Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

We should probably be doing another three-week lockdown about now.

 

I wear a gaiter 100% of the time when I go out shopping, etc. Yes, I have read the studies that the thin ones aren't terribly effective. I wear a thick one. It is always around my neck, and I forget like everyone else. But I never have to turn around to the car, etc. Just pull it up.

 

The Triple-Crown of masked shopping futility is fogging not only the reading glasses, but the polyethylene faceshield likewise.

 

You're clear. And I doubt carelessness is part of the equation. Best of luck to you.

 

You, too, can coach the Nebraska Cornhuskers then. Probably with more success and less whining than the current holder of the position.

 

UAB doctor talks COVID vaccine, future: ‘I’m hopeful but not confident’

"It almost feels like people don’t want to take the necessary steps to mitigate and simply want to ride it out until there is a vaccine, and that will solve the problem overnight. But some states have no idea how they’re going to pay for coronavirus vaccine distribution. Plus there’s the perception of the vaccine being fast-tracked for political purpose, though experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci have said the FDA will not let politics interfere with the approval process. What is your level of optimism about a COVID vaccine today, and what does the timeline for it look like right now?

So I’m hopeful, but I’m not confident. And the reason I’m not confident is that I’ve worked for years on an AIDS vaccine, and if you remember back to 1984, public health officials said in a public announcement “We will have an AIDS vaccine in two years." Well, it’s been 36 years, and we still don’t have one, despite having wonderful candidates that did all the things that you’d want to see in terms of correlative immunity, getting antibody, getting T-cell immunity stimulated. But when the rubber met the road and the clinical trials were done asking the question, “Does this vaccine protect someone from becoming infected?” every single one of them so far has failed.

So now we have multiple candidates that are in clinical trials right now to see whether those immune responses that are pretty robust in the Phase 1 and 2 studies, whether those immune responses translate into protection when it’s really tested out. We’ll find out. That’s part one.

Part two is will it work, and how soon will it be available if it does? And that really depends on how robust the response is. And nobody’s really talking about this, but let me go into that. For the vaccine to be released and sent to the FDA for approval sometime before the first of 2021, it has to be working like gangbusters. It has to be 95 percent effective for it to be released that early. Why? Because for this vaccine to make it out, it has to pass muster so that a data safety monitoring board that oversees the outcomes declares it so effective that they stop the study early, they say there’s no chance that this outcome of protection was an accident, was a fluke. So that requires, for stopping this early, 95 percent. If it doesn’t meet that, that’s not the end of the world. It just means the study continues into the first quarter of 2021, and they’ll take another look. Then it might have to be 80-85 percent effective. But if it’s not, the study continues on into the summer of ’21. And then maybe if it’s 70 percent effective, they’ll release it. That’s OK. I’ll take a vaccine that’s 70 percent effective right now. But nobody’s talking about the conditions around the early release of the vaccine, and I think that’s essential for everybody to understand."

 

We hit roughly 100k confirmed cases today. A few months ago, the consensus was that in the US you had roughly 10 real infections for every 1 detected case. Even if we have improved that down to a 6:1 ratio, that's still 0.2% of the population infected per day, and if anything that number is rising.

At this point, the debate appears to be moot. The US will reach some sort of endemic equilibrium (can't use the H-I word) before a vaccine would be available for wide use.

 

I AM NOT a person who has the antibodies.

 

But only if immunity is retained after infection. If it doesn’t and you can be re-infected ...

 

After this year, I am never using the word 'hopefully' again. It's as meaningless as 'very'.