76,626,060 total cases
1,691,942 dead
53,751,059 recovered
In the US:
18,077,768 total cases
323,401 dead
10,545,445 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
A family got on a United flight from Orlando to LA on Monday. All filled out paperwork saying they’d tested negative for COVID and were experiencing no symptoms. The father stopped breathing two hours into the flight. The flight was diverted to New Orleans while medical personnel from the passengers tried to restart his heart with CR (no mouth-to-mouth). While he was being removed from the plane (yes, him dead), the wife was heard telling the EMTs that he had, in fact, tested positive for COVID, had been having trouble breathing, and had lost his sense of taste and smell.
Bet they had a great time at Disney World.
(Also, the passenger demanding compensation for everyone on the plane is an asshole.)
It seems to me they should arrest the wife and give her 4 months in jail. And that the passengers should be suing her and her husband’s estate, not the airline, if any of them get sick.
I, for one, am looking forward to the Banged Up/Locked Up Abroad episode dedicated to her stupid stunt.
The surviving family members can feature on America’s Dumbest Criminals. If there’s ever a show for Darwin Award Winners & Runners-up, the dead dumbass can be featured in the pilot.
And damn near illiterate, to boot!
I don’t think this is true. According to a recent paper in Nature, it’s only the majority of vaccines that target the spike protein. The remainder do indeed use other approaches:
The majority of vaccine candidates currently in clinical trials target the spike (S) protein and its variants as the primary antigen. However, candidates that target other or multiple antigens are progressing, including candidates that target N protein, attenuated vaccines, inactivated vaccines and peptide vaccines
I’ve read that the “new” British strain has been known and tracked for months; the concern now is that it’s becoming the dominant strain. True? If so, current vaccines surely must take it into account.
I’ve also read speculative fears that because of mutations and such, what could happen is that strains start avoiding current vaccines, we have 2020-level outbreaks and their attendant consequences and control methods, we have to create a new vaccine to counter these new strains, extant strains start avoiding those vaccines, and around and around in a circle for years. Likely or no?
Anything could happen, especially when you’re talking about speculative fears, but this mutation is similar to the last, and the vaccine is likely to work against it. It doesn’t seem like this particular occurrence would make the speculative fears any more likely.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-strain-idUSKBN28T0TU
IIRC it was first detected in September.
As a rule of thumb, it is now the dominant strain in (most of) Wales, plus those parts of England placed in Tier 4. Handy repost, scroll down to the maps:
These are the areas where infection rates are escalating most rapidly - the reason for the raid escalation being (it is postulated/presumed) that the new strain is the dominant strain in these areas.
j
By “current” I meant the ones that are entering use now. Pfizer, Moderna, Oxford/AstraZeneca. They all prime the immune system to respond to the spike protein. The US and AIUI, Europe, don’t have any other vaccines that close to implementing.
There’s a good reason that the spike protein is used as antigen for many candidate vaccines. Spike has evolved a specific shape to bind receptors on our cell surface, to get the virus into cells. If an antibody binds spike, it is therefore quite likely to prevent this, to be neutralizing.
In order for a mutant spike to evade a vaccine, it must change shape enough to avoid the neutralizing antibodies, but retain the right shape to bind the cell surface receptors. That’s not impossible, but it’s difficult. It’s especially difficult if there are multiple clones of antibodies that bind different epitopes on spike, something that’s quite likely when the whole spike protein is used as antigen in these vaccines.
The other part of why it’s hard for a pathogen to evolve to evade the vaccines is that they don’t just give us neutralizing antibodies. With mRNA and DNA vaccines in particular, which induce the host cell to manufacture spike protein inside the cell, there is likely also a strong response from the adaptive cell-mediated immune system. This is the coolest part of the immune system, because your cells effectively encrypt the antigens they encounter, and induce an adaptive T-cell response to anything that looks wrong (non-self) in the encrypted form. And the encryption key varies very widely among humans. So if spike mutates to evade one human’s cell-mediated immunity, that evasion strategy may not work for any of the next 10 humans it encounters. I dug up an old post I wrote about this here.
This isn’t really breaking news, but as it pertains to a current hot topic I’ll drop it in here. A new website that allows you to model the spread of COVID across the UK.
Explanatory piece from Imperial College, London* (with a link to the website).
Website itself.
j
(*) - just typing that, I’m thinking: there’s a name it’s time to change
New list of states with the highest ever (for the state) highest daily COVID count (seven-day average) occurring on December 18 or 19
Maine
Massachusetts
New York
California
West Virginia
South Carolina
North Carolina
Arkansas
Oklahoma
Mississippi
Alabama
Georgia
Florida (finally breaking the earlier high in July)
Texas
and Puerto Rico, as well.
Fourteen states and one territory, and its shooting up rapidly in several of those. THat’s a big change over a couple of days ago.
The overall cases recorded in the US, after going down tantalizingly over recent weeks, is now higher than it has ever been.
And we’re not even to Christmas yet.
These vaccines could not have come soon enough.
I like how you described this as “encryption”.
…and Ontario is apparently going into lockdown, provincewide. On Christmas Eve. In Southern Ontario, for 28 days; in Northern Ontario, for 14 days.
The Ontario government is poised to impose a provincewide lockdown starting Christmas Eve, sources confirmed Sunday, as the province logs more than 2,000 new cases of COVID-19 for the sixth consecutive day.
A 28-day lockdown for the southern portions of the province, south of Sudbury, Ont., will begin at 12:01 a.m. on Thursday, sources confirmed.
No official announcement yet.
77,172,237 total cases
1,699,644 dead
54,089,577 recovered
In the US:
18,267,579 total cases
324,869 dead
10,622,082 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Bloomberg has a vaccine tracker. So far 1.8M people vaccinated worldwide with 556K in the US. Some of the state totals are really low. That might indicate the snafu with distribution in the beginning or it might just be the timing of the reporting. The rollout of the Moderna vaccine should bump up those numbers along with straightening out the distribution problems with the Pfizer vaccine.
As of Dec. 20, 2020
New Reported Highest cases on December 20:
New York
West Virginia
South Carolina
North Carolina
Arkansas
Oklahoma
Alabama
and Puerto Rico
Seven states and a territory
Six other states experienced highs over the rest of the weekend
Biden was vaccinated on TV. (Pence was a few days ago.)
The EU approved the Pfizer vaccine and plans to start distributing it soon.
Looks like roughly 1 anaphylactic reaction per 100k right now. They are recruiting volunteers for a study, but as the article notes, it might be difficult to find many.
Also, I know a past article mentioned something along the lines of .63 percent incidence of an allergic reaction in the vaccine group and .51 percent incidence in the control group for Pfizer’s study but it’s worth noting that the only incident of anaphylactic reaction was in the vaccine group. (One out of 18,801 who received the vaccine).
This article backs all of that up.
One of the healthcare workers in Alaska had to be hospitalized in the ICU because she continued reacting when the epinephrine would wear off. She had to be placed on an epinephrine drip, and closely monitored until she could be weaned off the drip. (I’m not clear on how many days she was hospitalized, but it was at least one full day.)