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Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of March 15
This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
I got my first Pfizer shot Friday at a FEMA location! It went pretty well, aside from someone being initially skeptical of my vulnerability form. (My doctor emailed it to me so it looked like "a photocopy" which was... Suspicious? Not sure why; it all matched my ID.)
Aside from the intense arm pain whenever I moved it for the first day, it's hard to say what were side effects and what was just chronic illness symptoms due to getting up early, going out, and being stressed. I lay around the first day feeling tired, and I drank massive amounts of water. The second day I felt amazing, better than I have in months. Weird~
I’m so happy you were finally able to get it! Congrats!
Thank you! It's heartening to see so many other people I know also getting appointments.
That's great, good for you!
I don't want to downplay your medical issues, it sounds tough. But could part of it be some sense of relief that you have immune protection now?
I'm waiting on a job abroad, if I don't get vaccinated by early may I'll have to do a 14 day very strict quarantine.
Stress does make my symptoms worse, so starting on my way to being vaccinated could definitely help me handle them better.
I think it was probably a combination of relief, taking time off work (which exhausts me), and drinking more (one of the things that helps POTS).
I hope you're able to get vaccinated soon! Or that the quarantine isn't too rough.
The COVID Tracking Project is shutting down, and they published an article about some lessons learned:
We're still thinking about pandemic data in the wrong ways.
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Belgium starts vaccinating genpop today. https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/159996/belgium-starts-vaccinating-general-population-today-how-reserve-lists-will-work-over-65s-flanders-interfederal-leftover-vaccine-doses/
Don't let that title fool you: Genpop doesn't mean all priority groups have been vaccinated. No. It means "anyone who isn't resident or staff of an elder care home, or medical staff or volunteer in charge of COVID patient".
That is the entirety of what it means. We're starting the second phase. Starting with 65+.
What a slow nightmare.
In more personal news, I'm fully recovered from my first shot. As a data nerd I of course tracked the entire thing. Timeline was:
So, that's CureVac, and it lines up pretty well with most other vaccine side effects. It was pretty mild overall, especially considering I didn't medicate until the worst had passed. A friend who got the Pfizer vaccine had a pretty harrowing 48 hours after her first injection, and they told her that she most likely had caught COVID in the past as the side effects are stronger for those who had it before.
The brain fog was real though. Jeez. I tried to work a bit once my chills and fever had cleared up but kept missing obvious issues, typos etc. The whole thing worsened my insomnia (which started before the injection) quite a lot as well and last night was my first restful night in almost an entire week.
The Medical System Should Have Been Prepared for Long COVID
A good article that talks about how medicine isn't prepared for long COVID... But it should have been, because we've seen this before countless times, both during epidemics and on the individual level with things like ME/CFS.
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I had a personal revelation this morning about why "kids are fine" makes me rage and why this article about going on vacation with kids upsets me so much.
I got sick with a mild cough when I was 15. It wasn't bad enough to miss school (although obviously in retrospect I should have taken time off to avoid exposing other kids). But after three days the cough went away and I was left with unrelenting fatigue and a bunch of other symptoms. I was home sick for 3 weeks and then tried to go back to school. I made it half a day, struggling to go up the stairs and unable to remember my own locker combination. I ended up in the nurse's office, lying on a bench and feeling my heart pound in my chest as if I'd run a marathon. My mum picked me up and I never went to high school again.
Some kids will get long COVID. There's no way to predict which ones; I was perfectly healthy until that mild cough, as far as anyone knew. They, like me, will lose the ability to do the things they love. Many will have to drop out of school. And no one seems to care.
There was no way to predict my illness, but we're already seeing studies confirming kids with long term symptoms from COVID. And yet everyone seems perfectly willing to sacrifice some number of kids to potentially life long disability so that all the other kids can get back to their lives faster. And this morning I finally cried about it.
Separate post for this which is absolutely enraging:
https://twitter.com/Mikepeeljourno/status/1370686985359261701
https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1371031598351716353
https://www.ft.com/content/8e2e994e-9750-4de1-9cbc-31becd2ae0a8
AstraZeneca's willful negligence is slowly approaching conspiracy levels of intentional sabotage. Little French me is itching to get the guillotine out once we find out exactly who the fuck is responsible for this massive a fuckup.
I'd keep the guillotine on the shelf for now. Revenge is a dish best served cold. Best to wait until we know what's going on. I'm not even seeing any notable news publications that would warrant conclusions anywhere close to what you allege.
U.S. to send 4 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico, Canada in loan deal: official
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What is Going on With the AstraZeneca/Oxford Vaccine?
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I disagree. Germany has observed 7 cases in 1.7M vaccinated people. We have started vaccinating with AZ 1.5 months ago. If we plug in the incidence of this specific disease of once per 100k person years we can expect 2.2 cases - we have 7. For some reason we have different numbers than britain who have seen 3 cases in 11 million doses given (possible 5.5 or 11 million people).
This does not at all smell to me like a nothing burger. There is something here, or at least there is sufficient evidence to assume so. The question is at this point not "are there safety concerns?" but rather "do the safety concerns outweigh the benefits?".
I am sorry to say I disagree with your statistical analysis.
Germany has seen 7 cases and you would expect 2.2?
2.2? Out of 1.7M?
Statistically, you don't expect 2.2. A Monte Carlo simulation might show you the expected range is 0 to about 10 with a log normal distribution centering on 2.2.
The UK has seen 3 out of 5.5m. A Monte Carlo simulation might show you the expected range is 0 to about 25 with a log normal distribution centering on 7.
If this were a concern, you would expect to see the problem replicated in statistically independent samples.
If you analyze the unvaccinated people, by country, by cause of death, you are going to find at least one country which has a statistically abnormal cause of death per capita.
Our minds are very good at finding patterns. Sometimes we see patterns where they don't exist.
A few other countries have seen similar numbers to germany. I can not tell you what's going on in britain. Let me refine my assumptions a bit: The events actually happened within a 4-16 day window after vaccination. Let's call that 2 weeks. With that, our expectation actually drops to something like 0.6 and our baseline probability of seeing 7 cases is stupid low.
That said, you are right that seeing 7 cases given the previous assumptions is not super unlikely. My simulation gave my 8% for >= 7.
I don’t know enough statistics to do the calculations for this, but I think part of the issue here might be what’s called a multiple comparisons problem. If you do a lot of studies, some of them are going to have outliers, so then you have to decide if the number of outliers is more than average. There is an xkcd comic.
What does “multiple comparisons” mean in this case and how do you account for it? One way you can get multiple comparisons is by looking at multiple countries, but another way is by looking at multiple causes of death. They aren’t statistically independent though, so I don’t know what to say other than maybe we should see if someone who really knows statistics has studied this?
Oh, absolutely, that's a problem. If you run 20 tests for effects, then on avg. one of them will yell "here's a thing, and it's only 5% likely to be by chance". The thing is that with the update to 2 weeks instead of 1.5 months, there's a very high probability this is not just pure chance, even if you test for a lot of causes of death or illness in a lot of countries.
Add to all this that there is plausible mechanism here: As far as I understood, we know that covid can cause thrombosis, and we know that lack-of-platelets events are often caused by autoimmune interactions.
Here's the result of my monte carlo simulation, since I'm to lazy to model this as a distribution. Not a single sample of even 5 cases in 5000 samples. You're not getting to 7 by just testing for a lot of different things, you'd need truly enormous amounts of samples.
Starting Monday the curfew in my city goes from 18h to 05h. I think I'll lose my mind.
Washington State: Inslee Says All School Districts Must Offer In-Person Instruction
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