I look forward to fox news articles that are about tweets that say that covid was a liberal hoax and the fact that it went away soon after the fake election is proof.
The initial receivers are first-responders and high-risk health workers. I don’t know how many people that is, but they are definitely spreaders.
I assume the case rate is mostly dropping because we simply peaked (like previous times), due to a mix of herd immunity and social distancing resuming after the holidays, and the vaccine is helping that drop. But there really is quite a difference between 20% herd immunity and 25% herd immunity. You have to remember this thing both grows and dies on an exponential scale. My random guess is that it would take at least a month before new policy could result in a significantly different vaccine total, and we’ll be down to 50k/day and still dropping with new hospitalizations very low.
The local nursing home did the second round of shots last Wednesday. I think that is common in my state. We should see a drop in deaths by the end of February.
Cases may be up as the “more contagious” UK variant gets here.
I feel like high risk HC workers have more exposure, but also follow the CDC guidelines to the T. ICU nurses probably don’t go to crowded bars or parties after their shift.
If you wanted to vaccinate the spreaders, not the at-risk, you’d start at college campuses.
I thought the Operation Warp Speed was aptly named. I mean, there are about thirty million things Trump did wrong, but he DID get three vaccines approved for use by the general public in really record time. That’s a bona fide accomplishment. It doesn’t begin to negate all of the other truly terrible things he did, but it is a bona fide accomplishment, and I actually kind of like the name.
What’s needed now is a plan for actually getting needles into arms. One part of that is that they need a plan for using up unused doses that were thawed for people who didn’t show, or thawed by accident. My hairdresser has mastered the art of the cancellation list… I’m not sure why this is so difficult. But it needs to become official government policy.
Every dose is sacred, every dose is great. If a dose is wasted, twig gets quite irate…
It would be really nice if there were some sort of formal waiting list procedure for unused doses at the end of the day. Instead we have so-called Vaccine Hunters who wait all day at pharmacies and other vaccination sites hoping there are extra doses at the end of the day. Totally inefficient.
The J&J vaccine, which is currently going through EUA approval, might alleviate some of issues with distribution, due to no deep freeze requirement, long shelf life and single dose. It’s about as effective as a good Flu vaccine; against the SA variant, not so much. But it can buy us time until everybody can get a mRNA vaccine. Personally, I’m young(-ish) and healthy. If I had the choice, I’d choose the J&J vaccine and save the mRNA dose for somebody higher risk. Then get the mRNA version a year or so down the line.
The RNA vaccines haven’t been tested against the new variants, the numbers for them were measured before those became common. They may also be less effective against the newer variants of the virus.
In fact, they are already planning to tweak the mRNA vaccines to better attack the new variants.
Still, existing vaccines appear to be effective in protecting the recipient against serious disease, even with the newer ones.
I’m not concerned about the variants at all. Yes, the SA variant is particularly nasty, I’m not denying that. But if we can develop a 90% effective vaccine for the current dominate strain, we can for the SA variant too. We’re going to need periodic boosters though, you can bet on that. My guess is that it’ll be every 2-5 years, not annual like the flu.
I just heard a blurb on Sunday morning TV that, given the way this vaccine was developed, with all that fancy schmancy dna stuff, that they can “quickly” adapt the vaccine for the new strains, so that’s very heartening.
If the issues are of the not enough bodies then it should help. If the distribution operation is jacked then it probably won’t help much. I read a great article about a vaccine site in Mount Pleasant, SC. They had 1000 people in line and it was moving very slow with hours long waits. The mayor called the Chick-Fil-A and asked the manager to come by and see if he could help. He checked out the line, figured out the bottleneck was registration, and called 3 of their staff to come help register people. Within a couple hours they cleared the line and had it down to 15 minute waits.
Err, that sounds really straightforward to me, very “in the box” operations management. But i suppose my mom used to teach operations management at a business school, and maybe a little of it rubbed off on me.
The only thing out of the box was having the common sense to ask a businessmen, rather than a medical person, to evaluate the situation. For various reasons, the medical establishment is extraordinarily bad at logistics. I’ve spent too much time hanging out at a hospital recently, and I’m pretty annoyed by just how grindingly inefficient they are.
I’ll tell you what. If it were still the Trump administration, that Chick Filet manager would be installed as national vaccine distribution chief by now.
Plus, the more people who get vaccinated, the slower the virus will mutate. Honestly, when you read a scary virus variant news article, you can tell your inner Chicken Little to call the eff down. We got this. We really, really do.