Come on. It’s probably a combination of the two.
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Just criminal that all this wasn’t ready to go in advance.
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Hasn’t California been accelerating for a long time, with the new strain only having minimal cases outside of the UK?
Yes, but minimal still implies it’s a factor - we just don’t know how much of one yet.
Trying to mediate between the two extremes of CN and C here.
Fundamentally it’s just 1 more SKU to keep in stock on top of tens of thousands of others. I’m not exactly sure how everyone is managing to fuck it up so bad, but I do feel optimistic that the ship will get righted soon enough. The last-mile logistics are just not that hard. I’m pretty sure that I personally could vaccinate 500 people a day out of my home with one day to prep, a 1-hour primer on how to do the shot, and a phone number to call to order replacement supplies. That’s assuming someone else does the scheduling to one-hour blocks.
You keep positing best case scenarios for vaccine rollout and i am saying if 1 is perfect and 100 is total cluster, we are likely hitting at 85.
You don’t think having people opt out if this won’t make things less efficient. Meanwhile someone literally posted directly after me doses are going to waste.
Wasted doses, massive inefficiencies, the potential for people to not get dosed properly and literally nobody is in charge.
I am telling you people who are scheduled not showing up is going to slow things down not speed it up because we are talking about competency all over the map and we are expecting all this little pockets to seamlessly handle these logistical issues with aplomb.
What happens when a nursing home gets 80 doses for 80 people and 20 don’t want it. Do you think those extra doses are efficiently then transferred to some place else efficiently?
There are literally hundreds of issues in all this and with literally no authority to sort it out and give direction we are going to have 5000 outlets flailing.
Nothing about this is efficient so far. I hope as we move into February we get most of this stuff handled but it should not have been this silly.
If there was ever something the federal government should be overseeing and managing, this is it. Instead they have passed the buck to states who are mostly not equipped to do this and are doing buck passing of their own.
I am not trying to pick a fight. I am just frustrated at how poorly this is unrolling. I know it won’t be that way forever but this is absolutely going to be responsible for a decent number of people unnecessarily dying.
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Is this significant? A doctor on tik tok was explaining what it all meant but I am curious on your thoughts.
Yeah if people were doing what they were supposed to be doing, this new strain would be wholly irrelevant.
The problem isn’t the new strain, the problem is people unable to give up old habits for a period of time.
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It’s definitely going to get straightened out, I just hope sooner rather than later. It’s just insane that there is literally nobody in charge of this.
Re variant
It sucks but inevitable and obvious that a more aggressive strain will show up in America.
The new character just reaffirms that we should be under a lockdown similar to the spring one. Nationwide. It really doesn’t change anything about what we should be doing and should have been doing for about two months now.
Maybe it will help convince some OFB and OFS advocates to do the right thing and got on board the lockdown train. Still we are entirely dependent on Georgia as to whether or not we can lockdown and support people through it.
CN has been right all along, as to others welcome but it shouldn’t have taken the new strain to get on board.
Maybe if you want to escape lockdown you need a vaccination card with a code similar to the back of your drivers license. Perhaps that will get people to “roll up their sleeves”.
You want to eat out? Get the damn shots.
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Dude…
If informed UPers can’t keep up social distancing it’s not surprising the (on average less informed) general population doesn’t.
That is the basic problem, sure, but many people can’t resist temptation for long periods without incentives or (ugh) severe penalties.
Apart from peer pressure which is a big factor I’m sure, a lot of people just don’t have the self-discipline.
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Define significant.
We made this change in NY too, and it’s fairly common practice in many areas in normal times
Cant think of a single time I got someone back ever who was coded in the field unsuccessfully for >20 minutes either.
It’s a pretty straightforward decision IMO. It’s a black tag in a mass casualty event. That’s what LA is in right now, an extended mass casualty event.
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California has been upswing since October, and mobility data between residencies is above normal in California. Could a strain play a part? I guess so. Stupid is the problem though.
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Nahh, standard in lots of systems pre covid
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/31/covid-vaccines-destroyed-wisconsin-hospital/
Team guillotine
Over the weekend, a Wisconsin hospital announced that it had been forced to toss more than 500 doses of the coronavirus vaccine because an employee accidentally left dozens of vials unrefrigerated overnight.
But on Wednesday, the hospital said the incident was no accident.
In fact, the employee at the Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wis., later admitted to purposefully removing more than 50 vials of the Moderna vaccine from a refrigerator, the hospital announced, rendering them useless.
The hospital has fired the employee, who has not yet been identified, and local and federal authorities are now investigating, the Grafton Police Department confirmed to The Washington Post early on Thursday.
The employee’s tampering will delay the inoculation process for hundreds of people, the hospital said, in a state where 3,170 new cases were reported and 40 people died Wednesday of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, according to The Post’s coronavirus tracker.
How much is really known about COVID strains in the US? Here’s what the CDC website has to say about surveillance:
Strain Surveillance in the US
In the United States, sequence-based strain surveillance has been ramping up with the following components:
- National SARS-CoV-2 Strain Surveillance (“NS3”): Since November 2020, state health departments and other public health agencies have been regularly sending CDC SARS-CoV-2 samples for sequencing and further characterization. This system is now being scaled to process 750 samples nationally per week. One strength of this system is that it allows for characterization of viruses beyond what sequencing alone can provide.
- Surveillance in partnership with national reference laboratories: CDC is contracting with large national reference labs to provide sequence data from across the United States. As of December 29, CDC has commitments from these laboratories to sequence 1,750 samples per week and anticipates being able to increase this number.
- Contracts with universities: CDC has contracts with seven universities to conduct genomic surveillance in collaboration with public health agencies.
- Sequencing within state and local health departments: Since 2014, CDC’s Advanced Molecular Detection Program has been integrating next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics into the U.S. public health system. Several state and local health departments have been applying these resources as part of their response to COVID-19. To further support these efforts, CDC released $15 million in funding, with COVID supplemental funds, through the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity Program on December 18, 2020.
- The SPHERES consortium: Since early in the pandemic, CDC has led a national consortium of laboratories sequencing SARS-CoV-2 (SPHERES) to coordinate U.S sequencing efforts outside of CDC. The SPHERES consortium consists of more than 160 institutions, including academic centers, industry, non-governmental organizations, and public health agencies.
Through these efforts, anonymous genomic data are made available through public databases for use by public health professionals, researchers, and industry.
I am kind of astonished by how unbelievably bleak every date and number in this snippet is (they brag about a $15 million grant!! They’re working on scaling up to 750 samples a week!!! “Since November 2020”!!!)–it sounds like there was basically no surveillance being done until superCOVID was reported, and now there’s a frantic scramble to get up to speed. Am I misreading, or is there some other organization (state public health?) responsible for this kind of thing?
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Doctor called. I tested negative. As I still have a cough, I am going to enjoy my New Year’s Eve without any alcohol. I don’t care. Cannot wait for this year to be over.
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Give us a heads up on how 2021 is since you will get there a few hours ahead…
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You certainly already know this, but just reaffirming that there will be no more lockdowns in the United States, ever, no matter what.
There may be friendly suggestions to stay home or limit gatherings, but there will never be anything resembling a lockdown anywhere, even in the most well-run liberal bastions.
Lockdowns require one of two things; either a willingness of the population to voluntarily comply, or an enforcement mechanism to compel compliance. Neither of these two things exist to any appreciable degree anywhere in the US.
From the beginning, we talked about whether there would be a “new normal”, and unfortunately what we didn’t fully appreciate was that the new normal was a never ending pandemic with mass death and suffering. The new normal is staying inside until you give in like everyone else, then roll the dice to see if your family lives or dies. Happy New Year.
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I think the Aussies are already there. We should ask them.
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