- billions per week of half assed lockdown vs a few billion more for high quality timeley vaccine delivieries of the good stuff --- of course they chose the lockdown
- open schools as if nothing happens vs using UV-based air filtering machines and so on as a minimum level of precaution --- of course they choose to open schools with classrooms some of which even don't have windows that can be opened properly
- governing party members of parliament scamming the public out of money by selling overly expensive, low quality masks
- minister of health busy sueing newspapers for disclosing prices on his million dollar real estate purchases vs minister of health actually being busy 24/7 with fighting the crisis
the list goes "on and on and on", these are just the most popular ones right now. It's just a dumpster fire at this point and the positives will not be recognized divorced from said pile of crap.
Polititians are stuck between trying to make the free-for-all phase as long as possible, but still look as though they did everything to help, so that they can win the next election.
At the beginning of the pandemic, it was believed that the virus was using droplet transmission alone. In such a scenario, surgical masks, for the general public, would only be required in people who were sick to prevent transmission and N95 masks would primarily be required by health care workers. Considering the mask shortages faced in many countries at the time due to panic buying, the communications made by governments to the public w.r.t the benefits of masks make sense from a cost benefit perspective since it would guarantee that the people who needed the masks the most (medical workers and sick people) would receive them and reduce the spread of the virus.
Fast forward 2 months later, airborne transmission as well as asymptomatic transmission of the virus were both confirmed independently in several labs. This would mean that the prior strategy of only using surgical masks on sick people wouldn't really work well anymore. In the meanwhile, the availability of masks was much higher due to increased production. Hence, to reduce the risks of airborne and asymptomatic transmissions, governments released advisories asking all people to wear masks.
When officials start doing this, you have to play a sort of game where you try to figure out why they said something and what it signifies. You have to try to divine the state of reality and figure out what to do based on what you think they were trying to get people to do (there's a lot of uncertainty in this).
By that point, by definition, trust in the person (and probably the institution) is gone, and we don't have a lot of trust in institutions to spare.
Now anti-maskers and other covid deniers are citing that report: "don't do anything, even the government research says it is useless".
But of course if a government official lies to you about your own health risks then that has very high costs, much higher than whatever masks were saved. They could have just said "masks are useful, but you need to be trained to use them correctly, they are difficult to manipulate, etc. and they are very scarce so sadly let's stay home and let doctors and nurses use them".
I might sound as if I'm upset at that, because I REALLY am. I hate when governments lie, even if they are "white lies", and I hate when they treat their constituents as kids.
As a citizen, would you trust the government if they did yet another 180, after demonstrating to you 2x that they didn't actually know what they were talking about?
One of the many things that I've learned from this pandemic is that for better or worse, the answer to this question is emphatically yes for a significant percentage of the population. Many folks will indeed blindly trust whatever they are currently being told by people they believe are authorities or experts. At times this may be a good thing, but I personally lean toward thinking it's not good overall. And as you correctly point out, another big chunk of people will understandably lose faith in institutions and authorities that either were wrong or simply lied, which I'd argue likely causes significant long term damage to the healthy functioning of a society.
> Considering the mask shortages faced in many countries at the time due to panic buying, the communications made by governments to the public w.r.t the benefits of masks make sense from a cost benefit perspective since it would guarantee that the people who needed the masks the most (medical workers and sick people) would receive them and reduce the spread of the virus.
The government lying to its people is never acceptable. Also, there was plenty of time to ramp up mask production when the virus was spreading in China and later Italy. Taiwan did this successfully, why did supposedly more developed countries fail so badly at ensuring adequate mask supply?
Wow, this is exactly how the masks thing played out in Poland. I wasn't aware that this "makes are useless" followed by "masks are mandatory" (with Poland together with a ban on selling them on the biggest platform, big like Amazon is in the US - Allegro).
And now here in Poland we are at the "AstraZeneca vaccine is safe" and we are vaccinating with it, I wonder how many EU countries still use it besides Poland.
People never look at "date of death" or "infection date" all they care about is "reporting date" - and every newspaper out there will show you the effects of government measures on "reporting".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_trading_in_Hong_Kong
Globalization came to bite the hand that easily gave production out of hand for single-use items.
I mean some people were looting pharmacies for chloroquine so lying at that point on masks is almost a security issue..
Which is what WHO and EMA are saying. But now that there’s panic, they’re not relevant anymore.
As opposed to who? I see tons of scientists proclaim things as ‘proven’ which later turn out not so true after all.
Any potential safety issues with vaccines must be investigated, otherwise there will be a huge problem with trust in vaccines and in the regulator. There's already a huge problem with vaccine skepticism, and vaccine fanatics are making things worse.
This is not the issue. A few billion would not have magically solved the problems with vaccine deliveries. The EU has contracts with pharmaceutical companies which these companies are not honoring sometimes intentionally so.
AstraZeneca for example doesn't have the production capacity to supply what they promised to the EU even if the Belgian site was working properly. That's the result of the EU audit. These companies are betting that the consequence of them not fullfiling their contractual obligation will be insignificant compared to their benefits. As these companies remain hugely profitable, their production issue is not linked to difficulty accessing capital. It is naive to assume things would have gone differently if the EU was paying more. It would just have meant more profits for them.
The heart of the issue is that contraty to the USA or China the EU is weak so companies don't hesitate trampling it. If a Chinese company did to China what AstraZeneca is doing to the EU, the CCP would take control of it and its CEO would never be seen again. Meanwhile, the USA has little qualm using its legal system to punish companies defying the state to much. Congressional inquiries are not fun.
Compared to the status of 11.03.2021, additional cases (as of Monday, 15.03.2021) have now been reported in Germany. In the analysis of the new data status, the experts of the Paul Ehrlich Institute now see a striking accumulation of a special form of very rare cerebral vein thrombosis (sinus vein thrombosis) in conjunction with a deficiency of blood platelets (thrombocytopenia) and bleeding in temporal proximity to vaccinations with the COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis presents with nonspecific symptoms (eg headaches). It can only be diagnosed with cerebral imaging of specific modalities (CT or MR brain venogram, expensive and specialised tests). From speaking to colleagues in the UK, their hospital system is quite overwhelmed and doctors are repurposed outside their field (eg surgeons looking after internal medicine patients). It is quite possible in the throes of a pandemic to be underestimating the incidence of this condition in the UK.
"The decision today is purely precautionary..." given this level of signal. We don't have details on the age groups involved and the normal rates expected but I can hazard a Fermi Estimate that the risk is minuscule compared to COVID-19 itself. I look forward to seeing the actual data in coming days/weeks. Precaution without downside is acceptable; this is not one of those cases, IMO. YMMV.
Or perhaps not, given that 2020 deaths in Germany were 985,145, only 4.85% higher than 2019, and only 3.2% higher than 2018 (and so basically in line with what we would expect from an aging society).
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...
It's not about the "oh it's worth the risk compared to COVID 19". If it's a side effect it wasn't spotted in the trials, why was that?
It's not a side effect? It was a problem in production? What problem? Was is tampered with or was an accident? What failed in QA to let that batch come to the public? Was is a storage problem that compromised the batch quality? Was it while in transport or in the local hospital?
You talk about this like background noise. It's not. It should be investigated.
It's good that this is happening, because it shows regulators are doing their job. This is what builds trust in vaccines, not disregarding odd occurrences because they seem to have no "statistical relevance". That's just ignorance talking.
It's not a political decision no matter how many people try to spin this. This is the outcome of doctors reporting an anomaly to a regulator. The system is working, and this should give you reassurance, not doubt about the consequences of stopping a vaccine.
I'm pretty sure they know the consequences of this setback, so for them to stop it it's because something is not right.
"It's not a political decision"
From the perspective of the regulators, there are asymmetric personal consequences.
If they make a decision that leads to 50 clotting deaths but saves 5000 people from COVID as a counterfactual, their head is on a chopping block because those 5000 foregone deaths are invisible but the 50 deaths are visible.
If they make a decision to halt the vaccine distribution and this kills an extra 5000 people - well that's no problem because they were just being careful.
Society has set up a political situation where there is literally only one choice that absolves the bureaucrats from a negative personal outcome. Of course they're going to go that route.
Personal incentives are incredibly powerful drivers of behavior, whatever the publicly stated reasons for an action may happen to be.
It may be the case that they've made the right decision, but we can't assume that it was for the right reasons.
I'm more saying that the incentives of regulators/politicians aren't always aligned with public health, since the decision that protects public health and the decision that protects careers aren't always the same thing.
I like to believe that these institutions - regulators - know better then to cover their asses, because if that was protocol until now for sure there would be a lot of problems with medicines and vaccines.
At leas the European ones (the cases I know) seem to have been pretty competent on their jobs, so I doubt that is a motivation.
But what are “the right reasons”? This one is a moral dilemma that has no solution. “OK, let’s kill these 50 people so that that those 5000 could live.” No one in their right mind can propose that.
Imagine this is the outcome of a production problem, yet regulators refused to acknowledge this until it was out of proportions because the problem wasn't fixed. Not only people would lose trust on vaccines, they would lose trust on the regulator - this extends far beyond this vaccine, but all vaccines and medicines.
People need to feel safe, and to know that regulators are not sleeping on their job. It's not a bureaucratic job, but that they are actively looking at data and reports from doctors.
Banning everyone from getting this vaccine is typical bureaucratic ass-covering. Their incentives are not aligned with ours. They get in trouble if they’re directly responsible for a few deaths, but not if they’re indirectly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
To give a point of comparison: 250 miles of driving gives you a one in a million chance of death. This vaccine is safer than that.
It's not bureaucratic ass-covering, it's literally the protocol that's in place and has worked to keep populations safe.
>250 miles of driving gives you a one in a million chance of death. This vaccine is safer than that.
Again you're missing the point. The correct analogy would be: driving on a car that randomly combusts, or has faulty breaks, due to bad QA. And this actually happens/happened, that's why some cars are pulled from the market to be fixed when such things happen. Doesn't matter if it has happened on 1 or 2 cars, it shouldn't happen. Want another analogy?
Want another example? The Boing 737 Max.
You should only be allowed to use products that are working as expected, not faulty products. Specially not medicines and vaccines, that could blow up the trust on regulators and the vaccines.
There is no safe option here. We have to think like we are in war time, not peace time. Allowing people with informed consent to take this vaccine will save far more lives than banning everyone from taking it.
Well that's arguable, I haven't had covid yet, and I don't plan on getting it. You had plenty of countries that handled covid without vaccines - we are where we are because western governments refused to take specific measures to control de pandemic (but this is another subject). So the alternative would be get a different vaccine.
Neither me EMA, or any regulator are advocating for not being vaccinated, I don't get where you're getting that from. The alternative to this vaccine is other vaccines, in EU alone 4 vaccines are approved and more are to come. Even AZ vaccine isn't excluded what so ever - they are investigating the potential cause.
>Allowing people with informed consent to take this vaccine will save far more lives than banning everyone from taking it.
Thankfully we have regulators that prevent such behavior. If there's a QA issue no one should be vaccinated with the batches affected by that, because proper QA seem to be without any of this reactions.
This is not established at all.
Overall the number of blood clots observed is actually less than expected, with an incidence lower than in the general population (i.e. without vaccine at all). My source is BBC News this evening.
Are we still having this debate.... Of course the overall mortality didn't change much, people stayed at home for literally 75% of the year.
Do you have the split stats for accidental deaths, road deaths, disease related deaths, &c. ? Because otherwise it's meaningless. We can put everyone in an artificial coma and get as little death per year as possible, it isn't a really interesting metric without the context.
Sweden, 2020 deaths only 6.2% higher than 2018, and following a weak 2019 flu season.
These are entirely acceptable death figures within the context of aging European societies.
COVID is basically a once-a-decade flu variant: like Swine Flu in 2009, which came and went without lockdown: https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...
So COVID is dangerous enough to lock down entire societies, but not dangerous enough to justify continued vaccination when 1 in 166,666 have blood clotting? This is probably the background rate.
It seems like Europe and its bureaucrats just can't let go of lockdown. Or alternatively, they wish to push the vaccines and end of lockdown into Spring/Summer, where natural seasonality will take care of COVID and give the appearance that lockdown and vaccines were a success.
Did you somehow forget that this is the second year of Covid? We've already gone through the whole "natural seasonality" cycle and the disease is very much still here.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailytrends...
From an average of about 50k cases reported daily in April through October to about 200k cases reported daily in November, December, and January, then back down to 60k by March.
And there's a similar winter increase in the worldwide cases (some of which is from the US cases, but not all):
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
It's impossible to be sure after just one year, but that hill in the winter certainly suggests a seasonal illness to me.
Further, South American countries were some of the worst hit during the Nov - Feb timeline. South Africa was badly hit around this time. And all these are Southern Hemisphere countries that were experiencing summer around then.
Now, there’s clear evidence that warmer weather makes things easier, since the virus has lower survivability outside a host in the heat, so all things equal, the spread would be lower in warmer weather, but it’s not so much lower that it can be considered seasonal, like the flu.
Same reason it was rampant in the US subtropical south during last summer, when it was uncomfortably hot and people stayed inside where there's AC.
They're referring more to, success can be claimed for lockdowns/etc whether or not they had an effect, simply by waiting until the natural seasonality causes a drop in cases.
> where natural seasonality will take care of COVID
I don't read that as your interpretation at all. It very much sounds like they are saying the spring/summer season will kill COVID.
https://brnodaily.com/2020/12/16/news/excess-mortality-rate-...
And that's old numbers, since then the situation only got worse: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/15/czech-republic-what... https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/28/europe/czech-republic-cor...
Source: https://opencovid-peru.com/reportes/sinadef/ (1100 deaths per day, compared to 300 average for 2019)
(In reality, in Sweden mortality is about 4.5 % higher than the average of 2015-2019, but that is still very significant; and of course, covid is not just that one either dies or is fine; there is the substantial but currently not very well known number of people with long-term health impact from the infection)
It shows that despite everything we've done we've had significant more deaths in certain age groups.
You seem to be genuinely curious. For those who want to scoff it off: look at those numbers and consider the fact that these numbers are what we see after a war-sized effort to prevent more damage: in most populations only a few percent have been hit.
At the moment this epidemic runs unchecked a death rates also increase even more as it easily overwhelms even European health care if it isn't kept down.
And no, it is not just the elderly: my age group (40+) and above are all at risk.
Which doesn't seem to have worked - infection rates are dropping off all around the world, regardless of the vaccination levels. It looks more like we hit natural herd immunity at about the same time in different places whether or not masks and lockdowns were used.
Yes, then it starts to have an impact; without those, there would have been mayhem.
For the two additional things you've mentioned: Limiting travel works to prevent the virus from entering an area, but if it's already there and uncontrolled it wouldn't have an effect. Likewise excessive hand disinfectant doesn't seem to have had an effect, because the virus doesn't really spread through surfaces like that [0] - it was an early precaution that wasn't reexamined.
With that in mind, and knowing that these were only two of the many measures made to reduce the infection rate, your parahprased statement "the measures were meaningless because they didn't stop the epidemic" is completely incorrect.
An epidemic isn't on or off. It develops at different rates, exponential->logistic if R>1 and exponentially dampening if R<1 for each area. A very steep exponential phase will obviously cause the problems we have been trying to avoid, and it's similarly obvious that the defensive measures have prevented that outcome most places.
I'm saying that looking at aggregate outcomes and comparing locations that took these precautions to ones that didn't, this isn't obvious at all. It looks to me more like these defensive measures didn't work, and I kinda want to know why, if they're as effective as the percentages you gave.
It's hard to find a society that took no measures, as the measures so obviously work and no one wants an uncontrolled epidemic, but there's plenty of societies that had differing degrees of catastrophe up to the point where they realized this or started being serious about it. Czech Republic, Peru, Brazil, Bergamo (the latter just being unaware) +++.
Covid initially had a reproductive number between 3 and 6 in the absence of measures - higher for the latest mutations. A cumulative reduction of R of 80% + 40% would make this an R of ~0.25-0.50, but that's assuming 100% compliance everywhere and always.
Indeed, this is what you see in societies that were serious enough but didn't eradicate the virus altogether -- largely no significant epidemic, but wildfire-like eruptions of disease in local communities that don't strictly follow the measures. E.g. classrooms, public transport, homes, pubs/concerts and so on. Norway, as a case in point, currently has an R of 1.33, with measures that kept R cleanly below zero until the British mutation became dominant (through initial seeding through import and then a few almost-inevitable cases). Cities where measures can almost always be followed have almost no disease, the illness only spreads in areas where many people live close together and have children/teenagers in school. This alone is enough to threaten the capacity of intensive care.
Personally I don't really think this merits much debate anymore, if the objective is to seek the truth rather than some ulterior motive (e.g. politicians who wouldn't mind if the pension liabilities fell). It's not subtle if you actually dig into the details.
Germany provides a useful testbed for the impact of mask usage, because the mask mandates have been decided on local regional levels (federal state or city) at different times. From these different times of mask mandates and different progression of epidemic in the areas that are otherwise comparable, we can see that mask usage has a clear impact.
As said, it doesn't stop the epidemic alone, but it helps to contain it. To beat it, we need immunity through vaccines.
It did work, hospitals can only absorbs so many patients in ICU per weeks/months. Once an hospital is at 100% capacity people start dying because they can't be treated (not only for covid)
It really isn't rocket science, of course natural herd immunity is helping, spreading it over a year vs a month is a game changer though.
1. If holding off AstraZeneca vaccine does not affect vaccination rate during the investigation period, it is a prudent thing to do.
2. If vaccine rate is expected to drop, number of expected increase in death per day due to covid vs blood clog should be compared, if we were to minimize short term death.
3. More concerning is unknown effect that could take a long time to materialize. This is a tough call to make since any effect is only theoretical at this point.
It is (or was), AZ was to supply EU with 500M vaccines this year but changed that to 200M.
EU got really served on the vaccine front, UK got more from AZ, US got more from Pfizer/Moderna (both have 3x more vaccinated than EU). And each transport that we ought to get is smaller or dalayed.
I wouldn't be surprised if governments there blocked some of the vaccine export.
I really hope that there will be a backslash for those companies for not fulfilling their obligations. If not now then later when there is a race for subsidies for "free" prescription medications.
You don't know this at all - we don't know what age groups are affected here, and COVID is pretty much negligible in many younger age groups. It's best to wait for more data to come in before drawing any conclusions.
Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.
A year ago there was a lot of noise about things like heart issues induced by COVID, which turned out to be mostly statistical errors in the papers that made the claims.
A lot of people (often people who never actually had a positive test) also claim to suffer from various mental impairments after their COVID infections, and some newspaper ran an article saying that some of these symptoms were alleviated after the people were given anxiety medication. Go figure ...
Check out this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1
The Spanish Flu has led to a „sleeping sickness“ epidemic years after it ceased.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....
> Since encephalitis lethargica’s (EL) prevalence in the 1920s, epidemiological and clinical debate has persisted over whether EL was caused by, potentiated by, or merely coincident with the Spanish influenza pandemic. Epidemiologic analyses generally suggest that the disorders were coincidental.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/
I’ll let the eventual studies give the percentages. But my (personal, non professional) take on this is that long-hauler experiences are a LOT more common then people realize, have been fairly ignored while people have fixated on the death count, and have big possible implications for quality of life for younger, otherwise healthy people.
Long covid:
> Estimates of the number of people with long COVID vary widely. In July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in five patients 18–34 years of age without chronic medical conditions and with a positive outpatient test had not fully recovered by 2–3 weeks after testing, and a research center in Rome found that 87% of 143 patients reported persistence of at least one symptom 60 days after onset of the disease. According to a preprint published in October that has not yet undergone peer review, 24% of 233 patients still had symptoms at 90 days after infection. Data from a smartphone app, as reported by the COVID Symptom Study, showed that one in ten patients with COVID-19 have symptoms after 3 weeks. Given the scale of the pandemic, if even only a small percentage of the tens of millions of infected people worldwide develop long COVID, a staggeringly large number of people would need long-term follow-up and treatment.
"Paediatricians in Israel, which has surged ahead in vaccinating its adult population, reported a sharp rise in covid-19 infections among young people, with more than 50 000 children and teens testing positive in January—more than Israel saw in any month during the first and second waves."
A single metric (e.g. positive tests) is not enough to assess any severity here, and even those metrics come with caveats because all of our methods of determining them are imprecise.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...
But in Germany and Europe children can't get vaccinated and by the time young adults can it will be September anyway.
> Moreover, the database is not a representative sample of the sars-cov-2-positive population. Because it only contains records from people who have interacted with a medical service provider, it excludes those who weather the disease at home without medical assistance.
This will exclude the vast majority of people in younger age groups who were affected. Serology studies have shown us that in many densely populated places infection rates have been far into the double-digit percentages - if this statistic was true in the way you interpreted it, we would know that by now.
(Edit: Deleted second paragraph that wasn’t clearly worded.)
The virus needs the host in order to spread. The virus doesn't have any other ulterior mechanism that wants to kill humans.
This is why spanish-flu virus got weaker over time because as it evolves, if it kills humans rapidly, it cannot evolve. So, nature sorts it self out.
http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2007/08/26/rabbits-1-virus...
Covid is transmitted mostly during its mild phase, it only becomes severe a week later, if you are unlucky. If you are lucky, you clear off the infection and gain relatively strong immunity. For the virus, both scenarios are similar.
The only thing is that if it was just a cold, we wouldn't bother with preventive measures and the virus would spread more easily. However, when both the lethal and nonlethal variants are present, the nonlethal variant doesn't have an advantage since we treat everyone the same way, so it is unlikely for the nonlethal variant to take over on its own. At least not on a short timescale.
The solution is to create our own nonlethal variant, also known as a vaccine. Well, vaccines don't spread, I guess we could make a vaccine that spreads but "what could possibly go wrong..."
On the other hand, getting a potentially faulty vaccine would seem to mostly only be a risk to the individual, although I suppose there is some risk of overwhelming hospitals still.
Please just stay home for a few more months so this shit can finally fucking end. It’s already been a year.
Edit: an important factor, too, is that understanding the potential risks of the AZ vaccine is hard, and the average person may not expected to fully understand them. Right now, it seems like even the authorities don’t understand them.
I'm not sure what your point is with the apparent difficulty of understanding the risks of a new vaccine. Are you saying "it's hard, so just trust what the authorities tell you"?
To be clear, we’re talking about the risk of the AZ vaccine specifically. It seems like there might be something specifically wrong with it. Ceding approval authority to bodies like the FDA is how medicine is regulated all over the world. That’s how literal snake oil is blocked from sale. Among other things, it prevents desperate patients from making uninformed, dangerous, and expensive treatment decisions. The average person really isn’t equipped to read a medical study and adequately interpret the results. This information isn’t even at the maturity level of a study, and the risk is that people hurt themselves and undermine the confidence in this vaccine and others.
As for your comments on regulation - yes, that is correct, which is why I was surprised when I got so much flak for pointing out that, at least in the UK, regulatory shortcuts were taken to rush the approval of Covid vaccines.
There were shortcuts taken in all countries to get the vaccines out. In the US, there is no FDA approved COVID vaccine. Every “approved” vaccine is actually under an emergency use authorization.
FWIW, the LCD of most relevant studies show that maybe banning large gatherings is useful, whereas all other measures we've invented in the meantime have dubious efficacy at best - and extremely high costs.
There are plenty of places in the world that didn't implement the "fight COVID at any cost" policies and they're doing just fine. Trust me on that, I live in one of them.
>Or let people have a choice in determining whether the risk is worth it for them.
Are there any countries where the vaccine is mandatory? That choice already exists doesn't it?
For those jurisdictions like the UK, India, and Canada that continue recommending AstraZeneca, I'd suggest that COVID-19 vaccines are like beer; the best one is the one in front of you.
(I’m looking at the linked PDF https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/newsroom-en/hp-ne...)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...
The 0.0015% is the known rate of blood clots from all the AZ doses on the continent according to what the GP has reported and RFI has confirmed the same numbers today (30 cases in 5M doses but it's not clear how many have died and why).
So 0.4 death rate times 0.004 chance to get covid in my area equals 0.0016 chanches to get covid and die which is one point higher than the chances of getting blood clots from the vaccine. Yeah, I botched the last product, so it's actually about the same risk figure, but the benefits of getting vaccinated outweigh the risks and the allegedly faulty vaccine batch has already been halted anyway. I have acquaintances that were vaccinated with the allgedly faulty batch AVB2856 before it was halted and they're doing just fine.
The 0.0015 risk of death seems high. Where are you getting that from?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-german... gives "The EMA has said that as of March 10, a total of 30 cases of blood clotting had been reported among close to 5 million people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot in the European Economic Area, which links 30 European countries."
But if you want to take the German numbers, 3 deaths out of 1.6m vaccines:
3/1,600,000 = 0.000001875 (In percent, 0.0001875%) which is 0.125 of your figure.
And the OP gives a base rate of "two to five cases per 1 million individuals per year" for context; we need to subtract out the base rate from the observed deaths too (because obviously the base rate of this condition occurs regardless of whether you take the vaccine).
[edit: percent conversion typo]
The base rate is per year, the AZ vaccine was used for about 3 mo in the EU. That leaves us with a base rate of 0.5 to 1.25 cases per million per 3 mo, so using your numbers:
1.875 - (0.5…1.25) = 1±0.375
deaths per million if we were to keep the inputs unchanged?
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1C7K3u3vKrIMt-sa4_t3...
The first cell is the model I was building, I finally got it into reasonable shape. It comes from the published national statistics for death rates. (Comments welcome, I just sketched this to help me think about the numbers here. No claim on this actually being right.)
The second cell is my attempt at rendering your initial calc, though I've not folded in the base rate changes. We can go into the weeds there but looking at the results I don't think we need to; my calcs naively attribute all the blood clot cases to the vaccine and still give COVID as being worse than the vaccinations by a factor of 400-800.
The way you're thinking about base rates sounds right to me though, and it does sound like the best guess is we're at something like 4x above base rate.
Given that I implemented my model with a completely different approach and we're both within a factor of 2 (if I've rendered yours correctly) I think we're in the right ballpark here, at least for "Fermi calculation" level of completeness.
Guardian article with more numbers: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/16/benefits-of-as...
> Birth control pills can also cause thrombosis. So why is there all the fuss about the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca? It is true that for birth control pills thromboses, even with fatal outcome, are known as a very rare side effect. They are listed in the Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC). The birth control pill is available only on prescription. Every woman must be informed of this risk by the prescribing physician. For the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca, there is currently a suspected very rare side effect of sinus vein thrombosis with accompanying platelet deficiency, sometimes fatal. It is not listed in the SmPC. The consideration of whether the vaccine can continue to be used even though it may cause this very rare side effect (if necessary, after this risk has been added to the SmPC) will be made at the European level by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and at the national level by politicians. The procedure has been initiated.
Which sounds pretty clearly like bureaucratic CYA instead of an actual cost/benefit analysis that takes into account the excess deaths that are now being caused due to pausing the vaccine rollout.
"This potential side-effect is not listed in the SmPC so we need to pause vaccinations", ignoring the fact that hundreds of people are dying every day in Germany (https://www.google.com/search?q=germany+covid+case+fatality+...).
I've had elevated blood markers for clotting during covid-19, and now I hear of this.
I'm thinking of taking 75 mg aspirin, before and after the vaccine. On the other hand, the issue is the patients have low platelet count and I understand that this is the way aspirin reduces blod clotting.
So, do these patients have low platelet count because they had blod clots, or the other way around?
Afik, in the case of COVID-19, clotting is an autoimune issue, so perhaps the clotting is not something related to the astra Zeneca vaccine, but something about the immune response itself.
(Not a doctor) From listening to the "Faucis" of various countries (incuding the original): I believe that the vaccine is not a watered down virus, so technically you are not making yourself vulnerable/more sensitive to the virus. It is suppsed to 'teach' your body how to build the defence.
Only the Chinese virus is a 'watered down' version of the virus. All the others (including the Russian) is an RNA-type-thingie.
No where did I say any of these vaccines are 'live' or even attenuated coronavirus. It is 100% impossible to get infected with covid-19 from any of the vaccines. However it is possible to take a drug which lowers your immune system response and you fail to build a strong response to the vaccine and the spike protein RNA or other bits in the vaccine. Hence why I said _talk to your doctor before doing anything like taking aspirin right before the vaccine_.
This site is full of pure lunacy when it comes to any COVID-19 or medical issues. The comments in this thread and many others over the past weeks are just unbelievable low quality. Folks, stay in your lanes with software and startups...
"If the rash is itchy, you can take an antihistamine. If it is painful, you can take a pain medication like acetaminophen or a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)."
No need for speculation. RTFM applies here, too.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/al...
This is not true. There are 11 current vaccines in use around the world, of 4 different types. Even the vaccine mentioned in this article is an adenovirus-vector vaccine.
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are the only mRNA vaccines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine#Vaccine_types
From personal experience today (spouse getting second dose of Moderna), the nurse explicitly suggested using Tylenol to handle fever in case it occurs.
Here is a quote from https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/clinic...:
Management of post-COVID-19-vaccination symptoms
For all currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines, antipyretic or analgesic medications (e.g., acetaminophen, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) can be taken for the treatment of post-vaccination local or systemic symptoms, if medically appropriate. <ellipsis>
I'm not worried about blunted immune response because I've taken heaps of asprin when I had COVID-19 (it might be why I got tinnitus for close to 6 months afterwards -- that or the antibiotics) and I mean grams per day and I had very high antibodies levels afterwards.
Does aspirine not cross the blood brain barrier?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/al...
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/astrazeneca-warns-europe-of-lar...
Of course they are influenced by what they see in the news and questions by the government, but aren't a political player.
They are hopefully scientific, but they are definitely not independent, not even by name.
I assume this is referring to the US export ban. It definitely isn't referring to Italy.
All of this over the 3.8 million doses they bought, and were intercepted and taken by Italy (whose export control already reduced the shipment size to 780k doses).
> AstraZeneca on Friday said unspecified export restrictions now rendered plans to bring in large amounts of doses made outside Europe unlikely.
This suggests that countries outside the EU have imposed export restrictions that contribute to the vaccine shortage.