Yeah, that problem is quite a ways down the road.
87,672,258 total cases
1,892,074 dead
63,145,541 recovered
In the US:
21,857,616 total cases
369,990 dead
13,024,142 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
New benchmarks for the US today in both daily new cases (260,973) and daily deaths (4100). For comparison, 2,977 people died in the 2001 WTC bombing.
New Record Highs in Daily Reported Cases (seven day average) on January 6 2021
Rhode Island (really shooting up fast)
Louisiana (also shooting up fast)
Texas (also)
Surprisingly, that seems to be it, although seven states had record highs yesterday (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma )
From the BBC
The UK government is working closely with the manufacturer, to ensure the drugs - tocilizumab and sarilumab - continue to be available to UK patients.
As well as saving more lives, the treatments speed up patients’ recovery and reduce the length of time that critically-ill patients need to spend in intensive care by about a week.
Both appear to work equally well and add to the benefit already found with a cheap steroid drug called dexamethasone.
The article gives brief details of a study in 800 intensive care patients.
j
I don’t think this has been posted in this thread yet, though I’ve been kind of distracted the last day or so.
People with no symptoms transmit more than half of all cases of the novel coronavirus, according to a model developed by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
[ . . . ]
Fifty-nine percent of all transmission came from people without symptoms, under the model’s baseline scenario. That includes 35 percent of new cases from people who infect others before they show symptoms and 24 percent that come from people who never develop symptoms at all.
Here’s a new BMJ article about the evidence to support the UK’s decision to go with an interval of up to 12 weeks between first and second dose of both the Pfizer and the AZ vaccines:
Covid-19 vaccination: What’s the evidence for extending the dosing interval?
TLDR on evidence:
AZ: well, there’s a bit.
Pfizer: uh…
It’s very much a “balanced” article, giving (loosely speaking) some “for” and some “against” positions. As examples:
For:
But Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chief investigator into the trial of this [AZ] vaccine, said that extending the gap between vaccines made biological sense. “Generally, a longer gap between vaccine doses leads to a better immune response, with the second dose causing a better boost. (With HPV vaccine for girls, for example, the gap is a year and gives better responses than a one month gap.) From the Oxford vaccine trials, there is 70% protection after the first dose up to the second dose, and the immune response was about three times greater after the second dose when the second dose was delayed, comparing second dose after four weeks versus second dose after 2-3 months,” he told The BMJ , referring to the MHRA’s summary of product characteristics.
“With the Pfizer vaccine, there are no published data comparing shorter and longer gaps between doses because all participants had the second dose at 3-4 weeks. However, the biology is straightforward and will be the same as with all vaccines . . . The immune system remembers the first dose and will respond whether the later dose is at three weeks or three months.”
Against:
Paul Bieniasz, a retrovirologist from Rockefeller University who is studying how the virus can acquire mutations, has warned that the UK was taking a gamble that risked fostering vaccine resistant forms of the virus. He told the news site STAT, “My concern, as a virologist, is that if you wanted to make a vaccine-resistant strain, what you would do is to build a cohort of partially immunized individuals in the teeth of a highly prevalent viral infection.”
It’s worth reading all of the (fairly short) article.
j
California’s hospitals, morgues, funeral homes, etc are still buckling:
Unfortunately I think we’ll go past the two million dead mark in the next seven days.
Aye; that’s pretty much a certainty, barring discovery of an immediately effective cure/prophylactic.
14,000 x 7 = 98,000 and the gap is only 95,000 or so at the moment.
Interesting: Worldometer had 374,124 dead a couple of hours ago, which was quite a startling number
88,503,304 total cases
1,906,749 dead
63,612,605 recovered
In the US:
22,132,045 total cases
374,124 dead
13,143,317 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Earlier this week in Austria, the government has decided to extend the existing lockdown, which was to have expired on 18 January, until 24 January. After that time, it was planned to allow restaurants to open during the daytime only, but most other shops (apart from essential ones like grocery store and pharmacies) were to remain closed. However, the number of new daily infections has been on the rise again (from a post-holiday low of 1391 on 2 January up to 2540 yesterday) and so today it’s being considered whether to further extend the existing lockdown to the end of January.
Meanwhile, with only 0.07% of the population vaccinated so far, Austria’s vaccination program is almost the slowest in the European Union. (Only France, at 0.01%, is worse.)
There’s a website called Time to Herd. It does a simple calculation of using how many vaccines given a day to calculate how long it would take at that rate to get to 70% of the population vaccinated. IF (big IF), herd immunity is reached at 70%, and the current rate of vaccinations hold constant, the website gives the number of days until herd immunity.
The US will reach herd immunity by that calculation in 1,195 days.
Israel will reach herd immunity in 101 days.
The UK will take 1,928 days.
Norway will take 5,795 days.
Since the roll out has been pretty slow so far, most of the other countries besides Israel are in the thousands of days. Hopefully, the rate of vaccination will increase.
The UK also “approved” the vaccine today. (The difference is that the EU has licensed the vaccine, the UK has maid it available for use on a temporary basis).
UK stocks not expected before March.
j
New Record High daily new cases (seven day average) on January 7 2021
Rhode Island (still shooting up steeply)
Connecticut
Delaware
Alabama
Texas
Arkansas
Quebec is imposing a curfew from 8pm-5am with this new lockdown, starting Jan 9 and continuing for 4 weeks. This is the first curfew implemented in Canada since the start of the pandemic, this article notes:
Hopefully it helps! The numbers are ever-increasing these days.
Maybe this isn’t the right thread to ask this question… so a mod is welcome to move it somewhere else-- maybe the general COVID discussion.
Is this new rule and others y’all have cited in Europe, to wit, extending the curfew by a few hours for the next 2-3 weeks, then allowing <whatevers> to open, then closing them a week later, yeah schools are open, then they’re not, then they are… are these changing/shifting-in-the-moment strategies having any positive effect? How can locking stuff down for, say, two weeks really make much difference? Are the local govts doing this just so people won’t rebel over what IMHO needs to happen, namely, a hard lockdown for the next six months or something.
As the article headline says in the box: “how much difference will it make?”
I ask, “how much difference can it possibly make?”
(I know there’s no clear answer. It just seems to me that a haphazard approach invites haphazard results.)
I think you have to factor in the latest version of Covid - it is having a very serious impact in the UK despite lockdowns - which area now slated to go on for at least 4 weeks with a tacit hint that this could be very much longer - at least another 2 or 3 weeks more.
In fact I personally get the feeling that the progress of the vaccination program is likely to be the main consideration in unlocking rather than the fall of infections.
Our recent history of lockdown is that a couple of weeks prior to Xmas a newish set of protocols were introduced, with lockdown levels from 1 to 3 being implemented, that went up to 1 to 4 pretty quickly and the vast majority of the UK was either 3 or 4. (I will link to the lockdown levels in a moment – just stay with me for a bit)
They had an alleged 2 day easing of restrictions for Xmas(but I personally beleive that this was widely breached), meantime most of the area outside London was on level 4 London on Level 3 and the more sparsely populated counties on Level 3.
We had lots of whining about why the most populous part of the country was on L3 with infection rates very nearly the same as L4 parts of the country.
It almost appeared to be working, there was a hesitation and small reduction of infections for a few days, but since then it has absolutely shot upwards, especially in the London zone (which is basicly a part circle of UK around 80 miles across centred on London)
We have now reached a crisis, we have now got implementation of L5 pretty much everywhere, its a lockdown and London Mayor has announced a state of medical emergency due to the impending collapse of medical services - and this allows for much more draconian action, transfers of staff and patients and opening of stanby facilities.
If you look on the worldmeters site and view what has taken place in the UK, you’ll see what happened in the period from around 5 Dec onwards - worth noting that there were calls for earlier and harder lockdowns around 7th Dec including the closure of all schools but the administration were slow to respond - by around 10th Dec for the initial raising of the lockdown level to a few more days to teh highest level.
What that means is this, earlier lockdowns are way better than later ones, once you are already starting to be concerned, its already way too late. Short lockdowns are a waste of time, actually they may be counterproductive because any slight fall in infection rates leads to demands to unlock and for complacency which leads to an increase in infections with an absolute vengeance
COVID is raging and still Trump has managed to make it the second most important story.
Here’s some news: