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Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

reuters.com

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Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#551

Post by ppf »

oivey wrote: post #535
ppf wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice, and I suppose everyone entering and leaving the country will need vaccine passports. It's as if everything that we were told would never happen, is going to happen. "A few weeks to flatten the curve", and now we are swallowing the idea of 100% vaccination and associated papers. 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…

I guess I don’t remember things the same. In my state, the most extreme restrictions (basically, everything is closed that isn’t remote or essential work) were lifted after a bit. I don’t recall ever being under the impression that restrictions would ever be completely lifted until the vaccine was rolled out. I recall at the time there being a lot of worry about how long that would take. I also don’t recall anything…

If your (state, country, whatever) has a 100% vaccination policy to "prevent mutations", then how can you possibly not have a vaccination passport?

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#552

Post by marvin »

Izkata wrote: post #538
ptaipale wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war-sized effort includes a lot of other things besides vaccines: lockdowns, masks, drastic reduction of international travel, tankerfuls of hand desinfectant, etc. Yes, then it starts to have an impact; without those, there would have been mayhem.

If all that - which was in place in late spring and summer last year - was the reason, then why did cases start increasing anyway in the fall? 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 d…

Your reasoning does not make sense at all. I hope you're just missing GP's point. Maintaining a 1 meter distance has been shown to reduce the likelihood of contagion by 80%. Using a face mask has been shown to reduce the likelihood of contagion by 40%.

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.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#553

Post by Izkata »

marvin wrote: post #552
Izkata wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all that - which was in place in late spring and summer last year - was the reason, then why did cases start increasing anyway in the fall? 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 d…

Your reasoning does not make sense at all. I hope you're just missing GP's point. Maintaining a 1 meter distance has been shown to reduce the likelihood of contagion by 80%. Using a face mask has been shown to reduce the likelihood of contagion by 40%. 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 meaningle…

> 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.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#554

Post by angry_octet »

anthonypasq wrote: post #522
angry_octet wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Norway is one of the few countries where it makes sense to be extra cautious, as they have excellent medical records and strong control over virus transmission. It's absolutely mad for Italy, Austria etc. But this is not a surprise: countries that handle the pandemic well (evidence based rather than populism or dogma) continue to manage the vaccine rollout well, and vice versa.

By most metrics the US and UK have handled the pandemic horribly, yet are at the front of the pack by a mile in terms of vaccines.

Yes, the US and the UK have done a good job ordering vaccine. The UK learnt a lesson about outsourcing and used the NHS for vaccine delivery. Delivery in the US is still shambolic, they just have an enormous supply.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#555

Post by estaseuropano »

blagie wrote: post #318
tazjin wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the risk is minuscule compared to COVID-19 itself 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.

The risk *of death* from COVID is pretty negligible for some age groups. The biggest confusion of this whole situation is we've fixated on CFR numbers as a measure of risk. Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.

Agree fully, although even the mortality numbers far outweigh the thrombosis incidence!

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.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01177-6

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#556

Post by petre »

theptip wrote: post #548
petre wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 4% deaths are from covid-19, not from the vaccines. 3.4% is the WHO global estimate if you want to be more precise and 2.5% in my country as of today. 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…

Got you, thanks. (Side-note, I wish it were easier to transmit simple models like this as part of discourse). 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…

There's a mistake on my part, the risk of getting blood clots, not death, is actually even lower, 30/5/1e-6 = 6·1e-6, not 0.0015.

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?

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#557

Post by _ph_ »

raducu wrote: post #543
_ph_ wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to a high-ranking doctor on the German TV today, the observed effect isn't normal thrombosis but a brain related thromboses, where prophylactic treatment is not possible.

Really curious, why is prophylactic treatment not possible? Does aspirine not cross the blood brain barrier?

I am a bit out of my depth here, but from what I understood, it is not a normal kind of thrombosis, but more an interaction of the immune system with the thrombocytes in the brain which actually causes bleedings, so aspirine or any other blood thinner would not be helpful.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#558

Post by _ph_ »

yladiz wrote: post #362
_ph_ wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccination rate in Germany will drop considerably while the hold is in place, at least 20%, if not more. I don't know the exact numbers, but vaccination is quite blocked on vaccine supply at the moment.

This isn't really true for the AstraZeneca vaccine, though. There's supply, but people don't seem to trust it and it's just sitting on the shelves because even when people book an appointment they don't show up. I'm sure the number of vaccinations _will_ drop, because it's one of the only few vaccines being distributed, but I doubt it will be as high as you mention here.

From what was just shown on the TV, it is currently more like 30-40% AZ vaccinations.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#559

Post by theptip »

petre wrote: post #556
theptip wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got you, thanks. (Side-note, I wish it were easier to transmit simple models like this as part of discourse). 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…

There's a mistake on my part, the risk of getting blood clots, not death, is actually even lower, 30/5/1e-6 = 6·1e-6, not 0.0015. 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?

I knocked together a quick Collab for this; feel free to clone and work with it.

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...

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#560

Post by PicassoCTs »

nabeelms wrote: post #420
geff82 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget that the German government resorts to "alternative facts" since the pandemic began just as they see fit. When we had nor masks available last march, they said "masks are useless" two months later they were mandatory "because they are the best thing we have". Recently, a post by the government on Facebook said "AstraZeneca gave us one of the best vaccines ever" just as people started to cancel their a…

I'm not aware what exactly the German government has said in the past w.r.t mask usage. However, governments claiming mask usage was not required near the start of the pandemic followed by them later requiring people to use masks was actually an understandable decision on their part from what I've understood of the situation as it unveiled. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was believed that the virus was using dr…

Truth does not work that way. If you have to prioritize masks for something, regulate that market down - by simply making it a crime to deal with them without offering them to the government first.
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