RebKell's Junkie Boards

[Luuuc]

Lots of eyes on Israel atm as they pass 50% of the population being vaccinated

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Thanks for calling. I wait all night for calls like these.

[Howee]

[pilight]

I had a worse reaction to the cheap store brand adhesive bandage they put on my arm than I did to the vaccine. You can still see the outline where it burned into my skin six days later.

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I'm a lonely frog
I ain't got a home

[tfan]

[FrozenLVFan]

[Luuuc]

His words were "I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life." To me that's not quite going as far as claiming herd immunity, but anyway

IF the stated estimate of "250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March" actually holds true (it sounds like a stretch*) then I think a return to normal doesn't sound unreasonable by the end of April.
By that time I guess the size of the anti-vaxxer community is what will determine just how normal things are.
Of course so will the continued availability of the vaccine over the coming months, emergence of more Covid mutant strains, etc.


* Apparently ~ 65 million doses have been administered to date. So that estimate above would require another 185 million doses in the next 38 days, or nearly 5 million per day. Seems pretty optimistic if the current rate is ~ 1.5 million per day.

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Thanks for calling. I wait all night for calls like these.

[Ex-Ref]

Meanwhile, the flu has all but disappeared this year.

[tfan]

With regard to the 5% or 6% outside the 94% 95% effectiveness of the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines, I thought I had read that even though those people got it, they felt the vaccine gave them protection from the most severe symptoms. But I can't find that now. I am hearing that about the Johnson and Johnson 75% effectiveness: 75% won't get it, but the other 25% are protected from the most severe symptoms.

Edit: heard it today said that J&J was 7x% effective in preventing infection, and 85% effective in preventing the most severe symptoms.

[Queenie]

Appointments opened up in Queens and I'm getting my first shot on the 13th!

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Ardent believer in the separation of church and stadium.

[scullyfu]

I’m 71, live in WNY & can’t get one due to no vaccine. The website is a joke.

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i'll always bleed Storm green.

[GlennMacGrady]

Both my wife (Moderna) and I (Pfizer) are now fully vaccinated and past the two week window. I had no side effects other than a very slightly sore arm after the second shot. My wife had a fever for one day after the second shot.

Connecticut is doing a reasonable job of distribution. With two political exceptions, they are opening up strictly by age cohorts. They are not using the CDC comorbidity list because (a) it's underinclusive, (b) it's overinclusive, (c) it's almost impossible to administer in terms of proof of comorbidities, and (d) most of the comorbidities skew naturally into the older age cohorts. This makes sense to me.

The two political exceptions are that in addition to the eligible age cohorts, there will be a separate stream of vaccines available for black/brown minority neighborhoods and for school staffs.

Israel's post-vaccination real world data are mirroring the ~95% effectiveness claimed in the Moderna/Pfizer trials.

The flu has effectively disappeared this season not only in America but all over most of the world -- in terms of positive tests, hospital admissions and deaths. No one really knows why. The easy explanation is that masking and social distancing have driven away the flu even though it's hotly debated as what actual quantitative effect those measures have had on Covid.

Another explanation is that flu deaths are being counted as Covid deaths because of the expansive way Covid deaths are reported.

A third explanation is that PCR tests, which have lots of flaws and inaccuracies in any event, are not picking up flu infections because the labs, which are swamped with Covid testing, are not getting around to testing the flu samples until too late in the infection window. In other words, people with flu, which comes and goes much faster than Covid, are testing negative because the labs are waiting too long (three or four days) to process the submitted samples.

A fourth explanation is that, in some sort of evolutionary/microbiological sense, Covid virus is "out competing" flu virus for residence in the human host.

But it's all speculation. As Arthur C. Clarke put it in one of his three laws of science: "For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert."

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http://www.youtube.com/MagicBusBasketball

[Howee]

[GlennMacGrady]

[Luuuc]

[tfan]

[FrozenLVFan]

[GlennMacGrady]

MIT Technology Review (Feb. 19):

[GlennMacGrady]

I have my own theory about why flu has almost disappeared. It's a form of the "out competing" idea, which I call the Wolf-Cheetah Theory.

People are deer. They can run pretty fast. But grey wolves can run faster, and have been killing the deer for centuries. The wolves prey on deer by running down the old and sickly deer, who can no longer run fast. The vast majority of deer are young and healthy enough to outrun the wolves.

Suddenly, the yellow cheetah appears on the scene. The cheetah can reproduce much faster than the wolves can, so pretty soon there are a lot more cheetahs in the world than wolves. In addition, the cheetahs can run a lot faster than wolves.

The wolves and cheetahs run after the same old and sickly deer. But there are so many more cheetahs and they are so much faster than the wolves, that there are hardly any catchable old and sickly deer left by the time the wolf pack arrives. Death counts of deer from cheetahs start to exceed death counts from wolves. This causes wolves to die out from starvation, and as this happens, the death counts from the cheetahs begins to swamp the disappearing death counts from wolves.

To keep thriving the wolves have always had to kill a few young fawns as well as old and sickly deer. But the cheetahs are so much more successful at killing old and sickly deer than the wolves, that they ignore young fawns almost completely.

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http://www.youtube.com/MagicBusBasketball

[Luuuc]

How come wolves are starving in countries that don't even have the yellow cheetah?

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Thanks for calling. I wait all night for calls like these.

[FrozenLVFan]

Because the deer spent the holidays at home as recommended by the cervine CDC instead of out partying with the wolves?

[GlennMacGrady]

[Luuuc]

[jammerbirdi]

Regarding the vaccination process in California, I can't. Even. I'm done.

When the story is written... wow.

It was announced just three weeks ago that California would move to vaccinating those 16-64 with certain health conditions beginning in the middle of March. I just got a notice from my health care provider of that fact on I believe the 24th of February. By the time I got that notice, that information had already been rendered essentially useless if not totally obsolete.

Because as soon as the state issued those new guidelines the governor was inundated with pressure from parents who were beyond sick of having their children on their hands 24/7 to vaccinate the entire education system and get the schools open. He is now fighting for his political life as the recall effort reached its goal of however many signatures was needed for it to move forward.

The state had previously announced, as I posted here probably six weeks ago, that it was moving away from area of employment as a determining factor for who gets the shot next and was going with using age and likelihood of actually getting seriously ill or dying of COVID. Remember that? Another short-lived finger-in-the-air of the prevailing political winds.

Now they have yet to give vaccines to the majority of those over the age of 65, who are themselves completely baffled and put off by a ridiculously difficult and failing online sign-up process... but have gone back to using employment in determining who is in what tier and so the remaining seniors are now but one third with EVERYONE working in any capacity in any form of education in California getting another third of the available vaccine and food/agriculture workers getting the last third.

AND... the latest (I think. Who knows?) by mid-March the state of California will start reserving 40% of new vaccine supplies for at-risk communities based on race or ethnicity.

Without even criticizing one of those decisions on its own... you can see what the cluster fuck of hellish boils California has made of this vaccination process. Not alone, as reports from other states show. But this what we're dealing with in California.

So... still about a 130 people dying a day in LA County. I would like to know their ages. Average age of the last 1000 people maybe who have died here. I bet they're mostly seniors.

Okay, now I will criticize some of the decisions. I said this in the very first posts I made in this thread. When you start talking about prioritizing all those who work in education in the state of California you are talking about sucking up an incredible amount of vaccine all for people who don't REALLY have to be anywhere but sitting at home like everyone else who is sitting at home. Those kids, and those parents, all under the age of 50, can gut it out for the rest of the school year and take up in person learning in the fall when everyone has been vaccinated.

We should not be sacrificing lives, which we are SURELY doing, the lives of those who are most likely to get seriously ill and die of COVID, so that we can get kids back in school right now. It's just wrong.

If you take just those education people out of the equation there would be plenty of vaccine available for essential workers and communities of color after very quickly finishing off those over the age of 65.

Except for this one nagging remaining problem. That is those mostly likely to die of COVID-19 which MOST ASSUREDLY includes so many in at-risk, under-served, communities of color.

Those ages 16-64 with significant health problems would also be a huge and potentially massively so grouping to have to prioritize. Maybe that's why they keep pushing them aside for other more politically popular prioritizations.

But this should have always been about vaccinating first those who work in health care along with those most likely to get sick and die of COVID. Everything else should have taken a back seat to those. And some better method of determining who those people exactly are and how we might better determine the very often unique qualifying levels of illness are that recommends them for receiving a jab all should have been determined a long time ago rather than the navel gazing feet shuffling way the state is doing it now.

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Every woman who has ever been presented with a career/sex quid pro quo in the entertainment industry should come forward and simply say, “Me, too.” - jammer The New York Times 10/10/17

[Ex-Ref]

You can go to the dashboard and find out some info. https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/

I found where the total deaths by age are and the total cases. 65+ is at 74% of total deaths, 10.7% of the positive cases and 15.4% of the population.

Compare to 78% of deaths in Indiana are aged 70+ and 11% of positive cases.

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"Women are judged on their success, men on their potential. It’s time we started believing in the potential of women." —Muffet McGraw

“Thank you for showing the fellas that you've got more balls than them,” Haley said, to cheers from the crowd.

[insidewinder]

Yeah, CA is getting too complicated and silly. They keep changing the criteria, which frustrates everyone. Individually the new plan sort of makes sense, but for instance, unless there is a concrete plan to get schools going really soon, what's the point of vaccinating all teachers, school staff, etc. ahead of other groups? They aren't all in vulnerable demographics. It takes about two months to get two shots and wait a few weeks for the second shot to fully kick in. The plan is to have teachers, etc. vaccinated by the end of March I believe? So that means those people would not be ready to go back to in person school until near the end of May??? Are they going to start school at the end of May? School over the summer would make sense but is that really the plan? Have the teacher's unions agreed? Is there money to pay them extra or what? If there is a plan and money to fund it, cool, go for it. Somehow I doubt it. And what about the variants that in other countries seems to infect young kids at high rates? Is now the time to think about in person school with those variants coming our way?

Then there is this thing where people who work in any food service can get vaccinated as essential workers. So my niece, who is 20 and works part-time in a chocolate shop where she hardly sees customers, she just packs stuff up and the like, is eligible but her mother, mid-50's with some serious health issues that mean COVID could kill her, is not yet eligible. Well maybe if she kicked up a fuss she could get a shot, but that is not her way.

Giving more doses to underserved communities is good, and I am certainly willing to wait while those folks get some deserved help. I don't know that setting aside 40% of all vaccines in the state for a few zip codes is the way to go. I just don't trust that there is a plan that won't drag everything out. 40% for how long? What percentage of the 40 million people in the state will be served by that 40%? Why not set vaccination sites in those places and make sure they get well supplied without some percentage being held for those places unless that percentage is really getting into arms of the targeted people there?

I would hate to be 64 years old, knowing that people one year older are getting vaccinated now and have been for over a month, yet I will maybe become eligible in April? May? Who knows? And a 64 year old is basically the same as people a few years older in risk. I know there had to be a cutoff, but still, 65 gets vaccinated in Feb but 64 gets vaccinated months later?????

I am not 64, for the record, but I will be 60 shortly, and this kinda bugs me. My risk of serious illness is much higher than many people who are eligible. I am ok waiting my turn. But please, give me some clue and some hope that there is a plan for me. I just feel like things are going off the rails a bit and I will not be eligible for months while everything around me opens up. Family my age in other states are now eligible. I will be the last, by months, to get a vaccine. There is a vaccination site in my neighborhood two blocks down the street from me to serve my neighborhood. I see people getting shots and they are mostly younger than I am by a lot. I worry that they will do all this fancy stuff about who gets vaccinated and then say screw it and open it up to everyone under 65, and I will have to compete for vaccinations with all the 30 year olds in May or something.

I know this is all a bit whiney, but it has been a long year, and I am tired of the constantly shifting criteria for opening things, closing things, who gets vaccinated, etc. Make a solid, simple plan, and stick to it.