More about the UK variant:
I’m not a COVID skeptic by any stretch, but those articles are a mess. Of course a new strain is growing rapidly as a percentage of the total infections. Anything with a low base can exhibit insane growth.
What matters is not the rate of change in mix of strains, but rate of change of infections total. If the new strain is quickly and massively taking over but total infections are level, we don’t have an infectiousness crisis.
We might be setting up a survival crisis, but that won’t be known until the new-strain infections are numerous enough, and testing is accurate enough, to track the disease course by strain for every infection to recovery or morgue as the case may be.
98,748,510 total cases
2,116,437 dead
70,920,474 recovered
In the US:
25,390,042 total cases
424,177 dead
15,222,719 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
This was also linked in another thread. It looks like the Danes are worried because the real numbers of the variant went up even while total covid cases went down. It’s not just the percentage of cases going up.
That said, I agree there’s lots of non-disaster explanations for that number shift.
This isn’t exactly breaking news, but it is the answer to a much pondered question: if a vial of the Moderna vaccine (for example) contains 6.3 ml, how come that’s only 10 x 0.5 ml doses? Why can I not get 12 doses (say) out of there? 'Fraid the answer is obvious, and I’m embarrassed not to have figured it out for myself.
The answer is in the EMA assessment report for the Moderna vaccine (just out - more from that later when I’ve gone through it properly).
There is no manufacturing overage. Each vial contains 6.3 mL fill volume, which corresponds to 10 doses of 0.5 mL (containing 100 micrograms mRNA). There is a 1.3 mL vial overfill. During the evaluation the applicant has been requested to justify this and confirm whether it would be feasible to retrieve 11 doses. The applicant responded that the fill volume was defined using components commonly used in preparation / administration of intramuscular injections (allowing for the dead volume from BD disposable syringes 1-mL with luer lock, 20G 1.5” needles), consideration of hold-up volume in 10R vials, the fill tolerance observed at fill finish sites and the validated extraction of 10 doses from each vial.
My bold. OK, so if you look at the picture below (click for a better view) you’ll see that at the end of the syringe there is a narrow part where the needle fits (the luer). The needle either slips on or locks (screws) on.
The luer is dead volume - the plunger cannot push liquid out of it. The smaller the dose, the smaller the syringe used, and the larger, proportionately, the dead volume in the luer. Even so, this isn’t normally a big issue - but in the case of these vaccines, multidose vials are being used - so that you have to allow for 10x this dead volume when you fill the vial. Thus the surprisingly large fill volumes of the vials.
j
Here’s some actual breaking news:
In the letter to Prof Whitty, seen by the BBC, the British Medical Association (BMA) said it agreed that the vaccine should be rolled out “as quickly as possible” - but called for an urgent review and for the gap to be reduced.
The doctors’ union said the UK’s strategy “has become increasingly isolated internationally” and “is proving evermore difficult to justify”.
“The absence of any international support for the UK’s approach is a cause of deep concern and risks undermining public and the profession’s trust in the vaccination programme,” the letter said.
j
99,329,286 total cases
2,130,422 dead
71,371,105 recovered
In the US:
25,566,789 total cases
427,635 dead
15,330,949 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Tomorrow the world will have over 100,000,000 total Covid-19 cases.
One year ago tomorrow, on 24 January 2020, there were 1,644 total cases worldwide and only 44 deaths.
Further to the subjects of vaccine vial filling and syringe dead volume, see this article in Politico. (And an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.)
Pfizer is counting extra coronavirus vaccine it uses to top off each of its vials toward its commitment to deliver 200 million shots for the U.S. pandemic response — even though there aren’t enough syringes capable of squeezing out the extra fluid.
The Trump administration Food and Drug Administration on Jan. 6 approved a Pfizer request to update its vaccine label to clarify that six doses, instead of five, can be drawn from each vial. The new label came several weeks after the agency said pharmacists could administer any surplus they could successfully extract from the vials…
…The Centers for Disease Control alarmed some state officials Thursday when the agency indicated it would start counting Pfizer’s vaccine vials as holding six doses, according to an email from the agency obtained by POLITICO. The CDC said it would increase the number of syringes it’s shipping with the vaccine, but that they may not be the “low-dead-volume” variety capable of extracting the extra doses.
j
Here’s one of those “hmm i hadn’t considered that” kind of pandemic news:
That is a small general aviation field. Back in the early days of COVID the main airline airport in Las Vegas had no control tower for almost a week. Talk about a clusterf***.
We’ve always had procedures for individual comm outages and for facilities going offline, but that tested the system pretty hard.
Around the US, the FAA has since had to close a few other “never close” control facilities for a couple shifts here and there. Sometimes as with the article Bo cited, there are substitutes that can be patched in with littel to no disruption or strain. In other cases not and suddenly we’re operating 1950s style.
Thank goodness traffic volume is still off about 50% vs pre-COVID.
How many staff a major airport tower? Are we sending home 8 guys or a lot of support staff in or nearby the tower when this (an outbreak shutdown) happens?
The Pfizer vaccine has been approved for use in Australia.
The first groups should start getting the vaccine towards the end of February, staggered as follows:
- Phase 1a: Quarantine and border workers, frontline healthcare workers, aged care and disability care residents and workers
Phase 1b: Anyone over 70 years old, other healthcare workers, younger adults with an underlying condition, high-risk workers (like emergency services personnel and meat-processing workers), and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are aged over 55.
Phase 2a : Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are between 18-54, along with Australians over 50 years old and other critical high-risk workers
Phase 2b : The rest of the adult population, plus anyone from the previous phases that may have been missed
Phase 3 : Children, but only “if recommended” given the evidence that they don’t transmit the disease like adults
Looks like I’m in 2a, as is my partner. No idea when that will be.
99,774,351 total cases
2,139,031 dead
71,762,746 recovered
In the US:
25,702,125 total cases
429,490 dead
15,409,639 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Violent anti-lockdown riots in the Netherlands yesterday:
Just a hair under 100,000,000 cases worldwide today. More than a quarter of those are the US. The next largest country, India, clocks in at well under half the US cases. The numbers are slightly different on the Johns Hopkins site than Snowboarder gives, but those proportions hold true. For a while the US was slipping into the “one fifth” of the world’s cases, with India edging up on us, but we’ve puled ahead, to our detriment.
That said, states declaring a record number of daily highs (seven day average) are still few. Over this past weekend, only New Hampshire seems to have set a new record. The US daily reported new cases has dropped very significantly from its record high a few weeks ago.
For major airports you might have 6-8 controllers on duty during peak times and 3 or 4 during the wee hours. Plus 1 or 2 technicians. Times 3 shifts times 7 days. The point is closing the whole thing down for a couple days to have time to sterilize the facility. There’s also the need to quarantine the ill plus anyone they interacted with in the couple days before the illness was detected to ensure nobody else is nurturing an undetected infection. That often amounts to about half the total staff who’re now out for a week-ish awaiting test results. Which headcount shortage in turn affects how they can reopen after the sterilization.
IOW, the way to stop COVID cold in a microcosm is to do accurate contact tracing and hard isolation of everyone who might have picked it up. Who knew?
Radar facilities are much larger. The ones for major airports have anywhere from 15 to 30 people on duty at a time. The dozen enroute centers that control the non-airport traffic have 150 people on duty at a crack. Again 24/7 but with half or less of that during the wee hours. When one of those goes down w a COVID case it’s a BIG deal.
Switching gears …
We had a post in one of these threads recently from an educator. When one school teacher goes down w COVID they end up pulling 10 other teachers and staff out of service pending testing. They just don’t have the excess staffing to battle through having any of their staff get sick.
It’s the multiplier and the testing delays and test inaccuracies that make disease avoidance sooo much more effective than disease response. If only …
Yep. I was about to post this. Hasn’t been this bad in forty years, when we had mass riots at the coronation of Queen Beatrix. I’ve seen the footage from the past two days, it reminded me of ye olden days when football (soccer) hooligans used to set fire to lampposts and bus stops. Fortunately 99% of the population complies with the new rules and the protests are widely condemned. However our own tiny aspiring autocrat Thierry Baudet has been inciting people in a way comparable to what Trump did three weeks ago. Not pretty.
I haven’t seen anything yet posted about this and it may fall under @LSLGuy’s caveat in his Post # 262, but I thought it should be mentioned:
What troubled me most about this new California strain is that it may be resistant to the vaccine.
Some damning evidence has already come to light. State health officials reported this week that a patient in Monterey County who had tested positive for an infection in April and recovered has now been infected with B.1.426.
That suggests that the new strain may be able to hide its presence from antibodies created after exposure to other versions of the virus — a phenomenon known as “immune escape.” If that’s the case, it might undermine the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and antibody-based treatments.
Of course, there is much more research to be done. Maybe this won’t end up as bad as it looks at first glance.
It’s a bit of a jump from “this new strain bypasses acquired immunity from earlier infection” to “this new strain bypasses vaccination-acquired immunity”.
In particular, someone’s acquired immunity targeted something about the virus to attack. That something was selected by the blind forces of rapid evolution in that person’s immune system. And may, by good or bad luck, have picked something well-conserved among SARS-nCoV-2 strains or something subject to widespread variation as SARS-nCoV-2 itself undergoes rapid evolution.
Conversely, the vaccines have been designed to target something very distinctive and believed to be fundamental to SARS-nCoV-2. Such that any plausible mutation will still express what the vaccine is targeting.
It was never an impossibility that SARS-nCoV-2 might mutate to slip away from the current vaccines. This latest occurrence doesn’t alter that.
Having said all the above, I have this cheery thought as well.
The ideal way to create a vaccine resistant variant of a disease is to first have widespread infection, then have a slow vaccine rollout, and finally have large areas of the state / country / world that never achieve a critical mass of vaccinated individuals. That is totally daring the disease to mutate out from under the vaccine.
Don’t tempt Mother Nature. For She is a cast-iron Bitch and you are but road-kill.
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Double-masking is a sensible and easy way to lower your risk, especially if circumstances require you to spend more time around others — like in a taxi, on a train or plane, or at an inauguration.
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One big advantage of double-masking that I’ve found is that it creates a better fit and closes the gaps around the edge of your mask.
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This is something simple and effective that people can do right now without ordering more and better (more expensive) masks.