…vaccinations in New Zealand will finally begin next week, but the roll-out here will be pretty different to most of the rest of the world due to the way we have managed the pandemic.
The first people to be vaccinated will be the 12,000 workers that are working in Managed Isolation Facilities (MIQ), and they expect that to take 2-3 weeks. The next group will be the household contacts of MIQ workers, then Healthcare and essential workers as well as the most vulnerable, including “the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions.” They expect the process to vaccinate (everyone who wants a vaccine) to take about a year.
I probably missed it, but I couldn’t quite tell from the article why it seems like the process will take significantly longer to reach fewer people than many other countries across the world. Is it that New Zealand has felt secure enough to not request a lot of supply, letting it go to other countries more in need? If so, might positive changes in production that may happen in the near future mean that normal NZ citizens could be able to get their vaccine ahead of schedule? Or is there some other practical concern that complicates it more than most?
Tennessee is still at the 70+ and co-morbidities level. Supposedly, 65+ (my group) will begin in March. We seem to be far behind the curve. I’m not stressing too much about it though. I can handle the isolation until the weather warms up anyway.
It is also pointed out that the hospital where he worked fired him, and no other hospital or medical group will touch him until this is fully resolved. So he’s out of work now for some indefinite time.
…I mean, “longer” is a relative term, and a year to roll out a vaccine nationwide doesn’t really seem like a long time to me? We stopped comparing ourselves to how other nations are handling the pandemic a really long time ago. It isn’t a competition.
The only thing delaying opening the borders isn’t how fast we vaccinate the population: its how fast the rest of the world vaccinates their people. We are in this for the long haul. As a business I’ve been planning on things being closed for 2-3 years. Anything less than that is a bonus.
The vaccines are going through all the standard processes and audits and they have taken a bit of time. We’ve already signed purchase agreements for about 24 million doses of vaccine from four different suppliers, and we have also secured enough vaccine that we are providing for free to people in the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, Samoa, Tonga and Tuvalu. The Ministry of Health are also building a replacement for the National Immunisation Solution as well.
I strongly suspect the vaccination process will take less than a year. But it is much better to under promise and over deliver. We’ve built up a really solid wall of defense against Covid: in the last month we’ve nearly had a couple of “breakouts” into the community (of the new variants) but they were stomped out quickly because everybody played their part. For us the vaccine is just another line of defense.
The entire state of Tyrol has just been sealed off in order to check the spread of the new coronavirus variant that was first detected in South Africa and for which vaccination does not appear to be effective. Germany has closed the relevant sections of its border with Austria, and Austria itself has taken the drastic step of erecting an internal border around Tyrol, guarded by 1200 soldiers and police officers. No one gets out without showing negative results from a recently and independently administered coronavirus test. Mobile testing stations are being deployed on the internal border.
Melbourne has just jumped into * sigh * stage 4 lockdown once more, as a small UK-variant cluster escaped from hotel quarantine is obstinately not going away.
They say five days. I honestly don’t see how that can possibly be enough, with the incubation period being what it is.
This isn’t exactly breaking news, but I’ll post it here anyways. I’s a hell of a resource, and you could spend a week fiddling with the data it contains. Note that it’s a pre-print, and yet to be peer reviewed.
In this analysis of 28.9 million adults living in private households and 46,790 COVID-19 related deaths, we highlight several major findings. First, in the first wave all ethnic minority groups were at elevated risk of COVID-19 related death, and in the second wave, people from South Asian
background, in particular Bangladeshi and Pakistani, but not Black individuals, were at greater risk of COVID-19 death compared to the White British population. Second, geographical factors explained more than half of the differences in COVID-19 mortality risk in the first wave, but much less in the second wave. Third, socio-demographic factors explained a similar proportion of the elevated risks of people from Bangladeshi and Pakistani background in the first and second waves. Fourth, adjusting for comorbidities did not substantially reduce the ethnic difference in risk of COVID-19 related death, after other factors that had already been accounted for.
My Bold - them’s some numbers. A treasure trove of data.
Maybe you’re behind the curve, but I wouldn’t assume that by the groups supposedly eligible. Many states have a whole lot of people eligible, but that doesn’t mean all the people in the first groups to be eligible have been vaccinated, or that people in any eligible group can get appointments or vaccinations.
All generally “first world” countries have about the same ratio between medical capability and population size. If it’d take a year for the US medical industry, competently deployed, to vaccinate the US population, it’ll probably take the German medical industry about a year to do all the Germans and the NZ medical industry about a year to do all the Kiwis.
Each nation has roughly similar surge capability to press-gang paramedics, medical trainees, pharmacy workers, etc., into sticking arms. And similarly a capacity to organize shipping, set up distribution centers, take appointments, etc.
To be sure there are individual differences in countries’ capabilities as well. But those are fine tuning, not orders of magnitude differences.
IOW, NZ being 1/70th the population of e.g. the USA does not mean they can do the job to themselves by themselves in 1/70th the time.
Delaware apparently reported 80k new cases on Wednesday:
That’s more than any state has reported in a single day, and was enough to make the 1-week average numbers for the entire nation to tick up for a day. It’s clearly a correction of some kind, but I don’t see news of it. Anybody know what happened there?
Hawaii is still age 75+ and front line health care workers. Lt. Gov. Green and others are pushing a new 65+ age - won’t make much difference since we’re short on vaccines right now.
Typo on the part of whoever was doing data entry for that website, maybe? None of the other trackers I look at regularly (NYT, WaPo, Worldometers) show anything remotely like that, and neither does Delaware’s state data dashboard.
Both NZ and Australia have taken the chance to do the full drug approval processes before starting their vaccine programs. Probably everyone in countries currently vaccinating is doing so under an emergency or fast-track approval from their relevant authorities.
A big part of that decision to delay is to build confidence in the vaccine being safe, and having fewer people reluctant or refusing, both by a full assessment process and seeing just what side-effects emerge.
And we are in the enviable position of being able to wait a few more months to increase vaccination rates.
An alternative explanation is that he was creating opportunities to vaccinate his friends and family. Support from the medical profession might indicate that he was acting ethically, while still leaving open the possibility that he was acting against management instructions. In this scenario, the question isn’t if he was breaking Texas regulations, but if he was doing an end-run around hospital protocols.
I don’t know how he got reported in the first place. It may be that the court case was subordinate to getting fired, rather than the cause of.
It’s predicated on the belief that the outbreak is already contained. The only new cases that might show up in the next 5 days are people who got infected a week ago.
If any new cases do show up, it will have to start again, but the 5 day restrictions emphasizes the fact that the point where they really needed the effective restrictions was at quarantine two weeks ago.