I’m not going to consult my crystal ball here, but the vaccine rollout is going to be outrageously sensitive.
Some countries (like New Zealand, for instance) might start requiring an immunity certificate in order to travel. Some airlines might as well. Schools probably will. This will be fodder for conspiracy theorists, who are already running rampant over actual obviously benign shit like masks and Wayfair.
The election and whatever chaos follows will also be in the same time period.
There will absolutely be fake news surrounding the vaccine and side effects.
And there will also be real news surrounding the vaccine and side effects.
There are lots of people who assume they’ve gotten COVID, or that COVID isn’t that harmful anyways.
There is plenty of reason to be extremely concerned about the roll out and people being resistant to taking the vaccine.
I’m not too worried about the safety of the vaccine. There’s not much chance of my getting the opportunity to take it until after it is pretty well tested in other countries.
Interpretation is that relative risk of death has increased for all age groups because of COVID, at comparable rates of increase. Since younger people started with a fairly low risk of death and older people started with a fairly high risk of death, a constant relative increase leads to many more old people actually dying from COVID. If you’re 30 years old, you have a low risk of dying of COVID, but COVID definitely increased your (already very low) risk of dying.
The baseline risk of dying is higher for older people, covid has a similar multiplier effect on age groups.
This is true for a lot of things, even things you may not expect. Car accidents are a lot more deadly for elderly people too, for example. They’re fragile and don’t have the ‘physiologic reserve’ of younger people.
I get both those things, but people aren’t saying younger people don’t get covid, they are saying it’s not as dangerous for younger people. I don’t know that that chart is going to make anyone feel more at risk than the ones you commonly see that show the risk of death from covid by age group.
Students in Germany’s northern Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state have become the first in the country to return to school for full-time classes following the summer break.
Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek has called for mask requirements inside school buildings, but decisions on the school system ultimately fall to state governments.
At the height of the pandemic in Germany, schools offered limited classes and distance learning.
Some then began offering partial hours, but this is the first return to something closer to normal.
All 16 states have agreed to return to full-time learning following the summer holiday, which is staggered in Germany.
Students are set to return in Hamburg on Thursday and in Berlin next week.
It comes as a study by the University of Leipzig suggested that schools were not a source of infections.
Tests conducted on 2,600 students and teachers in Saxony in May and June found no acute infections. Fewer than 20 of those tested had antibodies, which would indicate a past infection.
Germany has recorded more than 211,000 cases of coronavirus, according to data collated by Johns Hopkins University.
Try to think of it in ‘change one mind’ terms. You might not even know you changed the mind, but its worth it if it changes even one person’s mindset or way of dealing with risk.