Bad News Thread

Grace T. said:
Trump and his team did a better job than Europe (but not the UK or Israel).......

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | Europe’s Vaccine Rollout Has Descended Into Chaos (Published 2021)

It should have been a success. What went wrong?
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
Click to expand...
“The country could afford the mass purchases thanks to decades of economic growth, grounded in high-technology, medical research, water conservation, sophisticated weapons development, cybersecurity and more. The growth was spurred by market-oriented public policies, adopted after years of sluggish European-style socialism under Labor governments.”

"What have we learned so far? The earliest data covers the whole population, not subgroups, but it is very encouraging. It shows that the vaccine is actually more effective than Pfizer reported from its Phase 3 trials. By Jan. 30, six weeks after Israel began inoculations, more than 1.7 million Israelis had received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. Another 1.3 million had received their first dose. Of those who received the full inoculation, only around 300 later showed any significant COVID symptoms (less than ½ of 1%). Only 16 needed hospital care, less than 0.002%. A single dose seems to provide about half the necessary protection."

www.discoursemagazine.com

Why Israel Leads the World in Vaccinating Its Population

Its fast start is producing lessons and benefits for other countries
www.discoursemagazine.com www.discoursemagazine.com
 
Further stepping on their message....everyone needs to be vaccinated in order for us to get back to normal, but social distancing and masks are necessary even after vaccination....why then would anyone under 30 want to get a vaccine (particularly since the non-mRNA vaccines are not 100% efficient and you would likely get it anyways)? Not a great sales pitch.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1357381715401056256
 
Grace T. said:
everyone needs to be vaccinated in order for us to get back to normal, but social distancing and masks are necessary even after vaccination
Click to expand...
We have seen a variety of "top" people peddle this for some time. Expect them to try it and in many cases to succeed.

Why would we need to social distance and wear masks if we have a vaccine out?

We don't play this safety theater with other diseases floating around....flu for instance. A large percentage gets the vaccine every year, but we know despite that 30-90k will still die in the US in any given year. We don't shut down this or that.

But these yahoo's are going to try for a totally different standard with covid. No thanks.
 
My kid has been in school since... september? Is varying degrees of hybrid. Have their been cases? Sure. There have been instances where neighboring schools had to rewind back to virtual due to an outbreak among trachers.

But, IMO it hasn't been anything earth shattering. I am completely fine with them being on campus, no worries here. At some point they should look to other districts for guidance if they are struggling- real life examples of it working.

I cannot imagine my oldest STILL being totally virtual- how awful.
 
Glitterhater said:
My kid has been in school since... september? Is varying degrees of hybrid. Have their been cases? Sure. There have been instances where neighboring schools had to rewind back to virtual due to an outbreak among trachers.

But, IMO it hasn't been anything earth shattering. I am completely fine with them being on campus, no worries here. At some point they should look to other districts for guidance if they are struggling- real life examples of it working.

I cannot imagine my oldest STILL being totally virtual- how awful.
Click to expand...
There are only two reasons that people don't want kids back in school full-time, 1) unfounded fear, or 2) prisoner of a far left narrative.
 
Errr....this really looks really bad. @dad4 I need your help interpreting the number here, but it looks like we are in a race between vaccination and a real super bad spring wave. If I'm interpreting the numbers correctly, to suppress the new variant would require a superstrict lockdown (far stricter than the stupid Newsom December lockdowns) for which there is now virtually no political will left to do. The best thing that could happen is the J&J and AZ vaccines could get rolling quickly and we use those to vaccinated the 40s-60s and essential workers, but the FDA is doing it's FDA thing and is making them jump through hoops to submit. @dad4 would be interested in what you think.....



https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1357312201909018626
 
Grace T. said:
Errr....this really looks really bad. @dad4 I need your help interpreting the number here, but it looks like we are in a race between vaccination and a real super bad spring wave. If I'm interpreting the numbers correctly, to suppress the new variant would require a superstrict lockdown (far stricter than the stupid Newsom December lockdowns) for which there is now virtually no political will left to do. The best thing that could happen is the J&J and AZ vaccines could get rolling quickly and we use those to vaccinated the 40s-60s and essential workers, but the FDA is doing it's FDA thing and is making them jump through hoops to submit. @dad4 would be interested in what you think.....



https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1357312201909018626
Click to expand...
You need to get some good data on virus transmissibility, vaccine effectiveness, and cross immunity by variant. I don’t have all that, but I can give you an idea of my logic:

The regular variant kicked our ass. R0 was only 3, but we still had to infect 60% or so of the population in order to get over it.

That puts our NPI as 1/6 effective. It takes R=3 and drops it to R=2.5. Multiply by 5/6.

b.117 has a higher R. maybe R0=5. Add in our lame attempts at NPI, and you get R = 25/6.

So b.117 wants to run until it gets 1-(6/25) of us. 76%

Fortunately, the vaccine mostly works, and that may mean that normal immunity mostly works. if both work 90% of the time,

you get 54% have working natural immunity and another 9% have vaccine immunity. So, 63% have a working immunity. The virus infects another 13%. So, about 1/4 the size of our winter surge. Not fun.

Also preventable. Many local areas manage NPI that is better than 5/6. LA might be around 1/2. They took a variant with R0=5 and made it look like R=2.5

If the nation can do as well as LA did, b.117 would not spread. We’d be starting at 63%, but we’d only need 60. Unless you significantly change behavior, I don’t think b117 will hit LA very hard at all. The rest of us are in trouble.

When you run the same computation on the SA variant, it looks much worse. Might be delayed because it will first hit during summer. Might not. (need a good way to represent weather.). Either way you start with much lower immunity, because the vaccine and traditional immunity are both less effective. You’re still driving towards 75% or 76%, but you have further to go because you start much lower. So, 30% of us get it if it can beat the weather, 25% if it has to wait for fall. twice as bad as b.117.

Or, so says a math guy with no epidemiology training.
 
dad4 said:
You need to get some good data on virus transmissibility, vaccine effectiveness, and cross immunity by variant. I don’t have all that, but I can give you an idea of my logic:

The regular variant kicked our ass. R0 was only 3, but we still had to infect 60% or so of the population in order to get over it.

That puts our NPI as 1/6 effective. It takes R=3 and drops it to R=2.5. Multiply by 5/6.

b.117 has a higher R. maybe R0=5. Add in our lame attempts at NPI, and you get R = 25/6.

So b.117 wants to run until it gets 1-(6/25) of us. 76%

Fortunately, the vaccine mostly works, and that may mean that normal immunity mostly works. if both work 90% of the time,

you get 54% have working natural immunity and another 9% have vaccine immunity. So, 63% have a working immunity. The virus infects another 13%. So, about 1/4 the size of our winter surge. Not fun.

Also preventable. Many local areas manage NPI that is better than 5/6. LA might be around 1/2. They took a variant with R0=5 and made it look like R=2.5

If the nation can do as well as LA did, b.117 would not spread. We’d be starting at 63%, but we’d only need 60. Unless you significantly change behavior, I don’t think b117 will hit LA very hard at all. The rest of us are in trouble.

When you run the same computation on the SA variant, it looks much worse. Might be delayed because it will first hit during summer. Might not. (need a good way to represent weather.). Either way you start with much lower immunity, because the vaccine and traditional immunity are both less effective. You’re still driving towards 75% or 76%, but you have further to go because you start much lower. So, 30% of us get it if it can beat the weather, 25% if it has to wait for fall. twice as bad as b.117.

Or, so says a math guy with no epidemiology training.
Click to expand...

Useful. Much thanks in understanding this. We know the vaccines (even the J&J and AZ which are in the 60%-70% overall efficiency for the older variants) still help out with serious illness and death. The thinking is the thing is so devastating because of the autoimmune response of our bodies (not necessarily because of the virus itself) because it has never seen something like this. That's why the thinking on t-cells for cross-rona viruses is that they might help (because the body recognizes and says "oh I haven't seen this before but I've seen something close, so let's try this which worked before"). So the societal question is how much are we prepared to accept the possibility of illnesses overall in light of the death rate and serious illness rate (including long COVID) dropping but not to zero.

In any case, I think the thing you and I are both clued into but not everyone in these forums, the general public, the media, and even the health care experts are clued into is that the current issue continues well into 2022 with more minor surges to come in spring (and wow....summer/fall depending on the seasonal impacts) and then again possibly into next winter if the thing continues to mutate at the rate it has been. The question then is do we accept folks are vaccinated and that's the best we can do and open up, or do we continue to run scared.
 
dad4 said:
You need to get some good data on virus transmissibility, vaccine effectiveness, and cross immunity by variant. I don’t have all that, but I can give you an idea of my logic:

The regular variant kicked our ass. R0 was only 3, but we still had to infect 60% or so of the population in order to get over it.

That puts our NPI as 1/6 effective. It takes R=3 and drops it to R=2.5. Multiply by 5/6.

b.117 has a higher R. maybe R0=5. Add in our lame attempts at NPI, and you get R = 25/6.

So b.117 wants to run until it gets 1-(6/25) of us. 76%

Fortunately, the vaccine mostly works, and that may mean that normal immunity mostly works. if both work 90% of the time,

you get 54% have working natural immunity and another 9% have vaccine immunity. So, 63% have a working immunity. The virus infects another 13%. So, about 1/4 the size of our winter surge. Not fun.

Also preventable. Many local areas manage NPI that is better than 5/6. LA might be around 1/2. They took a variant with R0=5 and made it look like R=2.5

If the nation can do as well as LA did, b.117 would not spread. We’d be starting at 63%, but we’d only need 60. Unless you significantly change behavior, I don’t think b117 will hit LA very hard at all. The rest of us are in trouble.

When you run the same computation on the SA variant, it looks much worse. Might be delayed because it will first hit during summer. Might not. (need a good way to represent weather.). Either way you start with much lower immunity, because the vaccine and traditional immunity are both less effective. You’re still driving towards 75% or 76%, but you have further to go because you start much lower. So, 30% of us get it if it can beat the weather, 25% if it has to wait for fall. twice as bad as b.117.

Or, so says a math guy with no epidemiology training.
Click to expand...

What variable are you currently using for asymptomatic or non-test confirmed COVID cases? At one point assumptions ranged up to 10x, but I’m not sure what the current assumption should be.

In September models were using 9x, but I wonder where it is at now?

www.nature.com

Substantial underestimation of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the United States - Nature Communications

Estimating the extent of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a population is challenging due to the limitations of testing. Here, the authors estimate that the true number of infections in the United States in mid-April was up to 20 times higher than the number of confirmed cases.
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
N00B said:
What variable are you currently using for asymptomatic or non-test confirmed COVID cases? At one point assumptions ranged up to 10x, but I’m not sure what the current assumption should be.

In September models were using 9x, but I wonder where it is at now?

www.nature.com

Substantial underestimation of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the United States - Nature Communications

Estimating the extent of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a population is challenging due to the limitations of testing. Here, the authors estimate that the true number of infections in the United States in mid-April was up to 20 times higher than the number of confirmed cases.
www.nature.com www.nature.com
Click to expand...
Can't be 9x. Some places are above 12%. That gives you a 108% infection rate.

An OC study in the fall found 6x, for them..

Even 6x gives you above 100% infection rate for certain counties.

Going with 4 or 5x, depending on positivity rate. High positivity implies higher multiplier.
 
dad4 said:
Can't be 9x. Some places are above 12%. That gives you a 108% infection rate.

An OC study in the fall found 6x, for them..

Even 6x gives you above 100% infection rate for certain counties.

Going with 4 or 5x, depending on positivity rate. High positivity implies higher multiplier.
Click to expand...

Thanks.
 
Saw a report today that Kaiser has said if vaccine production/distribution doesn't vastly speed up, it take them four years to vaccinate all their members.

I'm not one of the smart ones working on this stuff but it seems to me that it would cost the US less to throw ALL of it's resources to fixing that than it's going to cost them indirectly from all the jobs being lost.
 
Glitterhater said:
Saw a report today that Kaiser has said if vaccine production/distribution doesn't vastly speed up, it take them four years to vaccinate all their members.

I'm not one of the smart ones working on this stuff but it seems to me that it would cost the US less to throw ALL of it's resources to fixing that than it's going to cost them indirectly from all the jobs being lost.
Click to expand...

If the FDA were to be more efficient and approve the J&J and AZ vaccines (the AZ has already been approved in the UK and IIUC Europe), it would quickly double our available supply particularly because of the need for only 1 dose in the J&J vaccine. The problem is a lower overall efficiency, which isn't good enough for some of the most vulnerable, but should be fine for all adults less than elderly or severely disabled.
 
Glitterhater said:
Saw a report today that Kaiser has said if vaccine production/distribution doesn't vastly speed up, it take them four years to vaccinate all their members.

I'm not one of the smart ones working on this stuff but it seems to me that it would cost the US less to throw ALL of it's resources to fixing that than it's going to cost them indirectly from all the jobs being lost.
Click to expand...
Nationally, we are at about 5%. 8% first dose, 2% second.

Annoyingly slow, but I don't see 4 years. NYT puts it at December, based on current rate. Should speed up if/when they approve J&J or AZ.
 
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