Promising New Coronavirus Vaccine

[digitaldog]

You should post part of this study on bold. And then tweet it to a wider audience.

Be my guest, I'm not on Twitter (or Facebook).

[digitaldog]

JANUARY 20, 2022 / 11:59 AM / MONEYWATCH

As the Omicron variant rips across the U.S., in early January almost 9 million Americans said they were not working because they had COVID-19 or were caring for someone with the virus — triple the number from a month ago. The surge in sick workers is impacting industries ranging from hospitals to airlines, adding to the nation's labor crunch.

Worth a reminder from last month:

So now that Covid is on the way out, we're left with the economic damage.

[digitaldog]

And in the stupidity department more proof of natural selection:

A popular Czech folk singer who deliberately caught COVID-19 has died, her son says. Hanka Horka, who was not vaccinated, caught the virus from her son and husband, who are vaccinated but still caught it over the holidays, according to BBC News.
The 57-year-old purposefully did not stay away from them and exposed herself the virus, which she caught. Horka posted on social media January 14 that she had recovered from the virus – but her son told BBC News she died two days later.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60050996

The number of Covid cases in the Czech Republic reached a new daily high on Wednesday, with 28,469 cases reported in a population of 10.7m people.

[LesPalenik]

JANUARY 20, 2022 / 11:59 AM / MONEYWATCHWorth a reminder from last month:
As the Omicron variant rips across the U.S., in early January almost 9 million Americans said they were not working because they had COVID-19 or were caring for someone with the virus — triple the number from a month ago. The surge in sick workers is impacting industries ranging from hospitals to airlines, adding to the nation's labor crunch.

Yahoo Finance reports that US jobless claims rose to 3-month high. The market is dropping like a stone.

Weekly new jobless claims unexpectedly jumped last week by the most since October, with some renewed virus-related disruptions at least temporarily impeding the labor market's recovery.
The Labor Department released its latest weekly jobless claims report Thursday at 8:30 a.m. ET. Here were the main metrics from the print, compared to consensus estimates compiled by Bloomberg:

Initial jobless claims, week ended Jan. 15: 286,000 vs. 225,000 expected and a revised 231,000 during prior week
Continuing claims, week ended Jan. 8: 1.635 million vs. 1.563 million expected and a revised 1.551 million during prior week

Initial unemployment claims rose for a third straight week, coming in near the 300,000 level. This represented some backsliding from recent progress in the trajectory of jobless claims. Claims had reached a 52-year low of 188,000 in December, as many employers attempted to keep their existing workforces in the face of widespread labor shortages.
Continuing claims also came in higher-than-expected in the most recent data. These claims, which tracks filers still collecting regular state unemployment benefits, rose by more than 1.6 million in mid-January.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/weekly-unemployment-claims-week-ended-jan-15-2022-200147927.html

[digitaldog]

My wife is upset as she was a fan.
The guy who had several underlying health conditions killed himself:

The late rocker Meat Loaf was outspokenly anti-vaccine mandate and anti-mask before his death —  once telling a reporter, “If I die, I die, but I’m not going to be controlled,” according to reports Friday.

The 74-year-old “Bat Out of Hell” singer —  who was reportedly critically ill with COVID-19 before he passed away Thursday — was opposed to pandemic restrictions, slamming lockdowns and mask mandates during an interview last summer.

[sf]

The guy who had several underlying health conditions killed himself:

Rubbish. He was exposed to a danger which resulted in his death, possibly because he elected not to take precautions which might have prevented it.

The concept is wholly different from suicide.

S

[digitaldog]

Rubbish. He was exposed to a danger which resulted in his death, possibly because he elected not to take precautions which might have prevented it.

The concept is wholly different from suicide.

S

Substitute anti-vax, overweight, underlying medical conditions for Texans:

"You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans". -George Carlin

[Robert Roaldi]

Some research on "super-immunity" https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-discover-two-paths-toward-super-immunity-to-covid-19/.

[Chris Kern]

One of the mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant, designated BA.2, is rapidly gaining "market share" in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and Denmark.  Because it appears to be displacing the initial Omicron BA.1 strain—i.e., it is being identified in an increasing proportion of the infections subject to genomic sequencing—it may be more transmissible than Omicron BA.1, but so far the evidence is sketchy:

“Omicron has three main [subvariants]—BA.1, BA.2, and BA.3—according to the World Health Organization (WHO),” Dr. Donald C. Vinh, associate professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill University, Canada, told [Medical News Today]. . . . It is important to mention that there are very limited data on clinical differences between BA.2 and BA.1. Specifically, we have no firm data to know if BA.2 is more contagious, results in more severe disease, or can evade immunity better than BA.1. Nonetheless, early data from Denmark and the U.K. suggest that BA.2 may be more contagious than BA.1.”

Gathering data about rate of spread of this variant is complicated because it is missing a couple of mutations in the coronavirus spike protein that make it more difficult to identify in PCR (and presumably other molecular) tests.  So far, however, there appears to be no reason to believe the differences between BA.1 and BA.2 would make the current vaccines significantly less effective in preventing severe illness or death from infections of the latter.

[digitaldog]

Interesting article:

Why do some people get Covid when others don't? Here’s what we know so far

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/03/why-do-some-people-get-covid-while-others-dont.html

[digitaldog]

The US hit 900,000 dead (that are recorded) third cause of death in the US, and the stupidity continues on, elsewhere : https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=140036.msg1233866#msg1233866

[Chris Kern]

An old friend reports that when he asked his young granddaughter "are you positive?" about something she had told him, she didn't understand he was inquiring about her certainty regarding the statement but assumed instead that he was referring to her COVID-19 status.

[Robert Roaldi]

I'm hoping that someone who understands the modelling better can answer. Several Canadian provinces are announcing an end to Covid restrictions in the very near future. But when I look at the Worldometer new infections and daily deaths graphs, the numbers are not much lower now than they were at the peaks of waves 1 & 2, although the numbers are obviously trending down rapidly after the holiday wave. We've relaxed restrictions before and have had to follow them with subsequent re-newed lockdowns. I assume that the idea is that vaccine penetration is high enough now, compared to earlier waves, that it makes sense to proceed. Is this the case?

Four years was about the length of time given for passage of a pandemic, as per the historical record. It seems as if the new vaccines have short-circuited that.

[digitaldog]

Took only one month to go from 300 to 400 million reported infections.
Good synopsis here:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/09/world/covid-test-vaccine-cases

The world surpassed 400 million known coronavirus cases on Tuesday, just one month after reaching 300 million, a staggering increase driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant as governments and individuals worldwide wrestle with how to confront the next stage of the pandemic.

It took more than a year for the world to reach 100 million confirmed infections: The first cases were identified in late 2019, and the 100 millionth in January 2021. It took only seven months to double that number, and now six months to double it again. Daily case counts have begun to decline, but there have been an average of more than 2.7 million infections reported every day, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

And the coronavirus continues to take a devastating toll, including in the United States, where the virus has killed at far higher rates than in other wealthy nations.
ore than 5.7 million people worldwide have died of the virus, including more than 900,000 in the United States alone. On average, the United States is reporting 2,598 new deaths a day, the equivalent of a disaster worse than Pearl Harbor every day. Globally, 10,900 people a day are dying from Covid-19.

[LesPalenik]

Took only one month to go from 300 to 400 million reported infections.
Good synopsis here:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/09/world/covid-test-vaccine-cases

It's safe to assume that the new infections are under-reported. Especially with the less fatal Omicron variant. The ratio between the deaths and (reported) cases in US has been steadily increasing. Yesterday's count: 2,777 deaths, 179,169 new infections.

[Chris Kern]

Some recent encouraging evidence of why three doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines are so remarkably effective in preventing hospitalization or death.

The 3rd dose of mRNA vaccines boosts plasma antibody responses to multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants including Omicron, but the levels are insufficient to prevent breakthrough infection in many individuals. The 3rd dose also elicits increased number of memory B cells that express more potent and broader antibodies. These cells do not appear to contribute to circulating plasma antibody levels, but upon challenge with antigen in the form of a vaccine or infection, they produce large amounts of antibodies within 3-5 days. . . . . Thus, rapid recall by a diversified and expanded memory B cell compartment is likely to be one of the key mechanisms that contribute to the enhanced protection against severe disease by a 3rd mRNA vaccine dose. [citations omitted]

Also encouraging: the "memory" immune response produced by the current vaccines continues to be effective against the extremely-infectious variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that currently are circulating after the initial vaccine-induced antibodies have begun to wane.

The highly mutated SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (B.1.1.529) variant has been shown to evade a substantial fraction of neutralizing antibody responses elicited by current vaccines that encode the WA1/2020 Spike1. Cellular immune responses, particularly CD8+ T cell responses, likely contribute to protection against severe SARS-CoV-2 disease2–6. [The] cellular immunity induced by current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines is highly conserved to the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Spike. Individuals who received Ad26.COV2.S or BNT162b2 vaccines demonstrated durable Spike-specific CD8+ and CD4+ T cell responses, which showed extensive cross-reactivity against both the Delta and Omicron variants, including in central and effector memory cellular subpopulations. Median Omicron Spike-specific CD8+ T cell responses were 82-84% of WA1/2020 Spike-specific CD8+ T cell responses. These data provide immunologic context for the observation that current vaccines still show robust protection against severe disease with the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant despite the substantially reduced neutralizing antibody responses. [citations omitted]

[Robert Roaldi]

Some good news, the Worldometer 7-day average of US daily deaths seems to have finally dipped below 2000. The numbers still seems high to me, but the curve has been trending in the right direction.

[Robert Roaldi]

A good interview with Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch on the Deep Background podcast about the future of Covid, Harvard epidemiologist and recurring guest Marc Lipsitch.

It's about 40 min long. From the blurb on the landing page: "Harvard epidemiologist and recurring guest Marc Lipsitch discusses what we can learn from omicron surge. Lipsitch also addresses some common omicron myths and discusses the possibility of a 'master vaccine'.”  One of those myths is the often repeated idea that viruses become less virulent with time. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, it's a mistake to make the assumption.

[dreed]

What difference does the vaccine make, you might ask.

Back in 2020 I had covid-like symptoms but couldn't get tested - wasn't sure. From 2022 experience, turns out it was.
In 2022 (after being vaccinated twice), I was exposed to it by spending many hours working closely with someone and presented symptoms shortly thereafter.

In 2020, it took ~2 weeks for the very mild symptoms to progress.
In 2022, it took ~2 days for the symptoms to be resolved (4 months after vaccine #2.)

But that's just the visible symptoms from breathing. There are other internal organs that have suffered but that only got picked up because I do a regular thing with my doctor (full blood, urine, etc) at the start of 2021. Hopefully they can get back to normal in time.

Didn't being infected in 2020 protect me in 2022? No. Body defenses created as a result of infection lasts 6-12 months max.

SARS-CoV-2 is nasty. If you've had it, ask your doctor for a full checkup (bloodwork, urine, etc) to see if everything is "normal'.

Surviving COVID-19 without being vaccinated doesn't mean you're "OK".

[Robert Roaldi]

The US 7-day avg daily deaths from Covid continue to decline as shown on Worldometer https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/, although it is still above 1000 per day. It is trending in the right direction though and at that rate is 3rd leading cause of death according to CDC stats https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm. The first two are cardiovascular and cancer and their rates are probably consistent with time, while the Covid numbers fluctuate a lot as waves pass.

Here in Canada more and more provinces are relaxing Covid restrictions. Ontario will probably be removing their mask recommendations by the end of March if the numbers continue to improve.