The missing context in vaccine mandate coverage. Analysis: News organisations have devoted plenty of space to the unvaccinated healthcare and education workers being stood down this week.
But many of those stories are missing vital context. The front page of the Northern Advocate newspaper today. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch. Singapore to End Free Covid Treatment for Those 'Unvaccinated by Choice' Singapore will no longer cover the medical costs of Covid-19 patients who are eligible to get vaccinated against the virus but choose not to, the country’s Health Ministry said.
“We will begin charging Covid-19 patients who are unvaccinated by choice” on Dec. 8, the ministry said in a statement on Monday. Those who are not eligible for the shots will be exempt from the rule, it said, including children under 12 and people with certain medical conditions. The number of severe cases, which have been mainly among unvaccinated people, has stabilized but remains high, the ministry said. People testing negative for Covid-19 despite exposure may have ‘immune memory’ We all know that person who, despite their entire household catching Covid-19, has never tested positive for the disease.
Now scientists have found an explanation, showing that a proportion of people experience “abortive infection” in which the virus enters the body but is cleared by the immune system’s T-cells at the earliest stage meaning that PCR and antibody tests record a negative result. About 15% of healthcare workers who were tracked during the first wave of the pandemic in London, England, appeared to fit this scenario. Tasmanian healthcare workers struggling with long Covid over a year on from outbreak. By ABC investigative reporter Emily Baker Anita* survives in the gap between living and dying.
Her once full existence is now stunted by fatigue, difficulty breathing and severe joint pain. Photo: Unsplash / Daan Stevens. Momentum builds in capital but concern over Māori vaccine uptake. After a slower start Wellington's vaccination rollout has leaped ahead in recent weeks.
The Porirua Union and Community Health Clinic's vaccination team: from left, Ioana Viliamu-Amusia, Sally Tui, Uili Te'o, Maire Christeller and Ma'u Pauta. Photo: RNZ / Hamish Cardwell But clinicians want more resources to help fight the war against social media misinformation - particularly to convince rangatahi Māori.
Breakthrough deaths 0.5%, 76% of whom are ‘clinically vulnerablle’ - JHU 18/9’ Coronavirus Update (Live): 382,019 Cases and 16,565 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Outbreak - Worldometer. NOTE: Worldometer has now redistributed over the time series the 3,951 backlog deaths reported by the state of Bihar (India) on June 9, 2021 (following a government revision of the entire 14-month period), and the over 7,000 backlog deaths (“delayed reporting”) released by the state of Maharashtra (India) on June 10, 11, 12 and June 13, 2021 that had actually occurred in the months of May to early June 2021.
April 6 (GMT) 19980 new cases and 900 new deaths in the United States An estimated additional 180 - 195 deaths per day occurring at home in New York City due to COVID-19 are not being counted in the official figures. "Early on in this crisis we were able to swab people who died at home, and thus got a coronavirus reading. But those days are long gone. We simply don't have the testing capacity for the large numbers dying at home. Now only those few who had a test confirmation *before* dying are marked as victims of coronavirus on their death certificate. This almost certainly means we are undercounting the total number of victims of this pandemic," said Mark Levine, Chair of New York City Council health committee [source] [source] – barbaragrieve
Additional delayed reports are expected from Maharashtra in the coming days.
As always, Worldometer is committed to redistributing any backlog over the period in which it actually occurred rather than showing it on the day in which it is reported (which would inevitably - and often significantly - distort the actual trend). Ending lockdowns with 80% vaccinated could cause 25,000 Australian deaths, new modelling suggests. Australia’s national plan to end lockdowns once 80% of the adult population is vaccinated could result in 25,000 deaths in total and 270,000 cases of long Covid, new modelling warns.
The work by researchers at three leading Australian universities predicts more than 10 times as many deaths as the Doherty Institute modelling that underpins the national four-phase roadmap. That plan was adopted by national cabinet in July but is subject to different interpretations by state and territory leaders. The Doherty modelling looked at the number of deaths in the first 180 days of reopening at the 70% and 80% thresholds that lead to phase B and C – when lockdowns would be “less likely” and then “highly targeted”.
The latest research models total cumulative deaths over a longer time frame during phase D of the national plan – when no restrictions remain. Grafton defended those differences, explaining the group had assumed hospitalisation and deaths would continue “until everyone is infected”. A grim warning from Israel: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta. “Now is a critical time,” Israeli Minister of Health Nitzan Horowitz said as the 56-year-old got a COVID-19 booster shot on 13 August, the day his country became the first nation to offer a third dose of vaccine to people as young as age 50.
“We’re in a race against the pandemic.” His message was meant for his fellow Israelis, but it is a warning to the world. Israel has among the world’s highest levels of vaccination for COVID-19, with 78% of those 12 and older fully vaccinated, the vast majority with the Pfizer vaccine. Yet the country is now logging one of the world’s highest infection rates, with nearly 650 new cases daily per million people. 3 ways the coronavirus could evolve...
Vaccination is not a personal decision. JHU 6 January data count. What Are No-Vaxxers Thinking? So what will change their minds?
I cannot imagine that any amount of hectoring or shaming, or proclamations from the public-health or Democratic communities, will make much of a difference for this group. “I’ve lost all faith in the media and public-health officials,”said Myles Pindus, a 24-year-old in Brooklyn, who told me he is skeptical of the mRNA vaccines and is interested in the Johnson & Johnson shot. “It might sound crazy, but I’d rather go to Twitter and check out a few people I trust than take guidance from the CDC, or WHO, or Fauci,” Baca, the Colorado truck driver, told me. Other no-vaxxers offered similar appraisals of various Democrats and liberals, but they were typically less printable.
From my conversations, I see three ways to persuade no-vaxxers: make it more convenient to get a shot; make it less convenient to not get a shot; or encourage them to think more socially. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even further.
From a public podium, he accused the state government – which was led by an opposition party – of pandering to the Muslim community by spending more on Muslim graveyards (kabristans) than on Hindu cremation grounds (shamshans). With his customary braying sneer, in which every taunt and barb rises to a high note mid-sentence before it falls away in a menacing echo, he stirred up the crowd. The Geography of Pandemic Effects by Robert Muggah. After a year in which COVID-19 has suspended normal life as we once knew it, it is important to take stock of the big picture. Only by understanding which developments will prove permanent, and which fleeting, can we begin to make smart decisions for managing the aftermath of this historic crisis. OTTAWA – The COVID-19 pandemic is transforming virtually every aspect of our lives.
While causing tremendous loss of life and unspeakable pain and suffering, it is also accelerating a host of climatic, digital, and socioeconomic transformations. Researchers Are Hatching a Low-Cost Covid-19 Vaccine. A new vaccine for Covid-19 that is entering clinical trials in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam could change how the world fights the pandemic. The vaccine, called NDV-HXP-S, is the first in clinical trials to use a new molecular design that is widely expected to create more potent antibodies than the current generation of vaccines.
And the new vaccine could be far easier to make. Existing vaccines from companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson must be produced in specialized factories using hard-to-acquire ingredients. In contrast, the new vaccine can be mass-produced in chicken eggs — the same eggs that produce billions of influenza vaccines every year in factories around the world. If NDV-HXP-S proves safe and effective, flu vaccine manufacturers could potentially produce well over a billion doses of it a year. Bhutan Is the World's Unlikeliest Pandemic Success Story. On January 7, a 34-year-old man who had been admitted to a hospital in Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, with preexisting liver and kidney problems died of COVID-19. His was the country’s first death from the coronavirus. Not the first death that day, that week, or that month: the very first coronavirus death since the pandemic began.
Why camels are worrying coronavirus hunters - BBC Future. Variants v. Vaccines - Tomas Pueyo. German translation 2021 promised to save us. The vaccines were finally here. It was a matter of time. Then B117 arrived, exploded in England, collapsed its healthcare system, and spread across the world. 'Vaccine nationalism' echoes the disastrous mistakes made with HIV. Though HIV and Sars-CoV-2 are very different viruses, the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted striking parallels: governments being too slow to respond; a marked impact on minority communities and a failure to understand why; a governmental response which has veered into overpolicing and victim-blaming, rather than taking every conceivable measure to help people stay safe and healthy. I watch with growing consternation as the world repeats the mistakes of the early response to HIV.
Stories of vaccine nationalism fill the headlines, while Boris Johnson celebrates the UK having vaccinated more people than the rest of Europe combined. By the middle of January, just 25 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine had been administered across all poor countries in the world, compared with 39m in wealthier ones. This Is When the Fever Breaks. 3C epiphany - The Japanese authorities understood covid-19 better than most. The Swiss Cheese Model of Pandemic Defense. Public investment in vaccine. The Swiss Cheese Model of Pandemic Defense. 'A huge loss': tributes to victims of the UK's Covid second wave.
Africa's success - 2/11/20. Those We’ve Lost. Getting Wise to Fake News. 'Why wait for it?' How to predict a pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic in 28 charts, maps, and graphics. How to Stop the Next Pandemic. NY Times Front Page unemployment. Please Press Pause Changes from Covid. JHU 27 August. How Epidemics End.
As the historians at the University of Oslo have recently noted, in epidemic periods “the present moves faster, the past seems further removed, and the future seems completely unpredictable.” – barbaragrieve
Moral Reasoning in a Pandemic. : Lessons from Italy's lockdown. The way we live now - Covid-19 is here to stay. People will have to adapt.
Covid-19 is here for a while at least. The vulnerable will be afraid to go out and innovation will slow, creating a 90% economy that consistently fails to reach its potential. Many people will fall ill and some of them will die. You may have lost interest in the pandemic. It has not lost interest in you. ■ – barbaragrieve
The worst is to come. Based on research in 84 countries, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reckons that, for each recorded case, 12 go unrecorded and that for every two covid-19 deaths counted, a third is misattributed to other causes. Without a medical breakthrough, it says, the total number of cases will climb to 200m-600m by spring 2021. At that point, between 1.4m and 3.7m people will have died. Even then, well over 90% of the world’s population will still be vulnerable to infection—more if immunity turns out to be transient. – barbaragrieve
Six month timeline - JHU. The COVID Tracking Project. How Germany got coronavirus right.
From the plague to MERS: A brief history of pandemics. Radical right illiberal populism. New Zealand - Response to Covid-19. 'This man knows he's dying as surely as I do': a doctor's dispatches from the NHS frontline.
The true metric of success in a pandemic is simple, the overall number of deaths prevented. The point of our response to coronavirus is not to flatten curves, ramp up headlines, protect the NHS or invent mathematically nonsensical equations: it is the prevention of unnecessary dying. – barbaragrieve
“He is not a statistic,” Michael repeats. Then he pauses. And in the bleakness and tenderness of the next four words, I think I understand for the first time the true cost of a pandemic. “He’s my best friend.” ••• – barbaragrieve
Character has precisely nothing to do with it. It never does in the real world of the hospital where the good, the bad, the brave and the timid all kneel alike before cancers and microbes. – barbaragrieve
People do not die from this illness – or from any other – because they lack grit. Nor do they live by sheer pugnaciousness. – barbaragrieve
Listening to the politicians and journalists talk – loftily, from afar, an Olympian perspective – coronavirus can feel like a mathematical abstraction, an intellectual exercise played out in curves and peaks and troughs and modelling. But here in the hospital, the pandemic is a matter of flesh and blood. It unfolds one human being at a time. And when the statistics threaten to throw me off balance – the unprecedented number of deaths for peacetime – I try to keep things as small as I can. Winston used to work in the local glass factory. His wife died three years ago. He has two sons called Michael and Robert. – barbaragrieve
The Project Behind a Front Page Full of Names. Remembering the Nearly 100,000 Lives Lost to Coronavirus in America. The New York Times - rare to see a front page deliver such a gut punch #coronavirus #coronavirusUSA. The Great 5G Conspiracy. Sweden’s Relaxed Approach to COVID-19 Isn’t Working. Alone. Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic. Jacobs wellbeing costs of covid 19 uk. 200506 business RA instruction manual. Coronawashing: for big, bad businesses, it's the new greenwashing. Hospitals Are Having to Ration Essential Care. Can They Do It Fairly? May 5: An important update from Airbnb - Resource Centre.
Immunity certificates. Pandemic Recovery schematic. Epidemic Recovery framework. Respond, Resolve, Restore, Revitalize, Research/Relieve, and Reform. Aggressive testing and pop songs: how Vietnam contained the coronavirus. 10 key lessons for the future to be learned from fighting Covid-19. Vietnam has reported no coronavirus deaths – how? Has Sweden's coronavirus strategy played into the hands of nationalists? The names and faces of healthcare workers who died fighting COVID-19. The COVID-19 Crisis. Airlines and oil giants are on the brink. No government should offer them a lifeline.
In other words, let’s have what many people were calling for long before this disaster hit: a green new deal. But please let’s stop describing it as a stimulus package. We have stimulated consumption too much over the past century, which is why we face environmental disaster. Let us call it a survival package, whose purpose is to provide incomes, distribute wealth and avoid catastrophe, without stoking perpetual economic growth. Bail out the people, not the corporations. Bail out the living world, not its destroyers. Let’s not waste our second chance. – barbaragrieve
How humans have reacted to pandemics through history – a visual guide. Conditions for relaxing social distancing measures. 'We did it to ourselves': scientist says intrusion into nature led to pandemic. Regional Director - Statement – Transition to a ‘new normal’ during the COVID-19 pandemic must be guided by public health principles. Regional Director - Statement – Invest in the overlooked and unsung: build sustainable people-centred long-term care in the wake of COVID-19.
‘So much living to do’: stories of UK's coronavirus victims. Doctors, nurses, porters, volunteers: the UK health workers who have died from Covid-19. Coronavirus is the biggest disaster for developing nations in our lifetime. Coronavirus: Should We Aim for Herd Immunity Like Sweden? Most Post-Pandemic Predictions Will Be Wrong. Coronavirus: Prevent Seeding and Spreading - Tomas Pueyo - Medium.
Coronavirus: Learning How to Dance - Tomas Pueyo - Medium. Coronavirus: The Basic Dance Steps Everybody Can Follow. Coronavirus: How to Do Testing and Contact Tracing - Tomas Pueyo - Medium. Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance - Tomas Pueyo - Medium. Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now - Tomas Pueyo - Medium. Coronavirus: Out of Many, One - Tomas Pueyo - Medium. Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak.
The coronavirus was not engineered in a lab. Here's how we know. Covid-19 (Coronavirus) Update: Chronology of a Pandemic. Epidemics are like fires. COVID-19 and the neoliberal state of exception. Putin’s Long War Against American Science.