This is the most appropriate comment so far in this Escher-drawing of a discussion.
34,159,055 total cases
1,018,791 dead
25,430,443 recovered
In the US:
7,447,282 total cases
211,740 dead
4,699,706 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
If the vaccine does come in a needle free form, would it be possible to administer without going to a hospital or even by the patient themselves? If people could get the vaccine delivered to them and administer it to themselves, people might avoid the risk of contagion from getting the virus at the doctor’s office.
I haven’t thought through all the downsides and the ramifications, just wondering if something like this would be possible.
People with diabetes self administer injections all the time. A major reason for going to a doctor or a nurse is because many kinds of injections are known to (rarely) cause dangerous side effects.
This COVID vaccine is a candidate for needle-free because it is injected into the skin, not into a muscle or into the blood stream. And it won’t have the problem that some vaccines have that are grown in a host. But there still might be a bad reaction to the adjuvant ???
But small-pox vaccination was just done by scratching, and polio vaccination was just done on sugar cubes, and both of those were still normally done by a nurse.
There’s also the risk of doing it wrong. People with diabetes get training on how to do their injections, and they’re done multiple times a day. I’ve never done a needleless “injection” but I would assume it has to be held right up next to the skin – how much risk is there that people with no training, no education on how the administration technology works, and only doing it one time, are going to hold it too far away and essentially just wash their arm with vaccine fluid?
I don’t know the answer to that, but the risk of the spread of infection is higher if people don’t attempt it at all because they don’t want to go to their doctor’s office to get the vaccine.
My doctor’s office just offered drive-thru flu shots. They set up a large pop-up tent outside with a lane in their parking lot on a recent Saturday morning. All three people in my household got our flu shots, and we never even got out of the car. We all had masks on, and just rested our arms on the car windowsills while a nurse on each side of the vehicle administered flu shots.
I see no reason why they can’t do the same thing with a COVID-19 vaccine.
ETA: One possible difficulty might be very stringent cold storage requirements of some vaccine candidates.
The New York Times reports Cornell researchers analyzed 38 million articles about the Covid-19 article in English-language media around the world. Mentions of Trump accounted for 37.9% of the overall “misinformation conversation,” making him the largest driver of the “infodemic,” they concluded.
“The biggest surprise was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid,” Cornell Alliance for Science director Sarah Evanega, the study’s lead author, told the Times. “That’s concerning in that there are real-world dire health implications.”
Even more concerning, researchers found only 16.4% of the misinformation was “fact checking” in nature, suggesting that the majority of the falsehoods were conveyed without question or correction.
The study, released Thursday, is the first comprehensive examination of coronavirus misinformation in traditional and online media.
Love this!
The county I work for is going to use there ‘bus barn’ for the same type of set up. It’s a small county ~25000 people. The bus barn has drive trough bays where they normally service public buses. This will give the nurses much better protection from the weather which can turn nasty real fast this time of year.
The CEO of Pfizer says they will not give in to political pressure to speed up development of a vaccine.
“Hope Hicks, one of President Donald Trump’s closest aides, has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Hicks, who serves as counselor to the president and traveled with him to a Wednesday rally, tested positive Thursday, according to an administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private health information. She is the closest aide to Trump to test positive so far.”
In unison everyone:
HOW CLOSE WAS SHE?
Was she close enough to infect the Great Denier?
Hoping.
It appears so.
That’s a hell of a lot of precaution for a hoax, isn’t it?
34,481,663 total cases
1,027,653 dead
25,670,610 recovered
In the US:
7,494,671 total cases
212,660 dead
4,736,621 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Tr*mp and Melania have indeed tested positive for Covid-19. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump test positive for Covid-19 | CNN Politics
Why, yes, I am feeling petty and vindicated. I know he’ll get the best healthcare possible and sooner than us … civium?
So even at his advanced age and somehow superhero health… odds aren’t all that great since Hope (Hoax) Hicks was showing symptoms the Wed. after the Great Fudd Debate .
I’m still wondering who else was in the audience and backstage who didn’t bother with a mask.
(I think I stole this video from someone here tonite)