lobo411

Novavax's vaccine seems to be A+!

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20...-variants.aspx

VCURamFan

The positivity rate nationally is down around 50% in the last month. 6.9% right now for the 7 day average per Johns Hopkins. Testing numbers overall are down which makes sense as fewer sick people means fewer people seeking out tests.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states

exp

Hopefully what they observed with those animal tests will turn out to apply to humans vaccinated with this vaccine.

I would hope they’re running similar tests on humans vaccinated with the other vaccines, that is measure viral load in the upper respiratory as well as lower respiratory tracts.

Whenever a person who’s gotten full doses of vaccines test positive, they should be measuring the viral load.

but a lot of infections to vaccinated people may be asymptomatic so they wouldn’t be tested at all.

I think there was one informal study where the Israelis were going to periodically test health care workers periodically whether or not they had symptoms.

TTT

Good (quick) read on what might be next in the pandemic by Australian epidemiologist Gideon M-K.
The End Of The COVID-19 Pandemic: What do we have to look forward to?

littlefish

Looks fair. I'm still holding a slightly more positive view; maybe better to say there still feel to be some ways through.

On the one side the risk remains real that Covid-19 will impact enough individuals a second (and by extension third) time to out-run the problem the virus faces when its got to (nearly) everyone once.
On the other side, I feel the vaccine technologies and progress in scaling-up should (a big should there!) continue to buy time against new variants and also lower overall hospitalisation rates significantly. Leaving space for better research and targetting of transmission. For example, we've read previously about various sprays and other upper tract focus. For example, presumably drugs can also be developed aiming at the transmission elements of the virus.
Thirdly, maybe a weaker less deadly but dominant variant will emerge somewhere .... and we all give up and simply return to an accepted new normal.

One thing I have been watching is the cumulative population case levels, pre vaccines impacting the data. South Africa turned away their 2nd wave at somewhere around 25% having been infected. The US seems to be doing the same at more like 33%. Its not super clear to me the size of the mountains the vaccines really need to climb.

PanAmWT

These percentages do not mean the cases will continue to subside. They are the peak of the respective wave, but without other interventions the cases will hit at certain lower percentage levels then start the next way up. That is how linear wave dynamics work: two counteracting forces create the oscillation. When vulnerable persons become less available as infection rate increases, the case numbers will stop rising and begin to go down. When more people (those not yet infected, and those whose immunity after an earlier infection wane) come out of isolation the infection rate will go back up. More contagious variants help the upward force and more effective vaccines help the downward force. The waves can be dissipated if vaccines and health measures can suppress the viruses to below a critical level, when the linear dynamics is destroyed. Since both the vaccine effectiveness and the degree of virus infectiousness are functions of time, there is a lot of potential nonlinearity. Whether we can get out of the wave oscillation depend on how these functions varying in time. Since recalibrating vaccines follows the mutation of viruses with a time lag, the pandemic can be put out only if the mutation occurs at a rate slower than the vaccine improvement.

jmastron

It’s definitely good news to see the biggest surge finally subsiding -- and I have seen plenty of “mainstream” news/media here showing the good news of declining cases and hospitalization numbers (and for us what/when that means for moving to the next “tier” of relaxed restrictions). Using 7-day averages, we’re almost down to the case level of the beginning of November. Deaths are declining at a much flatter rate so far, near early January levels; that’s expected as deaths lag diagnoses, so we should expect improvement there too over the next few weeks.

The unknown is where the numbers will bottom out in the US -- after the first wave we settled at ~20,000 cases and ~500 deaths per day, then after the second wave it was ~40,000 cases and ~700 deaths per day. And then it’s a wait and see if increasing vaccination rates and continued vigilance will be enough to stave off another wave or keep it lower.

piyush

Over here in India we hit the peak in September and it's been going down since then. Back in September the reported daily cases hit almost 100,000. Currently its ~ 10,000 daily reported cases. Daily deaths too peaked at 1,200 in September. Current daily deaths are ~ 100. The actual Covid-19 cases will be much higher than reported but the death figures are probably pretty accurate.

Basis a recent sero survey done experts estimate that 21% of India's population has antibodies. ICMR sero survey: One in five Indians exposed to Covid-19 - BBC News.

A total of ~ 200 million Covid-19 tests have been conducted from March till January. From a peak of ~ 1.5 million tests a day in September we are down to ~ 700,000 daily tests now. Positivity rate was ~ 6% in September. It is now ~ 1.5%.

People here were extremely cautious from March - August but things have been opening up since then. Now almost every thing has opened up and people aren't as cautious as well. Hotels, restaurants, bars, etc. are extremely crowded and busy. People are gathering in big numbers as well.

We expected it to spike as things started opening up and winter came (it gets very cold in parts of India) but the opposite has happened. Even NPR did a segment on this recently.

Experts Trying To Uncover Why COVID-19 Cases Are Falling In India : NPR

Why Did COVID-19 Cases Dramatically Decline In India? : Goats and Soda : NPR

Any thoughts on why Covid-19 has reduced so much here?

fransknorge

Deaths in India are under-reported, probably vastly underreported.

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2859

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india...GRbdOQbQM.html

84fiero

Vaccines Need Not Completely Stop COVID Transmission to Curb the Pandemic
(Scientific American)

piyush

These are articles from 6-8 months ago. I'm living here and while I'm sure cases and to a certain extent deaths are understated it doesn't change the fact that the numbers are down drastically from the peak. Most states have even shut down several covid treatment centers that they had started.

In our capital there have been 100,000+ people protesting since a couple of months. Most aren't even wearing masks.

Really makes me wonder why Covid cases and deaths are going down so much.

exp

Past exposure to other coronaviruses don't seem to provide protection to Covid-19.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021...st-sars-cov-2/


So now, vaccines or bust.

lobo411

Doesn't apply to travel quarantines, but it's progress:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/10/healt...nce/index.html

FlitBen

ID experts lament their limited understanding of the seasonal patterns behind endemic infectious diseases. We can hope that risk factors will change if and where natural and induced herd immunity emerges. Rising resistance that varies across populations might explain why some outbreaks are fading faster than others, but not necessarily the seasonality (which likely involves amenable traditions and habitation).

Gottlieb got some things right.

CDC forecast infections approaching 100 million, the vast majority of them unreported. The models offer both cautionary lessons and hopeful signs, assuming herd thresholds derive from long-lasting individual immunity.

The optimistic view:

DaveS

You are asking a very reasonable question. It is not just India that is seeing cases come down where conventional logic would expect the opposite. You could look at your neighbour, Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries on the planet, but still seeing cases fall off. There are many others around the world too. One of the big failings in this epidemic IMHO is failing to look at what really is a risk factor for transmission. The restrictions we have in the UK and many other places are based on assumptions about how this virus spreads rather than any facts. We now see cases falling rapidly and no doubt politicians will argue that restrictions are working. But are they? Or would cases have come down anyway? You can make a strong argument that the policy here has failed and saddled us with huge debts and economic destruction.

There really needs to be some serious research into understanding what is going on. And it needs to looks at countries such as India so that better responses can be found. We have had a year of guessing, it is time for something better based on real scientific research.