I had my booster monday (Pf 1,2,3). Just tenderness on the underside of my arm - swinging the axe was a bit painful this morning. My wife had the booster on the same day (AZ1+2 & pf booster) and she has a rash from her shoulder down to her belly, which although uncommon is much more common in women than men according to Google. Both of us are feeling ok though. I’m happy the side-effects have been so mild.
And less effectiveness. When they were first available, it was a fair comment to make to say that the first available was the best option. With Delta and Omicron we’ve seen the adenovirus versions (AZ and J&J) have less broad protection against new variants and also seem to experience a more rapid drop off in protection.
Anyone who received AZ or J&J is now effectively unvaccinated.
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Quite so - it wasn’t the reason they were withdrawn in Canada, but certainly doesn’t make any kind of case for reintroduction.
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US authorities quietly (which kind of defeats the point) made the unusual decision the other week to affirmatively recommend the mRNA options over J&J moving forward.
mRNA vaccines are the ones which are showing a slight risk of myo/pericarditis especially in young males age 12-17. avg 20cs/100,000 doses. none reported for Janssen vector virus vaccine, which is basically built the same as AZ.
If I were going to get another booster, it would be AZ or J&J.
The risk associated with the mRNA vaccines are orders of magnitude smaller than the improvement in protection they provide against the adenovirus versions. Consciously choosing AZ or J&J at this point is akin to avoiding food for fear of choking.
A few months ago there was reason to speculate that an adenovirus version was the better choice for a booster for those who originally had the mRNAs, but it’s speculative and based on data that mostly pre-dated delta let alone Omicron.
That’s good news. But what about your lymph nodes??
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The UK did over 1 million vaccinations yesterday, for the first time.
39,995 first doses
54,085 second doses, and
968,665 booster/third doses
We also recorded over 100k new cases of coronavirus for the first time.
He was at the work Christmas party. I was too busy hanging out with a couple of voluptuous women who seemed like they were up for a good time…
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At least you are still testing at appropriate levels. Here we are using the Trump method to manage growth, fewer tests, fewer cases. We aren’t actually doing fewer, but multiple regions are now at peak testing capacity and restricting access to PCR tests. Flying blind.
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Yeah, the UK has been testing the shit out of coronavirus for a while now but it’s gone from around 800k per day to about 1.5million per day in the last couple of weeks. And that doesn’t even include all the lateral flow tests people are doing at home.
So far no real peaking on deaths or hospital admissions but we know how there’s normally a 10-14 day lag on rising case numbers translating to increasing hospital admissions and, unfortunately, deaths. If there’s a problem with the severity of Omicron we’ll start to see it reflected in those numbers in the next few days.
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Honestly, until PCR can turn around results in an hour, I really think it is outlived its usefulness, and even then they arent remotely as scalable as effective at home tests. If people are doing it properly, and continuing to isolate until the results come back, it just results in far too many people-days in isolation, especially for people who then return post-contagiousness positives. To me, the biggest issue with LFTs are the continued perception that they are inferior, and the challenge of counting the results in the official public health statistics (there is a mechanisms for this, but it is not required).
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In practical terms, people with minor cases who test positive on a rapid test and just take care of themselves should be fine. The problem I have with that is that we don’t have any mechanism to get those numbers and include them in case counts, which in turn are governing our policy reactions and behaviour. There are now people who truly believe that the Kingston area has seen case growth level off, which is almost certainly not true.
That, and we have made a complete mess of distributing rapid tests.
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Yeah, I edited my post a bit as you were writing it to say much the same thing.
And while we fucked up rapid test production as well, certainly PCR tests are insufficient to manage either, especially with the limitation on result turn around. Moving forward the focus should be on massively upscaling at home tests so that regardless of past issues, they are readily available. When this is combined with widespread education on how to use them to make per-day decisions, the effect will be significant. The challenge from there will be how these results are reported. You can do something so that only positive tests are reported but then you lose the value of % +ves. But I think that is secondary to giving everyone the tools to know today if you are safe to go into public.
On a 7-day rolling average both Germany and the UK are each doing more vaccinations than the US now.
I’m talking absolute numbers, not per capita. That’s just baffling.
My facility has 20 minute turn around times on a Covid test. Doesn’t really help when every single person who comes in needs a test and you only have one machine to run them on. In 12 hours the other day we did 35 tests and 15 came back positive
I dont think we have anything like the anti vaccine push amongst politicians in the UK or Germany as they do in the states though which has to be a significant factor, hasn’t it?
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That’s what I would have thought, but the push back I saw on IG and Twitter from Klopp’s recent comments about our club’s vaccination status really shocked me. I know these are world wide platforms, but a lot did seem to be UK based.
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