Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of July 26

So an update on my post from almost a mouth ago.

FIL was in a medically induced coma until about a week ago. It took him almost 5 days to regain consciousness after they stopped the sedation. MIL requested that my SO (who has worked in hospice) come so that they could have "the hard conversation", because MIL is not capable.

So now I'm in the ICU in the Durango Colorado hospital. Outlook is not good. FIL had double pneumonia while in the coma, on top of getting COVID. Which has absolutely wrecked his body. He's so weak at this point he can't even lift his own arm off the bed. The last of his 3 kids is flying in this evening, and I expect he's not going to last much longer after that.

From a Twitter update by Bob Wachter, the chair of UCSF department of medicine:

How much virus is around? Since early in the pandemic, I’ve used a piece of data available @UCSF (not publicly) to estimate the chances that a person who feels well in SF is carrying the virus. It’s our “asymptomatic test positivity rate” [...] That fraction was as low as about 0.1% in early June [...] Today, it’s 2.14%! So now that asymptomatic person has a ~1-in-50 chance of being positive.

Google delays return to office, mandates vaccines

In an email sent to Google’s more than 130,000 employees worldwide, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is now aiming to have most of its workforce back to its offices beginning Oct. 18 instead of its previous target date of Sept. 1.

The decision also affects tens of thousands of contractors who Google intends to continue to pay while access to its campuses remains limited.

“This extension will allow us time to ramp back into work while providing flexibility for those who need it,” Pichai wrote.

And Pichai disclosed that once offices are fully reopened, everyone working there will have to be vaccinated. The requirement will be first imposed at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters and other U.S. offices, before being extended to the more than 40 other countries where Google operates.

The email is here.

‘The war has changed’: Internal CDC document urges new messaging, warns delta infections likely more severe

The delta variant of the coronavirus appears to cause more severe illness than earlier variants and spreads as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal federal health document that argues officials must “acknowledge the war has changed.”

The document is an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slide presentation, shared within the CDC and obtained by The Washington Post. It captures the struggle of the nation’s top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus.

The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.

FDA, under pressure, plans ‘sprint’ to accelerate review of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for full approval

But with Covid-19 still raging, and its spread now fueled by the Delta variant, lawmakers and prominent health experts have urged the FDA to expedite full approval of Pfizer’s vaccine, saying it would be a powerful tool in convincing the unvaccinated to get their shots and in giving businesses and other entities a stronger legal foundation to impose vaccine mandates.

The process requires FDA staff to review millions of pages of complex data, conduct plant inspections, and negotiate with Pfizer over issues including the terms of the FDA’s approved label and the company’s postmarketing responsibilities. Now, the senior agency official said, the agency will initiate a “sprint.”

I'm incredibly shocked that daily new case numbers in Britain had fallen for six straight days in a row. I thought for sure that we'd be back in lockdown shortly.

CDC urges vaccinated people in covid hot spots to resume wearing masks indoors

The agency advised that people who live in high-transmission communities wear masks in indoor public spaces, even if they’ve been vaccinated. It also recommended that vaccinated people with vulnerable household members, including young children and those who are immunocompromised, wear masks indoors in public spaces.

The agency also called for universal masking for teachers, staff members and students in schools, regardless of their vaccination status. The CDC continues to recommend that students return to in-person learning in the fall.

[...]

New data suggests that people who are vaccinated and have breakthrough infections from the delta variant may have as much viral load as a person who is unvaccinated, which suggests they may be able to spread it to others, Walensky said. Such transmission did not happen in any significant way with earlier versions of the virus.

[...]

In addition to the masking changes, the agency also now says that fully vaccinated people should get tested if they have any covid-19 symptoms or if they were recently exposed to someone who had a suspected or confirmed infection. Fully vaccinated Americans also should isolate if they test positive for the coronavirus or are experiencing symptoms, it said.

Disney and Walmart mandate that [some] employees be vaccinated as covid-19 cases spike nationwide

Those Disney employees who are working at one of the company’s sites but remain unvaccinated must get inoculated within the next 60 days to comply with the new mandate, according to a company statement. Disney added that it has reached out to unions representing its employees regarding a vaccine mandate to be included under collective bargaining agreements, Bloomberg News reported.

[…]

Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer at almost 1.6 million workers, announced that all of its corporate staff members and regional managers would need to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 4. Though the mandate does not apply to store and warehouse staffers, who make up the bulk of the company’s workforce, Walmart is offering a $150 bonus as an incentive for those unvaccinated employees to get inoculated.

The company also said it planned to implement a system to keep track of vaccinated employees.

While companies are pushing for vaccinations, they must contend with employees who are seeking exceptions for medical or religious reasons. Walmart said in a statement that while a “small percentage” of employees are unable to be vaccinated for such reasons, those workers “must follow all social distancing standards, wear a mask while working, and receive weekly Covid-19 testing provided by Walmart.” Disney said it would allow “certain limited exceptions.”

Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns

A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.

[...]

The Elgazzar study was one of the the largest and most promising showing the drug may help Covid patients, and has often been cited by proponents of the drug as evidence of its effectiveness. This is despite a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in June finding ivermectin is “not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients”.

Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that “this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there”, and it appeared to him the data was “just totally faked”.

[...]

Lawrence said what started out as a simple university assignment had led to a comprehensive investigation into an apparent scientific fraud at a time when “there is a whole ivermectin hype … dominated by a mix of right-wing figures, anti-vaxxers and outright conspiracists”.

“Although science trends towards self-correction, something is clearly broken in a system that can allow a study as full of problems as the Elgazzar paper to run unchallenged for seven months,” he said.

“Thousands of highly educated scientists, doctors, pharmacists, and at least four major medicines regulators missed a fraud so apparent that it might as well have come with a flashing neon sign. That this all happened amid an ongoing global health crisis of epic proportions is all the more terrifying.”

Covid in Sydney: Military deployed to help enforce lockdown

The lockdown - in place until at least 28 August - bars people from leaving their home except for essential exercise, shopping, caregiving and other reasons.

Despite five weeks of lockdown, infections in the nation's largest city continue to spread. Officials recorded 170 new cases on Friday.

Soldiers will join police in virus hotspots to ensure people are following the rules, which include a 10km (6.2 miles) travel limit.

[...]

Australia's rate of vaccination - 17% of the adult population - remains one of the lowest among OECD nations.

From Twitter:

You’ve probably seen reports from Israel on low vaccine effectiveness in this wave. Is it because of Delta? Waning immunity? We think the reason is mostly that we got the denominator wrong.

[...]

This “wave” started from cities with high vaccination rate and couldn’t “find” unvaccined adults at risk. The denominator we need to use until mid-July is >95% vaccination rate and not the country’s average.