COVID-19: Chapter 7 - Brags, Beats, and Variants

An addition. Your post just reminded me of that story.

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I agree. Good article.

Eating outside is generally terrible. Posting this very correct take for the 8th or 9th time:

I mean, this is the good stuff:

The obvious flaw with eating outside is that the weather is often unpleasant. That’s why people aren’t suggesting that we eat outside all the time. Only on special “it’s such a nice day!” kind of days do people want to go outside. But what’s a nice day? Well, it’s a day when the temperature outside approximates the results of indoor climate control technology.

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Have you ever been to LA? It’s basically climate control.

If anyone in the LA area says they’ve found an appointment on this piece of crap interface I’m going to come to your house and smack you for lying.

The day this shows an appointment available, for any of the companies/hospitals using this interface, is the day I’ll know it’s time to move to the next tier. Or if we’re at the last tier it’s the the day I know we’re down to mostly anti-vaxxers.

August 2022 might be more realistic for the UK. We won’t be letting travellers,vaccinated or otherwise in for fear of them importing the South African variant, in much the same way we won’t be letting citizens out to return with the variant.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned on Monday the UK should be “under no illusion” that it will feel the effects of a rising number of cases on the continent.

One of his ministers, Lord Bethell, said the UK might put “all our European neighbours” on the “red list” of countries. People from those countries are currently not allowed to travel to the UK, with the exception of British nationals and people who are normally resident in the UK

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The team at the Centre for Virus Research in Glasgow used a replica of the lining of our airways, made out of the same types of cells, and infected it with Sars-CoV-2 and rhinovirus, which is one of the most widespread infections in people, and a cause of the common cold.

If rhinovirus and Sars-CoV-2 were released at the same time, only rhinovirus is successful. If rhinovirus had a 24-hour head start then Sars-CoV-2 does not get a look in. And even when Sars-CoV-2 had 24-hours to get started, rhinovirus boots it out.

“Sars-CoV-2 never takes off, it is heavily inhibited by rhinovirus,” Dr Pablo Murcia told BBC News.

He added: “This is absolutely exciting because if you have a high prevalence of rhinovirus, it could stop new Sars-CoV-2 infections.”

…

This is not exciting, because the conditions in the lab here aren’t remotely realistic.

Germany ‘in new pandemic’ - Merkel

We can now bring you more from Germany, where lockdown measures have been extended for a further three weeks after a surge in coronavirus infections.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the new restrictions on Tuesday morning, after marathon crisis talks with regional leaders.

The chancellor said Germany was in a “very serious" situation, leaving the country racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccinations.

Merkel said the highly contagious UK variant of coronavirus had become dominant in Germany, plunging the country into what she called “a new pandemic”.

“Essentially, we have a new virus,” Merkel said. “It is much deadlier, much more infectious and infectious for much longer.”

This is really infuriatingly vague. WTF does it mean?

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This is what it means for AZ

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Guessing it means we aren’t going to have the AZ vaccine here. Probably not big deal for domestic rollout, going to create a number of
global complications.

It looks like a non-story, some technicality or other. lol at “ohnoez AstraZeneca stocks closed lower”, here is their 6 month graph:

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I don’t really care about the stonks… I mean what does it actually mean for the vaccine? It sounds like an accusation of cooking the books on the data which would be really bad for a number of reasons if true.

I don’t get how you get that out of the media story. If they had actual concerns about efficacy they would say so. It’s some technicality about whether this is the most recent data or not and the regulatory authority has to act all concerned because it’s an ass-covering exercise. If they were like fuck it, let’s just not say anything, and then it turned out there was some actual problem they would get crucified. This is from the article:

“It is not unknown for a DSMB to disagree with investigators over interpretation of trial results,” said Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

“It is usually done in private, so this is unprecedented in my opinion,” he added. “It does not leave me concerned particularly unless they had found a safety issue that was being hidden, which does not appear to be the case.”

It’s going to be like that the vaccine is 78.8% effective instead of 79.0% effective or something and the “unprecedented” nature of going straight to the media is due to the unprecedented level of public scrutiny of this approval process.

Edit: And my point with the stonks was that the market reaction reflects what is substantially going on here, i.e. nothing, and that “AstraZeneca stocks are down” stories are just bullshit.

May as well do it properly.

Beat: My son’s class got shut because there was a case of COVID.
Brag: He just tested negative 7 days after last contact.
Variants: His test was performed by Doctor Corona.

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I guess my bigger concern is that this is going to further erode confidence in what appears to be a highly effective and safe vaccine that the world needs.

Inaccuracies, whether intentional or accidental, in a game as precise as vaccine manufacturing seem like a reasonable cause for concern.

Just helped my business partner and her daughter make appointments in Los Angeles. A wide, wide, variety of options available in terms of location, date, time, and vaccine type. Supply is very clearly outpacing demand. They should open it up to everyone and/or pour more resources into vaccinating people who can’t easily navigate a couple of websites to make appointments.

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