COVID-19 thread

[Raphael]

I really do wonder why it wasn't. If the current crisis is not an emergency, what is?

Perhaps no one ever thought of instituting the kind of procedures that could be activated for that kind of thing?

[Ares Land]

My own cynical take on this is that nobody's in a hurry to get people vaccinated because the logistics aren't ready. Which isn't terribly surprising. Still, I'm not entirely reassured by the idea that our governments are less efficient than Boris Johnson...

[Travis B.]

According to a recent POLITICO article, which I don't know how to link to instead of its amp version from my phone, it is primarily a matter of more bureaucratic hoops to jump through combined with trying to placate the antivaxxers by jumping through them.

[Raphael]

Trying to placate antivaxxers is pointless, IMO.

[Travis B.]

Trying to placate antivaxxers is pointless, IMO.

My view on antivaxxers is that instead of placating them they should not be allowed to even leave their homes - or have other people enter their homes other than people like doctors and like - until they are vaccinated. No personal belief or religious exceptions allowed. As for not being vaccinated for medical reasons, they should be required to have three doctors sign off on that, and that falsifying such a record should be grounds for losing one's medical license..

[doctor shark]

So, on a different note, as of midnight, the Netherlands is going into a pretty much complete lockdown for five weeks, which is the first time that this is happening here (the March/April situation was a partial lockdown!). Rutte's speech was quite alarming in how there were the protestors just outside the office jeering, whistling, and doing what they could to disrupt the address, but little surprise at that. Also unsurprising with seeing how badly the case numbers were trending. Still a bit depressing about not being able to go home for Christmas (I'm not taking any chances, especially with my mother and kittens) and also without friends, but, then again, that was just like the first lockdown. So nothing new.

I really do wonder why it wasn't. If the current crisis is not an emergency, what is?

Perhaps no one ever thought of instituting the kind of procedures that could be activated for that kind of thing?

The European Medicines Authority does have a kind of "emergency" procedure, called "conditional marketing authorization", but that still takes about a month or so for evaluation. Right now, two vaccine candidates (the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines) are both under an evaluation for the CMA, with a verdict (and possible approval) for the former due by the end of the year and the latter by mid-January. Both of the candidates under review are the RNA vaccines, which are new technology... for something like the Astra Zeneca vaccine, that could be more straightforward, but still, the review of the data can be quite involved, depending on how many people review it, what they're looking for, what the data contain...

My own cynical take on this is that nobody's in a hurry to get people vaccinated because the logistics aren't ready. Which isn't terribly surprising. Still, I'm not entirely reassured by the idea that our governments are less efficient than Boris Johnson...

I don't know how involved the evaluation process is here, but considering that it's on a EU-wide level, I'd imagine it to be a bit slower than in countries with single authorities. I wouldn't call it necessarily "less efficient", to be honest: this is something that needs to be gotten "right", and there'd be far more damage if there was a hasty approval of a bad product compared to a slower approval of a suitable product. A small advantage to the delay could be a wider roll-out of product once the approval's granted...

It is frustrating, considering that people've had quite a while to prepare for this and to get the infrastructure more than ready. But without knowing which vaccine would/could get approved first, it might not be worth it to invest in the ULT storage if you don't need the ULT storage capacity in the end.

[Torco]

My view on antivaxxers is that instead of placating them they should not be allowed to even leave their homes - or have other people enter their homes other than people like doctors and like - until they are vaccinated. No personal belief or religious exceptions allowed.

I think the right way to grasp this is to understand it as a religious difference. which isn't to mean it's not relevant, people back when also thought that what you believed about christology, icons and foreskins was important. but what I mean is that if your idea was a decree against jews, or wiccans. we'd all be mad af. Na, man, it's not that complicated. we do it right here in chile (and i bet we're not that special either). law says kid gets the shot and if you don't take him then there's a legal process to have a court issue an order and you probably end up losing custody if you refuse, like civilized people. It's all sorted out amongst the lawyers after 12 to 36 months. Of course, this means it's local health ministry officials that get to choose who to prosecute, and even our fash laugh at antivaxers, last i checked.


As to the vaccination logistics, it shouldn't be that hard. the thing is, it doesn't make sense to administer the shots any faster than they're being produced/bought from pfizer/distributed by china/whatever. it was always going to be a pretty slow process. I'd be surprised if rates are above 50% by january 22.

[Linguoboy]

As to the vaccination logistics, it shouldn't be that hard. the thing is, it doesn't make sense to administer the shots any faster than they're being produced/bought from pfizer/distributed by china/whatever. it was always going to be a pretty slow process. I'd be surprised if rates are above 50% by january 22.

I don't expect it to be close to that by then.

My social media has been mercifully free of antivaxxer nonsense lately but this morning a cousin of mine shared a long sciency-sounding post by a quack in Nevada who lost his licence over a decade ago. The kicker is that she lost her husband to COVID in the summer. I'm rationalising this as dysfunctional bright-side thinking. That is, I think she wants to believe that not only would surviving long enough to receive the vaccine not have saved her husband but that it would have been even worse for him. She never engages on her posts but she's got some stoner anti-authoritarian friend who got the flu once in 1995 after being vaccinated telling everyone to just "do what works for you". Dude, for the 100th time, that is not how pandemics work. But it's "all about control"! Again, if the government were trying to effectively control you, you think it would be doing it through the shambles of a joke of our public health system? FFS.

[Ares Land]

Many reasonable things.

It's indeed frustrating but yes, hopefully, we hope the actual roll-out will be a bit smoother in the long run.

Our neighbours (who also happen to be friends of ours) have a pretty... creative view of medicine, so of course they don't trust the vaccines and they're quite taken to conspiracy theories.
I think it's really a way to cope with stress.

I'm generally pretty optimistic about antivaxxers. When they'll be actually be faced with a choice between vaccination and contamination, I bet many of them will actually do the right thing.

[Torco]

I agree that a lot of them are probably gonna buckle cause it's not really about vaccines for them but rather about, i dunno, being based and redpilled or whatever.

problem is, those kinds of things often last no more than a decade or two: people who grow up hearing about how vaccines kill you actually come to believe vaccines kill you sincerely. that's the problem with the dogwhistle, too: the kids might end up believing you're actually talking about global finance and not the iudaioi or whatever.

(left the euphemism there even though i realized i'm not on a "social media" platform, where merely typing the word 'jew' lands you in bananaland)

[Ares Land]

Yes, it's possibly a risk.

Hopefully kids will end up so annoyed by their parents' antivaxx rants they'll adopt the opposite position.

[KathTheDragon]

Boris has cancelled Christmas in parts of the South-East just today. There's to be no mixing in or with the new tier 4 areas, even during Christmas, and outside tier 4 the Christmas rules have been restricted to just Christmas Day itself.

[Moose-tache]

I am extremely disappointed that the holiday movie industrial complex has not provided Christmasy movies that deal with quarantine. We've had so many Coronavirus porn parodies that some of them have sequels, but the machine that spits out formulaic holiday movies at the rate of about one per minute can't give me one themed offering? Here are my ideas, Hallmark, free of charge:

The Great Christmas Delivery: The year is 1918. A non-threateningly pretty white woman aged 25-30 must bring a shipment of flu vaccines to a remote village in New England during a snowstorm. To get there by Christmas she enlists the aid of a handsome but irritating lumberjack. He challenges her cynicism about holidays and love. They smooch in the snowy commons of the village after delivering the vaccines in time. He says he will support her ambitions of becoming the first female immunologist if she agrees to marry him.

Love, Unavoidably: Hugh Grant reprises his role as Prime Minister and must put a lockdown in place just days before Christmas. A working class family with charmingly unplaceable Northern/Midland accents scrambles to get ready for the holiday before the shops close down. On his way to his own family, Hugh Grant is stranded at this family's house just long enough to be stuck when the lockdown takes effect. He must now spend Christmas with the Fimblebottom family. They gradually warm to each other, and Hugh Grant gets closer to the chavy, non-threateningly pretty 40 year old aunt. He finds love and the true meaning of Christmas.

The Magical Mask: A group of neighborhood children insist that a disposable blue mask is magic, and their parents humor them. Then on Christmas Eve the children put the mask on a snowman and it comes to life! When they go off to play with the snowman, a non-threateningly pretty 35 year old white-Hispanic divorcee and a handsome widower must team up to find their children on the cold winter night. After a long adventure full of soul-searching, they find the children. The snowman melts just before the grown ups can see him, leaving a mask in a puddle. The two parents take their children home, but share a meaningful, flirty glance on their way home.

Porch Pirates: A non-threateningly pretty 20 year old woman of mixed race has an abusive boyfriend who forces her to be his accomplice while he steals presents from porches. When he gets coronavirus, she visits him in the hospital even though he is verbally abusive to her. A handsome nurse of the same racial admixture befriends her and shows her that she deserves to be happy. When the dickbag boyfriend recovers, he abuses her even more in shaky-cam for talking to another man. He makes plans to keep robbing porches with her help. The lead and her new friend call the police and ensure he gets caught in the act, freeing her from the boyfriend forever.

[Vardelm]

Boris has cancelled Christmas in parts of the South-East just today. There's to be no mixing in or with the new tier 4 areas, even during Christmas, and outside tier 4 the Christmas rules have been restricted to just Christmas Day itself.

At least if we get the usual "war on Christmas" B.S. from conservatives in the US, we can just tell them to look across the pond where the "real" war on Christmas is going on.

[Linguoboy]

So lately there's been a lot of debate about who's getting priority access to the vaccines. At Stanford University, there was a huge protest last Friday because the administration was immunising doctors who weren't seeing patients in person ahead of residents, who not only were but are being called upon to pitch in in COVID wards. They apologised and agreed to revise their plans going forward.

A lot of people I know are steamed that politicians--and, in particular, politicians whose support of Trump administration policies worsened the pandemic--are getting priority access. Vice-President Pence, for instance, has already gotten the vaccine. But then some have made the point that seeing figures like Pence and Graham get immunised might help convince refuseniks on the right to get jabbed when their time comes. I suppose we'll eventually know if that's the case.

Another point of contention has been whether to prioritise seniors over "essential workers". WHO and CDC guidelines, which put saving lives above all else, state that the most likely to die should get vaccinated first. Seniors do have the highest mortality rates, but they can also be isolated from exposure more effectively than many workers can. And then there's the added dimension that the elderly population in this country skews white and wealthier whereas essential workers are more likely to be poor and POC. It's a call I'm glad I'm not having to make.

On a personal note, one of my coworkers told me that his brother-in-law is a nurse practitioner at a clinic in rural Michigan and his concern is that he might not have enough takers for the 600 doses he's due to get next month during the 2-day window before they expire. We're seriously talking about caravaning there to get jabbed. I don't like the idea of jumping the queue, but I like the idea of precious medicine just being tossed even less.

Apparently there's going to be significant problems ahead with poor distribution of vaccines anyhow because the CDC has been using the wrong figures. MSM were reporting that the Department of Defense populated spreadsheets with estimates of how many doses would be needed while they waited for states and municipalities to report their totals and that not all of these revisions made it into the files before the initial doses were earmarked.

[Moose-tache]

I'm confused. Why would your friend's brother-in-law get a shipment of vaccines before the list of recipients was made up? That seems odd. And if the DoD didn't get all the names in time, wouldn't that result in shipping too few vaccines, not too many? I'm trying to understand how it's possible for vaccines to get sent somewhere without a list of names of people set to get vaccinated. Is there someone at Pfizer just stuffing crates and writing "Probably Somewhere in Michigan, I Guess?" on the side in Comic Sans?

[Raphael]

I'm more and more getting the feeling that how badly Covid hits a given place at a given time might be at least partly down to luck.

Edit: *applauds Moose-tache's movie ideas*

[Ares Land]

I am extremely disappointed that the holiday movie industrial complex has not provided Christmasy movies that deal with quarantine. We've had so many Coronavirus porn parodies that some of them have sequels, but the machine that spits out formulaic holiday movies at the rate of about one per minute can't give me one themed offering? Here are my ideas, Hallmark, free of charge:

I like the way all of these follow exactly the Christmas movie formula.

[Ares Land]

I'm more and more getting the feeling that how badly Covid hits a given place at a given time might be at least partly down to luck.

I feel the same! (How bad it's in the UK right now is at least partly bad luck too.)

I'm amused at the way lockdowns are framed as punishment for bad behavior.

[Torco]

I'm confused. Why would your friend's brother-in-law get a shipment of vaccines before the list of recipients was made up? That seems odd. And if the DoD didn't get all the names in time, wouldn't that result in shipping too few vaccines, not too many? I'm trying to understand how it's possible for vaccines to get sent somewhere without a list of names of people set to get vaccinated. Is there someone at Pfizer just stuffing crates and writing "Probably Somewhere in Michigan, I Guess?" on the side in Comic Sans?

why not? you're the warehouse manager: you have a bunch of emails and maybe an internal piece of paper all official saying to commence shipments. the guy with frigo-truck is outside. the paperwork and ID are in order. you double check your screen, in your "outgoing orders" thing there's a bit of a two-column spreadsheet: michigan 90.000, delaware 54.000, texas 197.000, etcétera. there's an email in your other window from like warehouse@michiganhospital.michigan.gov.us.freedom.com. it reads "thank you for contacting us, yes we have prepared the frigo-warehouses as per CDC memo number 2020-9271. I'm very sorry for the delay, I'll send you the vaccination schedule first thing monday as per the agreement with (your boss)." attached is a pdf that reads "michigan vaccine covid confirmation sworn statement v3" or something. the forklift operator is looking at you in confusion. "so... do I give it to them or what."

EDIT: why does that link to mail.ru wtf