So we’re a year out at this point as measured by when this started affecting me directly. On 3/1 last year I declined a significant speaking invitation at a major conference in NYC because of COVID. I took some heat for that decision, but I gave up my spot to one of my junior residents who did great. They all had to quarantine for two weeks after there was an outbreak of course at the event.
Anyways, I leave you with this picture, which is a memorial to the last non-rebreather mask in a hospital in NYC, with subsequent improvisations we made after the fact.
I’m not 100% sure if they actually used the one with the glove and biohazard bag, but they might have. I wasn’t at this place when things were ramping up. I think they did though.
Vaccination continues apace in the U.S. As of this morning, 76.9 million doses have been administered. 15.3% of the total population and 19.9% of the population over 18 has received at least one dose.
Over 2.2 million doses were administered last Thursday alone, which is still short of the one day record of 2.3 million set earlier in February.
On a more local basis, New York City will likely surpass 2 million cumulative doses administered by the end of the day. As in the rest of the country, wealthier and whiter areas have been getting vaccinated more quickly. The percentage of the population with at least one dose is 18.1 in Manhattan and 16.5 in Staten Island, compared to 13.2 in Queens, 11.0 in the Bronx and 10.4 in Brooklyn. Last Friday, NYC administered over 70,000 doses, setting a new high mark.
In December, 15% of teaching and support staff tested positive for antibodies compared to about 18% of people of working age in the same local authorities - giving them about an average risk for their age.
Between 25% and 50% of hospital staff had antibodies, according to various studies, while in care homes that at least one Covid outbreak, two-thirds (66%) of staff had antibodies by the end of the first wave.
In contrast, the proportion of school staff testing positive for antibodies rose to 15% from about 12% between November and December 2020.
Given schools were completely open during this period, “you would expect much higher antibody conversion if it was a high risk environment,” Dr Ladhani said.
He said the long-term harm of keeping children out of school was “enormous”.
“The benefits outweigh the risks, but the risks are not zero,” he said.
It was not possible to tell from the study whether any infections detected had been caught in school or in the wider community, or whether teachers were catching the virus from pupils or other teachers.
UK still very spooked about P1’s ability to reinfect and still be transmitted by the vaccinated…
Vaccine on its own is ‘insufficient’
Health officials are trying urgently to trace someone in the UK who’s tested positive for the coronavirus variant that first emerged in northern Brazil.
Scientists are concerned the variant may be more transmissible than the original virus, and more resistant to a vaccine.
Prof Stephen Reicher, social psychologist and Sage adviser, told BBC Radio 5 Live that despite the variant being "no more deadly” nor “causing more damage” than the original virus, “it does seem to be more infectious and at this stage we don’t know whether it can evade the vaccine or not”.
He said the public needed to do everything it could to stop transmitting the infection and the government needed to have more effective control of the borders.
“While [the vaccine] is great news, on its own, it’s insufficient because if we don’t stop the reproduction of the virus, there’s always a danger of new variants that will undermine the vaccine,” he added.
“We’ve got to combine the vaccine strategy with an infection suppression strategy… we haven’t put enough emphasis on this.”
Scientists ‘optimistic’ on vaccine protection against new variants
Prof Adam Finn, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, says scientists are “optimistic” Covid-19 vaccines will still prevent severe disease when tested against new variants.
He told BBC Breakfast: "At the moment, the evidence we have suggests that certainly the South African variant, and potentially this Brazilian variant - which is somewhat similar - the vaccines that we have at the moment are less effective at reducing at least mild disease and possibly transmission.
"We’re optimistic that the vaccines will continue to prevent severe disease but the evidence for that is still fairly limited.
“I think all the manufacturers are now working on the preliminary steps, if you like, to revising the vaccines if that proves necessary.”
Prof Finn added that vaccines being used at the moment are “very effective” against the predominant strains in the UK, however.
I continue to travel around (mostly work-related) and make anecdotal observations about masks and social distancing. The public’s efforts in all areas have steadily been eroding from December to now–and in December they weren’t great. The pandemic is basically over from a mitigation perspective in any place that voted R.
I’m worried that (1) ever-laxer social distancing, (2) variants, (3) the virus being spread all across all geographies, and (4) poorly-understood seasonality could all conspire to cause a fourth (final?) spike in the near future.
Even if not a spike, some where where we average 50,000 case per day, with the busiest risk being generation and proliferation of variants.
(Granted could be a series of spikes in different regions keeping at a more or less consistent rate)
I’m just hopeful that we do enough with vaccines to protect the vulnerable and somehow try to comfort myself that infections nibble away at the pool of people able to infect others in the future (albeit at the cost of infecting them today and all that entails).
If there are true long term syndrome(s) out of this then having an extra 1-2M per month will be a price paid down the road for our stupidity.
We had an expiring gift card deal at Cheesecake Factory for curbside pickup this last weeekend. Holy hell is the pandemic over according to the masses inside and crowding the mall halls waiting to get in. The food runner said the table wait time was 2 hours and people were just sitting there or shopping and coming back.
Yeah, if COVID ends up having down the line effects for the vaccinated we are just all fucked. Im not even going to worry about it because there is going to be basically no way to avoid that risk in the US.
Teachers have about the same spread as a community with uncontrolled spread is not a valid argument.
The paper shows that ~1 in 30 school staff caught covid in one month, that is a disaster and directly contradicts their conclusion. Some quick estimates puts that at the equivalent of 325k cases per day in the usa.
The only interesting thing about that paper is the utter failure of NHS protecting their hospital workers. Their antibody rate should not be that high.
My friend caught covid on NYE. She didn’t get very sick, but she still can’t smell. That’s scary neurological stuff.
It makes absolutely zero sense to be more worried about the long term effects of covid than the long term effects of the vaccine. I don’t understand that mindset in people. If you don’t get the vaccine you’re probably going to catch covid at some point.
I don’t think the teachers all caught it during December 2020 - these were blood tests so presumably the count is since March 2020…
In early December, the Office for National Statistics took finger-pricks from about 7,000 teachers in 15 local authorities across England.
About 15% of those teachers tested positive for antibodies.
This is not very different to the 18% of people of working age in the same local authorities tested around the same time – in fact, given the margin of error on any study like this, they’re basically the same number.
His team, from Public Health England, the Office for National Statistics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tested staff and students at a sample of schools for current and past infections.
If the US or elsewhere has conducted similar tests please feel free to link me
Up 3% during the spread of the UK variant - no big shock. Paper doesn’t know whether teacher infections even took place in school - I could be generous and say half might have… then we’d have to deduct those teacher to teacher and parent to teacher transmissions.
Current vaccines were designed around earlier versions of coronavirus, but scientists believe they should still work, although perhaps not quite as well.
A recent study suggests the Brazilian variant may be resisting antibodies in people who should have some immunity because they have caught and recovered from an earlier version of coronavirus.
Just want to give you an idea of how ass backwards some of these red states are. I live in TN in a county that borders KY. Because I do Door Dash, I am considered an essential worker. DD sent all the drivers a letter stating they are essential workers.
In TN, the state doesn’t recognize essential workers. Basically, first responders are group 1A, seniors are group 1B, at risk people are 1C, and then it’s based on age. So I can’t register for a vaccination in TN.
KY recognizes essential workers. So I tried registering in the county north of me in KY. KY is registering me to get vaccinated at a pharmacy. They will text me when to go to the pharmacy and get vaccinated, hopefully by end of the week. The pharmacy they are sending me to is in my county in TN.
This is going to be the new “common sense” here in the US, watch.
This was a quote from the Baker administration in MA
“The data is clear and the CDC reported in January that community transmission rates have little to no impact on schools’ abilities to offer safe, in-person learning,” the statement said.
Without even opining on whether we should OFS or not, how can that possibly be true?
