Covid vaccine for kids under 5 is delayed. The two-dose trial failed to generate enough immunity in the older portion of the 6 months to 5 years age group, so there will be further testing with a third dose included.
I think this may not be behind a paywall due to the subject – not sure, but I wanted to post the news.
Reading further, I realize I made a mistake in summarizing. Any delay might be minimal:
“It is important to note that this adjustment is not anticipated to meaningfully change our expectations that we would file for emergency use authorization and conditional approvals in the second quarter of 2022,” said Kathrin Jansen, head of vaccine research and development for Pfizer in a call with investors.
(From the article I linked above.)
Op-ed: sports & COVID:
Here is a nice chronological/geographical display of COVID in the U.S. I’m not a subscriber to Nat Geo, so if I can see it, I assume everyone can.
Appeals court reinstates Biden’s vaccine policy for businesses, setting up a likely showdown at Supreme Court
That is a fantastic article with FANTASTIC graphics. The monthly display of confirmed cases is REALLY cool.
273,977,023 total cases
5,360,767 dead
245,846,006 recovered
In the US:
51,610,281 total cases
826,719 dead
40,474,346 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
I posted this in the Omicron thread along with the cite, but Orlando has been tresti;g sewage and found that almost 100% of the virus in the sewage was the Omicron variant. And yet, almost all hospitalizations are currently from Delta. More anecdotal evidence that Omicron is less dangerous, although maybe it’s just too early to say.
14 days left, 6,326 deaths to go…
Somehow I’m hearing this to the tune of “99 beers on the wall”.
@Snowboarder_Bo Thank you for continuing to post the daily numbers.
I rarely acknowledge “thank you” posts butIt isn’t because I’m not grateful for the kind words: I am. So please, to everyone who has posted one: you’re welcome and thank you.
I didn’t start the thread for personal gratification and I don’t want to become the focus of the thread so I have quietly let most of them go. I didn’t want people to think I was being rude, tho; hence this post.
Thank you all for the kind words and for your participation in these threads.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming:
Looking at the number of covid deaths per million, it’s weird that the USA is doing worse in this epidemic than any other developed country, and worse than the great majority of developing countries too.
In North America, the US has higher deaths per million than both Canada and Mexico.
Canada vaccination rate for 12+ = 87%
US vaccination rate for 12+ = 70%
Mexico’s death rate is very close to the US, and I would wager there are likely some reporting issues there as well.
Obviously other factors like comorbidity rates (obesity in particular) and population age factor into that as well.
But from what I’m seeing if you took out the “preventable deaths” due to the unvaccinated, which the CDC put at 163,000 in mid-December, you would have a death/1M rate of 1,989 (rather than 2,478). That still isn’t as good as Canada (but is better than Mexico), but tells you that poor vaccine uptake is certainly a large part of the difference.
I don’t have firm evidence for this but I wonder if the narrow window between 1st and 2nd doses inthe USA may have contributed to this as well.
It was 3 weeks early on so I’m sure that many tens of millions were dosed under that regime.
We now know that longer=better and if those people have not been caught with a booster yet it may be that their protection has waned to a point where higher death rates could be expected.
Still applies in 2021. Who knew this would turn into a long-term volunteer job?
I don’t think so because if you look at the stats of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, the vaccinated did very well throughout the summer/fall delta surge.
Here’s another set of thanks!
They’d still do better than unvaccinated by quite some way and the summer was well within the window aforded by even a short-window vaccination regime.
What would be instructive is the fatality rate for vaccinated/unaccinated both in the summer and now.
Estimates in very highly vaccinated Denmark, even for a mild omicron, are bad news due to the sheer numbers overwhelming hospitals.