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COVID Thread 2: Operation Ludicrous Speed ! (Super Political!!!)

one more thing re: teachers. There are comments here that:

*teachers can choose to work remotely
*everyone masks in schools
*schools are implementing effective distancing measures

and while that may be the case in some places, none of them are universal. I personally know teachers who are required to teach in person, I know school systems who have (still) made masks for students optional, and every school that I know of is limited in its infrastructure and can't physically distance kids.

also, the teachers that I know personally WANT to teach kids face to face as they recognize this is needed (pretty sure our board teachers feel the same way)
 
NY Times email this morning re: Vaccine Alarmism and the consequence of hedging communications

A vaccine shot? No thank you

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’re probably familiar with the idea of vaccine alarmism. It goes something like this:
The coronavirus vaccines aren’t 100 percent effective. Vaccinated people may still be contagious. And the virus variants may make everything worse. So don’t change your behavior even if you get a shot.

Much of this message has some basis in truth, but it is fundamentally misleading. The evidence so far suggests that a full dose of the vaccine — with the appropriate waiting period after the second shot — effectively eliminates the risk of Covid-19 death, nearly eliminates the risk of hospitalization and drastically reduces a person’s ability to infect somebody else. All of that is also true about the virus’s new variants.
Yet the alarmism continues. And now we are seeing its real-world costs: Many people don’t want to get the vaccine partly because it sounds so ineffectual.

About one-third of members of the U.S. military have declined vaccine shots. When shots first became available to Ohio nursing-home workers, about 60 percent said no. Some N.B.A. stars are wary of appearing in public-services ads encouraging vaccination.
Nationwide, nearly half of Americans would refuse a shot if offered one immediately, polls suggest. Vaccination skepticism is even higher among Black and Hispanic people, white people without a college degree, registered Republicans and lower-income households.

Kate Grabowski, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me that she has heard from relatives about their friends and co-workers choosing not to get a shot because they keep hearing they can still get Covid and pass it on to others — and will still need to wear masks and social distance. “What’s the point?” she said, describing their attitude.
The message from experts, Grabowski said, is “being misinterpreted. That’s on us. We’re clearly doing something wrong.”

“Our discussion about vaccines has been poor, really poor,” Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist, told me. “As scientists we need to be more careful what we say and how that could be understood by the public.”
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The cost of confusion
Many academic experts — and, yes, journalists too — are instinctively skeptical and cautious. This instinct has caused the public messaging about vaccines to emphasize uncertainty and potential future bad news.

To take one example: The initial research trials of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines did not study whether a vaccinated person could get infected and infect another person. But the accumulated scientific evidence suggests the chances are very small that a vaccinated person could infect someone else with a severe case of Covid. (A mild case is effectively the common cold.) You wouldn’t know that from much of the public discussion.
“Over and over again, I see statements that in theory one could be infected and spread the virus even after being fully vaccinated,” Dr. Rebecca Wurtz of the University of Minnesota told me. “Is the ambiguous messaging contributing to ambivalent feelings about vaccination? Yes, no question.”

The messaging, as Dr. Abraar Karan of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said, has a “somewhat paternalistic” quality. It’s as if many experts do not trust people to understand both that the vaccines make an enormous difference and that there are unanswered questions.
As a result, the public messages err on the side of alarmism: The vaccine is not a get-out-of-Covid-free card!

In their own lives, medical experts — and, again, journalists — tend to be cleareyed about the vaccines. Many are getting shots as soon as they’re offered one. They are urging their family and friends to do the same. But when they speak to a national audience, they deliver a message that comes off very differently. It is dominated by talk of risks, uncertainties, caveats and possible problems. It feeds pre-existing anti-vaccine misinformation and anxiety.
No wonder that the experts’ own communities (which are disproportionately white, upper-income and liberal) are less skeptical of the vaccines than Black, Latino, working class and conservative communities.

Over the next several weeks, the supply of available vaccines will surge. If large numbers of Americans say no to a shot, however, many will suffer needlessly. “It makes me sad,” Grabowski told me. “We’ve created this amazing technology, and we can save so many lives.”
What should the public messaging about the vaccines be? “They’re safe. They’re highly effective against serious disease. And the emerging evidence about infectiousness looks really good,” Grabowski said. “If you have access to a vaccine and you’re eligible, you should get it.”
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New peer-reviewed Pfizer data says 1 shot of their vaccine is 85% effective at preventing symptomatic disease 15-28 days after being administered. That’s promising.
 
WRS said:
New peer-reviewed Pfizer data says 1 shot of their vaccine is 85% effective at preventing symptomatic disease 15-28 days after being administered. That’s promising.
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That's interesting. Does anyone know how strict the 21/28 day booster dosing is? could you do it 2 months later? 6 months later? i think the answer would be "no" but curious if there is a possible strategy to just do one-dose inoculation with MRNA vaccines until supply picks up and then circle around to the second dose
 
Henry Chinaski said:
That's interesting. Does anyone know how strict the 21/28 day booster dosing is? could you do it 2 months later? 6 months later? i think the answer would be "no" but curious if there is a possible strategy to just do one-dose inoculation with MRNA vaccines until supply picks up and then circle around to the second dose
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anywhere from 21 to 42 days post-first shot is the recommendation.
 
DeaconBrews said:
anywhere from 21 to 42 days post-first shot is the recommendation.
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And the general rule of thumb with booster vaccinations is that there is a “too soon” but there isn’t a “too late” time frame. So months later would likely be OK.
 
Proliferation of memory response actually requires contraction of effector cells and exiting of germinal center reactions, as well as the stopping of conversion to short lived plasmablasts and plasma cells which takes times (never hear plasma cell, what actually produces antibodies but I guess that’s too complicated for the media). Plasma cells probably alone at a minimum would provide 2-3 months of protection. You do want to hit a sweet spot for a booster because the immunity will wane in that transmission won’t be blocked and people will most likely get sick but not die/hospitalized.

Overall, I’d say the booster is probably too early, and the second shot has way too much antigen. Protection from a single dose would last 3 months as a floor, after that maybe lose transmission blocking/complete efficacy. If you hit someone up with a booster within that 3-6 months would be ideal, right now we are hitting a booster at pretty much the absolute earliest it’s even really possible.
 
Tobacco Road said:
Can you tell me more about all the flu cases being counted as COVID?
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It isn't complicated. Similar to the NYT alarmism article posted above, #science has created such a milkwich tornado of false negatives, false, positives, and incubation periods that nobody knows what the fuck to do in the moment when data gets reported.

We have about 200 employees and I've seen it at least once a week for the past few months. Employee says he/she feels like shit and can't come to work. Did you get a Covid test? Yes, I went to the clinic and it came back negative but "they" said I need to quarantine for a week anyway because I still might have it. Okay, wait a week, get another negative test, and come back to work. But while that person is out and the employer gets the State data inquiry, how do you think that worker gets reported????? - they are reported out for Covid, because they are. In hindsight 2 weeks later when they've had multiple negative tests, did they have Covid? No, they had the fucking flu, but it got reported as Covid and isn't getting unreported.

You don't think that similar pattern has played out with regard to dropping from 400,000 flu hospitalizations to 165? Poor bastard shows up feeling like shit yet tests negative for everything - stick him in the Covid Cave because we have to assume he has it! Covid stat. A few days later he either kicks or feels well enough to go home. Did he have Covid? Who the fuck knows, but he got reported as having it.

You're the supposed doctor, do you have a better explanation of how we dropped from 400,000 to 165 of flu hospitalizations despite tens of millions of people proudly ignoring all Covid protocols and acting completely normally? Rafi tried and failed miserably. Your turn, House.
 
on 1/20, the U.S. had 14.3 million with 1+ dose.

29 days later, yesterday, the U.S. had 16.2 million with 2 doses

that's not a perfect tracking system, of course, but suggests we're doing a very good job of getting the 2nd dose in arms, while 1st dose administration has stagnated at 900k-1 million per day

seems to me there is opportunity to be a bit more aggressive with 1st doses; I think at least part of the holdup is not supply of vaccine but of techs to administer the shots
 
thatguy2016 said:
on 1/20, the U.S. had 14.3 million with 1+ dose.

29 days later, yesterday, the U.S. had 16.2 million with 2 doses

that's not a perfect tracking system, of course, but suggests we're doing a very good job of getting the 2nd dose in arms, while 1st dose administration has stagnated at 900k-1 million per day

seems to me there is opportunity to be a bit more aggressive with 1st doses; I think at least part of the holdup is not supply of vaccine but of techs to administer the shots
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I don't know where you are getting your info, but last week 1.5 million doses were being given daily and that number was growing until the massive storms hit.
 
RJKarl said:
I don't know where you are getting your info, but last week 1.5 million doses were being given daily and that number was growing until the massive storms hit.
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I'm getting my info from the CDC website, which shows 1st doses and 2nd doses.

current 7-day average is 1.6 million TOTAL doses given daily. Of these, 900,000 are first doses. 700,000 are second doses.
 
It always comes back to 2&2’s employees trying to scam him out of time off.

He must be a real shitty boss
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
It isn't complicated. Similar to the NYT alarmism article posted above, #science has created such a milkwich tornado of false negatives, false, positives, and incubation periods that nobody knows what the fuck to do in the moment when data gets reported.

We have about 200 employees and I've seen it at least once a week for the past few months. Employee says he/she feels like shit and can't come to work. Did you get a Covid test? Yes, I went to the clinic and it came back negative but "they" said I need to quarantine for a week anyway because I still might have it. Okay, wait a week, get another negative test, and come back to work. But while that person is out and the employer gets the State data inquiry, how do you think that worker gets reported????? - they are reported out for Covid, because they are. In hindsight 2 weeks later when they've had multiple negative tests, did they have Covid? No, they had the fucking flu, but it got reported as Covid and isn't getting unreported.

You don't think that similar pattern has played out with regard to dropping from 400,000 flu hospitalizations to 165? Poor bastard shows up feeling like shit yet tests negative for everything - stick him in the Covid Cave because we have to assume he has it! Covid stat. A few days later he either kicks or feels well enough to go home. Did he have Covid? Who the fuck knows, but he got reported as having it.

You're the supposed doctor, do you have a better explanation of how we dropped from 400,000 to 165 of flu hospitalizations despite tens of millions of people proudly ignoring all Covid protocols and acting completely normally? Rafi tried and failed miserably. Your turn, House.
Click to expand...

Your write some really dumb stuff, but this is up there. We are talking about hospitalized patients. When someone is admitted to the hospital with respiratory symptoms they have a swab that is sent for a PCR panel, which now includes Flu A, Flu B, RSV, and COVID. Positive and negative results are reported, and that's how we know the hospitalization numbers for the flu, COVID, etc. for the United States. We aren't guessing based on people staying home from work. LOL.
 
There's no "hold up". The doses don't exist or haven't been delivered. It's not "stagnating". You can't snap your fingers and create capacity and deliverability.

Six weeks ago, we didn't have to do the follow up treatment.

What's happening now was unthinkable a month ago. We are doing great. Nothing is perfect. Before the storms, we were improving every day.
 
RJKarl said:
There's no "hold up". The doses don't exist or haven't been delivered. It's not "stagnating". You can't snap your fingers and create capacity and deliverability.

Six weeks ago, we didn't have to do the follow up treatment.

What's happening now was unthinkable a month ago. We are doing great. Nothing is perfect. Before the storms, we were improving every day.
Click to expand...

7-day rolling averages for 1st dose administration:

1/27: 917,000
2/3: 924,000
2/10: 947,000
2/17: 926,000
 
Again, there's only so much product and only so many doses can be delivered into arms. To not include second doses in the amount of service provided is not telling the whole story.
 
RJKarl said:
Again, there's only so much product and only so many doses can be delivered into arms. To not include second doses in the amount of service provided is not telling the whole story.
Click to expand...

and I'm saying that given what the experts are saying, on this thread, regarding the timing of the second dose, perhaps we should be diverting some resources away from delivering a second dose 21 days after the 1st dose, and instead deliver more first doses.

read those comments again - 2nd dose may be more effective if given later. Moderna alone will deliver 155 million additional doses by the end of May, with Pfizer coming close to that.
 
I'm totally not moving to The Vatican which is apparently ruled by some divine right autocrat.

EumVnE8WQAEliC8
 
thatguy2016 said:
and I'm saying that given what the experts are saying, on this thread, regarding the timing of the second dose, perhaps we should be diverting some resources away from delivering a second dose 21 days after the 1st dose, and instead deliver more first doses.

read those comments again - 2nd dose may be more effective if given later. Moderna alone will deliver 155 million additional doses by the end of May, with Pfizer coming close to that.
Click to expand...

If those two deliver 300M additional doses by the end of May, it will be a remarkable success. Let's say that 100M of those are second doses for people who have been treated already. That would mean by the end of May a minimum of 200M Americans will have been fully vaccinated from these two companies. If we only get 75M from J&J (single dosage), it will mean 275M fully vaccinated Americans by the end of May.

That would have been an impossible pipe dream 90 days ago.

As to delaying second doses, "may be" is the critical comment. We don't know that for sure. When we do, things can change.
 
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