2021-07-02 General

Mitigation Measures

Trudeau put in writing that the border stays closed to foreign nationals entering from anywhere but the United States until 75% of the population (not the adults, not the eligible) are fully vaxxed. The “anywhere but the United States” is interesting, I think it basically bans air travel.

Foreign nationals entering from the US seem to actually have the same set of restrictions. The document is long legalese and confusing.

There are a bunch of exceptions, including for relatives of Canadian citizens and permanent residents; there’s compassionate exception for caring for people and/or going to funerals; elite athletes coming in for a single event.


This study by the US CDC looked at masks and portable HEPA filters. The filters by themselves reduced aerosols by 65%; masks by themselves dropped it to 72%. With both, the aerosols dropped by 90%.

Vaccines

The final results of the Covaxin Phase 3 trial are out. (I think we’ve seen preliminary data before.) Covaxin is an inactivated virus, like Sinopharm, Sinovac, Shafa (from Iran) and QazCoVac-P (from Kazakhstan). They report results of 78% against infection (in India, finishing in Jan 2021 — so likely lots of Alpha but no Delta), but look at this graph:

After 90 days, there is NOTHING. It’s totally flat! So maybe we should think of it as a 100% vax but just very very slow.

Going back to the older vaccines, here’s the AZ chart:

There’s some strangeness at about 100 days in both the AZ arm (red) and the placebo arm, but starting at about 40 days, the AZ line looks quite (although not perfectly) flat.

This is quite different from Pfizer, which “goes flat-ish” in about two weeks:

Back to Covaxin. It has essentially zero side effects. So in the future, after we’ve got COVID-19 quashed into only a few smoldering embers, if we need boosters, maybe we should use Covaxin.

Covaxin is also important because their parent company, Bharat, it a manufacturing powerhouse. They expect to make a billion doses in the next year.