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Covid- Thank you, Next! Get out of our lives.


DireWolfSpirit

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4 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Holy smokes, 12 fully vaccinated people have died? 23 unvaccinated, that is not surprising, but fully vaccinated people long after the second dose? Do we know what vaccine they received?

This is the nightmare…

Yes. It looks pretty bad and if the trend is confirmed we'll go straight to lockdowns after the summer. Or maybe even earlier. I wonder if the Delta variant has structural changes that make it easier to transmit in warmer, humid weather. The Indian spike was somewhat unexpected.

There are (yet unconfirmed) reports that the symptoms are also changing, with people loosing hearing or other weird stuff as well as that children are more affected.

Yes. I understand that people, businesses and governments want to return to normality, but until we do not know how vaccines work against variants in real life, we need to be cautious. However, the implied message that "vaccines are not working" can be devastating. 

 

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22 minutes ago, Raja said:

But let's evaluate your claim based on PHE's reporting - amongst people that were diagnosed with COVID 19 that had the delta variant since February, there have been 42 deaths - of the 42 deaths, 12 deaths were in people that were fully vaccinated. That's 30 percent of deaths in fully vaccinated individuals - we are at a moment of uncertainty at the moment, and it is right for people to be cautious based on the evidence so far.

The right thing to do would have been to apologize, especially when your basic premise is incorrect. You've somehow gotten to middle age whilst still talking & behaving like someone who has not grown up and someone who lacks basic empathy.

 

 

If those statistics pointed to the fact that the vaccines don't work then that is a national emergency and we are all completely fucked. I'm going to wait to see what the analysis of those numbers mean though. Is the fact that people who have both doses of the vaccines are likely to be in the oldest age bracket and likely to be dying anyway relevant? Is this old dying 'from covid' or just 'dying with covid' statistic? I think it's all relevant. Deaths and serious hospitalisations are still very low,, and your chances of dying from the virus when being vaccinated appear to be minimal. 

However, going back to the original point, I absolutely do not apologise for what I said or the tone in which I said it. I thought the comment to stay in lockdown after being fully vaccinated is simply preposterous and defies all logic, and I don't think that position deserves a lot of sympathy unless there is some existing medical reason that needs to be accounted for, which seems very unlikely. What is the point at which they would consider leaving lockdown? I don't see that there ever is a point in time where that happen. You tie that into senior SAGE scientists recommending we socially distance and wear masks for eternity and you start to wonder if people are wanting to wrap themselves in bubble wrap for the rest of their lives, and are simply unable to logically assess risks in their head.

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This good enough, @Fragile Bird?:

Quote

ST. IVES, England (AP) — The Group of Seven nations are set to commit to sharing at least 1 billion coronavirus shots with the world, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Thursday, with half coming from the U.S. and 100 million from the U.K. as President Joe Biden urged allies to join in speeding the pandemic’s end and bolstering the strategic position of the world’s wealthiest democracies.

Johnson’s announcement on the eve of the G-7 leaders’ summit in England came hours after Biden committed to donating 500 million COVID-19 vaccine doses and previewed a coordinated effort by the advanced economies to make vaccination widely and speedily available everywhere.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-africa-g-7-summit-coronavirus-pandemic-2a95a7f4da8f8899d3039ad3a46ddd31

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Not a completly unexpected development. People who do no stop wearing masks and avoid things like traveling are cautious but not in an unreasonable way.

I certainly won't use puplic transport or go to the shops without a mask until things are more clear even after I'm fully vaccinated. It is not like wearing a mask on those situations harms me. I also lived more than a year without indoor dining and stuff and I'm in no hurry to do those things. 

Edit: I do miss attending cons in person but those are disease spreading events even in normal times... :d

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27 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Holy smokes, 12 fully vaccinated people have died? 23 unvaccinated, that is not surprising, but fully vaccinated people long after the second dose? Do we know what vaccine they received?

This is the nightmare…

I'd be careful in interpreting small numbers - especially when we don't know more - we should find out in the next few weeks. PHE's priority investigation is vaccine effectiveness against hospitalizations & deaths, so we should get those numbers soon. PHE have said analysis against vaccine effectiveness is 'in process', which would make sense given that we are still following up a large percentage of cases.

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2 minutes ago, Leap said:

So I think the effectiveness of the vaccine is still there.

Yeah, I don't disagree. Plus the numbers will be fairly volatile given that a large number of cases are still under follow up. PHE are still processing vaccine effectiveness against hospitalizations & deaths, so we will see what they say.

Does Boris announce on Monday what the decision is regarding the 21st? I'd imagine we will stay in the current phase for at least a couple off more weeks.

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16 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

However, going back to the original point, I absolutely do not apologise for what I said or the tone in which I said it. I thought the comment to stay in lockdown after being fully vaccinated is simply preposterous and defies all logic, and I don't think that position deserves a lot of sympathy unless there is some existing medical reason that needs to be accounted for, which seems very unlikely. What is the point at which they would consider leaving lockdown? I don't see that there ever is a point in time where that happen. You tie that into senior SAGE scientists recommending we socially distance and wear masks for eternity and you start to wonder if people are wanting to wrap themselves in bubble wrap for the rest of their lives, and are simply unable to logically assess risks in their head.

Fortunately I care very little what you think about me. Though I should perhaps correct the impression you have taken of the level of precautions we are taking - for example we had a fortnight's holiday last month (self catering in the UK, but we did eat out in gardens a few times). The only reason I am even slightly defensive about our choices is that I realise that we are making them from a position of relative privilege.

And I did of course answer the question on when we would consider returning to normality:

  • After the rate of new cases stops rising exponentially.
  • Or after the data on the risks of the Delta variant becomes clearer, depending on what it then shows.
  • Or after we have caught it despite our precautions (and hopefully recovered).

You may think that this position "is simply preposterous and defies all logic" - that is your privilege.

And thanks for the support @Raja :)

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2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Oh look! “This in addition to the 80 M doses the US has already pledged”

And oh look! “The FDA has just announced 60 M J&J doses manufactured at the Emergent plant are contaminated and must be discarded.”

Those are part of the 80 M already pledged, the other 20 M are AZ doses manufactured at the Emergent plant. Watch this space to see the announcement they will also be discarded. 
 

And, as I said before, they were doses that Americans wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. 300,000 of those J&J doses were shipped to Canada. Health Canada has kept them in storage, refusing to release them because they could not determine if they were safe. Time for the garbage bin!

But, I’m glad Biden had announced 500 M doses will be donated. I don’t know why, though, only 200 M will be sent this year only starting some time in August. It’s only June, US vaccinations have dropped off a cliff, and surely  there are millions of doses that can be sent now. And Canada has given $400 M to COVAX already, at $4 a dose that’s 100 M doses and the US has 9x the population. Of course, the US future donations are Pfizer, which costs 5x more.

I’d point out that’s only vaccinations for 250 M people, a mere drop in the bucket. Manufacturing plants have to be set up on other continents so that more doses can be produced.

eta: I know the US has donated money to COVAX as well, but right now we have no plants manufacturing vaccine that we can donate. That day will come, and I expect we’ll be donating doses as well.

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17 hours ago, Zorral said:

Some people are so out of the loop of how most people live they seem not to have noticed that the libraries have been closed to public access for wifi for well over a year.  Only in a few places have the libraries opened so far as to allow people to sit in them and do computer work -- and those that do, are strictly limiting the time now, even on people's own computers, not just the library's -- which has always been the case -- one get a single half hour.

 

Not everywhere is where you live.

That's not at all the case here.

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24 minutes ago, Starkess said:

That's not at all the case here.

It is / was in most places in the state where you live according to a lot of my librarian friends in Illinois, whether public libraries or college and university libraries, and other research facilities -- to which of course the average person has no access at any time anyway.

 

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23 minutes ago, Zorral said:

It is / was in most places in the state where you live according to a lot of my librarian friends in Illinois, whether public libraries or college and university libraries, and other research facilities -- to which of course the average person has no access at any time anyway.

 

Was is the key word here. Was.

The situation on the ground has been changing rapidly for the past two months in the US. 

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20 hours ago, Kal Corp said:

Again, if you can't afford to take the time off from the side effects, it doesn't matter how convenient those shots are to get. That's a day of work you can't afford to lose. 

And per the above, that's precisely one of the big barriers - that people can literally not afford to miss work. 

Definitely shame them for not wanting to lose their jobs or get evicted though, I bet that'll definitely convince 'em

That's not exactly limited to minorities, there's plenty of white people who can't afford to miss work either.

Also FYI, I've gotten both shots without missing a minute of work. Pharmacies work on weekends and Friday afternoons too.

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5 hours ago, Leap said:

I think this is pretty worrying on the face of it, but a look at the graph shows it isn't that bad (unless I'm horribly misreading things in which case everybody panic). The deaths/cases % there is 42 deaths out of 33000 cases, which is 0.1% death rate. That's much, much lower than our actual death rate to Coronavirus, which is nearly 3% based on positive tests (so presumably lower since a lot of cases will go unnoticed).

So I think the effectiveness of the vaccine is still there.

Edit: what it shows is that although the AZ vaccine in trials had a 100% prevention of death record, against the vaccine that % is something less. We don't really know how much less without knowing which proportion of the 33k had been fully vaccinated. If very few of the 33k had been fully vaccinated, then the corresponding chance of death would be much higher, but at the same time that would show that the vaccine is still quite effective at preventing you from getting covid in the first place. So...it's complicated.

We do know what proportion of the 33k had been fully vaccinated if you look at the top row of the table you linked to. 1785 out of the 33206 people were fully vaccinated, so about 5%. 

So it looks like fully vaccinated people make up 44% of the total population, 5% of the infections, 10% of the hospitalisations and 28% of the deaths.

I wonder if some of the issue with the deaths might be that there's a small minority in the very unfortunate position of having a weakened immune system due to an underlying health condition that means the vaccine is less effective and at the same time being much more likely to die of Covid due to the same underlying health condition.

I agree the effectiveness of the vaccine does still seem to be there overall. Since it's the higher risk groups who have been vaccinated we would be expecting far more deaths from that group than the low risk unvaccinated group if the vaccine wasn't effective.

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2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

But, I’m glad Biden had announced 500 M doses will be donated. I don’t know why, though, only 200 M will be sent this year only starting some time in August. It’s only June, US vaccinations have dropped off a cliff, and surely  there are millions of doses that can be sent now. And Canada has given $400 M to COVAX already, at $4 a dose that’s 100 M doses and the US has 9x the population. Of course, the US future donations are Pfizer, which costs 5x more.

I’d point out that’s only vaccinations for 250 M people, a mere drop in the bucket. Manufacturing plants have to be set up on other continents so that more doses can be produced.

eta: I know the US has donated money to COVAX as well, but right now we have no plants manufacturing vaccine that we can donate. That day will come, and I expect we’ll be donating doses as well.

I imagine the US wants to build up a stockpile for 3rd doses, if and when required.  Although, doses have increased again in the US over the last week, possibly due to the opening up of vaccination to those 12 and over?  And they still need a decent amount of second doses also.

Bloomberg (paywalled) reports that the US had previously said it would donate $4bn to COVAX.  It is now going to half that donation by spending $3.5bn to buy 500m Pfizer doses.  What's better the financial or vaccine donation?  Money could arguably be more useful if there were more options out there.  Moderna/Pfizer are some of the more expensive options.  So COVAX could spend the money buying vaccines from other countries.  Novavax, still a US company, has a huge deal with COVAX but most of it will be manufactured in India (IIRC).

Either way, if you don't have manufacturing ability, you can still donate money.  This problem isn't for the US to solve.  The BBC talks about other donations but I doubt it is complete.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55795297

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-10/u-s-to-use-2-billion-of-covax-pledge-to-pay-for-donated-doses?utm_source=google&utm_medium=bd&cmpId=google

The J&J issues mess up EU's orders too.   As a precaution.

https://www.euronews.com/2021/06/11/us-health-coronavirus-vaccines-johnson-johnson

5 hours ago, Leap said:

I think this is pretty worrying on the face of it, but a look at the graph shows it isn't that bad (unless I'm horribly misreading things in which case everybody panic). The deaths/cases % there is 42 deaths out of 33000 cases, which is 0.1% death rate. That's much, much lower than our actual death rate to Coronavirus, which is nearly 3% based on positive tests (so presumably lower since a lot of cases will go unnoticed).

So I think the effectiveness of the vaccine is still there.

While the 0.1% death rate may sound ok, that data would suggest that once you get COVID after being vaccinated, you are more likely to die.  But then you go back to Raja's point about the danger of small numbers, which is very fair.  The people who get COVID after being vaccinated may have other health problems, while the unvaccinated are young and healthy (broadly speaking).

That's why we are at 0.1% versus 3%.  And given that figure, one could think that restrictions could continue to be swept away but anyone who gets COVID and dies after 21st June would be a bigger tragedy than normal.  Since a lot of it could be avoided with some patience.  In a year, people wouldn't care if restrictions were removed in June or July.  But vaccination will make a huge difference in that time period.

The published efficiacy against death is kind of nonsense though.  The vaccine manufacturers don't have the numbers in their trials to be definitive about that.  And they certainly don't have the numbers of the frail, immuno-compromised etc.

COVID trends always surprise me.  Ireland's numbers have been very stable over the last 2 months.  We were one of the best countries in Europe in early April but by early June we were well below average..  Not because we had gotten worse but because everyone else was getting much better.  But then this week, we've had a major improvement in figures.  It does make you believe the theory about warm weather affecting COVID.  Our summer arrives late...

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Come on, there were 0 deaths among the cohort with less than 21 days post dose 1, so this is clearly an instance where we have poor statistics to elucidate anything about the mortality of patients receiving vaccinations who got infected with the delta variant. That whole table is very confusing.

I mean, if you want to slice the data differently, 23 deaths among ~19k unvaccinated delta cases = 0.1% and 19 total cases among 9344 patients who had some form of vaccination protection = 0.2%, which would give us garbage conclusions. I'd wait a little bit for more data to come in.

 

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1 hour ago, Padraig said:

The published efficiacy against death is kind of nonsense though.  The vaccine manufacturers don't have the numbers in their trials to be definitive about that.  And they certainly don't have the numbers of the frail, immuno-compromised etc.

It's definitely a lot easier to have 100% survival rate with 30000 people in your trial than with 30 million people in the current real-world experiment.

6 minutes ago, Leap said:

Don't make me look at my own data!

I did have the advantage that I've looked at that table before (I think I posted a link to an earlier version of it previously in this thread).

1 hour ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Come on, there were 0 deaths among the cohort with less than 21 days post dose 1, so this is clearly an instance where we have poor statistics to elucidate anything about the mortality of patients receiving vaccinations who got infected with the delta variant. That whole table is very confusing.

I mean, if you want to slice the data differently, 23 deaths among ~19k unvaccinated delta cases = 0.1% and 19 total cases among 9344 patients who had some form of vaccination protection = 0.2%, which would give us garbage conclusions. I'd wait a little bit for more data to come in.

I think it might have been a good idea for PHE to put in some analysis of the data as well as the raw numbers. I think showing the raw data is important but some people do seem to be finding it confusing and panicking even though it doesn't seem particularly alarming.

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Nothing surprising or unexpected in the UK data shown in that tweet.  That little table in the tweet though doesn't provide enough information to be able to estimate vaccine efficacy at all.  You need the total number of the population in each of the the categories, i.e. X million unvaccinated, Y million received first dose, Z million received two doses, etc.), and the data needs to be stratified by important risk factors, such as age at the least.  Only then can you even attempt to estimate a rough vaccine efficacy.

Maybe this data is found in the full report, but if not, I assume it will be published in a follow up report after they've done some additional number crunching.

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3 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Come on, there were 0 deaths among the cohort with less than 21 days post dose 1, so this is clearly an instance where we have poor statistics to elucidate anything about the mortality of patients receiving vaccinations who got infected with the delta variant. That whole table is very confusing.

Mudguard's point about the lack of population size is a very good one.  But I think we can assume that the population size of the <21 days should be very small, and > 21 days is small enough also.  I basically ignored those columns.

IMO the table shows that the vaccines are definitely working significantly in stopping infections (which admittedly, isn't particularly surprising) but it is ery difficult to draw conclusions about what happens if you do get infected.

4 hours ago, Gorn said:

That's not exactly limited to minorities, there's plenty of white people who can't afford to miss work either.

Also FYI, I've gotten both shots without missing a minute of work. Pharmacies work on weekends and Friday afternoons too.

Yet people are saying in survey's that work is a major issue (for those unvaccinated).   How do you square that?

Probably paywalled but this goes through all the other vaccination candidates.  Nothing particularly major in it but a good summary.

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White people are major vaxx refusniks.  Has that been forgotten?  Just outright refusing.  Also even when dying insisting that covid-19 is a hoax.  Gimme a frackin' break.  It's mostly white people who are the problem.

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