NHS planning to start covid vaccination of under 50s by end of January
hsj.co.uk
hsj.co.uk
There is no excess mortality for those under 14, as covid goes after the ACE2 receptor, which mostly gets activated at puberty.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/parenting/coronavirus-chi...
Getting kids back to school seems like a high priority.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lettergram/covid19-analysi...
In terms of what that means, if you're 15 - 45; 1 per 1000 people die in a given year.
This year it'll be 1.2 per 1000, for the 15 - 45 age range.[1]
This goes across the board, for 45-64 you're looking at an increase from 1/500 to 1.2/500... etc, etc.
edit-to-add:
I recall during our new parent class the lecture where they were discouraging the use of pain drugs during birth because it increased the chance of a bad outcome by 2x or 4X. (I can't remember the actual value the nurse said.)
When I asked what is the actual chance of a bad outcome and what is 2x of that. She didn't know and didn't like me pointing out in front of the class that 2x was probably still pretty close to zero.
Sweden, Belarus and now Switzerland are proving that if you don't do lockdowns you get ... nothing. Same kind of epidemic as everywhere else. Nothing out of the ordinary and a year that's comparable to any flu year.
Look at the data for parts of Switzerland that didn't lock down for the second wave (which is most of it, including where I live). It goes into remission anyway, without overflowing hospitals or mass deaths.
Remember that the only reason you believe deaths would be far higher without lockdowns is epidemiologists predicted that. But they have a long track record of making predictions that are always wrong. This time they were wrong again, just like all the other times. There was never any experience based justification for lockdowns or even restrictions of any form: only models, which have turned out to be buggy and unrealistic.
It's definitely not comparable to any flu year, although definitely not crazy bad (unlike other countries).
In case of Poland, with ~5-10% infected population, the last month was the most deadly since the last decade (and possibly - since the WW2):
https://infogram.com/liczba-zgonow-w-dobie-epidemii-1hnp27w9...
But look at total mortality so far in Sweden for 2020. Nothing special, on track to be a normal year. They had a very mild 2019 so it'll probably be higher than that, but nothing special in context. Same for Switzerland.
It's definitely not comparable to any flu year
I suspect you're using the word "comparable" differently to me. Biologically, sure it is. It hits the older a bit harder and the young not at all, so in some ways it's actually better than flu. However with flu since ~2000 there have been vaccines, and for COVID there isn't, so that makes it a bit worse. But if you widen your historical context and look at years before the flu vaccines arrived, then it's entirely comparable to flu years in the sense that mortality numbers are ending up very similar or even the same.
Look at the long term data for Sweden to put things in perspective:
https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...
Or for the UK
http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/
The world has seen far worse within living memory.
W.R.T. Poland, you didn't have a COVID first wave at all, and your second is correlated with the rest of Europe so you're going to be "doubling up" compared to some other places. But your epidemic peaked on November 11th, which means death will also soon peak, and therefore your results will look hardly different to other countries, none of which have experienced the huge waves of death that were supposedly going to engulf any country that didn't lock down. That's what matters: not whether COVID is 10% or 30% worse than a typical post-vaccine flu wave, or whether it's the same as a pre-vaccine flu wave. Those are all minor details. What matters is that the world is being put through crazy totalitarian restrictions and evil based on predictions that it'd be 10,000x worse than flu. And those predictions are all totally, completely, unambiguously wrong.
The productivity of working from home would go WAY up with this, so you could keep higher risk groups from interacting for longer (at least in my household - a kid running around is a MAJOR distraction)
Also, non paywalled take on the news:
https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/20/covid-vaccine-to-roll-out-to-...
"The HSJ says the plan it has seen lays out the priority groups for receiving the vaccine, and the dates they'll be offered it:
Beginning of December: Healthcare workers, care home residents and care home staff
Mid-December: People aged 80 or over
Late December: Those aged 70 to 80
Early January: Everyone aged 65 to 70, as well as all high and moderate risk under 65s Mid-January: Everyone aged 50 to 65
Late January: Everyone else over the age of 18 (but most of this group would be vaccinated during March, the report says)"
Didn't realise it was paywalled, sorry.
And it's going to be a similar situation in January and February, sure Bntch/Pfizer will produce a decent amount of vaccines specifically for the European market in Belgium and Germany, but again that's going to be hardly enough for everyone over the age of 18 in the UK - especially given the fact that those doses will have to be shared with all other European nations.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-20/eu-could-...
Once both are approved, assume that production can be ramped up even further.
This is my general rule in life: do what the professionals do.
Of course I have family members who are completely mistrusting of, say, medical professionals, and believe crap on the internet instead.
> I can't imagine taking a vaccine for covid anytime soon, least of all as the first round.
Well good for you, unless you're a doctor or nurse, you can’t. And by the time you ^are^ eligible, there will be millions of others who have the vaccine, and more data.
Granted, not the months or years of data you usually see with a vaccine, but that’s as abnormal as everything else these days…
You can extrapolate long term data from SARS and MERS for tail risks of contracting COVID; but there's no other similar immunizations to extrapolate from.
By the time a vaccine is available for me (not in any risk categories; fairly poor access to COVID testing in my county, which I assume would mean poor access to vaccines, too), I'd guess we would have a lot more data on any immediate negative effects, so there's some confidence building; but it's still a choice between an unknowable risk and an unknowable risk.
Balanced against long term unknowable personal health risk as you say.
In the end my pov is it's better to get on with living now and if a vaccine offers that then I'll take it.
This is the very first one, and on an accelerated schedule.
So the answer to your question is unknown, and whoever goes first gets to be part of the large study answering that question.
Personally I'm going to wait for either a conventional vaccine, or at least a year or so by lots of other people. (It helps that I'm 90% sure I had it already, and I'm low risk on top of that.)
Plus severe side effects would have been seen during phase 3 trials anyway.
There haven’t been other approved mRNA vaccines, period. And COVID just isn’t that big of a concern for most people.
There’s every reason for people to decide they don’t want to rush out to get this highly innovative and novel vaccine injected into their bodies.
That said, I'd still rush out and get it. I'm more concerned about the unknowns of Long Covid than I am about the unknowns of the vaccine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Covid
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine#Clinical_tria...
Medical science is really hard and often unintuitive. There was a great study that came out last week about statins and the nocebo effect [1] which I think is a great example of how hard it is to get good data on clinical symptoms.
But this is exactly the calculus that people will try to perform based on their own perspective on the relative risks. There’s certainly plenty of unknowns and cause for uncertainty.
Unless you are in a high-risk group, this should not be a serious concern. There is almost no evidence for "long covid". The vast majority of the evidence is anecdotal, self-reported clusters of symptoms that resemble other common illnesses:
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/11/17/what-is-long-covid...
When you look for higher-quality evidence for the syndrome, you find studies like this one, from the CDC, which defined "long-term" as "symptoms lasting longer than two weeks", where "symptoms" mostly resemble the aftermath of any mild respiratory illness -- fatigue, cough and headache were the most common:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930e1.htm
As for more specific studies, there have been a few papers about heart inflammation that have been widely circulated, but nearly all of these have been shown to have serious statistical flaws:
https://mobile.twitter.com/ProfDFrancis/status/1298514453642...
The narrative about athletes with heart damage have been shown to be exaggerated, at best, and physicians no longer MRI recommend screening of athletes without outward symptoms:
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/11/04/Heart-inflammatio...
https://www.si.com/college/2020/10/28/big-ten-covid-protocol...
https://images.saymedia-content.com/.image/cs_srgb/MTc2NDI1M...
More generally, physicians are recommending that these sorts of MRI-based fishing expeditions play no role in screening of otherwise healthy people who have recovered from Covid-19:
https://cvctcardiobrief.com/?p=20977
Covid-induced strokes also appear to be a case where cherry-picking statistics has driven a narrative of fear:
https://academic.oup.com/neurosurgery/advance-article/doi/10...
There are currently two clinical trials registered to investigate the question. The earliest we will have any high-quality data on this subject is 2022:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04411147 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT04362150
True. But how does that compare to evidence that the vaccine will have serious adverse effects?
I'm simply pointing out that the evidence for "long covid" is incredibly weak. One should use that to adjust their priors for any outcome.
Supermarkets are the largest vector btw
Cite, please. This matches nothing I have seen.
The biggest vectors seem to be Number 1: churches and Number 2: bars/restaurants.
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-supermarkets-most-common...
Edit: ok re-reading the article it says supermarkets were the most common place visited before testing positive, but then PHE states this is no proof that is where it's contacted.
I suspect that the issue is that people are going "Oh, I need a Covid test. If it's positive, I'm going to have to semi-quarantine. Let's stop at the grocery store before getting the test."
Many people go to supermarkets; they’re like central hubs in a network. It doesn’t mean that as much transmission happen there as in smaller confined places like houses and bars.
Just anecdotally this matches something the mayor of El Paso said a week ago - 33% of their cases were "big-box", followed by bars and restaurants, then "everything else".
Restaurants account for less than 10-15%
I live in New York and haven't been to a supermarket since March. It isn't hard to reduce your exposure to near zero if you have the gumption and the resources.
having said that, yes i'd have it if i could go eat in a restaurant again.
It's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out, once vaccines start to become widely available. I would hope that some "social inertia" will help convince people who are "on the fence" or otherwise skeptical about getting vaccinated, as they see more folks get it and the case numbers hopefully start to flatten out or drop.
The real crazies are a (regrettably) loud minority. We only need around a 75% vaccination rate with a 95% effective vaccine to get to herd immunity. I've no worries at all we'll be there by the end of summer.
Now, if you're arguing that people shouldn't be forced to be vaccinated, I agree with you. But you could make the same argument that people shouldn't be forced to wear masks, and I'd say "then don't allow them into the store".
Whereas the COVID vaccines are based on mRNA
More detail: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/flu-influenza-vac...
If not a high street pharmacist can give you one for ~£8
In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine I am more than a little concerned it has been rushed into mass production, and we don't have years of data about side effects and possible long-term consequences. We have certainly screwed up enough things in the past to put doubt in my mind we can rush something like this and not make a mistake we won't know about for 5-10 years. I was talking to a Doctor friend last night who said she has concerns because a couple of the vaccines use genetic material.
I'm not saying I won't get it, but I doubt I'll be one of the first to rush, and I may drag my heels a little to see what happens.