Coronavirus and You - Page 253

On September 23 2020 04:42 Mohdoo wrote:


...........................................

Night clubs are open?

On September 23 2020 03:45 Simberto wrote:
I just hope that i will be able to do my final exams in a month. I am gonna be seriously pissed if those assholes who just cannot do without an Oktoberfest forced me to be in Limbo for another half of a year. It is so strange to me. Just don't party for a year. You can do that. It isn't hard. Or football games. We can do without those, too.

On September 23 2020 04:56 Nouar wrote:

Still closed here at least :-) But bars are open, technically with a 1m requirement and mask worn between sips. It's not working. And un-regulated parties (raves and the kind) happen because people can't spend a summer without getting wasted it seems.

The agency is issuing the guidance to boost transparency and public trust as it approaches the momentous decision of whether a prospective vaccine is safe and effective. Public health experts are increasingly worried that President Trump’s repeated predictions of a coronavirus vaccine by Nov. 3, coupled with the administration’s interference in federal science agencies, may prompt Americans to reject any vaccine as rushed and potentially tainted. ...

The guidance, which is far more rigorous than what was used for emergency clearance of hydroxychloroquine or convalescent plasma, is an effort to shore up confidence in an agency that has made missteps during the pandemic. With the vaccines, the FDA is expected to ask manufacturers seeking an emergency authorization — a far quicker process than a formal approval — to follow participants in late-stage clinical trials for a median of at least two months, starting after they receive a second vaccine shot, according to two individuals familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information before it is made public.

As a sign the vaccine works, the agency also is looking for at least five severe cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in the placebo group for each trial, as well as some cases of the disease in older people. These standards, plus the time it will take companies to prepare their applications and the agency to review the data, make it highly improbable for any vaccine to be authorized before the election. The agency has previously said any vaccine would have to be 50 percent more effective than a placebo.

On September 23 2020 06:55 Danglars wrote:
The real trouble with the vaccine is top politicians and media figures rejecting the possibility of taking a vaccine that's approved by the FDA while Trump is president. The process is far better represented by AstraZeneca shutting down the entire trial based on a single UK participant's neurological symptoms (now suspected to be due to unrelated transverse myelitis). The companies use an abundance of caution and observe a long process.

Trump has incredibly limited ability to force the FDA to approve a vaccine that's unready, and it should be obvious from past situations that his own departments raise the alarm over far less impactful actions. This is all a very public process. Politicians and journalists should be doing a far better job to reassure the public that the vaccine approval process is not vulnerable to secretive executive meddling. I've said before that they're only emboldening anti-vaxxers that have political disagreements with whoever's in office with future vaccines.

On September 23 2020 06:55 Danglars wrote:
The real trouble with the vaccine is top politicians and media figures rejecting the possibility of taking a vaccine that's approved by the FDA while Trump is president. The process is far better represented by AstraZeneca shutting down the entire trial based on a single UK participant's neurological symptoms (now suspected to be due to unrelated transverse myelitis). The companies use an abundance of caution and observe a long process.

Trump has incredibly limited ability to force the FDA to approve a vaccine that's unready, and it should be obvious from past situations that his own departments raise the alarm over far less impactful actions. This is all a very public process. Politicians and journalists should be doing a far better job to reassure the public that the vaccine approval process is not vulnerable to secretive executive meddling. I've said before that they're only emboldening anti-vaxxers that have political disagreements with whoever's in office with future vaccines.

On September 23 2020 07:09 Mohdoo wrote:


I don't think most people are saying no vaccine while he's president. People are just saying it will need the Fauci stamp of approval, rather than whatever goon Trump puts at the head of the CDC. There will be enough science people involved to where if it was actually bad, people would be leaking or speaking out. I know that is true, so if Trump says it is ready, and 2 weeks go by without a peep, I'm sure its fine. What a lot of people are saying is that by no means is his word sufficient on its own.

On September 23 2020 07:36 Amui wrote:

I'm sure you haven't forgetten HCQs forced emergency approval for covid treatment and Trump's peddling of it. Totally didn't turn out to be a drug that caused more issues than it solved and cause shortages everywhere for the people who actually needed it.

And yeah on Mohdoo's point, Fauci's stamp of approval. I trust Trump less than I could push him(throw is a bit much for somebody at his girth), and his stooges even less.

On September 23 2020 03:45 Simberto wrote:
I just hope that i will be able to do my final exams in a month. I am gonna be seriously pissed if those assholes who just cannot do without an Oktoberfest forced me to be in Limbo for another half of a year. It is so strange to me. Just don't party for a year. You can do that. It isn't hard. Or football games. We can do without those, too.

On September 23 2020 05:15 LegalLord wrote:

It's primarily my own observation. Most countries I've watched closely - US, Russia, India, Brazil, and West Europe - have very detailed statistics on their coronavirus situation. Active cases, test results, breakdowns by region, and so on. They also, for the most part, did extensive contact tracing since at least April, so their numbers make a lot of sense in terms of tracking the spread. They report daily, and do so in a very timely manner. Each of the above have problems in their numbers, certainly, but represent the kind of government pandemic tracking effort you'd expect to see.

Sweden did things quite differently, especially at first. It largely appears that "the strategy" called for a very minimal amount of actual testing, which meant very high CFRs and remarkably low case numbers. The Worldometers page doesn't meaningfully track active case numbers, which means those numbers are either not regularly updated or exceedingly difficult to find. The Swedish source is really just a single page with a couple of plots on it, providing little breakdown of regions or anything other than age for infection. And "daily" updates seem to be updated only once every several days, for several days. Not great, but not bad; certainly worse than most countries managed to do, but it's not really at the core of why I'm not too happy with Sweden's data reporting.

In general, there's a lot of talk had since March about how "the strategy" is supposed to be pretty sparse on data, although it's pretty clear that the whole thing was a complete and utter failure until they eventually took a much more traditional approach involving contract tracing, isolation, and widespread test availability. That leaves a good three-month period between March and July when the data out of Sweden is suspect due to a systematic tendency to under-test. While I do think Sweden has gotten over that particular bit of idiocy, it does raise two problems:

1. It's hard to reconstruct the early phases of the virus's course in Sweden because of several months of mediocre data collection.
2. It's hard to really understand the inherent biases in the specific way that Sweden reports data because they changed course halfway through. Every country has their own unique bias in this regard.

So notionally, Sweden looks very good, and I don't think that's because they faked the data. Many folks will very gleefully point out the current state of affairs there, as proof that lockdowns were hooey all along. But there's not really enough data to make sense of the larger trend, because Sweden doesn't publish much of said data, so we're left inferring from scraps. For example, I remember when India reported really fantastic test/infection/death numbers, at a time when in hindsight (and foresight) it was obvious that the virus was spreading uncontrolled. And Sweden had a moderate uptick within the third week of September in the infected cases - is that indicative of a larger trend, or not so much? Hard to tell without more context.

I suppose my thoughts here are a bit disjointed and don't necessarily paint the picture of Sweden as a country with immediately bad data. However, I see enough oddities in what they actually have that I think it right to point out that I have had, and continue to have, concerns about how complete their numbers are for practically gauging the status of the virus in that country.

On September 23 2020 08:50 LegalLord wrote:

After far longer than it took highly vulnerable countries like Italy to bring things under control, Sweden did - with a death rate far more like Italy than like its neighbors in Finland/Norway. And it looks like there's a small, but significant uptick now in case load, just shortly behind when the rest of Europe is having the same. Uh, good job?

The claim about "high level of immunity" is even more disgusting since it seems largely based on a hefty dose of wishful thinking. Sweden had a bad strategy that killed more people, but at least it won't have to deal with this again, or so the narrative goes. I can understand valuing some of the other advantages of trying to make a "strategy that can work over the long term" but Sweden mostly just found a way to fail badly, adapt somewhat, and be left with a pretty bad record backed by a lot of pseudoscience that some people can find a way to be really happy about.

On September 23 2020 18:14 warding wrote:

Check out the excess mortality table on Our World in Data:
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
+ Show Spoiler +
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but apparently there was no excess mortality in Sweden this year?

In Portugal we avoided a lot of covid death with the confinement, except we had a ton of excess mortality because of delayed medical care for every other disease. Four million medical consultations not done in Portugal alone, not to mention the thousands of cancer diagnoses that will generate more preventable deaths.

On September 23 2020 03:45 Simberto wrote:
I just hope that i will be able to do my final exams in a month. I am gonna be seriously pissed if those assholes who just cannot do without an Oktoberfest forced me to be in Limbo for another half of a year. It is so strange to me. Just don't party for a year. You can do that. It isn't hard. Or football games. We can do without those, too.

On September 23 2020 08:50 LegalLord wrote:

I know what "the strategy" was and don't need that explained. The problem is that it was a really stupid idea that led to significantly more death than a more sane approach with a short lockdown, good contact tracing, and then back to mostly-normal. It seems that around the June-July timeframe was when Sweden started to pivot towards something resembling the more standard approach, which was when it started to become better overall.