BBO Discussion Forums: Coronavirus - BBO Discussion Forums

Tyler Cowen said:

I love how officials in the UK responsible for managing the pandemic allow themselves to describe mundane acts as though they just moved mountains. Case in point:

A headline on BBC (link here) reads Covid-19: England delivering 140 jabs a minute, says NHS chief executive

The NHS Chief Exec didn't define how they are deriving the statistic. Presumably this is based on minutes in a working day (8 hours?) which translates to 67k jabs per day. If one allows for the lunch hour (i.e. proper workday of 7 hours), the number is even lower at 59k per day.

The article goes on to talk about setting up vaccination centres that will operate 24x7 within the next 10 days. This suggests that the vaccination programme currently operates only during the day time and that the "140 a minute" calc is probably is based on working hours only.

The vaccination rate is much lower than one would have thought possible or necessary. Yet, somehow the Govt. can spin it to make it look like success!

shyams- the daily vaccination figures are on the dashboard. It's currently around 300.000 a day. https://coronavirus....port_date_daily
Per capita, the number of doses given in the UK is the 4th highest in the world. https://ourworldinda...id-vaccinations

It's no secret that I don't hold our government, or its respone to covid-19, in high esteem. But on vaccines, they got it right - they bought more doses than almost any other country, MHRA was quicker than anyone else in approving them, and the NHS is fairly efficient at administering them. I think even the controversial delay of 2nd doses was probably the right call. And they might be able to vaccinate everyone over 18 who wants to by this summer.

 cherdano, on 2021-January-17, 13:02, said:

It seems that the article was probably giving an average over some unspecified time period (maybe since vaccinations started?), during which the rate of immunization has been ramping up. 300K/day is the peak this past Saturday.

300K/day is about 200/minute around the clock, or 625/minute if only 8 hours/day.

 cherdano, on 2021-January-17, 13:02, said:

Thank you for this information and the links. I was unaware that we really were doing so many vaccinations a day.

The dashboards are quite useful to track progress... and I intend to do so periodically. Well, at least until it's my turn to get vaccinated

At this rate, hopefully the entire Covid situation could turn around quickly within 2-3 month. I assume it is reasonable to assume that R0 for Covid will drop to insignificant levels once about 50%-60% of the country has been vaccinated. That is something I eagerly look forward to.

 shyams, on 2021-January-18, 02:39, said:

According to the Mayo clinic, it needs to be at 70%+

 pilowsky, on 2021-January-18, 03:43, said:

Ignoring the complications around k vs R, the percentage you need depends on how infectious the disease is. For the old strain where R was a little over 2.5 anything better than 40% (hence the 50-60% figure) will get R below 1 and the epidemic will fizzle. The new strains are more infectious (but less so than measles) so require a higher figure, but not as high as the 94% measles does.

 Cyberyeti, on 2021-January-18, 06:54, said:

Are you making a different point?
1. The Mayo clinic reference is specifically about sars-cov-2
2. All RNA viruses mutate and change their infectivity. Normally they get more infective and less dangerous.
3. Point number 2 is called the 'Theory of Evolution' - quite popular amongst Biologists north of the Mason-Dixon line - in this situation it means that the virus will likely become (simultaneously) more infective and (slightly) less dangerous.
4. Trump - surprisingly given his opinions about climate change in general - seems to believe that everything will get better when the climate changes - hmm, maybe his belief system is internally coherent after all.

 pilowsky, on 2021-January-18, 13:57, said:

I was responding to both the Shyams quote:

Quote

Where the 50-60 figure came from, it WAS reasonably accurate but out of date, and explaining why the Mayo clinic figure is higher.

shyams, let us know when you get an appointment so that we can figure out your age

 shyams, on 2021-January-18, 02:39, said:

I am afraid it's not quit that easy. For one thing, we don't quite know to what extent vaccines prevent transmission - e.g. there is a good chance that it's extremely high after two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, but seems unlikely to be as high after one dose of the Astrazeneca one. For another, I am afraid we will only find out over the coming year whether we have already created a mutation that happens to escape the immune response created by the vaccines.

Finally. I have young kids in pre-school/school. I am sure I am not the only in that situation whose social life pre-covid consisted to a large part of meeting other parents and their kids. Well, none of us will get vaccinated any time soon, and there aren't even trials at this point for young children. (Pfizer is running a trial for 12+ year olds I think.) So vaccinating everyone over 50 might make less of a dent to R than you might expect just based on the simple numbers game.
On the other hand, those under 50 are more likely to have been infected already.

I think what it comes down to is that as long as Her Majesty's government insists on playing this "Let's aim for R = 1 - epsilon" game, they will find ways to stay in shooting range (and thus just a stretch of bad weather or bad luck away from another emergence of cases) until a very large part of the adult population is vaccinated with two doses.

Meanwhile, we are 11 months into this and we still don't have widespread use of FFP2/N95/KN95 masks (you see them a lot in Germany), don't have serious sick pay for those who have to stay home because of a positive test/contact tracing, and have given up on backwards tracing. Even if each of these would just reduce R by 0.03, together they would roughly half the number of cases every 6 weeks. Would seem worth doing, no?

Here is a rather old reference (it's a fast-moving field) that explains why sars-cov-2 is mutating so rapidly.
how sars changes its infectivity.
I'm happy to explain SNP's etc, I note that the 452 mutation is now causing severe problems.

I think I may have made this quip about the thread's sub-title last year but when talking about ignoring history I think it wasn't the pandemic history that people ignored. Sadly it is now bein repeated and possibly irreversible. Everyone allowed the pandemic to take over absolutely everything and we are headed for total control of the planet, maybe forever. However people have been believing what they are fed from all sources for so long now etc

 thepossum, on 2021-January-19, 03:48, said:

I believe that over 2 million people are dead. Are you suggesting that those corpses are fictional creations of the media?

 Zelandakh, on 2021-January-19, 06:27, said:

Note: That death toll occurred despite a lot of efforts to restrict the spread of the virus.

Its remarkable to compare how successful various parts of the world have been in controlling the spread. (Yes, there have been confounding effects like the age of the population. Yes, there has been a lot of luck at play. However, it also seems clear that some countries such as Japan, New Zealand, etc. have been much muhc more successful than others at controlling the spread)

 Winstonm, on 2021-January-13, 13:31, said:

The whole placebo debate goes well beyond potentially subjective measure such as pain. One of the reasons why placebo became a mainstream research topic rather than a dirty word in medicine relates to a trial about the effects of altitude. It turns out that taking a placebo actually causes the blood to mimic the effects of taking oxygen, a purely physical response. The fact that this result was robust and contradicted everything supposedly known at that time about the placebo caused a burst of research. That research has turned up a number of such physical responses, with one key area indeed being pain, where natural pain killers can be detected in the body after application of a placebo (thus making it a confirmed physical effect).

Trials suggest that these natural pain killers are often at least as effective as commercially available ones. As an example, a recent major Oxford study (published in The Lancet) found that a fake shoulder surgery was just as effective at reducing pain as the real thing. As I wrote before, this is a really interesting area of research and it is good to put aside your preconceptions from decades of media telling you that "the placebo effect" is purely psychological and of no importance. Research is obviously ongoing but as far as I know, pretty much every team working in the field is producing results that back up these effects, with the emphasis now on working out how to use the effect rather than questioning whether it is real or not.

 Zelandakh, on 2021-January-19, 06:50, said:

I would be interested in any study of true physical findings such as improved oxygenation - have you links? Btw, It's not the media but my experience as a nurse that makes me take these findings with a grain of salt, most notably in pain management. Correlation is not causation, and finding endorphins (which pain causes to be released) is not a strongly valid argument.

There are many patient biases to overcome with pain studies. This abstract pretty well sums up my thinking about the placebo effect.

 Zelandakh, on 2021-January-19, 06:27, said:

No, he isn't - your thinking has become a little concrete.

Phil Kerpen @kerpen said:

 Winstonm, on 2021-January-19, 09:43, said:

Unfortunately I have long ago given up my link to the academic research database so it is not so easy for me to pinpoint the current research papers. What I can tell you is that leading expert in this area is Fabrizio Benedetti - a recent paper that came up for him via Google is this one but he has published many so do look around for more information. For a general overview of placebos from a few years back presented in an informal, entertaining way, you could also check out this BBC documentary.

Ok, thanks