radioactive material with short half-lives) is time-critical.

-cb

mccardey · Jan 3, 2021

MaeZe said:
It's so hard to believe 1 in every 1,000 people in the US have died from COVID. It's horrible.

It's 1 in every 950 now... Just horrific.

Gatteau · Jan 3, 2021

I read an opinion piece this morning from The NY Times about the idea of delaying the second dose, and my gut reaction was No, that seems like a baaaad idea, we can’t jeopardize immunity like that. But I felt like they made some interesting points. The authors (at least one a doctor from Harvard) seem to think a significant amount of protection is gained by a single shot, and no evidence has come to light so far to indicate that the immunity declines rapidly enough to worry about the booster coming within three weeks or a month. That was specifically the thing I had wondered about with this process: is it protection + booster, or half protection + half protection, or something else entirely? I guess they don’t actually know yet either (I’m sure a side effect of the rapid development timeline that got shoved through), but it feels like a pretty damn important thing to find out.

Of course now I can’t find that particular article, but here’s one from the middle of December saying a lot of the same things:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/opinion/coronavirus-vaccine-doses.html

Here’s the section I found most intriguing:

Crucially, though, we should begin immediate single-dose trials, recruiting volunteers from low-risk populations who are first in line for the vaccinations. For example, among health care workers protective equipment works, rates of infection among this group have fallen sharply and severe disease is much more rare.Younger essential workers without risk factors are less likely to be severely affected if they are exposed since this disease’s impact rises steeply with age. Just as tens of thousands of people volunteered for the earlier vaccine trials, many may well volunteer to test a placebo against a second dose, allowing us to quickly ascertain questions of durability and effectiveness of the single dose.

Is it very risky for those volunteers? There are scientific reasons to believe that the risk is not that high. For one thing, the initial shot — the prime — is clearly providing some immunity, and even if low-risk people are exposed to the virus later on, the natural infection in them could act like the booster: bolstering their immune system even further without causing severe, or even mild, disease. The rarity of reinfections from natural infections supports that line of thinking. Second, what we know about the immune system and Phase 1 and 2 data suggests that older people’s immune systems do not respond as strongly to the single dose, which means that we should keep both this trial and the possibility of a single dose reserved for lower-risk groups: healthy people under 65 without significant multiple comorbidities. The key question we’re looking at is the durability of the immunity provided by that dose, whether it wanes over time and by how much. Immunity is not a switch that gets turned off overnight; we could monitor these volunteers monthly and stop the trial quickly if a significant uptick was detected.

...

Even if we found the single dose to be somewhat less efficient than two doses, it’s important to remember that not long ago we would have been thrilled to have a vaccine even less effective than the single-dose numbers we’re seeing now.

If we start examining the effectiveness of a single dose now, and if we find that the data warrants it, we can go forward with it as quickly as possible. The prospect of adding hundreds of millions to those who can be vaccinated immediately in the coming year is not something to be dismissed.

I don’t have enough scientific background to know if this is a reasonable thing to do or not, but it seems to me to be worth a try.

cbenoi1 · Jan 3, 2021

One thing is certain - at the speed at which get got vaccines, only the barebones studies have been made to get approval. We will learn more in the coming weeks and months about those vaccines as we have learned a shitload in a short amount of time about this virus.

So we have a Plan A. That's good. There are indications people are working to accelerate this process. Human ingenuity at work.

Unfortunately science takes time.

-cb

Unimportant · Jan 3, 2021

cbenoi1: as I understand it, back when MERS was a problem, some NIH scientists put their all into figuring out how to sequence the 'spike' protein, how to create it and modify it, and how to use it to design vaccines. Then just as they were about to make the vaccines, MERS (also a coronavirus) disappeared from the landscape, their funding died, and the info got shelved. When COVID got sequenced by China and the info sent to these scientists, within two days they had candidate spike protein sequences for the pharma companies to make as vaccine antigens. Two days, for work that would normally take two years. That's how we got there so fast. The clinical trials haven't cut any corners.

Roxxsmom · Jan 3, 2021

What Unimportant said is true, I believe.

There is a very long article in the New Yorker this week that delineates the unfolding of Covid 19. It goes into quite a lot of detail. It's very long, but worth reading for folks who have access to the New Yorker. I do seem to be able to read it without logging in, so maybe it's available to non subscribers for free.

Or skimming, at least. I did mention that is is very long. It goes into some of the history of the researchers too, and it had a bit about the research on the recognition spike with MERS and how interest died off with the MERS outbreak, but there was some knowledge that carried over. Also, there was the fact that governments, including our own, arranged to purchase lots of vaccine before they knew whether they would be usable or not. This encouraged them to sink more into R and D and to get into production much more quickly than is the norm with new vaccines.

Thoroughly glad that Coronavirus didn't become contagious between humans as Sars-Cov-2 did, though. MERS had a much higher mortality.

MaeZe · Jan 3, 2021

Sorry I'm repeating myself.

Given what we know from other vaccinations, it shouldn't be a problem at all to delay the second doses of these vaccines.

We have a long history of immune system research and know how killed vaccines start an action. The 'start' doesn't go away. When I give doses of hepatitis B vaccine, there can be years between doses and you still don't need to start the series over again.

As for mixing vaccines, I would be fine mixing doses of the mRNA vaccines.

Again with hepatitis B vaccine which is also a 'biologic' we mix brands.

Given the mRNA vaccines work the same in principle, they should be OK mixed. But I might not mix an mRNA vaccine with the other vaccines which work like the standard killed vaccines do.

What lay people should know is that drug manufacturers can only put in a drug insert or guideline what they have tested. They cannot recommend mixing brands if they haven't tested it. They can't say it's OK to delay the second dose until they have tested a delayed second dose.

Generally when a drug or vaccine goes on the market, more data is collected. Information about inadvertent late doses accumulates. Information about inadvertent vaccinations of pregnant women also accumulates. Information about how long the vaccine remains effective accumulates.

Right now we need to get as much vaccine into as many people as possible. The last thing we need to be doing here is saving vaccine for people's second doses when there are high risk people who haven't gotten a single dose.

MaeZe · Jan 3, 2021

Roxxsmom said:
Thoroughly glad that Coronavirus didn't become contagious between humans as Sars-Cov-2 did, though. MERS had a much higher mortality.

Yes. We don't exactly know why MERS hasn't broken out into big numbers. It's right there in Mecca where thousands of people crowd together for the Hajj.

cbenoi1 · Jan 4, 2021

Unimportant said:
The clinical trials haven't cut any corners.

Yes and no. If you are saying the science was never sacrificed, I totally agree. But there is much more to know about those vaccines.

For example the Pfizer was not fully tested on children under 16 so we don't know. Do we need to have children vaccinated? Maybe. Maybe another vaccine will take care of that because it was tested on that slice of the population or it was derived from a vaccine base we know will work for this population. Can we extend the Pfizer dosage from 21 days to - say - 40? Maybe that works too, but testing it takes time. Nowadays some governments (mine included) are floating the idea of having the first Pfizer vaccine followed by the Moderna one some 30 days later. Will this work with the same level of efficacy or better? Maybe. If not, will the resulting efficacy be acceptable given the situation we're in? Maybe.

We have vaccines that work and I for one will not hesitate to get pricked when my turn comes. The next thing science needs to answer is how do we make this virus go away faster.

-cb

COVID-19 | Coronavirus January 2021

Friendly Frog

Snarkenfaugister

mccardey

lizmonster

Possibly A Mermaid Queen

MaeZe

Unimportant

No COVID yet. Still masking.

MaeZe

BenPanced

THE BLUEBERRY QUEEN OF HADES (he/him)

CWatts

down the rabbit hole of research...

cbenoi1

Bufty

Where have the last ten years gone?

cbenoi1

MaeZe

cbenoi1

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido

Friendly Frog

Snarkenfaugister

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido

cbenoi1

mccardey

Gatteau

cbenoi1

Unimportant

No COVID yet. Still masking.

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido

MaeZe

MaeZe

cbenoi1