Originally Posted by Bwana:
Once again, don't come in this thread with some kind of political agenda, or you will be shown the door. If you want to go that route, there is a thread about this in DC.
Originally Posted by Dartgod:
People, there is a lot of good information in this thread, let's try to keep the petty bickering to a minimum.
We all have varying opinions about the impact of this, the numbers, etc. We will all never agree with each other. But we can all keep it civil.
Thanks!
Click here for the original OP:
Spoiler!
Apparently the CoronaVirus can survive on a inanimate objects, such as door knobs, for 9 days.
California coronavirus case could be first spread within U.S. community, CDC says
By SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA, JACLYN COSGROVE
FEB. 26, 2020 8:04 PM
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating what could be the first case of novel coronavirus in the United States involving a patient in California who neither recently traveled out of the country nor was in contact with someone who did.
“At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown. It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of COVID-19, which would be the first time this has happened in the United States,” the CDC said in a statement. “Community spread means spread of an illness for which the source of infection is unknown. It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveler who was infected.”
The individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County, according to the state Department of Public Health.
The CDC said the “case was detected through the U.S. public health system — picked up by astute clinicians.”
Officials at UC Davis Medical Center expanded on what the federal agency might have meant by that in an email sent Wednesday, as reported by the Davis Enterprise newspaper.
The patient arrived at UC Davis Medical Center from another hospital Feb. 19 and “had already been intubated, was on a ventilator, and given droplet protection orders because of an undiagnosed and suspected viral condition,” according to an email sent by UC Davis officials that was obtained by the Davis Enterprise.
The staff at UC Davis requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, but because the patient didn’t fit the CDC’s existing criteria for the virus, a test wasn’t immediately administered, according to the email. The CDC then ordered the test Sunday, and results were announced Wednesday. Hospital administrators reportedly said in the email that despite these issues, there has been minimal exposure at the hospital because of safety protocols they have in place.
A UC Davis Health spokesperson declined Wednesday evening to share the email with The Times.
Since Feb. 2, more than 8,400 returning travelers from China have entered California, according to the state health department. They have been advised to self-quarantine for 14 days and limit interactions with others as much as possible, officials said.
“This is a new virus, and while we are still learning about it, there is a lot we already know,” Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California.”
It is not clear how the person became infected, but public health workers could not identify any contacts with people who had traveled to China or other areas where the virus is widespread. That raises concern that the virus is spreading in the United States, creating a challenge for public health officials, experts say.
“It’s the first signal that we could be having silent transmission in the community,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “It probably means there are many more cases out there, and it probably means this individual has infected others, and now it’s a race to try to find out who that person has infected.”
On Tuesday, the CDC offered its most serious warning to date that the United States should expect and prepare for the coronavirus to become a more widespread health issue.
“Ultimately, we expect we will see coronavirus spread in this country,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “It’s not so much a question of if, but a question of when.”
According to the CDC’s latest count Wednesday morning, 59 U.S. residents have tested positive for the new strain of coronavirus — 42 of whom are repatriated citizens from a Diamond Princess cruise. That number has grown by two since Messonnier’s last count Tuesday, although the CDC was not immediately available to offer details on the additional cases.
More than 82,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported globally, and more than 2,700 people have died, with the majority in mainland China, the epicenter of the outbreak.
But public health leaders have repeatedly reminded residents that the health risk from the novel coronavirus to the general public remains low.
“While COVID-19 has a high transmission rate, it has a low mortality rate,” the state Department of Public Health said in a statement Wednesday. “From the international data we have, of those who have tested positive for COVID-19, approximately 80% do not exhibit symptoms that would require hospitalization. There have been no confirmed deaths related to COVID-19 in the United States to date.”
CDC officials have also warned that although the virus is likely to spread in U.S. communities, the flu still poses a greater risk.
Gostin said the news of potential silent transmission does not eliminate the possibility of containing the virus in the U.S. and preventing an outbreak.
“There are few enough cases that we should at least try,” he said. “Most of us are not optimistic that that will be successful, but we’re still in the position to try.”
(CNN)With about 50 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine coming this year and about 1.3 billion slated to be manufactured next year, Pfizer is working to meet US demands for more doses, company CEO Albert Bourla said Monday.
The 50 million doses scheduled for distribution this year have already been manufactured, the CEO said, and half will go to the United States, while the other 25 million will go to the rest of the world.
Next year, Bourla expects US and European manufacturers to create another 1.3 billion doses. Pfizer and its partner, BioNTech, are maxing out capacity on both sides of the Atlantic, he said.
Of those, about 100 milliion will go to the States in the first quarter of 2021, per an agreement between the government and the vaccine makers, and 1.2 billion will be sent to other countries, he said.
The US government would like another 100 million doses in the second quarter, but as of right now, there is no deal in place and Bourla sees the third quarter of 2021 being a more realistic target.
Sounds like our company is going to be offering the vaccine to those who want it starting next week. Not sure which one we're getting yet but I'm guessing Moderna. They didn't even send the Pfizer vaccine to our hospital system which was perfectly capable of storing it. [Reply]
Of those, about 100 million will go to the States in the first quarter of 2021, per an agreement between the government and the vaccine makers, and 1.2 billion will be sent to other countries, he said.
Good thing we have the others coming soon. That's only 50 million vaccinations. We have a population of 330 million.
We don’t need 330 millions vaccinations immediately. Senior citizens aged 65+ make up roughly 16% of the population. Get them this vaccine and the death rate will be almost completely eliminated.
Originally Posted by RunKC:
We don’t need 330 millions vaccinations immediately. Senior citizens aged 65+ make up roughly 16% of the population. Get them this vaccine and the death rate will be almost completely eliminated.
That would be a great start
I suppose that depends on how you define "almost completely eliminated."
COVID-19 has killed 52,000 Americans younger than 65. [Reply]
Originally Posted by ChiliConCarnage:
Whoa, I didn't know we had 500 million doses of the AZ/Oxford ordered. Hopefully the results turn out good.
Initial data isn't as promising as the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine, but still something like 70% effective. Good enough for FDA approval
There's still something funny going on with that vaccine though. Here's a good read on it.
Originally Posted by :
Oxford/AZ Vaccine Efficacy Data
By Derek Lowe 23 November, 2020
As of this morning, we have a first look at the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine’s efficacy in clinical trials via press releases from both organizations. The number in the headlines says about 70% efficacy, but there’s more to the story.
Here’s the landscape so far: we have results from Pfizer and from Moderna, both of them developing mRNA-based coronavirus vaccines, and both showing efficacy in the 90 to 95% range. The Oxford effort is a different platform, though, with key similarities and key differences. It relies on another virus (a chimpanzee-derived adenovirus) that has had its original DNA genetic payload removed and substituted with the appropriate DNA to produce the full-length Spike protein of the coronavirus. In this construct, the original viral “leader sequence” at the beginning of this DNA has been replaced with another, the leader sequence found for the human tissue plasminogen activase (TPA) protein, because this gave better expression and a better immune response. These adenovirus particles can’t replicate – they don’t have the DNA to express the proteins needed to do that. But they do have all the viral machinery needed to infect a human patient’s cells and force them to express the coronavirus Spike protein, which will set off an immune response that should provide protection against later exposure to the real coronavirus.
So both the adenovirus vector and the mRNA vaccines hijack the protein expression capabilities of a vaccinated person’s own cells, making them produce SARS-Cov-2 Spike protein constructs and thus setting off the immune system. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines we’ve seen so far actually express a form of the Spike protein that has a couple of proline residues mutated to make it more stable, whereas the Oxford/AZ vaccine is using the straight wild-type Spike sequence – there’s one difference. Another big one is of course that the Oxford/AZ vaccine is using a completely difference virus to deliver a DNA sequence, whereas the mRNA vaccines are skipping up to a later stage in protein production and slipping messenger RNA directly into the cells.
What was announced today is that they have quite different results for two different dosing regimens. This interim analysis was run when 131 cases had been accrued across trials in the UK, Brazil, and South Africa across about 24,000 trial participants (treatment and control groups). In the treatment group, 8,895 participants received two full doses of the vaccine, spaced one month apart, and 2,741 patients got a half dose at first, followed by a full dose a month later. And the efficacy rates for these two dosing regimes were very different: 62% for the two-full-dose group and 90% for the half/full group. I do not see a breakdown of how those 131 cases partitioned across the two groups, but the overall N has to be higher for the first, doesn’t it? I’d like to know what the statistics are for the 90% efficacy number, for sure.
Update: many people had been wondering earlier today why there was a lower-dose initial group at all. Reuters reports that it was a dosing mistake in the UK, that the investigators were then stuck with. Immunology strikes again!
Update: OK, this is getting even worse. Reports are today (Tuesday, 24th) that the 90% efficacy group had an age cap, with no one over 55 in the trial, whereas the other dosing group didn’t. Apparently the confidence intervals on these two efficacy numbers are wide enough to overlap, which is what I was worried about in the update to the next paragraph. Oxford and AstraZeneca should have thought much harder about how they were going to present these numbers.
Why might there be such a significant split in efficacy? My own wild guess is that perhaps the two-full-dose protocol raised too many antibodies to the adenovirus vector itself, and made the second dose less effective. This has always been a concern with the viral-vector idea. It is, in fact, why this effort is using a chimpanzee adenovirus – because humans haven’t been exposed to it yet. Earlier work in this field kicked off with more common human-infective adenoviruses (particularly Ad5), but there are significant numbers of people in most global populations who have already had that viral infection and have immune memory for it. Dosing people with an Ad5 vector would then run into patients whose immune systems slap down the vaccine before it has a chance to work. That’s not the case for a chimpanzee-infecting form, naturally (few if any people have ever been exposed to that one!) but the two-dose regime may have run into just that problem. Immunology being what it is, though, there are surely other explanations, but that’s the one that occurs to me. Update: there’s always the outside nasty chance that the smaller N in the 90% group is giving a number that won’t hold up. I would hope this isn’t the case, but without a better look at the statistics, it’s not possible to rule that out.
Now, I’ve seen people speculating this morning that these numbers may be better than they look, because they believe that these trials monitored patients by PCR tests rather than by symptoms. If that were the case, then yes, that’s a finer net than the Pfizer and Moderna trials used and it would certainly affect the efficacy readouts. But I don’t think it is: looking at the published trial protocol for the US trial, the cases are defined as “SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR-positive symptomatic illness”, and the patients have to show symptoms of the disease (see Table 13). Update: I have been unable to find published protocols for the UK/Brazil/South Africa trials that went into today’s numbers, but I have no reason to think that they differ on this point. So I don’t think we can explain the lower efficacy by saying that they were finding asymptomatic people as well: the trial excludes asymptomatic people from its endpoint definition. The rate of asymptomatic cases in the treatments and controls will be determined in these trials (see section 8.5.2.1 of the protocol) but those aren’t the numbers we’re seeing today.
So from an efficacy standpoint, the choice is clear: if this vaccine is going to be deployed, the half-dose/full-dose regime is the obvious choice, since otherwise you can do the same amount of work dosing your population, use up more vaccine. doing it, and get notably worse results. How about from the safety side of things? The Oxford release says just that “No serious safety events related to the vaccine have been identified”, and the AZ one says “No serious safety events related to the vaccine have been confirmed”. I would have preferred to hear more about local and systemic reactions, as we did with the Pfizer and Moderna releases, but that seems to be it. Readers will recall that a participant in the UK trial developed transverse myelitis, and that the trial was stopped in the US for about a month. (Note: the US trial is the two-full-dose version). Update: they say now that they’re going to ask to switch to the apparently more effective dosing regime in the US trial.
Overall, I would have to think that Oxford and AZ are disappointed with the results from the two-full-dose regime and will be actively trying to track down the reason for the better performance in the the half/full dosing, which one would expect to be the way the vaccine is eventually used. How many of the other trials that are being run are using that protocol, one wonders? This could still be an effective weapon in the pandemic, but the stories are starting to differentiate. Pfizer (very effective, tough distribution and storage), Moderna (very effective, easier distribution/storage than Pfizer, but perhaps stronger safety reactions), and now Oxford/AZ (widely varying efficacy depending on dosing, easier distribution/storage, safety details TBD). The next vaccine effort to report efficacy will be J&J, another adenovirus vector, and this time with a one-shot dose. The landscape is starting to fill in a bit!
Originally Posted by Donger:
I suppose that depends on how you define "almost completely eliminated."
COVID-19 has killed 52,000 Americans younger than 65.
Yes I would consider the vaccination of people in the age group making up 83% of the deaths in our country from this virus to be a massive success. That would eliminate most of the deaths.
The younger people will get their vaccination soon [Reply]
Originally Posted by RunKC:
Yes I would consider the vaccination of people in the age group making up 83% of the deaths in our country from this virus to be a massive success. That would eliminate most of the deaths.
The younger people will get their vaccination soon
Yes, it makes complete sense to vaccinate as planned. But there's a common misconception that very few people under 65 have died from COVID-19. Just pointing out the facts. [Reply]
Originally Posted by TLO:
Sounds like our company is going to be offering the vaccine to those who want it starting next week. Not sure which one we're getting yet but I'm guessing Moderna. They didn't even send the Pfizer vaccine to our hospital system which was perfectly capable of storing it.
I got confirmed for mine on Friday morning. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Donger:
Yes, it makes complete sense to vaccinate as planned. But there's a common misconception that very few people under 65 have died from COVID-19. Just pointing out the facts.
In the context of 330 million Americans, that is a few. [Reply]
