COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

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2020 in one video.

https://twitter.com/j_fnavarrete/status/1295699014780891136

Eh, 2020 is worse than that for a variety of reasons.

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Herman Cain is still posting about how safe coronavirus is.

https://twitter.com/THEHermanCain/status/1300211456126803968

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Already 92k with partial results today.

A lot of the worst states for new cases are swing states, so maybe campaigning is spreading things.

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https://twitter.com/saikatc/status/1324038440900386816

Thanks, Nancy!

Democrats didn't want a deal before the election and now Republicans don't want a deal.

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I wonder how many dumbs think Biden is already President and has solved coronavirus. That isn't going to help.

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Ever heard of the Tuskegee experiment?

That was a while ago. But yeah, it's one of those things like Nixon telling South Vietnam to walk out of the peace talks that must have been written of as a crazy conspiracy theory until it was proven.

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Really hoping today's new cases number is a start of a trend and not an anomaly.

It's still the worst Tuesday.

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Wait, we almost broke the record on a holiday? Next week's numbers are going to be horrific.

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Today is awfully close to 9/11 and still counting.

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Arch, why are your numbers so different than Worldometer? It showed 174k for today.

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California shot up to 28k new cases today. But Newsom's kids are still going to school.

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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.

Absolutely we should be giving 1 shot to as many people as possible, rather than saving them for a 2nd shot, but our country isn't run by geniuses.

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If you insist on Moderna because it's one shot it will take longer to get everyone vaccinated.

We should be giving single shots of the two shot vaccines to as many high risk people as possible.

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It seems like if we just decide to give a half, single dose, we could vaccinate everyone who wants it within about month.  Given that we are racing against a much more contagious strain now, I am reasonably convinced that this is the way to go.

This is actually a situation where we should trust the social scientists more than we trust the doctors.  Doctors are given very limited statistically training; it is very committed to orthodoxy and giving a binary yes/no result.  Whereas social scientists, because they have to be able to intepret a much wider range of quantitative methodolgies, are more adept at thinking probabilistically about these issues.

The vaccines weren't tested to work at quarter doses. Stop your buffoonery. See the post above you as to why. No more needs to be said.

Moderna found that a single dose was 80-90% effective. It's insane to insist on giving second doses to everyone who got a first dose while millions of people are going to wait months to get a single dose. It's obvious that we should focus on giving a single dose to as many people as possible for now. Obviously a second dose for an ICU nurse or a nursing home resident should be prioritized over a first dose for a healthy person working or going to school remotely in their 20s. Basically we could put everyone into maybe 10 tiers of priority and your priority for the 2nd dose is a couple of tiers lower than the first dose.

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Biden will release all available vaccine doses in break from Trump administration policy of holding back stock for second dose

Two doses are absolutely needed for there to be any real effectiveness. Hopefully somebody who actually knows what they're doing will convince Biden to backtrack on this.

What is your evidence of this?

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4826

52% isn't enough to make a difference as far as spread, and 50/50 chance of getting it for general population means that higher risk patients will likely not have any real benefit.

If you actually look at the data day-by-day, the 52% figure comes from analyzing the the whole period after receiving the first dose but before receiving the 2nd dose.  The vaccine is basically totally ineffective for the first few days, and rises steadily thereafter.  If you just look at the period 14 days after receiving the first dose but before recieving the 2nd, I believe the vaccine was about 90% effective.

Moderna found a single dose to be 80-90% effective. Holding back doses for a second dose is dumb.

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yikes, why do they have to make this so hard?

https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1348492810895437826?s=20

Cuomo sent covid patents to nursing home, so it's pretty clear the answer is yes to trying to kill elderly.

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It was announced today that Newsom has decided to repeal the state's stay-at-home order (permitting outdoor dining and indoor salons) for reasons that, he assures us, are totally unrelated to the recall petition. We only make decisions based on the data and the science in California, after all. Never mind that ICU capacity's still at 0% and that state scientists just identified a new, more virulent strain here — the data says we should open up.

Oh, wait, you actually want to see the data we're using to make decisions? No can do, sorry, that might confuse the plebs.

State health officials said they rely on a very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public if they were made public.

Cannot wait to recall this chump.

Is he still sending his kids to school in person?

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The Johnson and Johnson vaccine has been only been shown to be 72% efficient. Now that might be because the trials haven't run long enough yet. But it'd be ironic if the vaccine that would benefit the most from a second dose would be the single dose one.

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CDC: Vaccinated people can meet up indoors without masks

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/542101-cdc-vaccinated-people-can-safely-gather-indoors-without-masks?fbclid=IwAR0EQTQhLHe8oFcN2DhmVG3SmVDHVAg5CzzMobHeMq5UACr3Hp8f0iCPBGc

Very irresponsible of the CDC.

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CDC: Vaccinated people can meet up indoors without masks

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/542101-cdc-vaccinated-people-can-safely-gather-indoors-without-masks?fbclid=IwAR0EQTQhLHe8oFcN2DhmVG3SmVDHVAg5CzzMobHeMq5UACr3Hp8f0iCPBGc

Very irresponsible of the CDC.

According to you it’s responsible to push forward a barely tested one-vaccine schedule ins yesas of what actually was tested properly but it’s not responsible to permit people to have very small gatherings with vaccinated people considering the vaccine after the second dose and two weeks is 95% protective?
Just checking.

People will just assume they don't have to wear masks any more. And I'm obviously not getting a vaccine for a long time thanks to second shots being prioritized.

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Some of the implied CFR rates by state right now are really bizarre.  Florida is averaging about 5,000 cases and 50 deaths per day (CFR~1%).  California is averaging around 2500 cases and 200 deaths per day (CFR~8%!!).  

Is Florida just much, much better at testing and thus counting cases?  Or much better at vaccinating the elderly?  What is going here?

FWIW, this isn’t really a red state/blue state thing.  NY has CFR ~1% while Texas and Georgia are 3-4%. 

Newsom didn't target those most at risk. A 64 year old with every co-morbidity wouldn't have been eligible until a couple of weeks ago.

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Just got my 2nd dose of the Pfizer vaccine last week. All that red....could this be the final surge of the virus??  I have feeling it could be and it won’t be as bad thanks to the vaccines.

No surge in the UK, which prioritized first doses.

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I really hope we get a vaccination mandate soon. The sooner we're out of all this the better.

There needs to be a lot more vaccine distribution first.

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For the AstraZeneca vaccine, it similarly was just a few sporadic cases that were identified. Big whoop. But once government regulators and scientists started to look into the issue, the number of clots identified dramatically increased.

This is not correct (the number of potential cases went from beyond minuscule to, well, beyond minuscule: even on the worst estimates we are talking of literally a million-to-one chance of death), please do not spread misinformation about vaccines on this forum.

Some people are driving over 100 miles each way to get a vaccine, which has more than 1 in a million chance of death.

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https://twitter.com/samjawed65/status/1385546644922507265

This is an excellent though somewhat long thread describing how things got out of control in India.  Unrolled version: https://threader.app/thread/1385546644922507265

The government response strongly reminds me of what I picture a second Trump administration would have done, and where the U.S. would be now.

Eh, it'd be about the same really. More dumb tweets, but also no pause of Johnson and Johnson.