Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[The Larch]

Today marks 1 years since the start of the Spanish lockdown. Happy covidversary to you all! 

I'll "celebrate" by being out of the house all afternoon and evening. 

[Grey Fox]

I've now exclusively worked from home for a year. I don't know how to feel about it.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - I follow a covid one year ago Twitter account. It's British focused but it is very weird seeing all this stuff again. It also feels like it was very, very recent.

[DGuller]

I was working from home on Friday, March 13, the day that was the last day in the office for pretty much everyone in NYC.  When I came in on Monday to pick up my belongings, I was utterly creeped out by how empty everything was.  Not a single soul in the subway car, and not a single soul on the floor I worked on.  I remember back then people were wondering how many weeks this would last for.

[Tamas]

I've now exclusively worked from home for a year. I don't know how to feel about it.

I know how I feel about it: I love it! Would be nice to occasionally meet my colleagues but otherwise goddamit this is convenient. I hope it becomes the norm.

[Josquius]

As I've said before it's a monkeys paw situation.
In theory the dream. In practice pretty horrid. I miss leaving the house and being able to go places other than the supermarket.

[Tamas]

As I've said before it's a monkeys paw situation.
In theory the dream. In practice pretty horrid. I miss leaving the house and being able to go places other than the supermarket.

But come on. Working from home is NOT stopping you doing those things. The pandemic is.

[Josquius]

As I've said before it's a monkeys paw situation.
In theory the dream. In practice pretty horrid. I miss leaving the house and being able to go places other than the supermarket.

But come on. Working from home is NOT stopping you doing those things. The pandemic is.

Which is also the situation that has made me work at home for the past year. Without one there wouldn't be the other.

Also I wonder on corona and the growth of wfh how it will alter wfh going forward. I can see a need for digital nomadism/working in a country where you don't live, needing to be sorted at least. At the moment I believe this is mostly dealt with on a case by case basis with agreements between bordering countries.

[Tamas]

The question was about working from home, not lockdown. :p

[Syt]

The conservative ÖVP is criticizing the health ministry, led by their Greens coalition partner, for allegedly not buying enough vaccine. A high ranking official (old guard ÖVP who didn't get on board with Kurz's rebranding of the party) was fired by the Green health minister for "being too bureaucratic". Meanwhile, critics point out that the ÖVP led finance ministry was informed about all purchases as they have to sign off on them, but there was no inquiry from them or other ÖVP members.

Kurz, meanwhile, has gone to his default "I didn't know" in such cases, saying he wasn't aware and has no knowledge of the procurement process (to which one of the leading political analysts said last night, "In that case he should answer the question what he's been doing in his job for the last 12 months.").

[Sheilbh]

Useful piece by David Spiegelhalter on the AZ - blood clotting suspensions:

There's no proof the Oxford vaccine causes blood clots. So why are people worried?
David Spiegelhalter
It's human nature to spot patterns in data. But we should be careful about finding causal links where none may exist
Mon 15 Mar 2021 07.00 GMT

Stories about people getting blood clots soon after taking the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine have become a source of anxiety among European leaders. After a report on a death and three hospitalisations in Norway, which found serious blood clotting in adults who had received the vaccine, Ireland has temporarily suspended the jab. Some anxiety about a new vaccine is understandable, and any suspected reactions should be investigated. But in the current circumstances we need to think slow as well as fast, and resist drawing causal links between events where none may exist.

As Ireland's deputy chief medical officer, Ronan Glynn, has stressed, there is no proof that this vaccine causes blood clots. It's a common human tendency to attribute a causal effect between different events, even when there isn't one present: we wash the car and the next day a bird relieves itself all over the bonnet. Typical. Or, more seriously, someone is diagnosed with autism after receiving the MMR vaccine, so people assume a causal connection – even when there isn't one. And now, people get blood clots after having a vaccine, leading to concern over whether the vaccine is what caused the blood clots.

Call it luck, chance or fate – it's difficult to incorporate this into our thinking. So when the European Medicines Agency says there have been 30 "thromboembolic events" after around 5m vaccinations, the crucial question to ask is: how many would be expected anyway, in the normal run of things?

We can try a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. Deep vein thromboses (DVTs) happen to around one person per 1,000 each year, and probably more in the older population being vaccinated. Working on the basis of these figures, out of 5 million people getting vaccinated, we would expect significantly more than 5,000 DVTs a year, or at least 100 every week. So it is not at all surprising that there have been 30 reports.

It would be so much easier if we had a group of people exactly like those being vaccinated but who didn't get jabbed. This would tell us how many serious events we could expect to happen to people that were the result of sheer bad luck. Fortunately, we do have such a group. In the trials that led to the vaccines being approved in the UK, volunteers were randomly allocated to receive either the active vaccine or a dummy injection. Everyone then reported any harms they experienced, but crucially nobody knew if they had received the real stuff or an inert injection. By comparing the numbers of reports from the two groups, we can see how many "reactions" were really owing to the active ingredients, and how many were linked to the vaccination process, or would have happened anyway.

Some kind of adverse events were reported by 38% of those receiving the real vaccine but, rather remarkably, 28% of those who received the dummy also reported a side-effect. This shows that the vaccination process itself causes about two-thirds of all the reported harm. Of more than 24,000 participants, fewer than 1% reported a serious adverse event, and of these 168 people, slightly more had received the dummy than the active vaccine. So there was no evidence of increased risk from taking the AstraZeneca vaccine. The Pfizer trials had similar results, with more mild or moderate adverse events in the vaccine group but almost identical numbers of serious events.

Trials are short and comparatively small, and tend to include healthy people, so we need to collect real-world data as the vaccines are rolled out. In the UK, adverse reactions are reported using the "yellow card" system, which dates back to the days when doctors filled in yellow cards to report side-effects. Up to 28 February, around 54,000 yellow cards have been reported for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, from around 10 million vaccinations given (the Pfizer vaccine has a slightly lower rate). So for both vaccines, the overall reporting rate is around three to six reports per 1,000 jabs. That means a far greater number of side-effects are reported in the trials than through the yellow card system (of course, one factor in this underreporting may be the yellow card website, which appears designed for medical professionals rather than patients experiencing side-effects).

The vast majority of the side-effects reported through the yellow card system and in randomised trials are reports of direct reactions to the jab, such as a sore arm, or subsequent general flu-like symptoms of headache, tiredness, fever and so on, which subside in a few days. The most serious problem is anaphylactic reactions, and the advice is not to inject anyone with a previous history of allergic reactions to either a prior dose of the vaccine or its ingredients.

So far, these vaccines have shown themselves to be extraordinarily safe. In fact, it's perhaps surprising that we haven't heard more stories of adverse effects. There could well be some extremely rare event that is triggered by Covid-19 vaccines, but there is no sign of this yet. We can just hope that this message gets through to those who are still hesitant because of the misinformation that has been spread about the supposed harm of vaccines, and the unhelpful comments made by some European politicians.

Will we ever be able to resist the urge to find causal relationships between different events? One way of doing this would be promoting the scientific method and ensuring everyone understands this basic principle. Testing a hypothesis helps us see which hunches or assumptions are correct and which aren't. In this way, randomised trials have proved the effectiveness of some Covid treatments and saved vast numbers of lives, while also showing us that some overblown claims about treatments for Covid-19, such as hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma, were incorrect.

But I don't think we can ever fully rationalise ourselves out of the basic and often creative urge to find patterns even where none exist. Perhaps we can just hope for some basic humility before claiming we know why something has happened.

    David Spiegelhalter is chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge

In the UK the MHRA have issued a brief statement that with around 11 million doses of AZ delivered in the UK and the "reports of blood clots received so far are not greater than the number that would have occurred naturally in the vaccinated population."

[Sheilbh]

One year anniversary of the celebrities singing Imagine
https://twitter.com/camillard/status/1370768650412687363?s=20

I'll always love how hard they lost basically one week into the pandemic as crisis. Absolutely incredible.

[Grey Fox]

1 of my uncles & 2 of my aunts got the Covidshield vaccine yesterday. 1st members of my close family to get it. 2nd dose in July.


Covidshield is AZ's vaccine made in India.

[The Larch]

Covidshield is AZ's vaccine made in India.

AFAIK Covidshield is the brand name of AstraZeneca's vaccine, it's not just the one made in India.

[Grey Fox]

Covidshield is AZ's vaccine made in India.

AFAIK Covidshield is the brand name of AstraZeneca's vaccine, it's not just the one made in India.

Alright, that's good. I did think it was ridiculous that it changes name because of being made in India.