It’s great to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps it will be a bit later but I strongly believe this will be possible.
Will only do it once scientists recommend and countries are welcoming me. I could travel today as a Norwegian citizen and green card holder, but that would not be very smart and nice so I’ll wait for answers similar to your questions.
Once the USA is largely vaccinated, all of the supply the USA was buying up can pour into other countries.
> But she said the most significant increase in hospitalizations in the state is in people in their 50s, a group still at risk of becoming severely ill or dying from Covid-19. Younger people have driven the rapid increase in cases recently, she said, including high school students who participate in sports and have contracted the virus through those activities.
> “I do think this could be the beginning of a third surge,” Dr. Khaldun said, after an initial rush of cases in Michigan last March and April, followed by a surge in October and November. “I am concerned. But I also think there are things that we can do today that will start to turn that curve down.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/us/michigan-covid-outbrea...
In the US, most (59%) deaths come from people aged 75+ according to CDC. People aged 75+ make up roughly 12% of the population.
Some places are at much lower percentages. "Fully vaccinated" varies from ~12% in Utah to ~24% in New Mexico. 17% overall for the US.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm...
Ideally you can protect them by suppressing the virus by herd immunity, which I think is actually a viable prospect with these vaccines.
[1] https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/blob/master/public/dat...
Google screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/OMu5EcY
Probably not. And in 6 weeks, that just means millions more will be vaccinated and younger people will have even more organic immunity.
In other words, there may be another surge, but it will probably be the last one, and probably over by May 15.
Again, non expert, don't cough on people, etc.
So things are better than in most places and will continually get better.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/us/michigan-covid-outbrea...
> Michigan has more recent cases per capita than any other state, and has seen them soar in recent weeks, to more than 5,600 cases a day from about 1,000 on Feb. 21. The nation’s top five metro areas in recent cases per capita are all in Michigan: Jackson, Detroit, Flint, Lansing and Monroe.
...
> Health officials partly attributed the rapid rise in cases to the B.1.1.7 variant that was originally identified in Britain and is widespread in Michigan. But they have also observed a broader return to prepandemic life seen in a relaxing of mask wearing, social distancing and other strategies meant to slow the spread of the virus — many weeks before a substantial portion of the population is vaccinated. On Thursday, Michigan officials announced that they had identified their first case of the P.1 variant, which has spread widely in Brazil and has now been found in more than 20 U.S. states.
...
> Dr. Joneigh S. Khaldun, the state’s chief medical executive, said on Tuesday that 50 percent of state residents over 65 were fully vaccinated, a sign of progress that the most vulnerable population is closer to protection from Covid-19.
> But she said the most significant increase in hospitalizations in the state is in people in their 50s, a group still at risk of becoming severely ill or dying from Covid-19. Younger people have driven the rapid increase in cases recently, she said, including high school students who participate in sports and have contracted the virus through those activities.
The relative rate doesn't matter, the absolute rate does (how often does it mutate at all and survive to infect another host).
It's always been a bad thing and will continue to be a bad thing.
Your argument, then, is that one can make a confident affirmative argument about the null hypothesis absent any evidence and be correct in so doing...?
COVID shouldn't be so much of a mystery any more, it has been 12 months of the most focused study the world medical profession has ever done. The only thing holding our knowledge back of the short term behaviour of COVID is ourselves at this point. We've had time to watch the disease play out multiple times.
(EDIT: If there is some reason that our rates will fall more quickly, I'd love to hear it.)
The argument for our lifestyle changes was always to "slow the spread" or "bend the curve". It seems we've done that about as well as we can.
Its definitely getting into the same order of magnitude at that point, though. It'd be hard to argue for stringent lockdowns, IMO.
The UK numbers have stopped decreasing since they re-opened schools, but that could be due to the B.1.7 variant.
I’m not optimistic we can rid ourselves of COVID completely, but pushing it to the fringes would be great.
The problem is that those 70% numbers assume even distribution, but that isn't turning out to be the case. Not only are different countries going at very different rates, but even inside of the US you can see a huge spread. This isn't just about where the vaccine is being delivered but we're it's being ignored. It's not hard to imagine that LA County might not ever get up to the 60% to 70% threshold needed for herd immunity due to a large community of antivaxxers who can support and spread new variants that spread further out.
This very article we're reading briefly mentions this, as pfizer is already working on boosters. Covid is not going to just disappear in the next six weeks.
I read an interesting article arguing that "the people who deserve the vaccine the least, should be the ones getting it first". As in, the kid who irresponsibly goes to Miami on spring break, should be the person getting the vaccine first- because vaccinating super spreaders would save more lives than vaccinating someone who stays home anyways. So arguably, the people who are most likely to transmit the disease should get vaccinated first.
The flip side of the coin is people who are most likely to catch the disease- probably already did. I can name a handful of people who I'm facebook friends with, who gave no shits about staying at home and caught covid already a few months ago.
So now, 1 year into the lockdown, the people who are most likely superspreaders- already got infected and are mostly immune. On the other hand, we're going to have 1/3 or 1/4 of the population still stay at home regardless of what the govt says.
So a significant percent of the population isn't contributing to spread anymore, even if they're not vaccinated.
The criteria for the various levels of reopening at the beginning were due the need to protect vulnerable people who did not have the opportunity to magically protect themselves by getting vaccinated.
This is a good review on whats out there: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01283-z
http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countri...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/24/moderna-covid-vaccine-booste... [2] https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/25/is-more-simply-better-wh...
* The 0.15% number is absurd when larger percentages of the US and UK population have died from Corona. Even if 100% were infected, IFR would have to be larger.
The fewer the infections, the fewer the mutations.
The fewer the mutations, the fewer the vaccine resistant variants.
The fewer the vaccine resistant variants, the fewer the need for new vaccines.
The fewer the need for new vaccines, the fewer the need for people to get vaccinated.
Repeat.
It's hard to predict when it will happen, but infections will collapse the same way they spread, but only if people get vaccinated and retain some discipline until the collapse.
We don't know whether it is rare or not. And we don't know how long immunity lasts. The Flu hits us every year.
The number of mutations in each subsequent generation is not strictly linked with the ability to evade the host immune system. Most mutations are either neutral or harmful to the virus itself. All you need is a single mutation that is beneficial - which is what happened in one variant of Covid - 20I/501Y.V1, most notably a mutation in the spike - S:N501Y.
Secondly, we do know that rates of spontaneous mutations are very high in RNA viruses, or more specifically, because of the way RNA polymerase functions.
Lastly, as a nitpick, a gene is a region of DNA - which is not at play here. But I got the gist of what you wanted to say.
-
Source: works in biotech
Aren’t you committing a logical error here? There will need to be new vaccines as long as there is at least one escape variant. The “fewer the need” is really a binary 0 or 1, and you haven’t done anything to show that your “getting vaccinated and retaining some discipline until the collapse” gets us from a 1 to a 0. There’s a time component as well.
But yeah, it’s a neat story that gets shots in arms.
Plagues end quickly all the time once conditions are no longer able to support it. Take a look at the current mouse plague in eastern Australia right now for a real world example. It's happened before but each time it collapsed as quickly as it came.
Statistically we will cross the threshold where the ecosystem is no longer favorable for the spread of covid and the plague will collapse. It will move back into the background noise just like the millions of other potential diseases that aren't currently causing a global pandemic.
The real danger are holdouts who can't or refuse to get vaccinated for whatever reason. If there's enough of them and they live close enough together to support a viable ecosystem that very well could provide a reservoir for covid to continue thriving and causing problems until they achieve herd immunity.
I can see several ways in which this is not true.
For one, several different variants might need to be handled with several different vaccines. Vaccines might also not work perfectly on a variant, but they might confer some protection, leading to overall less total viral particles produced, reducing the probability of an effective mutation.
That's not exactly how the flu shot works. They make an educated guess as to which strain will become most widespread, then develop the corresponding vaccine. Years that the flu shot isn't as effective is when they guess the wrong strain.
My guess is that next year's flu season is going to be a lot worse than more recent ones because of this.
Whether we do it, though, is another question altogether.
Just putting a mask on half the symptomatic infected people (or even better, getting them to stay at home) would probably do the trick.
Also, the flu has to start from a very low level. Might miss this flu season completely.
Do we have any sign yet on whether the COVID-season would be expected to run on a similar schedule?
(the "spike" that the vaccines target is important to the virus, so changes to it often make it much less infectious or whatever, and we don't really know how much room is has to both escape the vaccine triggered immunity and stay highly infectious)
Doing anything like this systematically should be though out carefully.
Doing my first 10 vaccines felt like buying software licence in the 90'. I fear that the new ones will be like those sucky Saas subscriptions.
Anecdotal but for my 2 appointments, the immunization centers clearly had a lot more capacity than customers. Lots of unused space and not-busy workers. I would guess because people that should be in line chose not to be.
But he also said shipments are improving and I also got a message from one of the mass vaccination sites.
To be clear, these were places where an appointment was needed, so they should have had a clear picture of demand.
But, we can probably reduce the number of cases per year to near 0 in the US, if all eligible people get vaccinated. Wiki told me there were under 500 confirmed cases in the US in 2018, and Google told me that r_0 for measles is between 12 and 18. COVID is nowhere near that transmissible.
I don't see that ever happening, at least for another generation or two.
There's also natural immunity for the ones who'd rather have that than the scary scientist-designed shot. The most irresponsible ones have the best chance of getting nature's vaccine. Depending on how long immunity lasts, that might drive it very low.
And as far as I know, the vaccines are highly effective and very few people are actually medically unable to get this vaccine. Honestly, if only people who chose not to be protected from it die... too bad for them.
Like if it's "therefore, past May 15 we should all just act as we did pre-COVID", that's different than "therefore, that's overall very good news for society".
There's a quantitative/qualitative thing going on here. We could be mostly "back to normal" in a broad numbers sense, while immuno-compromised people are left with a much more dangerous reality than they faced pre-COVID. They're left hoping for test/trace/eradication.
Personally, I'll feel pretty safe hanging out, even in closed-in areas, with other vaccinated people. But out and about, the decision to wear a mask will be more predicated on the actual disease prevalence numbers in that area. And we'll all continue to wait on data of how long the vaccines last.
I expect the emergence of new variants that spread in the unvaccinated either in places without masks (and resistant to vaccinations) like the US south, or (more probably) in the 96% of human beings that aren't Americans (and have much less access to covid vaccines), and the vaccine pressure selecting for the spread of variants that are different enough for the current set of vaccines to be less effective.
I am not an expert, this is just an educated guess by a layperson.
I also anticipate a major backlash against those who would refuse vaccines, as well as an impending necessary overhaul of the process and timeline for bringing slightly modified vaccines to market (as a clear need to quickly protect against new variants or even new strains emerges).
There is clearly a surge, but it's not yet worse than the previous one, and hopefully vaccination reduces the impact.
(I'm looking at the daily cases tab on https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98163_9817... )
Anecdotes about the variants spreading much more rapidly are going around though.
Cases up, but hospitalizations and deaths down. Giant nothingburger.
But if we keep moving the goalposts, we can stay hysterical for as long as we want.
50% of Republicans are wary of taking the vaccine. (Edit: that was Sep. 20' data. The partisan imbalance is now less with 56% of Republicans more or less opting in, notably, African Americans, theoretically 'most at risk' (we don' know exactly why) have the most hesitancy by race with only 61% planning to take it. [1])
Surprising number of elderly are not taking the vaccine, for a variety of reasons - access to information, travel, knowledge, language.
(Edit: more than 25% of age >80 in Ontario have been eligible and have not taken the vaccine. That's a 'very high number' for those most at risk. Toronto is now having mobile vans go door to door, esp. where there are high concentrations of elderly) [2]
For the same reason not everyone votes - a lot of people won't end up taking it.
I think the risk is that if there are 'no protocols' in place and we have the new more aggressive versions and lower rates of vaccination than we think ...
And we could definitely have another wave during the summer.
I believe the next few months will be fickle we should keep our guard up until 'done is done'.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/03/05/growing-share...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-19-vaccine-onta...
In Europe each country has their own definition of the above, making it nearly impossible to compare.
But judging from how things are going in Texas and Mississippi right now, there is a high chance of things being normal there on the May 15.
Mind you it does require around 25-30% vaccinated before you can say that.
https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronaviru...
I got dose 1 of Moderna yesterday (first day i was eligible).
"Organic immunity"? You mean that thing that the public health authorities are pretending doesn't exist, therefore requiring me, a person who caught, tested positive, and recovered from COVID in February to get vaccinated? Yeah, let me know when they stop pretending. I'm willing to get a vaccine, but annoyed because it has no benefit for me and only risk (albeit low).
Edit:
Downvote all you want, but I was a teen in the 90s when the public health authorities pretended like heterosexuals engaging in standard sexual activities were at equal risk of catching HIV compared to IV drug users and gay men. They weren't remotely at the same risk, by orders of magnitude. They wanted to promote safe sex and abstinence in teens and young people, which is a good thing, but they didn't hesitate to use the fear of HIV as a tool to (dishonestly) achieve that goal.
We don't know how the vaccine would improve things for people without visible long covid symptoms, but it is likely to help.
Also immune response improves after a vaccine just as it improves after a second shot.
There are risks, there might not be benefits for you, but there are definitely benefits to taking the vaccine for people who recovered.
I think a lot of sufferers of it are psychosomatic. The demographic for long covid doesn't match the demographic of those who are most at risk of the virus or get the worst symptoms. Instead, it matches the demographic most likely to complain about symptoms from other diseases that have attracted large numbers of sufferers, only to have most of them disappear when the disease became less trendy: Fibromyalgia and gluten intolerance, who had massive spikes in patients claiming to have the diseases, and suddenly big drop offs, for lifelong illnesses that don't go away. These patients tended to be affluent, white, middle-age women, who are not remotely the most at risk from covid, but are disproportionate in claiming long covid.
The vaccine probably has a placebo effect on these kinds of folks. Underestimating the full power of psychosomatic driven symptoms is a big problem. The mind can really make the body sick, and there's a lot of science backing this up.
I should specify that i don't think this is voluntary, or humans wanting attention. I think it's induced by excessive fear-based media and the subconscious, combined with the huge evolutionary advantage of the mind having the ability to induce vomiting if other tribe members who have eaten contaminated food begin getting sick.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23851-what-if-your-gl...
Can you provide links to any peer reviewed scientific literature on the benefits of the vaccine for recovered individuals? I don't trust any of the journalism on this, considering that they are universally scientifically and statistically illiterate clickbait producers these days.
But I would advise you to take it.
Yes, there are people who have caught it twice. They are rare, and the paper highlighted that a likely explanation was false positives in the original testing.
I'll take the vaccine, but shouldn't be required to.
Mind you, this is in Perú (he works at a mining firm) which was hit really hard in July and then now (one of the hardest per capita deaths).
Also, the Qatar study might not say much about the newer strands
First, it seems that natural immunity is a bit inferior to the mRNA vaccines ('only' 80% protection for people at your age[0]). Second, a single shot offers better protection against the SA variant which can apparently escape the immune reaction of some people who were previously ill[1]. A second shot is apparently unnecessary[2].
Local guideline is to wait a few months following recovery (there are concerns a too early vaccination will lead to immune overreaction) and then get a single shot.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[1] https://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/health/new-sa-covid-19-varia...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-had-covid-19-need...
I'm not an expert, so don't take this as advice to go coughing on everyone. But we all have to make some decisions based on imperfect information and it seems like covid is nearly knocked out.
There is some concern over another wave, but it might just be minor cases from unvaccinated young people. That hopefully won't lead to a lot more deaths.