Possibly contributed to a lost election plus the senate in GA. Anyway, Democratic voters care more about this than Republicans do. Unless Biden intends to gallop from one scandal or failure to the next the media will also actually have the time to report on it for more than 5 minutes.
Apples to oranges. Republicans arenât held to any kind of standards by the media or their voters. The same canât be said for Democrats.
1 Like
Not spreads easily, us Brits are used to that concern, as the US will be in 4 weeks or so. UK variant ~75% of UK ICU is occupied by under 70âs which is different from April - might be other factors at play etc.
Brazil variant v2.0âŚ
New viral lineage P.1 would appear to be causing reinfections and is also gaining dominance anywhere itâs found.
When the number of COVID-19 cases began to rise again in Manaus, Brazil, in December 2020, Nuno Faria was stunned. The virologist at Imperial College London and associate professor at the University of Oxford had just co-authored a paper in Science estimating that three-quarters of the cityâs inhabitants had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic coronavirusâmore than enough, it seemed, for herd immunity to develop. The virus should be done with Manaus. Yet hospitals were filling up again. âIt was hard to reconcile these two things,â Faria says. He started to hunt for samples he could sequence to find out whether changes in the virus could explain the resurgence.
On 12 January, Faria and his colleagues posted their initial conclusions on the website virological.org. Thirteen of 31 samples collected in mid-December in Manaus turned out to be part of a new viral lineage they called P.1. Much more research is needed, but they say one possibility is that in some people, P.1 eludes the human immune response triggered by the lineage that ravaged the city earlier in 2020.
IMO - Best case scenario is P.1 only reinfects 1 in 10, so small drop in efficacy of vaccine designed before new mutants existed - US to close borders to South Americans before P.1 detected in US (watch this space).
IMO - Worse case indications would seem to be 1 in 5 persons with reinfection chances = potential larger drop in efficacy and effectiveness of (current) vaccine and US, with itâs close proximity to South America, could already have P.1 in some states.
Looks like teachers in the Czech Republic have been upped on the vaccination tier scale. Now weâre at 1B which is the second highest available. Weâll probably get ours in June instead of September now!
Apparently, one of my sisters can get hers now but has chosen not to. Sheâs still convinced that it could have effects on her fertility. Havenât been able to convince her to get one even though she works with developmentally disabled people. The assumption that nurses somehow know enough to make that proclamation is absurd.
For a normally liberal, rational person, itâs kind of a shock to see this.
Apologies if ive missed this discussion.
Reasons for concern.
-
We are seeing multiple variants of Covid arising.
-
Some of those include, mutations to the spike protien, mutations that may make re infection more likely and mutations that may make the vaccine less effective.
-
We will see significant spread for a year or more so the population in which mutations can occur will be large.
-
This is even before we start seeing any significant selective pressure for variants that can overcome the vaccineâŚ
Are vaccines gonna get on top of this? Or do we have years of this ahead playing whackamole?
2 Likes
Former Czech Minister of Health/current adviser to the government on covid estimates that at least 3 million people in the Czech Republic have already been infected. There are slightly above 10 million people living in the country. Number of confirmed cases in total is 886,000.
Not sure if thatâs possible since he included no evidence. So Iâm opening it up to all of you.
In positive news, the reproductive number here has dropped to 0.8. Still unlikely to change the current restrictions in the next couple of weeks though. But might be (kind of) OFS/OFB again like September and December. Ugh.
Iâm hesitant to make strong conclusions on the specific mutants yet, the information is so early and there are so many different variants being observed.
But all certainly fits with the hypothesis that the more cases the more opportunities for mutants to arise and be selected for increased spread.
Half assing the vaccination program worldwide will do the same.
Antigen drift to avoid naturally acquired antibodies (âreinfectionâ)
Jfc we are stupid as a species. Evolution in action on an incredibly short time scale.
2 Likes
Things likely are at trough Q1 â21 but elimination of community spread/return to close to normal years away IMHO
Yeah, this is pretty terrible, tbh. Thatâs 50 million people fully vaccinated. At that rate it would take two years to vaccinate the US population.
What about the portion of yhe US population that is actually willing to be vaccinated?
1 Like
The guy selling the covid vaccine said that? Weird. I mean heâs probably right but we also have to live with chicken pox and measles forever too. Whatâs the big deal?
50 million of the most at risk people will lift a huge burden off our hospitals. I also think the portion of people willing to be vaccinated will rise over time. A lot of the resistance is people unwilling to take a vaccine Trump pushed. Hopefully that group comes around pretty quickly.
Certainly possible but also consider that Moderna would love to produce Covid vaccines under lucrative government contracts in perpetuity so maybe a more independent source would be valuable.
Dumb question but could the flu shot and covid vaccine be combined every year?
I guess first they need to come up with a single-shot covid vacc. But maybe after the first time vaccinated that becomes more feasible I dunno.
1 Like
Today is the day Joe Biden became President.
2 Likes
We wonât necessarily have stories like this in the US if US media are more responsible about what they report in the first place for the NYP to amplify and skew.
The NYP story doesnât really state what they died of, and as such, itâs not all that useful. Thousands of people will die shortly after taking the vaccine. Itâs not news when itâs a car accident or a heart attack that killed them.
As a layman I don`t think a yearly updated version of the vaccine would be necessary. With âunder-control Covidâ there should be a lot less genetic drift or whatever you call it than now and even now multiple available vaccines seem to work against most of the variants.
But as the world has only eradicated one single illness by vaccination it seems unlikely to vanish entirely. This seems especially true as there are already several animal species that have caught it and reinfected humans. Once that happens to a species in the wild, you will always have a reservoir of SARS-CoV2 in the wild.
None of this validates the claims youâre making.