Between this and the Biden win I’m feeling optimistic about the future of this country again.
Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. It's a nice idea conceptually, but the problem is psychological. People stop caring about tracing when 98% of all trace connections are false positives. If a person is infectious for a week and the r0 is around 1 then only 1 person of all the people they've been in contact with will actually contract the virus on average. The other 50+ people, assuming they can even b…
> Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. Could you go a little deeper in this? It seems to have worked in Australia, South Korea and NZ as far as I’m aware, what am I missing?
Worked to slow down the spread, but not to catch all cases. Remember the gay pub in South Korea?
Many people are not going to say they cheated on their SOs, or went to a swing bar, or a gay pub.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing. With 90% efficiency it will be extremely tough for the virus to spread. For any new cases you simply test everyone in the vicinity of the infected person. But I don't think even that will be necessary. 90% efficiency reduces R so much, it will probably die out on its own. The real problem is mutations that are not covered by the vaccine. If it mutates as efficiently as…
Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. It's a nice idea conceptually, but the problem is psychological. People stop caring about tracing when 98% of all trace connections are false positives. If a person is infectious for a week and the r0 is around 1 then only 1 person of all the people they've been in contact with will actually contract the virus on average. The other 50+ people, assuming they can even b…
"Covid19 would also be over if people with symptoms would just stay home."
That is unlikely to be true. There are asymptomatic super spreaders. The fact that R0 is currently hovering around 1 is that society has greatly reduced contacts. Even in areas where social distancing is a mere suggestion, most people are not behaving completely normally (a good thing). Flights are super low, movie theater visits are super low, hotel occupancy is super low. Social distancing and contact tracing work. Better social distancing and contact tracing work better.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#704Good: + ~90% of individuals achieve immunity. + no significant side-effects. Not so good: - two doses needed, 3 weeks apart, immunity after one month from first dose. Slow rollout. - -80C storage and transport needed. Challenging, but doable in developed countries, but still may slow down mass rollout. Not feasible in many developing countries. I still wonder about long-term immunity. Anyone can share any insight?
-80C storage is an issue, you are definitely right, but it is a common requirement for many biological samples and protein-based drug therapies. -80C lab freezers are not that expensive and all over the place. I used to work in biotech and, at one company, all of our intermediate drug substance storage was -80C. we had freezers big enough to drive a forklift into; one such a freezer could store millions of doses... a…
Could you name some of the companies? Are any of them public?
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm feeling a deep-seated wave of relief that I never thought possible. Like waking up from a year-long nightmare. Thank God. Moderna is also only weeks behind Pfizer/Biontech here with a very similar technology and manufacturing capability of hundreds of millions of doses. We'll be seeing the first EUA's by December, and shots in the arm before the end of the year. Pretty incredible that we can just science our way…
thank god Biden was elected, otherwise this news would have been thrown in the trash.
Why is this a Biden vs Trump issue? They both have campaigned on Covid19 relief. Just because Trump isn't unconstitutionally forcing lockdowns, testing, & contact tracing doesn't mean he isn't doing anything. Pfizer and other vaccine makers got assistance with expediting their vaccine R&D, approval, & distribution as part of Trump admin's Operation Warp Speed. https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/09/16/trump-administrati...
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty confident it's the former, which if the case, essentially ends the pandemic in a month after it's distributed, given that the R0 would drop precipitously. The challenge will be reconciling this with the antivax crowd given that as the vaccine rolls out the rate of infection will come down correspondingly among the whole population (including the unvaccinated). They'll immediately claim that the virus is "going…
It's a 2-dose regimen, needs to be stored at -70C, and Pfizer already said they'll only have 1.5B doses over the course of the next year. It's going to be a very slow roll out.
It is. I’m saying after that period.
Not withstanding the rather enormous caveat of antivaxxers. They have grown significantly in number during this pandemic what with all the wild conspiracy theories. It’s worth checking that out.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is 90% protection against disease, not necessarily 90% protection against infection. There's an important distinction: * Protection against disease means that you don't get sick. You may still contract the virus and spread it to others (the Salk vaccine against Polio works this way). * Sterilizing immunity means that you can't even get infected, so that you can't pass the virus on to other people. It does not lo…
> Importantly, this means that even with this vaccine, the virus may still be able to spread, and only vaccinated people will be protected (i.e., no herd immunity). Can't we still hit herd immunity as a byproduct of this though? If everyone can pass it along without symptoms, then eventually everyone will have it...
Herd immunity is when people who are not immune are protected by other people's immunity.
If enough other people have sterilizing immunity, the virus doesn't spread, and the susceptible people are safe.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is good news but I'm worried about the mutation already showing up in minks in Denmark. Minks apparently have a near identical respiratory system. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/denmark-plans-kill-15-mil...
Fortunately it sounds very contained. All cases (fewer than 15) were confined to a single location and there haven’t been any more detected since September. So most likely the mutation is now extinct.
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Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#709Given we can't even get people to wear masks, regardless of efficacy I think we mainly have an education issue and half the country voted for "fuck that let's die." I think we need to spend as much time/money on a social campaign with mask mandates, social distancing, quarantine, contact tracing.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty confident it's the former, which if the case, essentially ends the pandemic in a month after it's distributed, given that the R0 would drop precipitously. The challenge will be reconciling this with the antivax crowd given that as the vaccine rolls out the rate of infection will come down correspondingly among the whole population (including the unvaccinated). They'll immediately claim that the virus is "going…
We should be clear about the goalposts. Reducing the transmission rate to a manageable level will be very easy with even just some fraction of the population being vaccinated. What exact percentage is unclear, but it's a lot less than 100%. No realistic number of anti-vaxxers can change that. Eradicating the virus is a whole different goal, and there could be lots of different impediments to that. After all, we still…
It’s not terrible. It’s not ideal.
Letting this thing circulate seems dangerous given it introduces the possibility of a vaccine-resistant mutation. If anything it drives the evolution of the virus towards vaccine resistance similar to what happened with MRSA bacteria and antibiotics.