Covid-19 #22: What Were You Doing This Time Last Year?

[A wilding]

@Luzifer's right hand

With that proportion of people lost to fake news, you might try that I suppose, but as, to be effective, masks need to be worn properly, not touched, washed frequently, etc, I am not sure how much it would help.

(Not that a UK person such as myself can feel very superior here - we have our own fake news problems.)

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Cuomo now saying that anyone who fucks up vaccine prioritization is going to face a million dollar fine.  Wants to issue vaccine eligibility certificates.  What could possibly go wrong with a vaccine with a short shelf life? 

Seems like an over reaction that is going to result in tons of doses tossed into the trash unless they have some kind of stand-by system for expiring doses.

[Xray the Enforcer]

[mod] 1. Please keep it classy. 2. Any more edgelord shit in here will earn a permanent ban. If you want to be a sociopath, find another community. Thank you. [/mod]

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

48 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Cuomo now saying that anyone who fucks up vaccine prioritization is going to face a million dollar fine.  Wants to issue vaccine eligibility certificates.  What could possibly go wrong with a vaccine with a short shelf life? 

Seems like an over reaction that is going to result in tons of doses tossed into the trash unless they have some kind of stand-by system for expiring doses.

It's really a tough call either way. There needs to be strict enforcement, but at the same time we need to have some level of understanding. I wish I knew where the sweet spot was.

Regardless though, this is just another example of what a disaster this has been.

[Filippa Eilhart]

@Fragile Bird re your question about Poland from a few days ago: I don’t think there are more anti-vaccers per se than in other countries, but the people are in general distrustful of the authorities and only around 45% plan to get vaccinated. 

[Cas Stark]

Cuomo only looks good compared to the useless dude bro De Blasio.  Maybe someone could pay Mike Bloomberg to take over NYC for 3 or 4 months.  Or even two weeks.  

[VigoTheCarpathian]

2 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Enforcement in grocery stores and at the workplace is all that I ask for. Schools too I guess. That should not be impossible. In my experince we are not talking about a small minority here the number of selfish people is closer to 50% and we already lost them to fake news long ago. 

I get your frustration, and I too wish for some kind of societal enforcement. However, we’ve had a hell of a time in the US with enforcement - it’s massively difficult/unfair to make our grocery workers and business owners to enforce the mask and distance policies.  I’ve seen people flaunting it personally, either with no mask or wearing around their chin, and there are countless examples of dipshits storming a store without masks.

 Sad to say, most of our schools have active shooter policies and safeguards that probably would be easy to use to keep out maskless people.

Police, depending where you live, are selectively enforcing or not enforcing, which I also think is a problem (no unity on a pretty simple thing) - but I don’t think beatings are the answer to ignorance.  I’d like a “40 hours of community service at a local morgue or homeless shelter” policy that would avoid the issues that authorities are having with enforcement.

Or better yet, a national policy of “if you choose not to wear a mask, we either give you a vaccination now, or you now are responsible for $10k fine, 1/4 of which goes to police enforcement, 1/4 to vaccines for others, 1/2 to victims and charity”

[VigoTheCarpathian]

35 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Hey, a great way to skip the vaccination line to the front!!

Also, it is unknown whether or not people who have been vaccinated can still transmit COVID-19.

Definitely facetious in the social experiment suggestion, as the anti mask folks are typically in the “this is a hoax” camp, but I think they’d probably wear a mask if mandatory vaccination was the alternative. Whereas the people who are taking it seriously probably likely wouldn’t walk around without a mask on just to potentially skip the line.  I don’t think it’d be a symmetric response, but if it was, hey, more people vaccinated, and we’d have a solid idea of rates and a method for ensuring compliance at any level.

I don’t think much has really been done in for short-term incentivizing for our societies, to get desired results for medium/longer term issues, where people seem to form identities and community around an issue that shouldn’t have a “both sides are equally valid”, like anti-vaxxers.

[Fragile Bird]

12 hours ago, Spockydog said:

 

And I'm sure nobody will be surprised that:

WORLD FACES COVID-19 “VACCINE APARTHEID”

Western Capitalism really needs to go fuck itself.

Pardon? Did Canada demand Ebola vaccines when there was an outbreak in Africa? Europe and North America both have about 24 M cases of Covid-19, 48 M in total. Africa has 2.8 M cases. Even if testing is not extensive, Africa does not have 48 M cases, the death toll would be indicating otherwise. Asia has 10 M if you leave out India, India has 10 M itself but is also the world’s largest producer of vaccines and will likely have more people vaccinated by the end of the year than NA and Europe combined. South America had 14 M cases, but 7 M are in Brazil, a country with leadership in denial that is pretty well ignoring Covid and still basically has placed no orders for vaccine. Bolsonaro has warned the country the vaccine will turn them into crocodiles. I don’t know how many vaccine orders other countries in SA have placed.
 

In the meantime, Canada has donated $865 M to developing nations to help deal with Covid-19 and to obtain vaccines, together with other nations around the world, particularly from the G-20 as a whole. And has pledged to donate all vaccine over and above what’s needed in Canada to countries around the world. Right now the urgency for vaccination is in Europe and North America.

As for the speed with which countries are vaccinating, Israel is in the lead. As of last week, Israel had received 1 M doses. Israel has 9 M people. Canada has 38 M people. As of last week Canada had received 100,000 doses. As of Jan. 2, Israel had administered 1.09 M doses, suggesting they’ve received 2 M doses already. As of Jan. 2, Canada has administered 112,246 doses, because, you know, we’ve only received less than 250k doses so far and half are held back for second doses. You really can’t crank out vaccinations when you have no vaccine.

I don’t blame countries trying to resolve pandemic issues in their countries first, but they have not ignored the poorer nations either. They can always do more. But I’d say the situation is pretty darn grave in the US and the UK and other countries right now.

 

[Zorral]

14 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

But after the elderly people left, health officials called up their friends and family members and gave them the vaccine.

Nothing could be more predictable than this in decadent phase capitalist, white rich supremacist corruption criminal genocidal death cult Trump AmeriKa.

[Fragile Bird]

8 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Nothing could be more predictable than this in Trump AmeriKa.

I am not excusing anyone, but according to the story they knew they had x doses and after a point in time they sent everyone else home. But, as has been reported elsewhere, they got 6 or 7 doses out of the vials instead of 5 and by the end of the day started calling in people to get vaccinated so they didn’t need to throw out the remainder of the thawed vaccine. The vaccine is very unstable.

This was their first time doing this. If they do it again, calling in family and friends, heads need to roll. The next time if they have 200 thawed vials, technically 1,000 doses, they need to have 1,400 people there for vaccines, telling the last 200/300 that they may not receive a vaccine that day but will be prioritized for the next round.

Were they stupid in this first round, or evil? It’s been widely reported there are often 6 or even 7 doses in the vials. But people are stupid. As was pointed out up thread, a group of people got injections of the entire vial because someone didn’t read the instructions, ffs. In Germany, no less.

[Raja]

Oxfam state that all of Moderna's doses and 96 percent of the Pfizer/ BioNtech have been acquired by 'rich' countries. There is a whole initiative from the WHO, CEPI and GAVI that is trying to ensure equitable access to the vaccines.

In addition, here's a letter signed by various public health leaders, presidents, prime ministers and members of congress urging for a people's vaccine to be available equitably to all countries and people

These initiatives are not being done because it is 'fashionable', it is because there are legitimate concerns about access to these vaccines and how low to middle income countries are at a disadvantage ( look at the chart here in the NY times piece regarding vaccinations by income level, paints a pretty clear picture)

 

 

[Filippa Eilhart]

but because the rich countries had bought vaccines before they were even in the trials, we now have a few vaccines available after less than a year of research.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

14 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

And we're already reading about this kind of crap going on-

https://www.insider.com/health-officials-gave-covid-vaccines-to-friends-instead-of-elderly-2021-1?amp

They're playing with fire here.

According to worldometers, Tennessee is now 4th nationwide in infections per capita and they've just crossed 1,000 deaths/million. The 4th quarter of 2020 was their hardest. People start getting ideas in their heads that maybe grandma died because some "friend of a friend" got her vaccination; they won't wait for a rational explanation. There will be trouble.

The need to be better at this. 

[Galactus]

6 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

As long as there is no proper enforcement of the measures and the existence of bullshit things like mask exemption certificates most measures are pretty meaningless. There is no safe place except your own home thanks to these things because you can always encounter a person who refuses to wear masks.

Masks does not make you "safe", they improve the odds quite significantly, but you are still at risk. Its just that the risk is much more manageable. Its all about risk management, not about some arbitrary point of safety.

[Luzifer's right hand]

3 minutes ago, Galactus said:

Masks does not make you "safe", they improve the odds quite significantly, but you are still at risk. Its just that the risk is much more manageable. Its all about risk management, not about some arbitrary point of safety.

That is true of course unless I still had proper FFP3 masks which do provide a high level of safety.

[Fragile Bird]

32 minutes ago, Raja said:

Oxfam state that all of Moderna's doses and 96 percent of the Pfizer/ BioNtech have been acquired by 'rich' countries. There is a whole initiative from the WHO, CEPI and GAVI that is trying to ensure equitable access to the vaccines.

In addition, here's a letter signed by various public health leaders, presidents, prime ministers and members of congress urging for a people's vaccine to be available equitably to all countries and people

These initiatives are not being done because it is 'fashionable', it is because there are legitimate concerns about access to these vaccines and how low to middle income countries are at a disadvantage ( look at the chart here in the NY times piece regarding vaccinations by income level, paints a pretty clear picture)

 

What exactly confused you about my post? Right now the greatest need for vaccines are in North America and Europe. Wealthy countries have banded together to fight Covid-19 in poorer countries, as I said and as your links back up.

As for your NYT article, that’s a spectacular use of misleading information. Just glancing at that chart you’d think “oh my, Canada had 400 M doses and the US has barely 200 M”, which many people will immediately think. It actually shows Canada has bought 4x more doses of vaccinations that are in Phase 3, than the population of the country. We have 38 M people, that’s about 152 M doses. We’ll need almost half of them, 76 M, to vaccinate the country. Canada was late to start ordering vaccines, and scrambled to place orders with everybody and his brother. Back in July we had no idea which vaccine was going to be successful. In any event, because we were late we are receiving vaccines late, by the end of January we will have received just over a million doses while Israel has already received, for example, 2 M doses. We won’t have enough doses to vaccinate 10% of our population until the end of March or until some time in April. 

The US, on the other hand, has about 2x the number ordered of Phase 3 vaccine doses, so about 660 M doses, 500 M more than Canada, enough to vaccinate the entire country, and more importantly, they are at the top of the list and receiving those doses first. The US has already had 45 M delivered by the companies, though not distributed yet, and will have 120 M delivered by the end of March, enough for almost 20% of the population. Whether or not they get administered is another matter.

But that’s one helluva a misleading chart.

[Raja]

29 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

But that’s one helluva a misleading chart.

You're looking at the wrong chart.

I referenced the immunizations by income level chart, whilst you're talking about the first one. As to your repeated claims about wealthy countries banding together to help poor ones, these initiatives are led by the WHO and two non-profits, ,which is not the same thing *at all*. The US has also not even made a financial commitment to COVAX , and countries that *have* contributed to COVAX represent a minuscule amount of immunizations ( again, look at the immunizations by income level chart)

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

13 minutes ago, Galactus said:

Masks does not make you "safe", they improve the odds quite significantly, but you are still at risk. Its just that the risk is much more manageable. Its all about risk management, not about some arbitrary point of safety.

Are we still debating masks? 10 months in?

Yeah, and condoms are less then 100% effective. Same for vaccines. Vaccination works because, despite individuals' varying levels of immune response, you inoculate enough people; you eliminate so many potential vectors for the spread of the disease that it effectively disappears. Everyone protects everyone, even the few that don't have the vaccination.

Mask use doesn't involve a few people wearing masks so they can protect themselves. It involves everyone wearing masks so everyone can protect everyone. Social distancing; a little more. Hygiene and sanitizer; a little more. Sheltering & quarantining; a little more.  

Wordwide; infection and death rates are at an all time high. Most regions are also at or near all time high death/infection rates. Even with the vaccine, we have to come down from a level we couldn't even imagine back in the spring. This will take time. And, it's a pretty good bet, the vaccine rollout will be slower than initial projections.

Every weapon we have needs to be deployed right now. The worst thing that can happen right now is for people to relax because the vaccine is coming.

[Galactus]

Just now, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Are we still debating masks? 10 months in?

Yeah, and condoms are less then 100% effective. Same for vaccines. Vaccination works because, despite individuals' varying levels of immune response, you inoculate enough people; you eliminate so many potential vectors for the spread of the disease that it effectively disappears. Everyone protects everyone, even the few that don't have the vaccination.

Mask use doesn't involve a few people wearing masks so they can protect themselves. It involves everyone wearing masks so everyone can protect everyone. Social distancing; a little more. Hygiene and sanitizer; a little more. Sheltering & quarantining; a little more.  

Wordwide; infection and death rates are at an all time high. Most regions are also at or near all time high death/infection rates. Even with the vaccine, we have to come down from a level we couldn't even imagine back in the spring. This will take time. And, it's a pretty good bet, the vaccine rollout will be slower than initial projections.

Every weapon we have needs to be deployed right now. The worst thing that can happen right now is for people to relax because the vaccine is coming.

Yes. Thats what I said.