Sure. Buf if this puts us back to where we were in April of last year, we are in a much better place to keep the level low.
OTOH, a bunch of people without electricity crowded into emergency shelters is no good.
The regulations provide for the option of a fixed penalty without trial, like a traffic fine, without actually saying what the amount would be, or how it would be implemented.
That would depend on some other regulation or legislation which I haven’t seen.
A trial for a fine could take minutes, like a trial for a traffic fine, and might not even require the presence of the accused. That may have been what happened here.
The other interesting thing about the regulations, which I am not qualified to interpret, is (it seems to me), that (correct) information provided on the location form is legally exempt, and won’t be used to prosecute some other offence.
But if the 5G is out, they’ll be fine.
Yeah, as the fines were announced more or less instantly, I presumed that was a fixed penalty. Whilst a trial for a fine could be a quick affair, it would have a significant lead time (especially at present); and a trial leading to a lengthy prison sentence would presumably have lead time, court time and them a separate appearance for sentencing (I’m presuming from what you see in the news). I haven’t seen the legislation - got a link?
j
At least there’s that.
You’re not saying that they’re going to shelters because their internet is out, right? They’re going because their heat is out. And their electric stoves and water heaters. Did I miss something?
Yes. Without electricity, there’s no 5G causing COVID. (i.e., it’s a joke)
Yes, my point was that, given the ethical issues surrounding Human Challenge studies, they would only be done if they were able to provide data of significant value that could not come from trad phase III studies. And the quote from Andrew Catchpole indicated what some of those data might be.
Looking for a protocol (as I promised) I found instead a couple of interesting publications. This:
-contains a fuller listing of insights that challenge trials can offer. Too much to quote in full under fair use, but I was particularly struck by this:
Measure rapidly the efficacy of vaccines against new viral variants…
I’m inclining to the view that this is perhaps perceived as the major value. If the vaccines need an upgrade every six months, you can’t do a huge prospective trial every time.
The blog also discusses the issue of extrapolating from a pool of young healthy volunteers without comorbidity to (the principal group of concern) the elderly and infirm who do have comorbidities.
It doesn’t really go into detail about the fact that tiny challenge studies will likely only produce data using surrogate markers/endpoints (that is to say, for example, measures of immunological response rather than measures of clinical efficacy) which would not typically be acceptable for product licensing. But hell, in many territories they’re not licensed anyway (emergency use). BTW, the only correlation I’ve seen between immunogenicity and clinical efficacy of a COVID vaccine is in figure 4 of this [PDF warning]
Returning to ethical issues, I also happened across this [page from which a PDF is downloadable]:
https://www.who.int/ethics/publications/key-criteria-ethical-acceptability-of-covid-19-human-challenge/en/
The WHO were on this in May of last year. I’ve only skimmed this, but Table 2 lists risk minimization strategies for volunteers, which is an interesting read.
Initial challenges conducted one by one, with careful titration of viral dose
I think that’s part of the TeGenero legacy.
j
Oh. Too sub-tile for me. 
I’m absolutely worn out from all these events, power outage, now we’re being told to boil our water, my vaccine got canceled… I feel like I’m being fed slowly into a (battery-operated) electric pencil sharpener. But I’m grateful I don’t have to go to one of those shelters. I would have made a lousy pioneer. [/aside]
Carry on.
Shelters don’t appear to be over crowded. They are critical for those that need them, but most don’t. I know dozens of people with power out. Most have chosen to stay home: inside houses is mostly in high 40s, low 50s. Generally not cold enough to make risking the roads and the COVID and maybe the looters worth it. People who have left have gone to family, which is not great, but still vastly less out-and-about exposure than in a normal week.
I’m very very glad we have shelters. I am glad to see they are putting them in large spaces, screening people, and enforcing masks. There’s been no word they were filling up.
Please don’t think I’m arguing against shelters. 300,000 in Oregon were without power, some for days, and some still without. The choice to go to a shelter is balanced by the risk of COVID exposure.
Of course. And the risk of driving, and a not entirely unreasonable fear of your house getting robbed while your gone. It’s a mess. But I don’t think k It’s a COVID friendly mess.
There’s a report out today in NEJM on the Pfizer vaccine vs the various new mutant strains. Serum from vaccinated subjects in the Pfizer trial was tested in vitro against several strains of virus (engineered to replicate the key mutations in the new strains).
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2102017
For technical background this is the assay:
Plaque reduction neutralization test - Wikipedia
The outcome is being incompetently reported by the Guardian with the headline “Pfizer says vaccine offers two-thirds less protection from South African variant”. That is highly misleading - what was reported was a two thirds reduction in neutralizing activity, not in protection from disease. In fact, it’s not bad news at all.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/health/pfizer-vaccine-south-africa-variant/index.html
While the blood serum samples produced less neutralizing antibody activity, it was still enough to neutralize the virus, they wrote in a letter to the journal. This is in line with other studies. And it’s well within what is seen with other viruses, one of the researchers said.
“Although we do not yet know exactly what level of neutralization is required for protection against COVID-19 disease or infection, our experience with other vaccines tells us that it is likely that the Pfizer vaccine offers relatively good protection against this new variant,” Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch and an author of the study, told CNN.
“The reduction in the levels of neutralization against the South African variant of about 2/3 is fairly small compared to variations in neutralization levels generated by vaccines against other viruses that have even more variability in their protein sequences than SARS-CoV-2,” Weaver added.
The comment in CNN may paint too rosy a picture, there’s a lot of uncertainty yet, we have no direct data on efficacy in protection from disease with the variants. But the study is not the terrible news that the Guardian implies.
110,435,805 total cases
2,441,044 dead
85,328,408 recovered
In the US:
28,453,526 total cases
502,544 dead
18,596,497 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
More than half a million dead Americans due to covid-19 now.
Covid-19 has had an effect on US life expectancy:
The news is unlikely to get better in the near future:
This article has a surprisingly accurate title.
If this isn’t everything you need to know, it’ll do until everything comes along. Impressive resource/reference.
j
Not disputing the article or your points. But …
The standard logic used to compute life expectancy implicitly assumes that whatever is going on today has been going on and will keep going on for the rest of the life of the statistical newborn.
To the degree significant COVID mortality proves to be temporary, even if temporary is “10 years”, the life expectancy calcs will overreact to that temporary influence.
IMO what would be far more interesting would be to compute and compare the life expectancy tables for somebody, say, age 50 two years ago with age 50 today. And do the same thing for e.g. 70 yos. ISTM that’s where we’d see a massive hit in life expectancy.
For folks, such as myself, approaching retirement and also sliding into the COVID high mortality risk demographic, I might operate my life and my finances a lot differently if I knew that e.g. making age 80 was all but impossible, versus the age 100 I’ve used as my “just out of reach” planning benchmark pre-COVID.
For those of us who are old enough, COVID being “temporary” may still be most or all of our remaining statistically average life. I hope I’m not quite in that demographic, but so far an awful lot of humanity is trying real hard to make COVID a permanent part of the human condition.
South Africa has the problem that a different strain of the virus has become dominant here, and most of the vaccines being used are ineffective against it.
Fortunately the Johnson & Johnson vaccine works well against it, and they’ve just started rolling out vaccinations now. But it will be a few months before they have enough doses for everyone.
This vaccine also has the advantage that it only requires one dose, and can be stored using regular refrigeration, unlike the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
The J&J vaccine will also be manufactured in South Africa.
If I want to know the impact of COVID on the economy, I’ll ask someone with economic expertise. If I want to know why COVID is rising, falling, or staying the same, I’ll ask an epidemiologist.
I’m over listening to those with economics backgrounds (such as the author of that piece) trying to tell us anything at all about the epidemiological aspects of the pandemic.