Covid-19 #41: Collateral Damage

[Paxter]

44 minutes ago, Kalsandra said:

To be clear, right now SA is literally turning back vaccine supply because no one wants them. While its true that better fairer vaccines would help, a big problem is vaccine adoption. 

I think that’s a pretty significant oversimplification. The reason for turning back supply is in part because of hesitancy (“no one wants them”, in your words) but it’s also because of health system bottlenecks: funding, training and cold storage. You need more than just vaccines to vaccinate - you need a well resourced health care system. One that can effectively raise awareness of the need for vaccines and actually administer them on a mass scale.

In the case of measles, lots of African countries have this infrastructure. But it’s easier said than done to adapt this to COVID-19.

[DireWolfSpirit]

Ex b.inlaw is paying the price for his vaccine/covid denial. 

He's bed ridden and having breathing difficulties, no smell, no taste and all around severe bout of sickness from the virus. He not only contracted the virus himself he was irresponsible enough to have spread it to his brother and other family members.

The brothers have now had to close their business for two weeks. 

Wouldn't it have been simpler to have just got inoculated dude?

[rotting sea cow]

Regarding the new variant. I think we must assume it's already everywhere and those travel bans come - as usual - too late.

The woman who traveled from Egypt to Belgium reportedly tested positive 11 days after arrival. Although an unusual long incubation time cannot be ruled out, most likely she caught it there,  in Belgium, not in Egypt. 

Yesterday two planes were stopped in Netherlands with about 600 people of which 60 have tested positive, although no word yet about what variant, you can extrapolate that back to the previous days and weeks and to different countries. 

S. Africa simply announced the discovery because they have a decent testing and sequencing capability, but we must assume that silent spread has been going on for weeks if not months. 

We need then urgently to learn about its infectiousness compared with Delta, its capability for immune evasion and whether pathology and symptoms have changed.

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

Air travel bans can still be useful at preventing the spread I believe. They need to be more widespread for that to work I guess.

A lot of stuff I read mentions the possibility of untreated HIV being a possible origin route. If that is the case another thing caused by the greed based setup of our civilization.

If it is more dangerous Europe and the USA will fail again I worry. Other countries will handle it better.

The people in Hong Kong were detected in quarantine hotels if I understood correctly.

[rotting sea cow]

4 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

A lot of stuff I read mentions the possibility of untreated HIV being a possible origin route. If that is the case another thing caused by the greed based setup of our civilization.

I've read the same. The comparatively high prevalence of HIV in some African countries with those individuals being treated with antiviral cocktails make them dangerous factories of variants.  In fact, there is the speculation that patient zero was an HIV positive person.

[Loge]

9 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

You may remember I was making comments at the end of September about how well Poland was doing, with daily cases just in the hundreds, but that numbers had started creeping up. I noted that last year when my SiL went to Poland in September cases were far lower than in Canada, and then seriously spiked during the eight weeks she was visiting her mom. 
 

Well, dammit, hasn’t the same thing happened all over again. Poland was doing so much better than Canada, and boom! I took my eye off the numbers and Canada is averaging 3,000 or fewer cases a day and Poland is in the mid to higher 20,000s. We have the same population, 38 M or so. Canada has never hit 10,000 cases a day, except in days combining a few days because of holidays. 
 

It makes me worried about December through March, when we had our third wave last year and this year. Our vaccination record is way better, so maybe we won’t struggle as much this winter, but the other day when we had 750 cases in Ontario the province announced half the people were fully vaccinated. Today we had more than 900 cases.

I’d love to think Delta will burn itself out, but I fear Omicron will be worse. Like many other countries we’ve banned flights from South Africa, but I suspect the horses have left the barn.

Case figures are skyrocketing across Europe. Even Portugal and Spain, which are among the countries with the highest vaccination rates in the world, see a rapid increase. And that's before Omicron has even hit.

Meanwhile, Switzerland is holding a referendum to end the countermeasures.

 

Looks like Germany has its first Omicron case:

https://www.dw.com/en/covid-omicron-variant-likely-already-in-germany-says-minister/a-59954998

 

[Padraig]

6 hours ago, Paxter said:

I think that’s a pretty significant oversimplification. The reason for turning back supply is in part because of hesitancy (“no one wants them”, in your words) but it’s also because of health system bottlenecks: funding, training and cold storage. You need more than just vaccines to vaccinate - you need a well resourced health care system.

Good points.  Hopefully one positive from all this will be a renewed focus on vaccination in Africa and beyond.  A lot of countries haven't got close to their vaccine donation targets.  Although as you say, vaccines themselves may not be the biggest challenge, just everything else about getting shots in arms.

2 hours ago, Loge said:

Even Portugal and Spain, which are among the countries with the highest vaccination rates in the world, see a rapid increase.

Right, vaccination clearly doesn't stop increases in cases.  The question is whether it stops a country from having really bad outbreaks.  Spain and Portugal have still relatively ok levels of COVID but we don't know how long this wave will last.  Even though, its normally a couple of months.

In more bad news, Merck announces that its new anti-viral isn't as good as initially suggested.  Approximately 50% efficiacy has now turned into 30%.  Its not nothing but less striking.  Hopefully the Pfizer option will stay up at around 90%.

https://www.ft.com/content/5991288f-7e62-4de4-9d41-88285d29ee62

[Luzifer's right hand]

So we now live in a world where people refuse vaccines, take chlordioxid rectally after getting covid-19 symptoms, refuse to stay in a hospital and die at home.

You could not make that shit up...

[BigFatCoward]

2 cases of the new strain in the UK now. Of course it was never going to be kept out just by banning a few planes. 

[Luzifer's right hand]

27 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

2 cases of the new strain in the UK now. Of course it was never going to be kept out just by banning a few planes. 

If you guy just lived on an island. 

[BigFatCoward]

10 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

If you guy just lived on an island. 

Don't know what you mean. It's not like Australia and NZ have performed much better. 

[Clueless Northman]

2 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

So we now live in a world where people refuse vaccines, take chlordioxid rectally after getting covid-19 symptoms, refuse to stay in a hospital and die at home.

That would be a nice change, frankly. If all those who refuse vaccines decided to play it tough and stayed home instead of flooding the hospitals and ICUs, and leave proper medical treatment available to the sane responsible part of the population, it would be a great world. I'd sign up for it in a heartbeat.

[Luzifer's right hand]

38 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Don't know what you mean. It's not like Australia and NZ have performed much better. 

Lol they have performed incredible especially NZ. Delta punched trough but their numbers are still much better. 

 

23 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

That would be a nice change, frankly. If all those who refuse vaccines decided to play it tough and stayed home instead of flooding the hospitals and ICUs, and leave proper medical treatment available to the sane responsible part of the population, it would be a great world. I'd sign up for it in a heartbeat.

An Austrian leading figure in the local anti-vax scene did exactly that. A man of conviction and principles I guess. His son released everything to the public. I guess he was not really on board. 

[DMC]

So I've been hearing about this Omicron threat for a full day now and I'm still waiting for Lrrr to address us earthlings.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Just now, DMC said:

So I've been hearing about this Omicron threat for a full day now and I'm still waiting for Lrrr to address us earthlings.

Do you volunteer your human horn to appease him?

[Jaxom 1974]

21 hours ago, JoannaL said:

Its omicron not ny (just announced).  an interesting name, no idea how they counted. I think its sounds haunting?

Let's not forget the most important aspect of Omicron...all the anti-vax conspiracy nuts are incensed that "omicron" is an anagram of "moronic" and they're claiming it's now just something that they're being trolled over...

 

[DMC]

4 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Do you volunteer your human horn to appease him?

As long as it's not my lower horn.

[Zorral]

"New York declares covid state of emergency as Gov. Hochul warns that omicron variant ‘is coming’"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/27/new-york-omicron-coronavirus-variant/

Evidently what this 'covid state of emergency' means is this primarily, as the story only cites this:

Quote

As part of the emergency, the state’s health department will be allowed to protect hospital capacity by limiting nonessential and non-urgent care until at least Jan. 15. Hospitals with less than 10 percent staffed bed capacity, or those designated by the state, will be authorized to screen patients and restrict admissions to keep beds open for the most urgent cases. ....

.... She also urged New Yorkers to mask up in indoor public venues, get tested when appropriate and stay home when ill. She also reminded residents to get coronavirus vaccinations or booster shots.

Which means yet again the unvaccinated are eating all the medical resources and the rest of us can go into year 3, again w/o all sorts of early warning check-ups and so on and so forth, and even people needing surgeries and other procedures will have them again postponed.

Funny how this story is in the WaPo but the NYT doesn't yet have it up -- at least as far as my digital version is concerned.

[Kalbear]

11 hours ago, Paxter said:

I think that’s a pretty significant oversimplification. The reason for turning back supply is in part because of hesitancy (“no one wants them”, in your words) but it’s also because of health system bottlenecks: funding, training and cold storage. You need more than just vaccines to vaccinate - you need a well resourced health care system. One that can effectively raise awareness of the need for vaccines and actually administer them on a mass scale.

In the case of measles, lots of African countries have this infrastructure. But it’s easier said than done to adapt this to COVID-19.

SA is turning back J&J vaccines, which require almost no special storage.

Its vaccine hesitancy. 

The US needs to stop exporting antivaxxers.

[Zorral]

How Omicron got its letter-name.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/world/africa/omicron-covid-greek-alphabet.html?

Quote

 

....“‘Nu’ is too easily confounded with ‘new,’” Tarik Jasarevic, a W.H.O. spokesman, said on Saturday. “And ‘Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name.”

He added that the agency’s best practices for naming diseases suggest avoiding “causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.” ....

... she stumbled through confusing explanations about the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants. They are now known as Alpha, which emerged in the United Kingdom, and Beta, which emerged in South Africa.

“It makes it really cumbersome to talk about when you’re constantly using an alphabet soup of variant designations,” she said, adding, “Ultimately people end up calling it the U.K. variant or the South African variant.”

That’s the other big reason that the W.H.O. moved to the Greek naming system, Dr. Rasmussen said: The older naming convention was unfair to the people where the virus emerged. The agency called the practice of describing variants by the places they were detected “stigmatizing and discriminatory.”

The practice of naming viruses for regions has also historically been misleading, Dr. Rasmussen said. Ebola, for example, is named for a river that’s actually far from where the virus emerged. ....