Obviously, we can’t and don’t want to adopt such distancing measures permanently; they are onerous, damaging to many public-facing industries, and ultimately unsustainable. But we can develop better methods for infectious disease surveillance including more transparencies between nations (unfortunately, China has shown why not every country can be relied upon to provide timely and accurate information, but even cooperation between most major nations can help to identify an outbreak), as well as overall better public hygiene, a “Department of Disease”-level infrastructure to develop and produce new treatments and vaccines for emerging pathogens, and social mores that persuade people to self-isolate, wear masks, and take other precautions when they feel ill, which of course also requires universal access to basic health care and support so that people don’t feel as if they have to work despite being sick.
Obviously any large gathering has the potential to spread contagion by parties who unknowingly carry the pathogen, but it isn’t as if one single event allowed SARS-CoV-2 to become an out of control epidemic; it was people ignoring public health experts and electing to gather with families or go to massive underground events under the assumption that it wouldn’t affect them personally because they are just so special. We can’t prevent every infectious disease from becoming an outbreak, but we can limit the spread and scope of the outbreak such that we don’t have to resort to excessive restrictions and lockdowns, many of which have proven to be ineffective at containing spread anyway. California, for instance, has had an escalating series of lockdown measures including some that are so restrictive as to essentially be counterproductive, e.g. closing outdoor parks and forests, restricting or closing outside dining, et cetera, which resulted in such a backlash of people not following any public health guidance that they might as well just have told everyone to stay at home locked in a closet.
We need more sensible, evidence-based strategies for controlling and tracking outbreaks, along with support by government and public leaders instead of health authorities having to fight political resistance to even the more moderate and reasonable guidance, and be able to apply a reasonable, graduated response to infectious disease threats, combined with engendering public trust in government and health authorities to do the smart thing even if it means some personal sacrifices.
Nebraska has a 7 day rolling death per capita rate of .56. compare that to New York’s rate of 1.02 or California’s rate of 1.38 or Arizona’s rate of 2.3.
Most states would do well to be in Nebraska’s position.
My cite is any immunology textbook written in the last couple of decades. These are not novel insights; it is basic knowledge in the field.
The “fast job on the current covid vaccines,” is a result of the an unprecedented effort to develop, test, and deploy multiple vaccines inside of a year. We don’t know by how much delaying the second vaccine shot on the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines will make them less effective but it is clear that the effectiveness of a single shot is around 50% after the first 14-21 days, and that dramatic improvements to efficacy only show up after the second ‘booster’ shot. That may be in part because of the curtailed duration of the double blind study and not attempting an adjunct study to assess the effects of different intervals, but again, we want to go by data-driven science, not a random guess at what might be good enough.
Earlier in the pandemic we had people ‘guessing’ that hydroxychloroquine would be an effective life-saving treatment without any evidence and advocated for its wide application, and the we found out from the data that use of hydroxychloroquine actually correlated with increased mortality. Now we have people wanting to guess at the effectiveness of half of the demonstrated vaccine protocol, or hedge against the ability of companies and health departments being able to replace and distribute second shot reserves in sufficient time to still get good long term effectiveness, and any other amount of guesswork instead of applying good science and policy; and all of this because various governments, politicians, and leaders fucked up by not encouraging the public to take this seriously, or worse yet, declared the crisis to be a “plan-demic” and convincing people that wearing masks or maintaining distance was some kind of serious infringement upon personal liberty.
Yes, it has, and understanding of how long term immunity is developed has grown, but immunologists still cannot determine de novo how effective a vaccine will be or what effect modifying established protocols will have without without performing clinical trials.
That is a patently untrue claim. I have made no prediction of “what alterations to a booster schedule established in the last 8 months will mean”. What I have said is that we know from actual data what the effectiveness of the existing protocol is, and we do not know how much modifying that protocol will have other than that it could have significant undesired consequences. Any assessment of the efficacy or longevity made beyond that without some basis in clinical data are blind speculation.
I’m reminded of a recent discussion here about extremely few people were under 18 in the Pfizer trial but they still approved it for 16+. I don’t see a slight increase in the booster window is much more of breach of data following.
The ‘claim’ that I’ve made is that we know what the efficacy of the current protocols for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are based upon clinical trials, and that significantly deviating from the intervals in those trials caries a risk of reduced efficacy. I cannot provide a specific ‘cite’ that this will occur with the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines because no data exists and no trials have been conducted to assess the effective of variation in interval on long term efficacy, so we can only go from basic knowledge of immunology and how the immune cellular ‘memory’ (e.g. memory B cells and memory T cells) develops.
Now, are we done this hijack in your effort to somehow prove that I must be wrong in some way you can’t actually identify, or are you going to continue on with this nonsense?
Have we? When I looked last week New Hampshire had only given out about 1/3 of the doses distributed to nursing homes, far less than hospitals and the prison system had at that point. It’d be nice to think we’re doing much worse than average given how awful that is, but…
The rollout in Israel seems to show it usually takes about 10-14 days for the vaccine to start showing effects and gives about 50% immunity at that point (before second dose).
We get regular updates from the Governor and there is a dashboard for the vaccinations but they never come out and answer what I would think are the obvious questions. As best as I can tell we’ve vaccinated all the willing nursing home patients which is 80% of them. I don’t have a cite. The staff was a different percentage and is more like 40%. I’m not sure why the resistance but they don’t seem to realize we’re vaccinating based on classifications so if you miss your chance at getting it at the nursing home then the next opportunity is your age bracket. There aren’t people roaming the planet hoping you’ve changed your mind.
But I do know we’ve gone on to the next groups so I take it we’re done with the nursing home tier.
Forgot the time line. we hit 130% of the nursing home number (based on over 60 crowd) and that seems to correspond with the advancement of the next tier of people who can get it.
That happened on 12-Jan. So I’m thinking next week we see a positive trend in the death count because some of the people would have gotten it well before the 12th. We’re also seeing a significant downturn in hospitalization in my state (Ohio). So the potential is certainly there for some good news.