Vaccines
Sigh. Yesterday I showed a graph from Israel which looked a little funny, and repeated the explanations that were given. (BTW, I had heard before that Israel’s cases looked funny because the outbreak started in areas that were highly vaxxed and social separate from the unvaxxed places.)
Today, one of the authors of the study posted this graph for people over 60 in Israel:
So now I don’t know which graph is mislabelled.
This preprint compares Pfizer and Moderna in Minnesota and Florida during pre-Delta and Delta timeframes and found that Moderna was much more effective than Pfizer against Delta. It can’t say exactly how much (they didn’t have data on exactly who had Delta and who had Alpha), but in a period where Delta was 70% of cases, Moderna was 76% effective against infection and Pfizer was only 42% effective.
Moderna is going to build an mRNA plant in Canada!
Apparently, there is a rumour idea going around that vaccinations can cause more mutations, I guess because it could be a forcing function away from variants the vaccines can kill. This preprint says that vaccines suppress viruses in the real world.
This tweet thread looked at the difference between the US and UK in hospitalizations. They looked at what would happen if absolutely everybody caught COVID, based on effectiveness rates of 1-dose and 2-dose, the distribution of vaccination by age, and the hospitalization by age and got this graph:
NB: Canada has vaccinated more people (both 1 dose and 2 doses) than either the UK or the USA at this point.
Variants
If I recall correctly, there have been some studies which say that part of what makes Delta more contagious is that it has a lower time from exposure-to-contagious (the generation interval). This study in Singapore looked at the onset-to-onset interval (the serial interval) of Delta and didn’t find that Delta had a shorter serial interval than other variants.
Mitigation Measures
Quebec is instituting vaccine passports for high-capacity, crowded places like bars and gyms.
Recommended Reading
This article talks about intranasal vaccines for COVID-19 (and other diseases) — why we want them, why they are hard, and where their development stands.