Hide Ya Wives, Hide Ya Kids: Worldwide Coronavirus Pandemic!

[whywesteppin]

The best data so far is out of Israel because they've vaccinated most of the elderly but not many of the younger population. They've seen a drop in hospitalizations and deaths in the elderly group but not so much in the younger group, indicating the vaccine is effective in terms of large scale effects.

I don't know what they're comparing to, but out of half a million vaccinated people, there are 0 deaths and 4 who are severely ill. For comparison, in the USA, we have 5 deaths for every half a million people, per day, and about 100 hospitalized for every half million. And Israel had similar numbers a month ago, I believe. So it's 93% effective against any infections (according to the article) and 90-100% effective against severe illness and death so far (based on my rough calculation. Keep in mind too that most of these half million are older, so my numbers are actually underestimating how many deaths and hospitalizations we would expect by a significant amount, but also my math could be off).

It works: 0 deaths, only 4 severe cases among 523,000 fully vaccinated Israelis

HMO data a week after 2nd dose shows 93% effectiveness, ‘unequivocally' proving vaccine's success and leaving ‘no doubt’ it’s saved many Israeli lives, says Maccabi official

www.timesofisrael.com

Vaccines are curbing COVID: Data from Israel show drop in infections

The country is the first to see a direct effect of vaccines working in such a large group of people.

www.nature.com

edit: I should add that it's 15 hospitalized (4 severely ill). It's still early so it's hard to say exactly how effective the vaccine is but it seems to match the clinical trials so far, which is good news. The open question is what'll happen with the south africa variant and also how much and how quickly vaccination will lead to herd immunity (or a drop in infections among unvaccinated people in the population).

 

[ballinsam23]

Israel's vaccine distribution has been A1.

 

[dman14]

good guy Blake P has been a great help with getting good masks for myself and my family. i recently have been using this lg airwasher kf94 and the fit is really good on my face. the cool thing (that my wife showed me) is that the straps are adjustable. i got them from here: https://www.everydaybeautylab.com/lg-kf94-airwasher-face-mask-white-made-in-korea-lg-kf94/

are those reusable?

 

[stuntman mike]

are those reusable?

just like any disposable mask, they are made to be worn once but i usually hang the mask in the hot sun when i get home and alternate with a different one the next day. i probably use a mask about 3 or 4x and toss unless i have possible exposure at work, or the mask gets wet/dirty.

 

[Blake P]

are those reusable?

Aaron Collins has tested KF94’s at over 90% effectiveness after 40 hours of wear. As stuntman mike said, have enough to rotate them so you let one air out for a few days between wears and you can reuse them for a long time.

 

[Canadian Destroyer]

We need to talk about these doctors out here giving unqualified advice. They are giving people a false sense of security.
Members of my family were told by a doctor that they have "immunity for a year" when they were tested and found to have antibodies recently after getting COVID 3 months ago.
Honestly, I think a big factor in the how much the disease spreads is that there is no established guideline that all licensed doctors have to go by. You can go to 5 different doctors and be told 5 different things ranging from how long you should quarantine to what you should do, etc.

 

[160jordansdeep]

 

[DesD1]

We need to talk about these doctors out here giving unqualified advice. They are giving people a false sense of security.
Members of my family were told by a doctor that they have "immunity for a year" when they were tested and found to have antibodies recently after getting COVID 3 months ago.
Honestly, I think a big factor in the how much the disease spreads is that there is no established guideline that all licensed doctors have to go by. You can go to 5 different doctors and be told 5 different things ranging from how long you should quarantine to what you should do, etc.

Im in NJ these days and my Dad's wife was telling me that there was this Dr in the area at the beginning of the Pandemic telling anyone that would come with symptoms that it wasn't covid what they were feeling but just regular flu ...

Several covid cases were later found and the Dr and his wife died ...

 

[elpablo21]

 

[s3p4tu]

Welp....should I change my primary doctor if he is not even wearing mask the right way? He was even loosing it up while talking during my visit. I mean from all the people, the medical provider should be the one who shows the proper example.

 

[boxer15]

Got my first shot today. Went smoothly.

You could make big bucks selling those sticker on eBay.

 

[everysingletime]

I'm a bit concerned about the south african variant tbh

 

[jaymosenvied]

You could make big bucks selling those sticker on eBay.

 

[Nike Jordan]

good guy Blake P has been a great help with getting good masks for myself and my family. i recently have been using this lg airwasher kf94 and the fit is really good on my face. the cool thing (that my wife showed me) is that the straps are adjustable. i got them from here: https://www.everydaybeautylab.com/lg-kf94-airwasher-face-mask-white-made-in-korea-lg-kf94/

I just bought a few myself so I can double mask.

 

[misha]

I'm a bit concerned about the south african variant tbh

heard The Moderna vaccine is effective against that strain not as high but still good

 

[Blake P]

I just bought a few myself so I can double mask.

Unless you’re in a super crowded risky indoor situation, adding anything over the top would probably be overkill IMO. Those masks are already 99%+ effective against aerosol transmission.

 

[Mark Antony]

Because I mainly rock kf94s or kn95 had to fall back from double masking (ie a kf94 and a cloth mask over it), too tough to breathe and move around. Maybe it's better for people who don't have masks that add up to that percentage effectiveness.

 

[Nike Jordan]

Unless you’re in a super crowded risky indoor situation, adding anything over the top would probably be overkill IMO. Those masks are already 99%+ effective against aerosol transmission.

I understand, but I don't want my Uniqlo masks to go to waste.

 

[everysingletime]

Welp....should I change my primary doctor if he is not even wearing mask the right way? He was even loosing it up while talking during my visit. I mean from all the people, the medical provider should be the one who shows the proper example.

yea I'd change my provider

 

[s3p4tu]

Aaron Collins has tested KF94’s at over 90% effectiveness after 40 hours of wear. As stuntman mike said, have enough to rotate them so you let one air out for a few days between wears and you can reuse them for a long time.

I had my wife to wear 1 KF94 mask for the whole week last week at her workplace. She started complaining on the 3rd day . She said it started to smell a bit. I only have 2 just to see how they do. I am waiting for more to arrive from be healthy usa. I guess they are slower processing the order compared to everyday beauty lab, even though both are using Post Office and from NJ/NY.

I notice NBA players and staffs have been wearing either KN95 or KF94 masks too.

 

[Olympus]

Decline in new cases outpacing decline in testing

 

[MakeNTGreatAgain]

LA County vaccine shortage

mad ppl missed their appointments cuz something got screwed up

 

[yobyellav]

Hundreds of people are volunteering to escort elderly Asian Americans to help keep them safe | CNN

Jacob Azevedo's stomach turned as he watched a disturbing video of an 84-year-old Thai American man who was fatally shoved to the ground on a sidewalk in San Francisco.

www.cnn.com

This being necessary is disgusting.

 

[yasuke.]

Immunization Expert Accuses C.D.C. and Deloitte of Stealing Her Idea (Published 2021)

The Trump administration awarded a no-bid contract to Deloitte to develop software to track vaccinations, but the system has flaws. A competitor claims the C.D.C. and the company stole her intellectual property.

www.nytimes.com

Spoiler: Article Here

WASHINGTON — Last spring, when coronavirus vaccines were just a glimmer of hope, the Trump administration awarded the first of two no-bid contracts worth up to $44 million to a national consulting firm to help patients register to be immunized and states collect detailed data on vaccine recipients.
The result was VAMS, a vaccine administration management system built by the firm, Deloitte, which has been spurned by most states and become an object of scorn. And now, an immunization expert who had offered the government her own mass vaccination tracker at a lower price than Deloitte’s is accusing the company and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of stealing her intellectual property.
The expert, Tiffany Tate, the executive director of the Maryland Partnership for Prevention, made the allegation in a cease-and-desist letter obtained by The New York Times, and later confirmed its authenticity in an interview with her lawyer on Friday. Ms. Tate, who has spent two decades running immunization clinics in underserved communities, said she previewed her platform in May for Deloitte officials who were identified by the C.D.C. as consultants.
The C.D.C. expressed interest in buying it, she said. But the centers instead asked Deloitte, without a competitive bidding process, to build its own system, dismissing warnings from state and local health officials and immunization managers that it was unwise to roll out an untested platform in the middle of a crisis.
The letter, dated Aug. 30, says the C.D.C.’s specifications “mirror” the system Ms. Tate created — including a “new feature” that “eventually found its way into VAMS.” Ms. Tate, who is African-American and whose work has focused on minority communities, said the rejection was especially painful in the thick of a pandemic that disproportionately affects people of color.

“I was in shock, and I really was heartbroken because I’ve worked with these people my entire career and I respected them and I trusted them,” Ms. Tate said in the interview. “It was very, very upsetting.”Ultimately, the marketplace spoke. VAMS, which Mississippi’s state health officer, Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs, described this week as “suboptimal,” is being used in about 10 states. Ms. Tate offered to license her own system for $15 million — about a third of what the C.D.C. has committed to pay Deloitte — so the agency could give it free to states. When the C.D.C. rejected her, she said, she sold it to states herself.Now, 27 states and jurisdictions are using it, including North Dakota, which as of Friday had administered the first shot of a two-dose coronavirus vaccine to a higher percentage of its population than all but four other states. Louisiana is expected to sign on, which would bring the number to 28, and Virginia has abandoned VAMS for the system, known as PrepMod, Ms. Tate said.“She is a reputable person,” said Claire Hannan, the executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, who said that she, too, had assumed that the C.D.C. was buying Ms. Tate’s platform after hearing agency officials describe their coming system in conference calls last year. “This is a good system. It is built out of experience running these clinics. Does it do everything? No. Is it the perfect solution that everybody wants at the drop of a dime? No. But it’s working in many states.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/...301405807&surface=home-featured&variant=1_lda
At least one other developer of vaccine information systems, Mike Popovich, the owner of STChealth, which contracts with states to run their immunization registries, said he and his competitors were also asked to sit in on meetings and share information with C.D.C. and Deloitte — only to be shut out of the bidding process.
In its published “notice of intent” to award the contract to Deloitte without seeking other bids, the C.D.C. justified the decision by saying that the company had developed VAMS using its own “GovConnect proprietary platform.”

The agency did not respond to a request for comment.
Deloitte dismissed Ms. Tate’s claims as “baseless” in a statement issued by its spokesman, Jonathan Gandal, who described VAMS as a “scalable, Salesforce-based application designed to C.D.C.’s requirements and not based on” Ms. Tate’s “information or technology.”
Collecting immunization data is critical to the success of the government’s mass vaccination campaign, especially with vaccines that requires two doses, like the two currently in use in the United States. President Biden has promised to make sure that vaccine distribution is equitable, given the pandemic’s outsize effect on people of color. But that pledge can only be fulfilled with accurate demographic data.
Apart from the problems with VAMS, the C.D.C. also reported this week that its effort to gather race and ethnicity data on vaccine recipients was faltering. It has such data for just 52 percent of those vaccinated — a figure that Dr. Julie Morita, a former Chicago public health commissioner and expert in health equity, called “disheartening.”
Gathering vaccination data has long been a state-by-state effort; each state has its own immunization registry, which vary in sophistication and quality and are often geared toward childhood vaccines. A push two decades ago to develop a federal registry imploded after an uproar over patient privacy and how the data would be used.
Systems like VAMS and Ms. Tate’s PrepMod work in conjunction with state immunization registries, allowing patients to enter their own data when they make appointments, which can speed the vaccination process. Once patients receive their shots, the provider can send the data — along with the lot number and other relevant information — to the state registries.

Mr. Gandal, of Deloitte, said his company was “contracted to deliver a system for the early phases of vaccine administration, focused on frontline workers,” adding that VAMS has “performed as designed, with consistent, strong system performance and availability.”
The system was not developed to be used by all states “across multiple phases” of the vaccination campaign, he said. But the C.D.C. decided to make it available to states for long-term use, “requiring additional support.” Some states balked.
“Some states thought about making a switch from their system completely to VAMS, and a lot of them decided it wasn’t the most prudent thing to do,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
He said he told the C.D.C. that the money would be better spent beefing up the existing state registries.
Once it was rolled out, the Deloitte system was rife with problems. It was supposed to operate as part of an information-sharing network through a federal platform called the IZ Gateway, set up to allow state registries to send information to one another and the C.D.C. Information sharing is vital, experts say, especially in cases where people live in one state but get vaccinated in another, or move from one state to another between doses.
But VAMS has been unable to connect to the IZ Gateway, said Rebecca Coyle, the executive director of the American Immunization Registry Association. That forced the C.D.C. to create a “workaround,” she said, adding that she believes the problem is being addressed.
“If you look at a software system that was available to all jurisdictions to be used and you have less than 10 that have decided to use it,” Ms. Coyle said, “I think that maybe can speak for how useful it has been.”
Patients in states that use VAMS have also reported problems logging on to make appointments. “The promise of VAMS has not really come to fruition,” Dr. Dobbs said.

Such problems were reported last month by MIT Technology Review. PrepMod, too, has drawn some complaints, notably in Los Angeles. But Ms. Tate said officials there put it into use without receiving proper training, and were using the system, intended for consumers, in long-term care facilities — settings for which it is not intended.
Ms. Tate, 50, was silent about the dispute with the C.D.C. until being approached by The Times; she said she did not want to be characterized as a “whistle-blower” and spoke reluctantly, saying she did not want to jeopardize her working relationship with public health colleagues.

She said she began her public health career more than two decades ago helping administer flu shots to older African-Americans in Baltimore, in an effort to erase the racial disparity in vaccination rates. She has run her Maryland-based nonprofit for 20 years, often speaks at conferences and appeared in December on MSNBC to talk about the logistics of the coronavirus immunization campaign.
PrepMod is owned by a for-profit affiliate of the Maryland group. Ms. Tate’s work developing the vaccine management system grew out of her own frustration with tracking immunizations during the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, when she worked as a technical consultant for the state of Maryland. A big drawback, she said, was the lack of an automated system to track who was coming in to be vaccinated and when.
“There was tons of paper, there were long lines and we had to do all this data entry; it was a really inefficient process,” she said.
Eventually, she teamed up with a software developer to create an online application called ReadiConsent, which won an award in 2018 from the National Adult and Influenza Immunization Summit, a coalition that joins with the C.D.C. to improve the use of vaccines. The product drew so much attention that in January 2020, she convened a consortium of 30 states that were interested in buying ReadiConsent.
According to the cease-and-desist letter, on March 13 — the same day that President Donald J. Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency — Ms. Tate approached some officials she knew at the C.D.C. to tell them that she was updating her platform, and that she had a software firm with extensive government experience ready to scale it up for a “national rollout.”
The next month, she presented PrepMod to the American Immunization Registry Association, which was researching various software platforms for possible use in a mass vaccination campaign, and to C.D.C. officials, at meetings where Deloitte was present. The meetings included “a slide presentation and screenshots of PrepMod with detailed explanations of current and planned features,” the letter said.
Soon afterward, the agency inquired about the cost. “It was very clear that they were very very excited about what I was presenting to them and they told me that they didn’t have anything else,” Ms. Tate said in the interview.
In May, the C.D.C. awarded Deloitte a contract for $15.9 million — about $600,000 more than Ms. Tate had asked for. It has since awarded the company an additional $28 million for VAMS.
After the initial Deloitte contract was awarded, Ms. Tate said, she approached the company about forming a partnership with her. Instead, her complaint said, they tried to hire her to “work on the very software and project that she had already developed and created.” But the offer required her to sign “a release,” embedded in a nondisclosure agreement, and she refused.
Her lawyer, Howard A. Newman, said they were still awaiting a substantive response from the government; under federal law, they must wait six months before filing suit. Ms. Tate said she was trying to move on: “I’m really busy trying to help people save lives. That is my primary goal right now and this litigation stuff — we’ll just see how that plays out.”

America gon' America. A shame.

 

[whywesteppin]

thought this was worth posting in here as well. read the replies on the original tweet. it's gold.