News that is the polar opposite of @melbournered’s just before yours.
It appears for BJ, he really is banking on the vaccine being a silver bullet despite all the experts suggesting the contrary. But this government has demonstrated repeatedly that expert opinions are not really relevant to them.
It’s quite sad really. I genuinely feel for the people over there.
We’ve had a fairly strict lockdown for about 4-5 weeks now with another 10 days to go but over the past week our numbers of cases per day have stagnated at 350-450 roughly and we just don’t seem to be able to get them down.We seem to be doing better than some other countries in Europe and we are handling things better than in the spring,we’ve responded quicker to increases but weather it’s people breaking the rules or the time of year we are nowhere near as low as we expected to be after this length of lockdown.
Yeah, frustrating indeed. How effective is Ireland’s contact tracing? Being able to figure out where those cases are coming from would be key.
We were fucking up here six weeks ago, but have been trending down steadily for about 5 weeks now. I have a call tomorrow with one of my Toronto-based investors. I know he personally has been extremely careful, so must be frustrated to see their lockdown.
We were up at 1200 per day for about a week but acted fast and that quickly dropped and continued to drop over a few weeks but we don’t seem to be able to pull it down further.From what i think we track forward rather than trace back but there are calls for that to be changed in order to get the numbers right down.
Has anyone found any data on the breakdown of age demographic results for the Oxford vaccine trial? 30/101 split of covid cases between the vaccine and control groups, but most interested in the ages of those with covid in both groups. 70% efficacy is not brilliant and particularly not if it offers little improved protection for older adults, but perhaps useful as an additional measure.
@Limiescouse, you seem to have a good grasp of the vaccines. If the Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford vaccines (amongst others) are working on triggering an immune response, would there be a risk of adverse effects of mixing vaccines? I think you or @Arminius have mentioned previously how immune response vaccines can trigger ‘overloaded’ immune responses which are dangerous. I am worried about all these pharma companies rushing out their vaccines quickly and absolutely no testing about how they play together. Oxford vaccine appears to be very cheap and easy to distribute than the other two which may mean they are for different markets, but I think there will inevitably be lots of cross vaccination particularly with Oxford’s much lower efficacy.
All we know about the results for any of them so far is what has been part of the press releases so we dont know yet for any of them. That data becoming available will be part of the approval process though, so it’s coming.
Possibly, but there is no data on that. It is a bit of a problem as all of these are likely to be required on a regular schedule to maintain effectiveness. The different operational challenges each of these provides (e.g. Pfizer’s is likely to only be available in limited Centers of Excellence or in standalone Covid vaccine clinics) means what is available to you 3 years down the road may be different than what is available to you in the spring. I suspect though the “risk” in this case is more to do with blunted effectiveness than of adverse events risk.
An interesting point though is that with effective testing/tracing regimes, if you assume a 6-month efficacy period, you probably only need 2 cycles for a given society to eliminate transmission.
That must have been Limiescouse, or in something I quoted as a side point, because I have no real understanding of how that would work.
How excited should we get over the Oxford vaccine?
I appreciate it is cheaper and easier to store than the other vaccines, and at 70% it’s more effective than the seasonal flu jab, but is that good enough to warrant being termed “highly effective”?
I think the headlines i saw this morning suggested the Oxford/AZ vaccine can stop 90% as part of a two dose strategy. I dont know how this differs from the 70% group.
The cost differential is massive though, and that gets us into population-level considerations. The ‘herd immunity’ idea finally starts to become relevant. The Oxford vaccine puts whole population vaccination into reach of far more societies than the other two. At a population level, after two cycles, there won’t be much difference in the incidence level.
According to the beeb,
There are two results from the trial of more than 20,000 volunteers in the UK and Brazil.
…protection was 90% in an analysis of around 3,000 people on the trial who were given a half-sized first dose and a full-sized second dose.
While 90% protection is much better, it creates the logistical/administrative problem of requiring people to return for a second dose.
And is 3000 people a big enough sample size to have confidence in the results?
So can I get excited?
Why are you asking him? You need written permission from Boudica first.
I am. The end might be in sight, though not imminent. The brutal reality was that at Moderna/Pfizer costs, a global effort was probably out of reach. The Oxford vaccine changes that - one can see a strategy where the more expensive ones are used in countries with a high probability of contact, and the low cost one everywhere else.
How much difference is there in the costs?
Just a ball park figure if you can.
I have seen numbers as high as $40 for Moderna, Pfizer around $25, Astra-Zeneca has said they are targeting under $5.
Yeah, this is why they included a group with a single dose in the study. They have announced they are going to submit the two doses for approval, but given the issues with production capabilities, it will be interesting to see how they game out the overall public health benefit of 1) better individual protection for half the people vs slightly lower individual benefit (but still better than we hoped for at the beginning of this process and around the level required to achieve heard immunity) for twice the people.