Really? WOW! What an incredibly DAMNING referendum on the state of the current crisis! Whew! Wow...
Take your meds, dumbfuckler...

 

I knew it was over 4,000 beds ,
I just didn't realise how much over it is now

Nearer 6,000 quarantine and isolation beds.

No wonder it's costing a fortune ,
and stressing frontline workers and their families.

quote:
The vast majority of the 5,800 spots in the
32 managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities
across New Zealand were occupied over Christmas and New Year in Kiwis’ rush to return.
... reports that the earliest available vacancy was in mid-March.

 

Just an observation.

All along we’ve set sights on flattening the curve, from March 1st to probably the end of June, it was the intention to slow it down. That’s a pretty good stretch of time to figure things out, then early fall and the virtual shutdown of dining, sports and entertainment venues. All of this hit the average person very hard. People from outside the country criticized the US and it’s government for lack of leadership. It made a huge impact on national and local elections, perhaps swaying the country over to the other side.

All along, I’ve heard medical professionals say, the real impact will be in the winter, exactly like any other viral infection takes hold. This is true in the Northern Hemisphere, not in the Southern, they’re in the summer, headed to fall.

All of the spikes we see were coming, no matter what we did ahead of time, people are tired of isolating, distancing, putting social and family matters on the back burner. Children are tired of being deprived of interaction with their peers.

Personally, I think we fucked up, too much, too soon, no reserve for when it really hits the fan.

 

You must be careful taking those meds because we have flat earthers spoilung vaccine.......it would be funny if it was not so sad!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...ist-covid-19-vaccine-doses-steven-brandenburg

Thinskin

 

I work in a northeast coast hospital and I've noticed that covid is only a problem if you're in poor health, or an elderly. It seems to exacerbate prior health conditions. And you probably wouldn't be surprised how many Americans are overweight sleep deprived or just overall not taking care of themselves. Hopefully folks learn to live healthier lifestyles and we can start treating this virus more like a flu than a plague.

 

The warning signs have always been out there ,
now it is happening.
Variants that spread more quickly.

Which means they can vary/mutate more quickly ,
and it is happening.

South African covid is not only spreading faster , it is also mutating faster (they are saying , only time wil tell).

South Africa already has two new fast spreader variants ,
and authorities are already concerned one may lead to a more vaccines resistan strain ,
or at least resistant to the current batch of vaccines .

This is no surprise at all really , or at least should not be to any reasonably educated person.
It is what virus are very good at ,
Mutating.

It is why we can not eliminate them once we allow them to become widely established/endemic.

I believe it will probably be impossible now to eliminate this from much of the world ,
and that places like here ,
will have to rely on vaccinations and other continuing strict measures ,
to maintain a comunity free from this curse.
(if it is possible at all long term)
We probably won't know for at least 8 or 10 years ,
though we should get some idea within 3 to 5 , IF vaccinations succeed , as in 70 to 90% uptake of effective vaccines .

That is a damed tall order.

broardly speaking for anything close to WW control ,
that equates to
5,000,000 vaccinations a day ,
for
1,000 days .

Carve it down any way you like , it is still a tall order

Halve it ,
2.5 million vaccinations per day , every day for 1,000 days , just to gain 70% coverage for half the world.


This is not alarmist , it is just the recognised minimum stated by most experts ,
and there are plenty who say the requirement is more likely 90% coverage ,
or at least close to it.

Probably the first effective requirement should be "no international travel for ANYONE not vaccinated within the previous X number of days.

trouble is , first we have to find out what the value of X is ,
before we can set a hard rule.

So in the first instance all we can go for is pre travel vaccinations .

even then , that only means between hopefull 70 and 90+ % of travelers will actually be protected ,

because we have no idea which are the 7 to 30% the various vaccinations do not work for

Typical.
nothings simple about this curse

 

By the time the vaccine(s) are administered to 50% of the world population, most of the folks who didn’t get it, will likely to have gained immunity by contracting the virus.

But then again, it still is only fatal to less than 3% who do get it.

 

quote:


And since many medical professionals say that this virus and its mutants will be around for years, or decades, the only practical solution is to keep developing vaccines and inoculate as many as possible. Unending isolation will not stop the spread, no more than we can expect nonhuman hosts to do so.
end quote:
*********

That is probably absolutely true now

I certainly think so.

It is far to late now for everybody to go for elimination as we did.
It is also so bad and rampant now ,
that is probably not possible even for us to keep it out long term.

However we can keep up the current regime long enough for vaccines to become effective ,
and to at least protect a large percentage of the most at risk.
(hopefully long enough to treat all the high risk who can be)

After all what we have done is much cheaper than what most of the world is having to deal with.

(for example , currently , the only people in the country who need vaccine protection , are border workers , and border quarantine and isolatiin care and health workers , and their families.

The other 4.5 million kiwi are currently at between very low and no risk for now)

and we do have enough on order to treat all kiwi , and most of our Pacific neighbours ,
expected to start arriving
in the next couple of months .
So "hopefully" those border workers will be vaccinated in the next 3 or four months.

After that , the rest of us will be a progressively much less risk.,
as other of the more vulnerable get protection ,
and it may even reach us older high risk citizens relatively soon to ,
all of which reduces the risks to the rest.

 

The RIVM (the Dutch cdc) publishes a weekly report that is heavy on data and this weeks is 72 pages in Dutch but with lots of pictures and graphs.

One of the main elements is the age groups in which cases are rising significantly are the under 20's........whether this is due to the new variant is uncertain but it is one to watch.

https://www.rivm.nl/sites/default/files/2021-01/COVID-19_WebSite_rapport_wekelijks_20210105_1254.pdf

Thinskin

 

How are your vaccinations going?

You bullshitting old fraud the US never really shut down. Trump lied and red states believed him and refused to shut down or take the precautions recommended by the CDC because Trump went against them. While in the rest of the country that did shut down Trump wasted all that sacrifice by demanding states open up because he thought it would help him get re-elected and on top of his anti mask rhetoric spread the virus across the US worse than ever. Just like the scientists and healthcare professionals said it would.

Which is why we are sitting right here today.

New High: Coronavirus Lands 2,800 Americans in the Hospital in Just One Day

https://www.thedailybeast.com/coron...cans-in-the-hospital-in-just-one-day?ref=home

 

I would have expected 6-8,000 more, due to NYE, but then we still have 10 days of possible incubation to go.

One can only hope that the DK will keep us informed.

 

Two Americans dying every minute. Nobody saw this coming.

 

Really? Two deaths a minute? On a more normal time, the rate is about 10 per minute.

 

(CNN)Every day, the number of families mourning the death of a loved one to Covid-19 keeps growing at a devastating rate.

More than 300,000 people in the US have died from coronavirus since the first known death on February 6. That's an average of more than 961 deaths a day.
But this holiday season has been especially brutal, with more than 50,000 deaths in just the past month, according to Johns Hopkins University.
In the past week, an average of 2,403 people in the US have died from Covid-19 every day.


That's an average of one Covid-19 death every 40 seconds.

 

Actually Suz, you have to take the year into account not just the day.

There are 525,600 minutes in a year, a normal year sees just over 3,000,000 deaths in the US, if every COVID-19 death claim were over and above the normal rate, we would be looking at 6.3 deaths per minute, instead of 5.7.

I was wrong on the 10 per minute.

 

COVID-19 deaths would be too high if it were only 2 per day, and we should be doing what we can to bring the number down. But, we also have to be realistic.

 

This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, but most of all beware this boy. For on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

― Charles Dickens

 

While the UK variant, B.1.1.7, of the covid-19 virus is certainly more infectious, it is the new South African variant, 501.V2, which is causing concern for the science minded amongst us.

South African SARS-CoV-2 Variant Alarms Scientists
An additional mutation in the spike protein of the coronavirus may help it elude antibody recognition, and scientists are investigating if current vaccines will protect against it.

Scientists are testing if COVID-19 vaccines will protect against newly identified UK and South African SARS-CoV-2 variants, both of which contain an unusual number of mutations compared to other variants of the coronavirus. These mutations are concentrated mainly in the segment of the virus’s genome that codes for the spike protein, which the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines each build immunity to.

This additional research comes as British health secretary Matt Hancock says he is more concerned about the South African variant, known as 501.V2, as it relates to vaccine efficacy than the UK variant, known as B.1.1.7.

“One of the reasons they know they’ve got a problem is because, like us, they have an excellent genomic scientific capability to be able to study the details of the virus,” Hancock tells BBC radio, referring to a conversation with a South African health official. “And it is even more of a problem than the U.K. new variant.”

Spike protein shape shifter
While the UK variant was first detected in September, officials noticed that it was rapidly spreading through the country in mid-December, leading to tighter restrictions on movement and businesses within days. South African officials reported on December 18 that 501.V2 had been largely replacing other strains of the coronavirus as early as November.

501.V2 carries a mutation in the spike protein called E484K, which is not present in the UK strain, Francois Balloux, the director of the University College London Genetics Institute, says in a statement. “The E484K mutation has been shown to reduce antibody recognition,” he says, which may help the virus bypass immune protection provided by prior infection or vaccination. However, he says that the mutation is not sufficient for the variant to bypass the protection provided by vaccines.

John Bell, a University of Oxford immunologist who is on the UK’s vaccine task force, tells Times Radio that he thinks vaccines would work on the UK variant but there is a “big question mark” about 501.V2, as there is still sparse evidence about it.

Experts say mutations of the virus are to be expected. “Viruses mutate and new strains will emerge,” James Naismith, the director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, says in a statement. “The so-called South African strain has a number of changes, and scientists are working flat out to understand their significance. Some of the changes are quite significant and thus scientists are paying a lot of attention. We do not yet know enough to say more than this.”

In the unlikely scenario that the variant significantly lowers a vaccine’s efficacy, Bell estimates that it would take four to six weeks to develop a modified vaccine. “We’re now in a game of cat and mouse,” he tells Times Radio. “These are not the only two variants we’re going to see.”

Do approved vaccines work on 501.V2?
Richard Lessells, an infectious diseases expert at the University of KwaZulu-Natal who is working on genomic studies of the variant, tells the Associated Press that studying how effective the vaccines are against 501.V2 is “the most pressing question facing us right now.”

He and his colleagues are performing neutralizing assays using the blood of people who have been previously infected with the virus and the blood of people who have received vaccines to try to answer this question.

Albert Einstein College of Medicine virologist Kartik Chandran tells The Scientist in an email that it would also be useful to investigate cell-mediated immunity, which is a response driven by T cells and may be less sensitive to mutations in the spike protein than the neutralizing antibody response is.

Like the UK variant, scientists suspect that 501.V2 is more infectious than other strains of SARS-CoV-2 are, as it has rapidly become dominant in the country’s coastal areas. Lessells says he expects the variant will quickly become dominant in Johannesburg, the country’s largest city, and the surrounding provinces.

South Africa is currently experiencing a resurgence of the virus with new cases and deaths rising rapidly, surpassing what the country experienced in its first surge in late July.

After the first cases of the UK variant were detected in the US, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aims to sequences as many as 6,500 samples of the virus per week, compared to the 3,000 per week it is currently sequencing. 501.V2 has not yet been detected in the US.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-...PpQ&utm_content=105385995&utm_source=hs_email

Thinskin

 

Key developments from the Guardian's virus blog today.

Key developments today

• Belgium will receive only half the doses of the US drugmaker Pfizer’s vaccine it ordered for January because of a logistical difficulty that occurred last month.
• Spain could use the military to boost its vaccination effort as frustrations mount over the plodding pace of the campaign. Just under 83,000 doses of the vaccine have been given out since Spain kicked off its campaign about 10 days ago.
• The UK has recorded a further 60,916 lab-confirmed cases – the highest daily total reported so far, bringing the total number of cases in the UK to 2,774,479. A further 830 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19, bringing the UK total to 76,305. An estimated one in 50 people in private households in England had Covid-19 between 27 December and 2 January.
• England is in its third lockdown, the toughest since March.
• France reported 20,489 new confirmed Covid cases in the past 24 hours, up from 11,395 last Tuesday. It reported 867 new Covid deaths in hospitals and nursing homes. There were 378 hospital deaths on Monday.
• France is widening its Covid-19 vaccination rollout to firefighters and aid workers aged over 50 after making a slow start to its inoculation campaign.
• Italy reported 649 coronavirus-related deaths on Tuesday against 348 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections rose to 15,378 from 10,800.
• Germany is extending its nationwide lockdown until the end of the month and is introducing new tougher restrictions in order to get control of surging coronavirus infections, the chancellor, Angela Merkel, said.
• There is no indication that the coronavirus variant identified in South Africa is more transmissible than the one spreading fast in Britain, the World Health Organization’s technical chief on Covid-19, Maria Van Kerkhove, said.
• The Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency has told ambulance crews not to transport coronavirus patients who are unlikely to survive – in order to conserve oxygen supplies and ICU beds.
• The head of the World Health Organization is “very disappointed” that China has still not authorised the entry of a team of international experts to examine the origins of the coronavirus.
• Japan should issue a Covid-19 state of emergency in the Tokyo area as soon as possible, a panel of experts advising the government on coronavirus responses said.
• A study into patients with long Covid suggests many have been unable to return properly to work six months after infection. The research examined the impact on people months after their initial infection.

Thinskin

 

Are we actually looking at completely abandoning the global economic model in the face of viruses both know, unknown and all possible variation thereof?

Are we saying that lifestyle, career choices, educational systems, etal, will be scrapped and restructured to suit the facilitation of sweeping healthcare changes? All because of a virus that claims less than 1/10th of 1% of the population.

Flatearthers have nothing on the chicken littler.