COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Why are women so much less likely to say they will get it than men?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Why are women so much less likely to say they will get it than men?

I'd strongly wager the majority of anti vaxxers are women. There's a lot of overlap with new age religion, crystals, that kind of thing. Mommy groups are filled to the brim with this garbage.

I’m aware the majority of hardcore anti-vaxxers are women.  But I figured this is a tiny minority of the overall population.  It’s troubling that this pattern also appears true at such a wider level among the entire population.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Yeah, I don't really see why we should be holding vaccines back for second doses.  The data shows that just getting the first dose is just over 50% effective by itself, and a lot of people who get the first dose won't get the second dose regardless, so from an efficiency standpoint, it seems like we should be using the vaccines we have as quickly as we can use them.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1337417029033275392

Byrd, a former teacher and principal, in 2018 was accused by three former students of sexually assaulting them in the 1980s when he coached their girls basketball team at Wayne County High School.

He never publicly denied the allegations, but said he has done nothing wrong while in office.

WTF is wrong with half of this country???

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

So now the Pfizer vaccine has been approved and will be distributed starting this week, with Moderna likely to follow suit on the 17th. How soon before we see a real effect?

This is good to hear. But I suspect it will be at least 5-6 months before we start to see an impact from the vaccine's dissemination. Obviously, medical workers, high-risk and elderly patients, and essential workers will receive the vaccine first before the remainder of the population.

5-6 months??? Maybe 5-6 weeks.  It really depends how we end up prioritizing the elderly.  But just vaccinating the most vulnerable 20% of the population should reduce deaths by at least 90%.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Vaccinating the people in nursing homes alone will have a major effect. That combined with protecting health care workers will help with the hospital capacity crunch a ton.

I also wonder at what level do things start to drop on their own. Seems like the Dakotas are hitting some kind of natural slowdown where the virus is having a harder time spreading. It is still lingering but cases and hospitilzations have really fallen off in ND.

Of course both states have some advantages in their lack of density.

shhhhh few people want to acknowledge this.

Who’s not acknowledging what?

Obviously vaccinating the most vulnerable population will have a drastic effect.

Earlier up in this same page of the thread you have people claiming it will take 5-6 months to see any results from the vaccine.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I don’t really see why life can’t return to close-to-normal once the majority of the vulnerable population has been vaccinated by February.  I mean, wearing masks in confined spaces is fine, but certainly nothing should be closed.  The virus is not enough of a threat to young and healthy people alone to merit that sort of disruption to our daily lives.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I don’t really see why life can’t return to close-to-normal once the majority of the vulnerable population has been vaccinated by February.  I mean, wearing masks im confined spaces is fine, but certainly nothing should be closed.  The virus is not enough of a threat to young and healthy people alone to merit that sort of disruption to our daily lives.

COVID-19 (coronavirus): Long-term effects

COVID-19 symptoms can sometimes persist for months. The virus can damage the lungs, heart and brain, which increases the risk of long-term health problems.

Older people and people with many serious medical conditions are the most likely to experience lingering COVID-19 symptoms, but even young, otherwise healthy people can feel unwell for weeks to months after infection

There’s no doubt that the virus -can- cause long-term damage tp health in young people.

But the relevant question is whether the likelihood and seriousness of that damage is so debilitating to our health care system and society as a whole to merit an unprecedented disruption in our daily lives, a disruption which has led to long term economic devastation for a millions and likely permanent damage to the education of an entire generation of children.

I have seen no evidence that the answer to this question should be yes.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Trump shouldn’t need the vaccine right now because he already had the virus.  But in general, I do believe essential government officials should get it immediately.  At the very least anyone who has Secret Service protections.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I hope people dont let their guard down for the next couple of months as it's unlikely the average person will be able to get a vaccine until sometime from April to July

I think every adult who wants the vaccine will be able to get it by May.
The numbers I’ve heard are 20 million people vaccinated this month, then 30 million per month going forward.
That gets you to 170 million people by May, or ~half the US population.

Given that about 1/4 of the population are children who don’t qualify, and 1/3 of adults won’t want to get the vaccine, 170 million should cover every adult who wants it.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Are people who have had the virus supposed to get a vaccine at all? Like even when there's plenty to go around?

My impression is that they will be able to get it just as easily as those who haven’t had the virus.
And they certainly should get it once it is easily available.
But I think we should have a national policy of discouraging people who already had the virus from getting it immediately while it is still in short supply.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Are people who have had the virus supposed to get a vaccine at all? Like even when there's plenty to go around?

My impression is that they will be able to get it just as easily as those who haven’t had the virus.
And they certainly should get it once it is easily available.
But I think we should have a national policy of discouraging people who already had the virus from getting it immediately while it is still in short supply.

FWIW, one of my wife's relatives has had COVID twice, both times confirmed by test and with symptoms. They were 7 or 8 months apart. So either there are multiple strains or immunity fades (the first case was pretty mild, the second more severe).

Or one was a false positive test?  There have been a few confirmed cases of reinfection, but if it were actually anything but extraordinarily rare, we'd be seeing thousands of such cases every day.

Using a vaccine on someone who has already had the virus is 99% likely to be a wasted vaccine.  And while the vaccine is scarce, we cannot afford this sort of waste.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Fauci just said on MSNBC that he expects every adult who wants a vaccine will have it by the end of the 2nd quarter of 2021. But when asked about getting back to normal, he said that a vaccine is a complement not a substitute for COVID public health measures, and that it may be in the 2nd half of 2021 or longer before the level of infection is low enough that things can get back to what they were before.  🤷‍♂️

This messaging seems really bad to me.  If getting the vaccine is only a "complement" to all the other restrictions and inconveniences that the pandemic has brought, how are you going to convince the people to get the vaccine?

We need to emphasize that the vaccine is the only solution at this point.  Until you take it, you need to keep wearing a mask and socially distancing, etc.  But once you have taken it (at least the second dose), you are free to resume life as normal.  That's the only message that is going to get close to universal adoption.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

This looks like a good prioritization scheme:

https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1339245175835680772

Certainly there has to be a trade-off between saving the most lives and saving the most years of life. 

The fatality rate of this virus grows so exponentially with age that I think in general it is better to vaccinate older people first. 

But I’m not sure about the wisdom of giving first priority to those in nursing homes given that the average nursing home resident dies within six months of entering the home anyway.  There’s a huge difference in my mind between an otherwise health 70-year old with a life expectancy of 15-20 years and a long-term care resident with a life expectancy of a few months.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

What the hell happened in CA today?  They are reporting 61k cases today.  Their previous daily record was 37k, and cases are declining in most other states.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Doesn’t Californja have a mask mandate, as well as some of the toughest restrictions in the country?  Why are their cases surging so much right now?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Apparently, the data suggests that just getting the first shot of the Moderna vaccine is 92% effective.  It would seem like if we just gave everyone one shot, we could vaccinate everyone who wants it by early March.  I’m surprised there aren’t more people advocating for this, but here’s one:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/opinion/coronavirus-vaccine-doses.html

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

The CDC and the public health profession in this country has been absolutely captured by wokeness, thus we have recommendation for essential workers to receive the vaccine before the elderly, due to racial demographics.

https://twitter.com/JCompson_III/status/1339816443668553728?s=20

https://twitter.com/surplustakes/status/1339574645180289026?s=20


never mind the risks that COVID pose to black and brown elderly, many of them having health conditions like diabetes

https://twitter.com/dbaten3/status/1339936163797331969?s=20

Why does this tweet link to a photo of the headline of the article rather than the actual article?  That seems very disingenuous.

In any case, we probably shouldn't be trying to reduce total deaths, but rather years of life lost.
In the case of the average person, this would still tilt toward vaccinating the elderly first because of their death rate is exponentially higher than the that of young people (i.e. a 10% chance of saving 10 years of life is better than a 1% chance of saving 30 years of life).

But we also need to consider that the average elderly person comes in contact with a lot fewer other people than essential workers, so the essential worker also has both a higher chance of catching the virus and a higher chance of spreading it to others once infected.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Here's a link to the article since it isn't in the tweet:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-vaccine-first.html

The racial aspect seems like a very small portion of this decision.
But having read the article, it seems like they are classifying way too many people as essential workers.  Essential workers should just be people who are interacting with large numbers of members of the public on a regular basis.   Under this definition, I think they should vaccinate essential workers first.

But really we should just be prioritizing vaccinating as many people as possible as soon as possible, and this means just giving people ONE DOSE until the vaccine is widely available to everyone.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It was silly to shut everything down almost nationwide back in March when most of the country had no cases.  Except for in the NYC region, this just delayed the surges while making everyone too fatigued to shut things down again later when they would have been warranted.

We should have banned very large gathering and instituted a national mask mandate, but kept schools open and limited shutdowns to areas where there was a huge surge and the healthcare system was in danger of collapse.

We also should have incentivized vaccine challenge trials.  The currently approved vaccines were developed in about three days, and then delayed three or four months unecessarily while the trials just  waited around for literally millions of people to be infected naturally.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I really don’t understand why there hasn’t been more discussion about the efficiency of giving people one shot verses two. 

This would seem to me to be at least as important, if not more so, as the priority in which different groups receive the vaccine.  In fact, that question becomes much less important if we can agree that one shot is nearly as effective as two, which is what data suggest, at least as far as the RNA vaccines go.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Fortunately, we have a new administration coming in three weeks. Biden has pledged 100 million vaccines administered in his first 100 days. That won’t quite get us to herd immunity, but it should reduce deaths by more than 90% if allocated correctly.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I believe the trial evidence showed that the first dose of the vaccine didn’t even start to become effective until after about 10 days.  Nevermind the obvious fact that 95% effective != 100% effective.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Both of my parents got the vaccine today!

My dad is a doctor and qualified to get an appointment as a frontline healthcare worker (though he is mostly retired now and does part time volunteer clinic work).

My mom didn’t expect to be able to get it, but she went with him.  And apparently at the end of the day, they are giving vaccines to anyone who shows up on a first-come-first-serve basis if they have stock left over that they would otherwise have to discard. And I guess she lucked out.  My dad said they’d be looking up vacation flights tonight!

So this might be worth checking out for anyone that wants the vaccine immediately but doesn’t qualify.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1345819737389998082

It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but we just don’t know.  It might be worth doing in some places but not others for comparison.  If only we had done challenge trials we could have tested all of these ideas out.