At 38.5% vaccinated, US may be running low on people eager for a shot

I was able to get myself and my family signed up through UCI Health. But I got a friend, and his girlfriend, who drove up to the central valley (he's originally from the Fresno area) to get theirs. Another friend, who lives on my street in south OC, drove out to Redlands to get his. Another friend and his wife who live down here got their first shot this weekend up in Livermore, where her family is. They'll make another trip up north to get the 2nd.

It's all pretty dumb and arbitrary to me, the way this thing is being handled. In each case they were unable to get theirs locally, everything was booked with no insight into when the next availability would be.

I've helped a number of people get appointments in MA and had zero issues securing probably a half-dozen appts for people in the last 10 days. If the trackers are showing say >3-5 appts then there are usually some actually available (the macovidvaccine site is scraping/updating quite frequently).

Also, because of the way the MA state reservation system works -- they give you 25 minutes to fill out the appointment details once you "claim" a slot, often times you'll find a decent number of timed-out appointments showing up after the fact. Not to mention there are plenty cancellations (as presumably people are booking for family or maybe just vaccine shopping).

The only way I can interpret this is that you believe the cost-benefit is not there without a substantial altruistic motive. Do you think that, and if so, why?

“It’s going to go away”

Really? How many people are hospitalized each year due to the common cold?

"By now"? Where is the evidence that SARS-CoV2 has decreased its severity through mutation?

Your analogy is not correct. Our public health officials explicitly told us to do X and we could get back to normal. The officials then changed what needed to be done to get back to normal. It would be like if your dentist just said if you get a cleaning every 6 months you will not get a cavity. You then get a cavity and they say you need to brush your teeth once a day and get a cleaning every 6 months to avoid cavities. Next time you go the dentist you have a cavity so they say just brush your teeth, get a cleaning every 6 months and floss and you won't get a cavity. Next thing you know you have a cavity and they add brushing your teeth twice a day. This is not a feeling, but explicit statements by public officials.

I do not believe either the dentist in the analogy or the public health officials can actually know with any certainty what will happen in the future. Which is why I do not believe they just have made the statements they made. They can perhaps provide a sense of what could happen, but that is not what happened.

If the officials just said MAYBE after two weeks we can get back to normal if XYZ have happened then I, and many others, would have far less issues. We would understand that XYZ needs to happen prior to returning to normal. The problem is they explicitly said we just need to do X to get back to normal.

When can we actually go back to normal? There doesn't appear to be an explicit end goal that hasn't changed.

Our public health officials said just stay at home for two weeks and we can get back to normal. Then don't wear masks. Then always wear a mask. Next it was just wait until it gets warmer in the summer. Then it was just wait until the vaccine. Now some of them are actually saying wait until there are no new cases despite also saying that it will be with us forever and will become seasonal like the flu. If they actually want no new cases and if this does become a seasonal thing then we will literally never return to normal. That is the problem that many of us see. If they were just honest and straight forward with us from the beginning and may not argue we should remain locked down forever there would be far less issues.

The weather's bad _today_ but it's been mostly beautiful for the last two months, and will be beautiful all summer.

I just don't think they're thinking of inherent safety.

They're working on "six feet, fifteen minutes", which is increasingly useless and I'd argue now actively harmful guidance given the new variants.

If anything, the CDC recently _walked back_ some recommendations around fomite transmission, which I think was based on extensive study of the early variants which dominated the last year, and may or may not even be valid with the UK variant which is now prevalent.

In essence, we have enough delay between the situation on the ground, and the studies coming out, that the feedback loop is driving a wild oscillation. And I don't wish to get caught in it.

That's fantastic, thank you.

You want a source for what? That viruses are subject to evolutionary pressures and will mutate to better adapt to their environments like literally everything else as advantageous random mutations are found?

Thanks for your concern but it's not quite that clear cut and you may have misunderstood my phrasing. Virulence refers to the ability to infect and multiply. Pathogenicity refers to the damage to the host.

Since the 501Y variants do not survive the environment any better than original sequence virus it is assumed their increased observed spread is due to their virulence. This makes sense given that the 501Y change is on the ACE2 contact residues of the spike and probably gives greater binding affinity.

[0]: https://covariants.org/variants/S.N501 [1]: https://www.biologyonline.com/dictionary/virulence

>The virulence of a pathogen is often correlated with the so-called virulence factors. A virulence factor is defined as the factor that enables an organism to invade a host and cause disease. It also determines the extent of damage to the host. These factors may be secretory, membrane-associated, or cytosolic in nature. An example of a virulence factor is the ability of microbes to multiply within their host cells.