Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Tamas]

Hungary's numbers are increasingly terrible. They just announced stricter lockdown rules yesterday, but only for a period of two weeks which seems utterly ridiculous.  Also they are leaving it wide open for companies to decide themselves whether work from home is possible, so there are lots of people like a friend of mine whose job is to phone and email foreign clients, yet forced to go into the office. Several of his office-mates have tested positive, one had her daughter test positive but continued to go into the office. Their boss showed symptoms but didn't get tested and went for a corporate trip to the Czechs instead. His vice-boss also showed symptoms but went into the office anyways because the big boss was away and hey.

I am fairly certain this is not a uniquely terrible environment there, so no wonder it spreads like effin' wildfire.

Hungary did manage to produce some pretty good vaccination numbers recently though (most of it is Chinese so we'll see what practical result a shitty efficacy brings). But that may be thrown right out of the window now: they wanted to use the weekend to mass-vaccinate the under-60s with pre-existing conditions, and they used the central register database (where people who want vaccines had to sign up even though the country has probably a more intricate and precise info on citizens and their location than the NHS).

Problem is, somebody was apparently too lazy to process the reports from GPs and probably to do much of an elaborate address-checking. A lot of people have been SMS-ed to go for  a (first) weekend jab  who already had their jabs, and a lot of people are asked to get to the other end of the country for it. Utter chaos.

[Sheilbh]

Irresponsible bosses forcing people to come into non-essential work right now makes me really, really angry.

Danish data shows that B117/UK variant increases the risk of hospitalisation by about 60% - this does tally with some data in the UK that it has an increased risk of mortality.

Also it is now 25% of positive tests in the US and doubling every ten days - so it looks like the projection that it'd become dominant by the end of March. Hopefully the US vaccine program is able to counter a lot of the risk/mortality from that.

Separately which is incredibly positive news, Moderna have prepared a booster shot to counter the South African variant to the FDA to start clinical tests.

Interestingly the UK and the Access Consortium (which is the Australian, Canadian, Swiss, Singapore and UK medicines regulators) are adopting a different approach to the FDA and EMA for booster shots. There's no difference in terms of requiring similar safety levels but my understanding is that the approach by the EMA and FDA is that new vaccines must be no less effective than existing vaccines; the Access group are instead modelling their requirements on the flu vaccine so it can be less effective than existing vaccines but it should demonstrate a good immune response. It feels like the booster shot/variant shot planning is already the next challenge - and I've no idea how we'll roll that out with the Covax to get global distribution.

Edit: And on boosters - studies in Brazil have shown that the AZ vaccine is effective against the Brazilian variant which is very good news. Hopefully that also holds for the other vaccines so the only variant we need to worry about from a vaccine perspective at the minute is the South African variant.

[DGuller]

The downside of being an authoritarian during the pandemic is that if the authoritarian in charge is a moron, the whole country serves as a lab case for what happens when you don't do anything about the virus.  The problem with being a feckless democracy is that you're crowdsourcing the stupid authoritarianism down to people hungry to flex their power, such as office managers.

[Maladict]

There's a music concert this weekend in Barcelona. 5,000 people, indoors, no distancing  It's a pilot test actually, every person in attendance will be tested the day of the concert (antigen test) and get followup testing to see if the whole thing was a disaster.

They did something like that here. Turns out a lot of people didn't bother testing afterwards and of the ones who did a few tested positive.

Experiment: failed.

[Valmy]

Brazil is getting hammered

https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20210305-bolsonaro-tells-brazilians-to-stop-whining-after-record-covid-19-deaths

Brazil is truly an amazing country. A tiny rich oligopoly leading through remarkably corrupt politicians each one more loathsome than the last. It is like a fully matured version of what we are working on here in the US.

[The Brain]

Brazil is getting hammered

https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20210305-bolsonaro-tells-brazilians-to-stop-whining-after-record-covid-19-deaths

Brazil is truly an amazing country. A tiny rich oligopoly leading through remarkably corrupt politicians each one more loathsome than the last. It is like a fully matured version of what we are working on here in the US.

Please keep tan lines out of your pornos.

[Caliga]

Brazil is truly an amazing country. A tiny rich oligopoly leading through remarkably corrupt politicians each one more loathsome than the last. It is like a fully matured version of what we are working on here in the US.

Brazil is tiny?

[Valmy]

Brazil is tiny?

Brazil is huge. The Oligarchy is tiny, at least compared to Brazil's massive size.

[Caliga]

Oh I see what you meant.

[mongers]

I think there can be no doubt now that this pandemic has increased inequality ... faces and hands have never been cleaner, the rest of the body less so*.





* home day wear / what's below the desk out Zoom view can hide a multitude of sins.   

[Tamas]

In Hungary, fairly quietly but they added one more thing to the fresh restrictions: provisions for the relevant ministry to order medical workers in the private healthcare sector into state hospitals to help.

Medical students were told earlier this week that they can be required to attend ER/ambulance services - until then they were just encouraged to volunteer.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting issue in the US of people or areas refusing the J&J vaccine because it has lower efficacy in trials than Pfizer and Moderna. Obviously J&J was being trialled once lots of thewe new variants had emerged so it was a different environment, but again from my understanding it's less effective at presenting symptomatic infection but just as good at stopping hospitalisation and death which I still think should really be the focus of everything.

As with AZ in Europe it does make me think that one thing that helps vaccine roll-out in the UK is that we do very much have a "take what you're given and be grateful" attitude to healthcare which I just don't think applies in systems where there is choice

[mongers]

15:02
England's vaccine rollout in maps

Since 8 December about 18 million people have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine in England.

This covers about 38% of the population over the age of 16, according to NHS England figures.

Of England's 314 local authorities, NHS data suggests Tendring in Essex vaccinated the highest percentage of its estimated population, as of 28 February, at 51%.

Tower Hamlets in London vaccinated the lowest, at 14%.

You can read more about how the rollout varies across the country - and the possible reasons behind this - here

A worrying variation in rates.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-56293839

It's worse at 'sub-district' level:

The NHS also publishes figures down to a more local level, officially called Middle Layer Super Output Areas. About 6,800 of these exist across England, with an average population of about 8,000.

Of these areas, Saxmundham and Coldfair Green, on the East Suffolk coast, vaccinated the highest percentage of people across the country, at 66%.
The figures suggest more than 5,500 of the areas estimated 8,500 residents received a first dose.

Meanwhile the inner-city Cathedral and Kelham area of Sheffield vaccinated the lowest proportion of residents, at 4%, with 815 people receiving a vaccine dose out of an estimated 18,000 people living there.

[Sheilbh]

I don't know if it's worrying yet - because that map looks a lot like the ONS map of where the over-65s live which is what you'd expect given the focus of the rollout so far. For example they note that Tower Hamlets is at 14% but it's also the youngest borough in London (and possibly the country) and only 6% of the population are over 65. There's still a lot of poverty and risk in Tower Hamlets and there's a large British Bengali community who have had higher vaccine hesitancy than average (the East London Mosque is hosting a vaccine centre which might help) - so I wouldn't be surprised if take-up was lower than you'd hope against the population. But 14% could actually be what you'd expect for a very young area - I'm not sure.

I don't think the data goes down to wards but it would be interesting to see a map of NHS Trust area - because the weekly data includes the percentage of uptake based on the ONS's estimate of the number of, say, over 80s etc in that area (which is out of date because the data wasn't updated in 2020). I think the worst would still probably be London but I feel like it might tell us more than those maps.

[Admiral Yi]

There's still a lot of poverty and risk in Tower Hamlets and there's a large British Bengali community who have had higher vaccine hesitancy more dumbass anti-vaxxers than average (the East London Mosque is hosting a vaccine centre which might help) - so I wouldn't be surprised if take-up was lower than you'd hope against the population. But 14% could actually be what you'd expect for a very young area - I'm not sure.