Let's not forget to complain about the back button hijacking.
Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
731–740 of 1001 posts
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#732Good: + ~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?
Incomplete:
- Trial is only halfway complete.
- Preliminary results have not been peer-reviewed.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still other vaccines in testing that will be more suitable for those parts of the world.
Yes and that's a good thing. I think it's still important to recognise that not everyone is as privileged as many of us here, and that an inclusive approach to distribution will be important for this vaccine.
Viruses also, naturally, take longer to reach harder to reach areas. Basically, if the vaccine will have trouble reaching a community, the virus will, too.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#734Earlier 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…
Except that contact tracing has worked at scale, in most countries of Asia, Africa and Australasia.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#735Good: + ~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?
> I still wonder about long-term immunity.
The current understanding is that there will be likely no long-term immunity, just like the flu virus (as it mutates).
> -80 Degree Celsius storage and transport needed.
This is actually typical for vaccines storage/transportation needs. Unfortunately this will also means that it cannot be easily distributed into developing countries where supply chain requirements are largely unmet.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd happily take a shot a year for a decade in return for getting rid of lockdown.
s/a decade/in perpetuity We'll almost certainly need an annual covid vaccination for the same reasons we get annual flu vaccinations - with our current medical technology we can neither rid the planet of the virus nor obtain permanent immunity.
Sure, that works.
I didn't get flu shots in the past mostly because the shot hurts more than the flu, but COVID is another animal and pretty scary. Maybe they could be combined into a single poke.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#737Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it's a minor logistical challenge, it's simple enough to ship this in a liquid nitrogen dewar. Even very small cities will have liquid nitrogen facilities. Shipping from the nearest city to most of the population sounds very doable in 24 hours. Remember you only need to get most of the population to halt the spread. If there's some tiny village 3 days hike away in the rainforest, you can skip them.
Shipping hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccine at -80C is more than a “minor logistical challenge”. First, you’d never ship in a liquid nitrogen dewar. It would be a massive logistics bottleneck considering the weight of dewars and the volume you'd be shipping (Pfizer already has deals secured for hundreds of millions of doses). And plus, these are packaged vaccines - a glass vial with a label, in a paper box, wi…
This is a fundamentally easy thing to solve.
Developing a safe and effective vaccine -- fundamentally hard. Developing a nuclear weapon -- fundamentally hard. Developing a quantum computer -- fundamentally hard.
Shipping something cold at a large scale? Hard, but not fundamentally hard. We'll solve it. There's no fucking way the vaccine effort is stopped by refrigeration needs.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
So which company benefits the most here? From a cursory googling the following seem decent: - The Whirlpool Corporation - Electrolux AB - LG Electronics Inc. problem is these companies have a lot of exposure to other sectors as well of course.
Based on this NYT article [1], some logistics companies planning to store and transport the vaccine are using freezers from Stirling Ultracold. It may just be a curiosity, but their freezers (as the name would suggest) use bona fide Stirling engines rather than the typical two-stage compressors used in most ULT freezers. As someone in life science research who uses plenty of -80 freezers, I've always been curious abo…
gas-liquide cycle freezers typically do not have enough of a temperature gradiants to work. Normal freon (R-whatever you have heard of) don't get cold enough. That isn't to say you can't make one, but stirling cycle is not much worse so just use it.
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#739I'm feeling a deep-seated wave of relief that I never thought possible. Like waking up from a year-long nightmare. Thank God.
I'm glad we are going to have a vaccine, but I'm not so happy about 90% I have built up in my head the idea of all the things I'm going to do 'once I get vaccinated', but at 90% that gets pushed off to "once most people get vaccinated". If it were by myself, I might push my luck. But I want to do those things with friends, or family. .9^n is pretty shitty odds once n gets to around 5. There's a sort of rhetoric that'…
> "If I go out for steak, I'm probably okay at 90%," versus, "If we have our family reunion at Disney World, there's a 50% chance we're all going to be attending a funeral in a month, even if everybody got the vaccine."
How in the heck do you arrive at a 50% chance of someone dying? You might argue that there's a 50% chance of someone getting the virus (that's really debatable, it's not highly contagious), but even if someone did, their chance of survival is several orders of magnitude higher than 50% unless they are in a high-risk group...
Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
#740Let's not forget to complain about the back button hijacking.
I imagine its to do with the per-country redirect? I wonder if people coming in from a UK IP address are getting hijacked as well?