I’ve used natural immunity here as a shorthand thinking all itt understand.
I don’t think we can consider virus acquired vs vax A vs vax B to necessarily be the same in terms of specific antibody response and Memory T cells—paging wookie. Especially when we consider lasting immunity and escape issues.
Anecdotally I seem to here more about second infections being serious vs breakthrough infections (but of course those with second infections could be living c’est la vie and more exposed.
I’ll try to use infection immunity going forward if I want to differentiate.
Again let’s see what our biochem expert has to say.
Short term travel restrictions on countries that have identified Omicron cases are clearly correct, even if they aren’t foolproof. Exponential growth is very slow early on, so there’s a big difference between importing 1 or 2 cases and importing 10 or 20. Sure, if you do nothing you still end up with a massive outbreak, but you buy yourself 3 or 4 doubling times to respond. Long-term travel restrictions between countries that both have endemic COVID don’t make sense, but very early travel restrictions are good. The major lesson of the whole pandemic is overreact early.
This would mean that something like 2% of South Africa’s newly diagnosed COVID cases for today are on these two flights!
This would kind of suggest that cases in SA are much higher than are being reported, which would suggest that Omicron might be asymptomatic much more often. It doesn’t seem like there’s a big testing shortage there, which should mean that undetected cases are going undetected because they’re not giving reason to test?
Positivity is fairly low though (I think I saw 5% when I looked). With lots of symptomatic cases and overtaxed testing capacity, you’d expect to see really high positivity. Lots of asymptomatic cases would show up as normal positivity for “for-cause” tests but higher positivity for precautionary tests.
Does anyone report positivity separately based on whether the person getting the test is symptomatic or exposed vs getting tested without any reason to suspect exposure? It would be interesting data to have.
Not that I’ve seen, other than perhaps Zoe app in the UK.
It’s possible it will get reported how many of the 61 flights passengers were symptomatic as they have differing lengths of hotel quarantine (7 for those showing symtoms, 5 days without).
I reckon Omicron must be contagious as a contagious thing - a fair amount of these 61 passengers (so far) must have caught it enough to show on a PCR within 3 days of arrival at Schipol, assuming they didn’t all buy negative pre-flight test results. Similar happened to the Hong Kong case - they reckon they caught it at the airport as they had the pre-boarding negative so close to flight departure.
It gives more time for your resident population to get boostered before experiencing any possible wave.
I did some back of the cigarette pack maths last night and reckon retooling any vaccine will take 6+ months before it’s in arms - 2 weeks to see if current vax still up to job (Pfizer), 100 days to retool (Pfizer), 2 months trials and approvals, another x weeks / months for production and distribution, then x months for a new vaccine rollout - not gonna be a quick process, no matter how much optimism one may hold
And presumably, we’d want to be sending vaccine 2.0 to countries like South Africa first (paging sweetsummerchild)
Targeting countries and doing nothing else is what makes it bad policy.
Worst case if new vax needed in arms in summer seems like consensus. Assuming we go mass vax sites and manufacturing can be stood up more quickly, could be back to Vax for every adult in us by fall idk for kids. Poor countries back to SOL.
Moderna is probably more like 60 days to have a vaccine ready for trial than 100.
Moderna already has a couple “polyvalent” bad candidate that target mutations that are present in Omicron, so those might be valuable tools that can be ready earlier.
Production ramp-up seems like the long pole in the tent, and unclear how long it would take. Maybe this is delusional, but it seems crazy that it would take months to switch out the sequence in a vaccine. Is there some reason that all the equipment in a production line wouldn’t be fully sequence-agnostic? Why is it more complicated than literally just typing a new mRNA sequence into the mRNA generator and turning the machines back on?
Getting the EUA is worrisome too. This is an area where we need political leadership/judgment rather than the normal FDA process. Maybe once Biden has an FDA commissioner (!) he’ll be better able to control the agency?
If you remember back to Jan 20, AZ designed their vaccine over a weekend about 2 weeks after OG covid hit the UK. It still took 11 months before it went in the first arm. Even if we manage it in the half the time second time round, we’re still approaching 6 months including the time to check current vaccines against the new strain. Moderna also claimed, about a month after AZ, that their vaccine was designed in 48 hours.
Hard to see where we shave any real time off that guestimate, other than injecting without clinical trials.
Hopefully the vial and syringe makers are ramping production on the off-chance we require a new vaccine and the world isn’t caught short again. Pretty sure the UK closed it’s specially purposed vial production. Definately sure we repurposed mass vaccination centres but those could be re-established / staffed fairly quickly, if it came to it.
Andy slavitt said summer 2022. That guy has his flaws, but should have access to the people who would know. I’ve previously heard six months from Pfizer. I know you hate the bureaucracy, and with some reason, but there will be trials and testing and an approval process and all that stuff before mass vaxxing if we need to go that route. 2022 wouldn’t be as bad as 2020 IMO but would look a lot more like 2020 than 2021.
‘Would not be surprised’ if Omicron already in US, Fauci says
Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he “would not be surprised” if the Omicron variant was already in the United States .
Speaking to NBC News today, the president’s chief medical adviser said there is yet to be an confirmed case of the new strain in the US but added:
You know, I would not be surprised if it is.
We have not detected it yet, but when you have a virus that is showing this degree of transmissibility and you’re already having travel-related cases that they’ve noted in Israel and Belgium and other places, when you have a virus like this, it almost invariably is ultimately going to go, essentially all over.
Its ability to infect people who have recovered from infection and even people who have been vaccinated makes us say this is something you have to pay really close attention to and be prepared for something that’s serious
It may not turn out that way, but you really want to be ahead of it.
