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Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

reuters.com

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Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#151

Post by celticninja »

wang_li wrote: post #111
input_sh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're vastly overestimating our capacity to build enough vaccines and distribute them over the world, as well as dealing with those who will refuse to vaccinate. Even if we had a vaccine ready for the roll-out today, I don't see us going back to normalish until late 2021 at earliest. As with any vaccine, you'd need about 80% of the population to vaccinate in order for herd immunity to kick in. I feel like we…

Pfizer is already mass producing their vaccine and are saying they’ll have 100 million doses available this year and are targeting 1.3 billion next year. The US has five million people who tested positive and have recovered. Likely also another 30-50 million who were never tested because their symptoms were to minor. And another 66-165 million who have cross reactive T-cells. Some researchers have concluded that the…

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

The mayo clinic suggests it could be 70%, and I have seen others suggest 80%. I have not seen anyone suggest as low as 10/20% so I think that suggestion is a huge outlier and even the paper you link says as much.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#152

Post by nickcotter »

Good news but still a long way to go. How's it going to be rolled out? Here in the UK we have tried and failed to get a regular flu jab (our GPs have run out of a very small supply and the pharmacies don't have any to sell) and I'm not optimistic about our chances of getting this next year or whenever it arrives.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#153

Post by C1sc0cat »

jariel wrote: post #98
input_sh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're vastly overestimating our capacity to build enough vaccines and distribute them over the world, as well as dealing with those who will refuse to vaccinate. Even if we had a vaccine ready for the roll-out today, I don't see us going back to normalish until late 2021 at earliest. As with any vaccine, you'd need about 80% of the population to vaccinate in order for herd immunity to kick in. I feel like we…

COVID is special though in that if it were only as deadly to the young as it were to everyone, I don't think we'd be referring to this as a pandemic. Literally, right now we are seeing case rates explode, but the number of casualties is paradoxically very low because it's mostly the younger cohorts getting sick - which is probably a social function of things like 'back school' and 'risky behaviours' among younger gro…

Some of the longer term effects are scary though - I suspect that younger people might not be so blasé about chronic illness.

At minimum younger people who have had covid are looking at a lot more regular check-ups for the rest of there life.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#154

Post by acdha »

Izkata wrote: post #128
x87678r wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think any expert is predicting normalish by next spring, maybe in a years time if we're lucky. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/the-who-says-health...

Meanwhile the general populace cares less and less, so we may be back to normal in the spring regardless.

A disease isn’t something you can solve by pretending really hard that it doesn’t exist. People getting their news from irresponsible politicians get sick like everyone else, and that’s why it won’t get back to normal before there’s a vaccine or very effective treatment: it’ll be the same cycle of open-spike-close and businesses not having enough customers to be viable.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#155

Post by krona »

input_sh wrote: post #62
calvinv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if we're back to normalish by spring next year I think that would be a great outcome, if the messaging to the public would be, buckle down until then I think lockdown complaince could go up

I think you're vastly overestimating our capacity to build enough vaccines and distribute them over the world, as well as dealing with those who will refuse to vaccinate. Even if we had a vaccine ready for the roll-out today, I don't see us going back to normalish until late 2021 at earliest. As with any vaccine, you'd need about 80% of the population to vaccinate in order for herd immunity to kick in. I feel like we…

As with any vaccine, you'd need about 80% of the population to vaccinate in order for herd immunity to kick in.

Wrong. The herd immunity threshold (HIT) for influenza is 33%-44%. HITs are different for every infectious disease. Current estimates for COVID-19 are 60-75%.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#157

Post by JshWright »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #146
landryl wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it needed to hold the patent to be profitable as a manufacturer ? If the research has been already paid out, I'd prefer healthy competition.

The patent protects from somebody simply copying the formula. Which is many orders of magnitude cheaper than doing research and development, especially on human subjects.

Why does that matter if the research and development costs were publicly funded?

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#158

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

sanketskasar wrote: post #42
godelmachine wrote: post #16

Is this not the one they will launch in India first? Edit1: Just to throw in more info, Oxford plans to scale this up for mass production with Serum Institute of India and AstraZeneca.

It is the same. But you cannot expect a vaccine to work similarly in people of two different regions having major differences in their diet, climate and lifestyles. That's why many vaccine candidates are being tested in multiple countries( read potential markets). Also, I think the UK has preferential rights at least on the initial yield of the vaccine.

> But you cannot expect a vaccine to work similarly in people of two different regions having major differences in their diet, climate and lifestyles.

Can you? Do you have any examples of successful vaccines that are only given in one region because they have been proven ineffective in a different region?

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#159

Post by impendia »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #122
impendia wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various experts are predicting that the winter will be quite bad. See for example: https://covid19.healthdata.org/global?view=infections-testin... https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view... But notice, in the latter chart, that in the US the number of infections is predicted to peak in January and then start going down. It seems plausible that by March, we'll achieve some level of herd immunity,…

It's been estimated that 80% of the population needs to have been infected to achieve herd immunity. That means ~240 million people in the United States need to be infected. We're at 8.7 million infected. No way we get herd immunity anytime soon.

Herd immunity is relative.

For example, I'm a professor at the University of South Carolina. Here we've had around 2,500 confirmed Covid cases, and perhaps around 10,000 cases in actuality. Nearly all of them happened in the first few weeks of the semester, and now the positive test rate is extremely low.

Looking around town, it's pretty clear what happened. There are some students that have acted like nothing is happening, partying and drinking constantly. That population has presumably hit herd immunity already. Meanwhile, there are many students (and staff) that are exercising precautions, and not venturing out a lot, and probably few of them have contracted the disease.

Now, we can't just go back to normal, or else cases would spike among this second group -- but locally it seems that we can afford to relax a bit.

And, also, we're at 8.8 million confirmed infected -- the actual numbers are presumably much higher.

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