Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of April 19

Got my first dose of Pfizer yesterday. No side effects besides slight soreness at the injection site. Just 5 weeks and I’ll be a free man! This whole pandemic started with a cancelled trip to Los Angeles where my friend lives (and we’re all of the world’s best food resides). So I’m planning to head down soon after I’m fully vaccinated to bookend the whole experience. California is opening up all businesses in some capacity on the 15th of June. That might be a good date to arrive on.

I am getting my second dose today!! I'm kind of nervous because I don't want to feel sick, but also I'm super duper excited about being fully inoculated in two weeks. I'm going to get a hair cut lol! My SO will only be a week or two behind me which I'm grateful for. We'll be going back to the gym and living a little bit freer than we have the past year. I'll actually get to go to craft and yarn stores again, I'm so fucking happy 😭. I'll likely update this post with how I'm feeling after my second dose lol.

Update 1: it's now night time and there are some feelings of sickness, like when you feel a little weird and you know you're getting sick. Otherwise, nothing notable.

Update 2: it's morning for me and I was so damn achey with chills all fucking night. I kept waking up from every little bit of sleep I was getting. And my hip joint and elbow joint keep hurting but now that I'm actually awake and up, it's basically passed. I feel like the day after being pretty sick, but I'm tired because my sleep was shit. That's it though!

Update 3: what an optimistic fool I was. I sat through an hour long meeting and no, I am not quite up to snuff lmao. It feels like the last dredge of the flu. Achey and sensitive feeling and cold. Im probably going to take a half day, fuck this lol.

Half of US adults have received at least one Covid-19 vaccine shot

America may be close to hitting a vaccine wall

59% of U.S. adults say they're either already vaccinated, or plan to be as soon as the shot is made available to them. At the current U.S. vaccination rate, all of those vaccine-enthusiastic adults could be inoculated by the end of April.

Covid-19 vaccine demand is slowing in parts of the US. Now an uphill battle starts to get more shots into arms

One in five rural residents still say they will definitely not get vaccinated, according to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. About 73% of those respondents leaned Republican and 41% identified as White Evangelical Christians.

I don't think America is going to get 70-85% of the population vaccinated. Hopefully enough have vaccinations and natural immunity to avoid overwhelming the hospitals

A small group of acquaintances got together at a big house. The whole time they worn masks and kept their distance. And then they shared a joint. They all got covid, one of them died.

Roll your own joints, kids.

India’s devastating second wave

In the capital, Delhi, which at about 25,000 is recording more new daily infections than any Indian city, the number of cases is doubling every five days.

The sick are overwhelming hospitals in many parts of the country. The rate of ICU patients in Nagpur at 353 per million is higher than it was anywhere in Europe during the pandemic. Mumbai, the financial capital, has 194 ICU patients per million.

To meet surging demand, authorities have set up emergency coronavirus hospitals in banquet halls, train stations and hotels. India has taken emergency measures to secure oxygen supplies, boost production of drugs such as remdesivir and fast-track vaccine approvals. It has frozen vaccine exports, too, a decision that will have profound consequences for the developing world that is depending on Indian manufacturing for its jabs.

A Financial Times analysis also points to under-reporting of deaths. Local news reports for seven districts across the states of Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar show that while at least 1,833 people are known to have died of Covid-19 in recent days, based mainly on cremations, only 228 have been officially reported.

In the Jamnagar district in Gujarat, 100 people died of Covid-19 but only one Covid death was reported.

The situation in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, a state of 200m that is among India’s poorest, highlights how health infrastructure has been pushed to breaking point. Local media reported that at King George’s Medical University, there was a queue of 50 people per hospital bed.

[...]

“None of us suffered the death and devastation that we are seeing now. It is much worse this time than last year,” said Seema Shukla, a nurse at the government-run Sanjay Gandhi Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Lucknow. “The condition is so horrible that so many people are dying on the street, in their houses, before they can see a doctor or even have a test.

“From early morning to midnight my phone keeps ringing. Desperate relatives and friends are calling for help: ‘Please help me find a ventilator, bed, a nurse, oxygen cylinder, medicine.’”

I'm getting my first dose of Pfizer on Wednesday. I'm excited, but a bit nervous - I have a really busy day on Thursday, and I wasn't able to get an appointment at any other time. I hope I'm not feeling too under the weather that day.

Ontario hospitals under strain, and a premier under siege

There were 833 adult patients with coronavirus-related critical illnesses in Ontario ICUs on Saturday, up 92 percent from the beginning of the month, according to the provincial Health Ministry. At least 600 people were on ventilators — a pandemic record.

But critical-care physicians say those numbers don’t fully capture the number of severely ill covid-19 patients. ICUs are so taxed that many patients who would normally be treated in one, including those on high-flow oxygen, are being cared for in hospital wards.

[...]

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has come under fire for failing to heed warnings that predicted such a scenario, ignoring the advice of scientific advisers and presiding over a clumsy inoculation drive that has failed to get doses to those most at risk of infection. Opposition lawmakers have called on the Progressive Conservative premier to resign.

[...]

Health-care workers say emergency rooms are swelling with patients who are sicker and younger than during previous surges. Many require oxygen and deteriorate rapidly. They include a number of pregnant women.

This article describes a long list of problems causing delays to the Novavax vaccine. It’s hard to excerpt but I’ll give it a try,

As fears mount over J&J and As­traZeneca, No­vavax en­ters a shaky spot­light

In the now 16-month race to develop and deploy Covid-19 vaccines, Novavax has at times seemed like the pandemic’s most unsuspecting frontrunner and at times like an overhyped also-ran. Although they started the pandemic with only enough cash to last 6 months, they leveraged old connections and believers into $2 billion and emerged last summer with data experts said surpassed Pfizer and Moderna. They unveiled plans to quickly scale to 2 billion doses. Then they couldn’t even make enough material to run their US trial and watched four other companies beat them to the finish line.

[...]

Novavax shares some of the same attributes that led experts to talk about AstraZeneca and J&J as global vaccines. Based on more traditional technology than mRNA, the shot is easier to manufacture, can be stored at normal refrigeration temperatures and delivered to remote and under-resourced regions.

[...]

Novavax, though, isn’t quite yet ready to shine. If the past few months have given the world a crash course in vaccine manufacturing, Novavax has provided the most interesting case study. In 2019, after a setback on their RSV vaccine, the company sold off their only factory. They have since tried to pull off one of the most herculean feats in the history of industry: to go from a little-known, barely solvent company with no approved products and no manufacturing facilities to a biotech that could annually churn out 2 billion doses of the world’s most sought after product.

Amazingly, it’s largely been a success. Factories on three different continents are now churning out or preparing to churn out different components of Novavax’s vaccine, NVX-CoV2373. And the data that have come back are strong: In a 15,000-person UK study, the vaccine appeared as effective as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots: 96% effective against the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and 86% effective against the variant now common in the country.

“Everything about it that’s in the public domain looks promising,” says John Moore, an immunologist at Cornell, who was so impressed by the early results that he signed up for their Phase III trial. “The question is when is it going to get approved, and timelines seem to be getting pushed back and it’s not obvious why.”

[...]

Tech transfer, one of many once-obscure words that officials are now becoming familiar with, simply refers to the process of one company setting up its production process at another company’s facilities. For vaccines, it’s a far more important step than sharing patents or intellectual property, but it can be intensive. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel has said part of the reason his company has not enlisted more outside partners is that they don’t have enough trained personnel to do so.

Novavax had an advantage when it came to tech transfer. Their protein-based technology is similar to vaccines, such as the hepatitis b shot, which is already routinely made around the world.  The company, Trizzino said, has relied on a single team of about a dozen people who have flown around the world to build up the vaccine.

[...]

The problem is the same one that has affiliated the globe: the supply of raw materials. Although Novavax has established a manufacturing network across the globe, they’re missing key components to keep it running. That includes single-use bags that encase the insect cells when they’re inside the bioreactors. To get the Czech facility running, Trizzino says, they also need a filter that’s used throughout the production process, including for purification.

[...]

The [US] Defense Production Act doesn’t directly stop companies that produce components from exporting them, but it requires them to give the government priority on orders, meaning supply can continue once the US has enough to produce the vaccines it’s ordered but not enough but not until then.

“As long as they are fulfilling their contractual agreements with the US, a Defense Production Act priority rating doesn’t impact what they do or how they engage in other business,” a spokesperson for HHS said in an email. “It is our legal obligation to ensure that a company only uses a Defense Production Act priority rating to satisfy U.S. Government orders.”

Trizzino said those issues should be resolved by the second half of this year, at which point public health experts hope it will join a continued rollout of J&J and AstraZeneca’s vaccines.

American export controls threaten to hinder global vaccine production - The Economist -
alternate link

On April 16th, Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive of the Serum
Institute of India (SII), the world's biggest vaccine-maker, put out
a tweet begging President Joe Biden to "lift the embargo of raw
material exports out of the US...Your administration has the
details". Suresh Jadhav, SII's executive director, says "we are
absolutely concerned," and that in the next four to six weeks the
production of two vaccines will be affected: AstraZeneca’s, of which
SII makes 100m doses a month, and Novavax’s, of which it expects to
make 60m-70m doses a month. SII says it first alerted the American
government to the impending problem two months ago.

That was shortly after the Biden administration announced, on
February 5th, plans to use the Defence Production Act
(DPA)—legislation that grants the president broad
industrial-mobilisation powers—to bolster vaccine-making. This
legislation has helped American pharmaceutical companies to secure
raw materials and equipment needed to make more vaccines. But
American firms that supply products essential to vaccine production
say the DPA hinders their ability to export them. They must seek
permission before exporting goods, which requires time and
paperwork, and if America’s government decides they need the goods,
firms may be barred from exporting them at all. Some are also
concerned about pharma companies outside of America stockpiling
goods because of concerns about delays caused by American export
controls. Together, export controls and stockpiling risk gumming up
the global supply chain.

[...]

On March 24th, Micheal Martin, Ireland’s prime minister, warned
that export bans (and not just from America) would undermine global
vaccine production, and noted that the Pfizer vaccine involves 280
components from 86 suppliers in 19 countries. Richard Hatchett, head
of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a
global partnership to develop vaccines, says his organisation is
"extremely concerned about constraints on global supply chains".

Federal agencies lift pause on use of Johnson & Johnson vaccine, saying benefits outweigh risks

Man arrested in Mallorca town on suspicion of infecting 22 people with Covid-19

A man in the town of Manacor on the Spanish island of Mallorca has been arrested on suspicion of infecting 22 people with Covid-19, according to the Spanish National Police.

"Despite having symptoms and having done a PCR test, he continued his normal life without waiting for the result or quarantining," police said of the suspect in a tweet on Saturday.

Authorities added that the 40-year-old man "came to work with a 40°C fever [104°F] according to his colleagues. He was coughing loudly all over the place, lowering his facemask, while saying: 'I'm going to give you all the coronavirus.'"

The man infected eight people directly and 14 indirectly, both at his workplace and at the gym he attended, according to the police. Three of them were babies of only a year old, a police statement said.

The investigation began "at the end of January when authorities learned of the existence of a Covid-19 outbreak in a well-known establishment in Manacor," the statement said.

Over-the-counter COVID tests seem to be widely stocked in the US. They are listed here at $24 for 2 at Walgreens, and similar for CVS. From Twitter they are $8 for 2 somewhere.

If this had happened months ago it could have made a real difference. I don’t know if it will now with vaccine appointments becoming more easily available.