The US ***

[D_W]

I know you guys think we can't do public health in the US, but we can - we just end up doing some of it through public providers, and some private.

Class 1A here has been opened up not just to the elderly and really fat, but also to the moderately fat (like me). What's that? BMI 30. I just barely skid over the line at 205 and 5'9". I remember the says of getting to 160 pounds and thinking it was impossibly fat and I must get back to 145. Now, I'd like to get back to 160.

But, anyway, I'm the last adult in my entire extended family who isn't vaccinated - until Friday.

Class 1A BMI dropped from 40 to 30 to the lower cutoff and I at 30.something got in. All other relatives have either had covid, work in health care, are older, etc, have child care, dental licenses, etc. IT's bizarre -every single adult that is a first degree relative or in law has functional immunity and before the threshold was lowered, I was a huge potential fly in the ointment.

Here's how it went down - my health system is gigantic. They blew their vaccine wad on their employees, contractors, subcontractors, etc, with nothing left for anyone other than their nursing home patients. So they have been bombarding me with emails after I signed up for the class 1A to wait for them to get more allocation. Too bad, one of their competitors got it and is dosing shots at the baseball stadium in some figure like 4,000 a day.

I went, it was super orderly with a long moving line, took ten minutes, I sat in a large open area to confirm no shock and that was that. The lady flatly said to me "you're getting pfizer today, your second appointment is already scheduled exact same place and same time in 3 weeks, see you then. The scheduling is automatic and we cannot change it".

Perfect, I don't want a million options, just get the job done.

Everyone was pleasant, professional, the health system employees were all over the place outside on the road and in the parking lot helping to direct everyone - it was like white glove service. All you needed was a form of ID at the door and you were in and out with your card reminding where to go.

We are to get 150MM more doses or something before the end of March here. Covid cases are at 1/5th the level that they were 2 months ago and both vaccines seem to have no issues with any variant. Things are looking up.

(no symptoms from the first ***, either, aside from very mild shoulder soreness yesterday. I've dropped ice cubes on toes before and had more pain than that).

The reason for not having a gaggle of options here (as in right in my locale - normally for flu shots you get bombarded with options, spam, etc, to get your flu shot in various places) in the first place (counties around here and rural where my parents live were vaccinated long ago) is that our large health systems have HQs here with their contractors being here. In our county, the allotment was used quickly in nursing home and health system staffs. I wouldn't be surprised if out of the 1.2 million people in my county, that at least 50k were health care (as one of the systems itself has more than that in total staff - just not all in our county).

The anti-vaccine sentiment that the news drums up along with all of the other scare crap? It's not here on the ground.

I actually saw a news story today that said that the decline in tests (40% decline in covid tests to go along with the 80% decline in cases) may punish us by not finding all of the new covid cases as the government turns from testing to vaccinating. It totally glossed over the fact that there are three times as many tests being given now per positive case - the tests are down 40% because there isn't anyone to administer them to. I'm surprised they're even that high.

Deaths are a trailing indicator, so we still have relatively high deaths occurring from the longer term cases, but even those are down off of the peak and continue to trend down. It's almost as if such good news isn't worth talking about because it's not profitable.

 

[Inspector]

Glad for you.
As of the 17th of February our provincial government has only given just over of 50,000 doses and that includes the ones that got both jabs. My wife a nurse has had both of hers but without doses to give they are coming in little dribbles. I don't honestly expect to be able to get a *** until maybe mid-summer if I'm lucky. The governments, both federal and provincial, did too little, too late, to secure vaccines and as there are no vaccine producing labs in all of Canada we are in a long line of countries needing it. They could have set up production labs during the last year so that when one became available they could get domestic production going. Oh well in the mean time I will continue to wear my mask and stay away from people as much as possible.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/covid-19-vaccine-rollout-saskatchewan-1.5917032
Pete

 

[D_W]

I recall hearing early that Canada was dragging their feet on either adopting another vaccine or doing research in country that would lead to a vaccine, but that was months ago. Sorry to hear that it didn't pick up from there (the avenue that I heard through was actually a Canadian dr. guesting on an English youtube channel several times).

Despite the news reports here of the supposedly enormous number of people who wouldn't get vaccinated, the impatience about getting it done is 10 times as strong.

 

[clogs]

....just to add,
my daughter is a Paramedic trainee....in a v/large health service just outside London...
front line staff I would have thought........she's in the thick of it......
I asked when she would get her ***......she just laughed.......not enough to go around......
I'm still self isolating, she can have mine.......

please take care out there.....

 

[Jacob]

I know you guys think we can't do public health in the US, .......

We've done worse here than USA in terms of deaths per million, if that's any consolation!
USA 1,582 UK 1,803
Don't know if Trump deserves any credit, but Johnson certainly can be blamed for our pathetic scenario.

 

[AJB Temple]

Meaningless comparison ^. Population demographics are radically different.

 

[Jacob]

Meaningless comparison ^. Population demographics are radically different.

So it could be even worse than it looks?
UK is world worst of comparable demographics.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/...tain-end-worst-Covid-19-death-rate-world.html

 

[Inspector]

I recall hearing early that Canada was dragging their feet on either adopting another vaccine or doing research in country that would lead to a vaccine, but that was months ago. Sorry to hear that it didn't pick up from there (the avenue that I heard through was actually a Canadian dr. guesting on an English youtube channel several times).

The Mulroney government in the late 80's early 90's privatized a world leading government owned vaccine research and production facilities. They were later sold off to off shore companies and they were shut down here. Hence no government labs. SARS didn't wake up the government either. The reason we aren't getting any doses is because the government didn't order any until too late. We are getting both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. I don't know if the government is in line for any others.

A vaccine developed by the University here is in the first stage of clinical trials and if the trials are successful the vaccine might be ready for production at the end of this year. VIDO’s COVID-19 vaccine receives Health Canada clinical trial approval
Maybe that's the one I'll get jabbed with. Who knows.

Pete

 

[D_W]

Vaccine research here is private in general. IT's probably cheaper to have a private vaccine research arm but provide public dollars when you want them to do something. If there are two better vaccines than pfizer and moderna, I don't know what they are.

Locally here (in my city) we have a private system that does its own vaccine research. The had a viable candidate almost as quickly as they started on one (it would've been a mini needle patch), but I guess weren't selected to move on further. Their candidate showed efficacy nearly right away. Why? because they did research on SARS 1 and adapted a patch that they'd made for that.

In my opinion, too much excuse is made by governments and public officials that nothing was done because some capacity was made private. It was likely made private due to problems. We have a fusion reactor project here in the US - at least one. In the 70s, it as seen sort of as a public entitlement . I'm sure they made some gains, but they wasted huge amounts of money without accounting for much. If public entitlements are left like that, they eventually lower the standard of living for a simple reason - if we don't demand some sort of results by unit of resources, we won't get them.

We're seeing the same thing in space exploration here - SpaceX profitably launches loads and astronauts cheaper than the Chinese can now. Nasa would've had no hope.

I'd lay the blame on the provinces there not due to lack of a vaccine group - you could end up putting all of your eggs in one basket that way given the size of canada - but due to lack of moving to incent both private research and put precedent on acquiring foreign supplies (like the US).

I'm sure our vaccines cost more than some of the international versions, but that's kind of how we operate in the US, I guess. We'll get it to you first, and it'll be good, but it may be 10 times the cost of a russian or chinese version if such a thing comes up as viable. There's a profit motive to get it distributed here, too, and that helps make it happen quickly.

 

[D_W]

We've done worse here than USA in terms of deaths per million, if that's any consolation!
USA 1,582 UK 1,803
Don't know if Trump deserves any credit, but Johnson certainly can be blamed for our pathetic scenario.

Not sure most people would feel the same, but I like the balance we had here. You could choose to do something dumb (many did), but for most of us, it was possible to remain safe. Front liners here got vaccinated early (most were given adequate protection - my wife works in health care and nobody in her office got covid that they know of despite never shutting down patient contact).

I sure did see a lot of white hair at restaurants when they reopened, though. I was standing outside with a mask on to pick up take-away, and the white hair was going in to sit down and eat. Bonkers.

 

[D_W]

(I went back and checked our local vaccine candidate - by April 2, they'd proven Sars-2 antibodies in mice treated with the vaccine in enough quantity to fight the disease - at that time, I wanted to volunteer to receive that trial, but the option was never made available. I think the reality is there were so many candidates here that many were viable and were never picked because they weren't needed.).

 

[Jacob]

Vaccine research here is private in general. IT's probably cheaper to have a private vaccine research arm but provide public dollars when you want them to do something. If there are two better vaccines than pfizer and moderna, I don't know what they are.

Locally here (in my city) we have a private system that does its own vaccine research. The had a viable candidate almost as quickly as they started on one (it would've been a mini needle patch), but I guess weren't selected to move on further. Their candidate showed efficacy nearly right away. Why? because they did research on SARS 1 and adapted a patch that they'd made for that.

In my opinion, too much excuse is made by governments and public officials that nothing was done because some capacity was made private. It was likely made private due to problems. We have a fusion reactor project here in the US - at least one. In the 70s, it as seen sort of as a public entitlement . I'm sure they made some gains, but they wasted huge amounts of money without accounting for much. If public entitlements are left like that, they eventually lower the standard of living for a simple reason - if we don't demand some sort of results by unit of resources, we won't get them.

We're seeing the same thing in space exploration here - SpaceX profitably launches loads and astronauts cheaper than the Chinese can now. Nasa would've had no hope.

I'd lay the blame on the provinces there not due to lack of a vaccine group - you could end up putting all of your eggs in one basket that way given the size of canada - but due to lack of moving to incent both private research and put precedent on acquiring foreign supplies (like the US).

I'm sure our vaccines cost more than some of the international versions, but that's kind of how we operate in the US, I guess. We'll get it to you first, and it'll be good, but it may be 10 times the cost of a russian or chinese version if such a thing comes up as viable. There's a profit motive to get it distributed here, too, and that helps make it happen quickly.

Cuba deaths per million 29
USA " " " 1,584

 

[PUtcvNqa]

Somalia, Yemen, Haiti & Angola even lower than that
Its amazing

 

[cowtown_eric]

I'm in Alberta., a province. It is not likely known to other countries, but the CDN federal government releases the vacines and testing to the provinces ( whom have the responsibility for health care) for distribution. Our AB provincial government has been sadly lacking in problems of planning for distribution but public outrage seems to be having an effect on them., and things are seemingly progressing.

Trying to keep safe, as I trust all you woodbutchers are too!

Eric

 

[TominDales]

Glad for you.
As of the 17th of February our provincial government has only given just over of 50,000 doses and that includes the ones that got both jabs. My wife a nurse has had both of hers but without doses to give they are coming in little dribbles. I don't honestly expect to be able to get a *** until maybe mid-summer if I'm lucky. The governments, both federal and provincial, did too little, too late, to secure vaccines and as there are no vaccine producing labs in all of Canada we are in a long line of countries needing it. They could have set up production labs during the last year so that when one became available they could get domestic production going. Oh well in the mean time I will continue to wear my mask and stay away from people as much as possible.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/covid-19-vaccine-rollout-saskatchewan-1.5917032
Pete

Sorry to hear this, Canada is often a poster child or doing things well. I'm involved in the vaccine R&D programme, and my guess is that global production will ramp quite quickly and you will be flooded with material earlier than that. Most large economies including UK US, EU, and Canada, had to place early bets on a number of candidates as they could not tell which would work. India is a powerhouse of vaccine manufacture and the command economies also have production. The result is the west will have 4x more than it needs and will start to give it away. The giant factories in India will start to come on stream. Canada has a lot of good will due to its good general diplomacy, so will likely find a channel before long.
On the public vs private debate, Vaccine work is a good example where public private partnerships work well. Vaccine development is very high risk, the money is made on the childhood staples, epidemic vaccines are usually big loss makers and done for good will - Ebola, Sars etc as they need to be prepared in advance and no-one buys without a pandemic, which only happens once is a generation. Note that the Pfizer *** was developed by a German small co. Moderna, AZ was a publicly funded venture by Oxford and UK government with industry muscle in manufacturing. There are lessons to be learned by the West, where complacency over Sars and Swine flue left us short. In my company case we had a Pandemic scale up centre bid to government turned down 3 years ago despite £50m of industry co-funding, it just didn't seem a priority back then and without the long term public money, industry just cant sustain something that is only used in an emergency. Industry is great as scaling up manufacturing and relativity quickly - after a development lead time - in 6 months, PPE, ventilators, vaccine production has gone from tick over to global scale. The public investment is about having the starting infrastructure available to shorten the lead times, this is something that can be done through co-operation between public and private entities and amongst neighboring states, its an insurance policy. Lots of lessons to learn. We will probably overreact to the pandemic and we will end up with a surplus of laboratories sitting around waiting for the next epidemic.....

 

[D_W]

Cuba deaths per million 29
USA " " " 1,584

whoopee jacob. That doesn't make me wish I lived in Cuba. Italy, UK and US were ideal targets for the virus. Italy because of the back and forth with the Chinese, and the US and UK because we are tourist destinations in certain areas.

Cuba also does repression "real good". They sound like your kind of folks:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/07/cuba-covid-19-rules-used-intensify-repression

(Washington, DC) – The Cuban government is using regulations designed to prevent the spread of Covid-19 to harass and imprison critics, Human Rights Watch said today.

On November 26, 2020, Cuban security forces detained 14 government critics in Havana after alleging that one of them had violated Covid-19 rules by failing to re-take a test for the coronavirus........

Fabulous.

 

[D_W]

Our AB provincial government has been sadly lacking in problems of planning for distribution but public outrage seems to be having an effect on them., and things are seemingly progressing.

We had some of it at the state level here.

Early on, we had excellent allocation of the vaccine, and the potential to train people to administer it in droves. The state government dragged their feet and said the current law didn't allow them to just provide funding for it. Of course, this was mentioned after it was questioned, and not before. You'd think that rather than opening the books and saying "ghee, can't do it - rules say no. That's the rules. What's for lunch?", someone would've concluded "I think we might have a big enough problem here that we should address it before someone asks about it".

I guess we're waiting for a bigger problem. Distribution is in full force here now - staff to administer vaccine now outstrips supply.

 

[Jacob]

whoopee jacob. That doesn't make me wish I lived in Cuba. Italy, UK and US were ideal targets for the virus. Italy because of the back and forth with the Chinese, and the US and UK because we are tourist destinations in certain areas.

Excuses excuses! The simple fact is that both Trump and Johnson were in denial. Johnson caught up but not before achieving world beating death rates.

Cuba also does repression "real good". They sound like your kind of folks:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/07/cuba-covid-19-rules-used-intensify-repression


Fabulous.

HRW tends to support United States foreign policy, particularly regarding Latin America.
Cuba is highly respected in terms of public health and also foreign medical aid. As an American you probably wouldn't know that D_W!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watch

 

[D_W]

your posts are comical, Jacob. Like something I'd expect out of a 15 year old hoping to major in art.

 

[mikej460]

So, I read posts quoting statistics as flawed, also different countries using different metrics, some countries with low outbreaks vs. low transient population yada yada. This isn't a p*ssing contest guys. Things are getting much better, but complacency is now the enemy; people who have had their ***(s) are feeling they can go back to normal and people who haven't (under 60s in the UK) see this and just copy their behaviour. Now we hear of people travelling from red list countries with new variants attempting to enter the UK without quarantining. It is still a dangerous world.