Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of March 15

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~

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.

1. All data are created; data never simply exist.

Before March 2020, the country had no shortage of pandemic-preparation plans. Many stressed the importance of data-driven decision making. Yet these plans largely assumed that detailed and reliable data would simply … exist. They were less concerned with how those data would actually be made.

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2. Data are a photograph, not a window.

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The charts seem authoritative, comprehensive. Yet the work of producing these data has taught us that every metric represents a different moment in time. You aren’t really looking at the present when you look at these charts—you’re looking at four different snapshots of the past.

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3. Data are just another type of information.

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Data are just a bunch of qualitative conclusions arranged in a countable way. Data-driven thinking isn’t necessarily more accurate than other forms of reasoning, and if you do not understand how data are made, their seams and scars, they might even be more likely to mislead you.

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[...] it wasn’t that the pandemic in those states had gotten worse in February, but that the peak straddling December and January had been even more damaging than we knew at the time. Public-health officials continue to believe that the data in front of them can be interpreted without sufficient consideration of the data-production process.

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+.

People can only sign up within their own group on the registration list: first the over-65s, then people with underlying health conditions, followed by people working in essential professions (these are only police officers who do interventions), then the rest of the adult population.

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:

• Injection given at 10:30.
• Something started feeling wrong around 20:00.
• Temperature starting to rise around 22:00.
• Fever starting around 23:30 (>38C), peaked around 03:30 at 39C
• Fever went gradually back down afterwards, reaching 38C around 10:00. I took a paracetamol around this point after clearing it with the staff.
• Temperature stayed higher than normal throughout the day, with a mild fever still ongoing at 23:00 and some chills.
• First normal temperature reading at 10:30, exactly 48 hours after injection. No more symptoms since that time.

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

more than six months after AstraZeneca signed its contract with the EU, the Halix factory is not one of the three facilities approved by the European Medicines Agency to make vaccine drug substance. The Halix factory hasn’t been approved because AZ hasn’t submitted all the necessary data to the European Medicines Agency regulator, according to EU officials.

A Commission spokesman has today confirmed AZ has not requested to authorise the Netherlands plant for EU supply. As for why, "you'd have to ask the company. It's the company that has to submit the necessary information to allow the medicines agency to conduct this assessment"

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.

U.S. to send 4 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico, Canada in loan deal: official

The United States plans to send roughly 4 million doses of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine that it is not using to Mexico and Canada in loan deals with the two countries, an administration official told Reuters on Thursday.

Mexico will receive 2.5 million doses of the vaccine and Canada is to receive 1.5 million doses, the official said.

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The deal to share the vaccine, which is still being finalized, does not affect President Joe Biden's plans to have vaccine available for all adults in the United States by the end of May, the official said. It does not reduce the supply of available vaccine in the United States.

The deal is likely to be announced publicly in the coming days.

What is Going on With the AstraZeneca/Oxford Vaccine?

I have not been the biggest fan of the vaccine, because its
initial rollout was (frankly) botched. It was difficult to figure
out how efficacious it was, and that confusion persisted after
further attempts to clear things up. The last figure I’ve seen is
that the European Medicines Agency estimates the vaccine to be about
60% effective, and at the same time the EMA does not see safety
concerns with it. But there are many member states of the EU who
apparently disagree, citing reports of blood clotting problems
and/or thrombocytopenia after dosing.

I think that there are several distinct levels to this problem.
The first, obviously, is medical. The big question is, are the
reports of vascular problems greater than one would expect in the
vaccinated population as a whole? It’s not clear to me what the
answer is, and it may very well be “No, they aren’t”.
That CNBC link above quotes Michael Head at Southampton as saying
that the data so far look like the problems show up at at least the
same levels, and may even be lower in the vaccinated group.
AstraZeneca has said that they’re aware of 15 events of deep vein
thrombosis and 22 events pulmonary embolisms, but that’s in 17
million people who have had at least one shot – and they say that is
indeed “much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a
general population of this size“. It also appears to be similar to
what’s been seen with the other coronavirus vaccines, which rather
than meaning “they’re all bad” looks like they’re all showing the
same baseline signal of such events across a broad population,
without adding to it.

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But many European countries are definitely seeing another wave of
infections, and the EU case numbers as a whole are going in the
opposite direction to the US ones. There are surely a lot of reasons
for this, with new viral variants being one, slow vaccine rollouts
being another, and now complete vaccination halts set to add even
more. Put as bluntly as possible, even if the AZ/Oxford vaccine has
these side effects (which again, I don’t see any evidence for yet),
you are still very likely to kill more people by not giving it.

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Reports are that the US trial of the vaccine has reached its
events threshold, so we’ll be seeing completely new clinical
efficacy numbers for this vaccine soon.

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

Washington Governor Jay Inslee says school districts must now offer in-person options for children to attend school.

“By April 5, all students in kindergarten-through-six must have the opportunity to engage in an onsite, hybrid model of instruction. By April 19, all other K-through-12 students must be offered a hybrid model of instruction," Inslee said on Friday.

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Reykdal says 270 Washington districts have filed state-mandated plans for teaching students in-person and, as a result, are now collecting federal checks from the last round of stimulus payments. He says 35 districts, including Seattle, have not filed plans and are not receiving stimulus money.