Coronavirus COVID-19 - Global Health Pandemic #95

[margarita25]

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[SouthAussie]

Canada ... will other countries follow?

I knew this was coming, after how many people have gotten it?

The unusual blood clotting disorder linked with Oxford-AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine is a different kind of clotting problem, one that requires more extensive care, can’t be predicted and is “really kinda bad,” says a Toronto infectious diseases specialist. The case fatality rate ranges between 20 and 40 per cent.

For those reasons and more, Dr. Andrew Morris believes it’s time to halt AstraZeneca’s shots in Canada, except for people aged 40 or older living in hotspots with a high amount of disease activity and a high risk of infection, and only then if people face a two- to three-week delay in getting a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shot — mRNA vaccines that haven’t been associated with the same blood clot “safety signal.”

'Very little excuse' to continue to use AstraZeneca in Canada: infectious diseases specialist

BBM
Only the countries that are lucky enough to have a good supply of other vaccines. Which is virtually no country.

They think they have worked out what is causing the rare clotting.

Scientists Find How AstraZeneca Vaccine Causes Clots

Many countries are allowing the AstraZeneca vaccine to be used for the older population (in my country, over 50s only) because the immune response is typically lower in older people.

 

[weepingangel]

No new COVID deaths were reported in Mass. Tuesday, the first time in nearly a year

 

[musicaljoke]

No new COVID deaths were reported in Mass. Tuesday, the first time in nearly a year

Wow, this is wonderful, happy news. I can hear the cheers from medical staff across the state.

 

[LadyL]

Bodies wash up on the banks of India’s holiest river as the virus spreads nationwide.

 

[acutename]

I was just in the NO DISCUSSION variant thread reading about variants in Montana. How are these variants spreading there?

I did happen to read an old (Dec 2020) article with a retelling of outbreaks before shut downs and after large events:
How US failed to meet the challenge of COVID-19 - USA Today
https://www.usatoday.com › news › 2020/12/10 › how-...
Dec 10, 2020 — worry,” Sevil said. “We're going to make it.” Gina Jere lost her father to COVID-19 in March, not long after her. Show caption Hide caption. Gina Jere lost her father to COVID-19 in March ...

I am so afraid that as we re-open, some vaccine resistant variant will spread all over and we will be having pandemic 2.0

 

[Inthedetails]

New York and Maryland public unversities now planning to require covid vaccinations:

"The State University of New York and the City University of New York plan to require that all students attending in-person instruction in the fall be fully vaccinated against Covid-19...
the requirement would be contingent on the federal government granting full approval to the vaccines now in use. So far, three vaccines have been given emergency use authorization in the United States, but none have full approval yet...

At the end of April, the University of Maryland system announced that it would require students and staff to be vaccinated."

State and city universities in N.Y. will require vaccinations once the shots have full approval.


This is big news, imo.

 

[LaLaw2000]

Bodies wash up on the banks of India’s holiest river as the virus spreads nationwide.

This makes me so very sad. They deserve so much better than this atrocity. The people of India have been on my mind so much lately.

 

[LadyL]

This makes me so very sad. They deserve so much better than this atrocity. The people of India have been on my mind so much lately.

yes these poor people - it's just too much - it's a colossal disaster IMO

 

[SouthAussie]

Australia has now signed a deal for 25 million doses of Moderna.

But it is a trickle deal. Vaccines trickling into the country.

We have a huge buy with Pfizer. Trickling in.
Now a large deal with Moderna. It will trickle in late this year and next year. (Presuming our regulatory approval will go ahead)
Novavax is supposed to release next month. Who knows how much we will get of that order. (Upon our regulatory approval)

They think our borders will likely be closed until mid 2022. A whole year more.

Moderna says it has signed deal with Australia to supply 25m doses of Covid vaccine

 

[Inthedetails]

California university system to require covid vaccines.

" Two of the nation’s largest university systems say they intend to require COVID-19 vaccinations for all students, faculty and staff on University of California and California State University campuses this fall....

CSU spokeswoman Toni Molle said the timing of a formal mandate will depend on when the FDA gives full authorization to one or more of the vaccines and also on discussions with labor unions. It could come before or after classes start.

'We are announcing now so that students and employees have time to receive a vaccination; by fall, when the proposed policy would take effect, she said...

Students or staff who fail to comply with the mandate 'will be barred from in-person access' to campus programs and facilities, including campus housing, the system said."

California's public universities to require COVID-19 vaccine

bbm

 

[JDG]

Australia has now signed a deal for 25 million doses of Moderna.

But it is a trickle deal. Vaccines trickling into the country.

We have a huge buy with Pfizer. Trickling in.
Now a large deal with Moderna. It will trickle in late this year and next year. (Presuming our regulatory approval will go ahead)
Novavax is supposed to release next month. Who knows how much we will get of that order. (Upon our regulatory approval)

They think our borders will likely be closed until mid 2022. A whole year more.

Moderna says it has signed deal with Australia to supply 25m doses of Covid vaccine

Being in Canada, we also have vaccines 'trickling' into the country.

Am curious, do you have the 4 month wait between shots that our 'leaders' have stuck us with??

They made a political (certainly not scientific) decision that we could wait up to 16 weeks between shots.

No idea of how this will affect efficacy or leave people open to increased variants or even encourage more variants because the population is 'partially vaccinated' being hosts for new and worse variants to use as hosts. ugh

Our supply has improved somewhat in the last week or so but the powers that be have also thrown away the plan for vaccinating by age and are now going by postal code for areas where there is 'more COVID', essential workers etc.

Are you at least getting your shots on the Pfizer/Moderna schedule?

Thanks

 

[weepingangel]

Thanks for that link. Very interesting article IMO that I hadn’t read before.

I was just in the NO DISCUSSION variant thread reading about variants in Montana. How are these variants spreading there?

I did happen to read an old (Dec 2020) article with a retelling of outbreaks before shut downs and after large events:
How US failed to meet the challenge of COVID-19 - USA Today
https://www.usatoday.com › news › 2020/12/10 › how-...
Dec 10, 2020 — worry,” Sevil said. “We're going to make it.” Gina Jere lost her father to COVID-19 in March, not long after her. Show caption Hide caption. Gina Jere lost her father to COVID-19 in March ...

I am so afraid that as we re-open, some vaccine resistant variant will spread all over and we will be having pandemic 2.0

 

[LadyL]

People who receive mixture of COVID-19 vaccine doses are more likely to experience side effects, study finds

 

[weepingangel]

The outdoor mask mandate has been loosened. So why is everyone still wearing them? - The Boston Globe

Masks, we can’t quit you.

Just in from Israel for a visit and eager to stroll along the Charles, Iris Yoeli had a question for her son: Did she need to wear a mask? Nah, he told her, the outdoor mandate has been relaxed. If you can stay approximately 6 feet away from others not in your household, you generally don’t need a face covering. So when she strode out of his Cambridge home with her dog, she did so with her face uncovered.

But wait … what was going on? Wherever Yoeli looked, there were people wearing masks — joggers, parents pushing strollers, people whizzing by on bikes.

“I went here and there, maybe only two people did not wear masks,” she said, sounding like someone caught in an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

It made her so uncomfortable that she hasn’t stepped outside barefaced since. “It was like I was an outsider,” she said.

After a year of smile-free interactions, fogged glasses, maskne, and general mask misery, you would have thought we would have ripped those things off our faces and never looked back.

But masks, we don’t know how to quit you.

Why not? For starters, there’s intense confusion. Can you really stay far enough away from people on the Esplanade? Then there’s the political angle — liberals fear they’ll look like anti-maskers if they shed their facial badges. And experts in human behavior say a powerful social phenomenon, beyond even Donald Trump, also is driving the behavior.

So many people are ignoring the updated state guidelines — which no longer require people to wear masks when they walk, bike, or run alone or with members of their households if they social distance — that many who want to stop wearing masks are still covering their faces because it’s easier than dealing with the glares.

Iris’s son, Erez Yoeli, a research scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management whose work focuses on altruism, says that kind of social pressure is the force driving many mask wearers now.

“Until people are reasonably sure that others also know the rules have changed — that a consensus has built that masks outdoors aren’t required — they’ll want to avoid looking like jerks,” he said.

David Rand, an associate professor at MIT whose research bridges the fields of behavioral economics and psychology, said it’s a well-studied phenomenon known as a “sticky” social norm.

“A norm got established,” he said, “and now, even though the rationale behind the norm has changed, the norm has not kept up. The norms are stickier than the official rules.”

Amid the politicization of masks,liberals have made COVID protection or prevention behaviors part of their identity, he observed. “If you’ve spent the past year feeling good about yourself because you’re wearing a mask, how can you take it off?”

It’s not like wearing a mask endangers other people the way not wearing does but even so, hostility is growing toward people who are wearing masks in situations where others don’t think they need to.

Priscilla Kwok, a local public school teacher, said that as she was walking to her Lyft, which requires masks, an unmasked man yelled at her: “Wearing masks? You gotta be kidding me you [expletive] idiot.”

“It’s very difficult to know what constitutes rational behavior during a pandemic like COVID-19 so there’s a limit to how much you might judge anybody’s choices,” Nate Silver, the well-known statistician, tweeted on Tuesday.

“But I’d argue one sign of *irrationality* is if a person doesn’t change their behavior much after being vaccinated.”

For most of the year, at least in liberal Massachusetts, we’ve been the ones who shamed. It was our sport. But now one of our most educated suburbs, Brookline, is the one being mocked internationally for its initial refusal to lift the outdoor mask mandate.

“They’re gonna need Lin-Manuel Miranda specials to tell educated white liberals to trust the science,” tweeted Astead Herndon, a CNN political analyst and New York Times reporter on May 2.

Another attack appeared a couple of days later, in the form of an Atlantic articlethat ridiculed Brookline as part of a larger trend: “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown.”

Part of the problem is that even people who’ve been waiting for this moment might not be ready. It’s been a year, but it still feels too soon, especially since in the US we’re nowhere near herd immunity, and the question of the vaccines’ effectiveness against variants lingers in the public’s mind.

“To tell people overnight, ‘Don’t worry about it, take off your masks and enjoy life,’ seems confusing,” said Aisha Langford, an assistant professor at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine.

“We need clear messaging about what’s safe and what’s not,” she said, “so that people feel more comfortable restarting the activities they stopped during the pandemic.”

Masks may have turned into a “security blanket,” said Barbara Kamholz, an associate professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine.

“When people are in very high risk or traumatic situations they typically develop ways of coping to maximize safety,” she said. “In this case, wearing masks per CDC guidelines was one example of healthy, scientifically sound coping to maximize safety.”

But the challenge, she said, comes now, when the state has said we can take masks off in certain outdoor situations. “Because the coping behavior kept a person safe, it can be very hard to give it up.”

Despite the constant messaging — or perhaps because of it — many people are confused about the latest rule change. Some people think the new state guidance applies only to fully vaccinated people (it doesn’t).

Others don’t trust the government, particularly since at the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC instructed people NOT to wear masks unless they were sick or caring for someone who was sick and not able to wear a mask. Who’s to say they’ve got it right this time?

In Watertown, even though she knows the new rules and trusts the CDC, Purnima Thakre cannot bring herself to walk barefaced, and allows herself only the periodic indulgence of pulling down her N95 for a quick gulp of full-strength air.

“I’ve gotten used to wearing masks,” she said. “I feel like it’s normal.”
​

 

[weepingangel]

Bam
Ohio Residents Can Win $1 Million Prize if They Get COVID Vaccines, Gov. Announces
More at link
Officials across the United States are looking for unique solutions to overcome coronavirus vaccine hesitancy, and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine upped the ante in a big way.

In a series of social media posts Wednesday, DeWine announced that the state of Ohio will randomly select five residents who have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, and those residents will receive a prize of $1 million.

The drawings will begin on May 26, and will occur on each successive Wednesday for five consecutive weeks, DeWine says:

 

[margarita25]

This makes me so very sad. They deserve so much better than this atrocity. The people of India have been on my mind so much lately.

yes these poor people - it's just too much - it's a colossal disaster IMO

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[SouthAussie]

Being in Canada, we also have vaccines 'trickling' into the country.

Am curious, do you have the 4 month wait between shots that our 'leaders' have stuck us with??

They made a political (certainly not scientific) decision that we could wait up to 16 weeks between shots.

No idea of how this will affect efficacy or leave people open to increased variants or even encourage more variants because the population is 'partially vaccinated' being hosts for new and worse variants to use as hosts. ugh

Our supply has improved somewhat in the last week or so but the powers that be have also thrown away the plan for vaccinating by age and are now going by postal code for areas where there is 'more COVID', essential workers etc.

Are you at least getting your shots on the Pfizer/Moderna schedule?

Thanks

Yes, we are getting our shots on schedule. Pfizer (for emergency, medical, and quarantine workers) have their shots two weeks apart. The over 50s have their Astra Zeneca 12 weeks apart (as recommended).

Nobody else is being vaccinated yet because we don't have enough Pfizer to do the under 50s.

 

[LaLaw2000]

I'm in Louisiana and had the first Moderna vaccine on March 9. I had the second Moderna vaccine on April 6.

I had a very sore and feverish arm for several days with the first one. With the second one I had really bad side effects like a bad case of the flu. I didn't eat for 3 days because I was nauseated and didn't feel food would stay down. On the 5th morning I woke up feeling fine and had energy.

Would I do it again? YES! Being indisposed for a few days is much better than dying with Covid!

I am 70 years old. I am thankful for the vaccine.

 

[Inthedetails]

The outdoor mask mandate has been loosened. So why is everyone still wearing them? - The Boston Globe

Masks, we can’t quit you.

Just in from Israel for a visit and eager to stroll along the Charles, Iris Yoeli had a question for her son: Did she need to wear a mask? Nah, he told her, the outdoor mandate has been relaxed. If you can stay approximately 6 feet away from others not in your household, you generally don’t need a face covering. So when she strode out of his Cambridge home with her dog, she did so with her face uncovered.

But wait … what was going on? Wherever Yoeli looked, there were people wearing masks — joggers, parents pushing strollers, people whizzing by on bikes.

“I went here and there, maybe only two people did not wear masks,” she said, sounding like someone caught in an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

It made her so uncomfortable that she hasn’t stepped outside barefaced since. “It was like I was an outsider,” she said.

After a year of smile-free interactions, fogged glasses, maskne, and general mask misery, you would have thought we would have ripped those things off our faces and never looked back.

But masks, we don’t know how to quit you.

Why not? For starters, there’s intense confusion. Can you really stay far enough away from people on the Esplanade? Then there’s the political angle — liberals fear they’ll look like anti-maskers if they shed their facial badges. And experts in human behavior say a powerful social phenomenon, beyond even Donald Trump, also is driving the behavior.

So many people are ignoring the updated state guidelines — which no longer require people to wear masks when they walk, bike, or run alone or with members of their households if they social distance — that many who want to stop wearing masks are still covering their faces because it’s easier than dealing with the glares.

Iris’s son, Erez Yoeli, a research scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management whose work focuses on altruism, says that kind of social pressure is the force driving many mask wearers now.

“Until people are reasonably sure that others also know the rules have changed — that a consensus has built that masks outdoors aren’t required — they’ll want to avoid looking like jerks,” he said.

David Rand, an associate professor at MIT whose research bridges the fields of behavioral economics and psychology, said it’s a well-studied phenomenon known as a “sticky” social norm.

“A norm got established,” he said, “and now, even though the rationale behind the norm has changed, the norm has not kept up. The norms are stickier than the official rules.”

Amid the politicization of masks,liberals have made COVID protection or prevention behaviors part of their identity, he observed. “If you’ve spent the past year feeling good about yourself because you’re wearing a mask, how can you take it off?”

It’s not like wearing a mask endangers other people the way not wearing does but even so, hostility is growing toward people who are wearing masks in situations where others don’t think they need to.

Priscilla Kwok, a local public school teacher, said that as she was walking to her Lyft, which requires masks, an unmasked man yelled at her: “Wearing masks? You gotta be kidding me you [expletive] idiot.”

“It’s very difficult to know what constitutes rational behavior during a pandemic like COVID-19 so there’s a limit to how much you might judge anybody’s choices,” Nate Silver, the well-known statistician, tweeted on Tuesday.

“But I’d argue one sign of *irrationality* is if a person doesn’t change their behavior much after being vaccinated.”

For most of the year, at least in liberal Massachusetts, we’ve been the ones who shamed. It was our sport. But now one of our most educated suburbs, Brookline, is the one being mocked internationally for its initial refusal to lift the outdoor mask mandate.

“They’re gonna need Lin-Manuel Miranda specials to tell educated white liberals to trust the science,” tweeted Astead Herndon, a CNN political analyst and New York Times reporter on May 2.

Another attack appeared a couple of days later, in the form of an Atlantic articlethat ridiculed Brookline as part of a larger trend: “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown.”

Part of the problem is that even people who’ve been waiting for this moment might not be ready. It’s been a year, but it still feels too soon, especially since in the US we’re nowhere near herd immunity, and the question of the vaccines’ effectiveness against variants lingers in the public’s mind.

“To tell people overnight, ‘Don’t worry about it, take off your masks and enjoy life,’ seems confusing,” said Aisha Langford, an assistant professor at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine.

“We need clear messaging about what’s safe and what’s not,” she said, “so that people feel more comfortable restarting the activities they stopped during the pandemic.”

Masks may have turned into a “security blanket,” said Barbara Kamholz, an associate professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine.

“When people are in very high risk or traumatic situations they typically develop ways of coping to maximize safety,” she said. “In this case, wearing masks per CDC guidelines was one example of healthy, scientifically sound coping to maximize safety.”

But the challenge, she said, comes now, when the state has said we can take masks off in certain outdoor situations. “Because the coping behavior kept a person safe, it can be very hard to give it up.”

Despite the constant messaging — or perhaps because of it — many people are confused about the latest rule change. Some people think the new state guidance applies only to fully vaccinated people (it doesn’t).

Others don’t trust the government, particularly since at the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC instructed people NOT to wear masks unless they were sick or caring for someone who was sick and not able to wear a mask. Who’s to say they’ve got it right this time?

In Watertown, even though she knows the new rules and trusts the CDC, Purnima Thakre cannot bring herself to walk barefaced, and allows herself only the periodic indulgence of pulling down her N95 for a quick gulp of full-strength air.

“I’ve gotten used to wearing masks,” she said. “I feel like it’s normal.”
​

This is so true! I thought so many of these thoughts just yesterday. I live in a neighborhood that has been compliant and cooperative with masks from the start. Wearing a mask has become part of being "polite" as well as safe.

Yesterday I walked to the grocery store with my mask on when I realized I'm fully immune and don't need it outdoors! But all the people around me on the sidewalk were wearing masks, though I'm sure many/most have also received the vaccine.

It's going to be awkward for awhile, and social awkwardness is not the end of the world. We've never gone into a pandemic before and have never came out of one before either. We'll figure it out.

jmo