States with new daily highs of new case reports (seven day average) over the weekend:
Maine
New Hampshire
Vermont
Massachusetts
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
Ohio
Indiana
Nevada
Oregon
California
Utah
Colorado
Kentucky
West Virginia
Maryland
Delaware
North Carolina
Arkansas
New Mexico
Arizona
Oklahoma
Mississippi
Alabama
Texas
(Puerto Rico)
On the plus side, a lot of states have seen the number of new cases drop since hitting highs on the 15th or 16th last week. On the other hand, half the states plus Puerto Rico have hit new highs.
The UK is set to end the current lockdown in a week or so; IMO this isn’t a good idea. I see that the number of new cases has dropped some since the lockdown started 3 weeks ago or so, but I doubt ending the lockdown will have positive effects as far as controlling the virus.
If you go from zero cases to 10,000 cases and lockdown until there are only 1,000 cases, you are still starting your second wave from 1,000, with all the same multipliers in effect so now you get 100,000 cases. If you then lockdown until you have 10,000 cases, you are just starting your third wave from there…
In a nutshell this vaccine uses a different harmless virus as a carrier for the anti-COVID payload. The thought is that the bigger early dose teaches your body how to defeat that carrier virus so effectively that the second dose is rendered ineffective; your body kills it before it delivers the payload.
Speculation, but apparently logical speculation based on similar problems with similar carrier-virus-based vaccines.
The news about the Oxford/AZ vaccine is especially good because it’s dirt cheap, easy to produce, and doesn’t require frozen storage. Even with a somewhat lower efficacy rate, this might have a greater global impact than the fancy-pants expensive ones. Also, it bodes well for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine which uses a similar mechanism.
It’s beginning to look like the major remaining obstacles to wiping this virus out are production capacity and distribution logistics, which is extremely encouraging.
It’s a viral vector vaccine based on an adenovirus genetically engineered to display some covid DNA. Or at least, that’s how I understand it works. It’s not an old-school attenuated virus vaccine, but it’s not as new-fangled as the mRNA vaccines either.
I believe the leading Chinese and Russian vaccines also fall into this category.
He’s had a COVID channel running since the very beginning and delivers thoughtful analysis of the state of play while also delivering a sound education on the realities of biochem, drug discovery, drug approval, drug distribution, etc. As well as a clear and humble exposition about how much remains guesswork.
See also Utah, Oklahoma, and North Dakota. Or really, just about any state with only a few urban areas large enough to have more than one hospital. It’s ugly out there.
As a Kansas Citian who lives on one side of the state line and works on the other, I feel this article so hard. The pandemic had truly exposed the years-long, selfish, moronic inefficacy of both state governments and their electorates. It is indeed difficult to not feel resentful.
Interesting. I had some qualms about the safety of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, just because it’s such a new process. I think I’d prefer the potentially slightly less effective but more proven technology one, but I’m guessing they won’t be equally available. I suspect that if you want to be able to choose, you’ll probably have to be willing to wait. That’s a different calculus, because then there’s the risk of more time totally unprotected.
I’d like to know more about the plans for distribution within the US.
Having been a vaccination clinic nurse during the H1N1 crisis, I can tell one thing about any plan: “Everybody has a plan til they get punched in the nose”. IOW, it is going to be much harder and take much longer than the powers that be will admit.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not, but that isn’t the same thing at all.
City-dwellers weren’t intentionally flouting public health guidelines and clogging up all the urban hospitals as a result of their devil-may-care attitudes. They were encouraged by their doctors to go live out in the country because it was believed that country air would cure them. TB patients who moved out to the country were following the best practices of the time. They were the opposite of irresponsible.
Also, there were sanitariums devoted solely to TB to prevent general hospitals from being overrun with TB patients. Sure would be nice if we had something like that with COVID.