2021-04-17 General

Vaccines Buried in this article about Moderna signing a contract with Rovi, a Spanish company, to make ingredients for their vax is something that mentions that Lonza (Moderna’s primary subcontractor) has two manufacturing lines that it expects to become operational in the next few weeks. Currently, only one line is operational. Tripling the Moderna output… Continue reading 2021-04-17 General

2021-04-16 General

Vaccines One might think you’d have to have quite a high vax rate before case counts would come down. Israel currently is basically back to normal, and their vax rate is only about 60%. Want to know more about what scientists think might be behind the AZ clotting issue? The Atlantic has a good article… Continue reading 2021-04-16 General

2021-04-16 BC

Supply Bad news, good news, and awesome news. Bad news: Moderna fell down on supply again, telling us that they will only ship half as much next week as they promised, so shorting BC by 78 kilodoses. (We are still waiting on a shipment of 106K this week, we’ll see if it comes through.) Good… Continue reading 2021-04-16 BC

2021-04-15 BC

Panic!!! There is a group of people calling themselves the BC Modelling Group which released a presentation yesterday. They are quite alarmed by the rise of the VOCs, and foresee an explosion of cases. There is also a guy Eric Feigl-Ding who has also been sounding the alarm about the levels of P.1 in BC,… Continue reading 2021-04-15 BC

2021-04-15 General

Vaccines The vaccines are good, but not perfect. In the US (which has had much greater levels of the virus), they had a 0.008% chance of getting COVID (out of 66 million fully vaccinated) 0.00056% chance of being hospitalized (7% of these infections) 0.00001% chance of dying from COVID(7 in 66 million vaccinees) (Chance of… Continue reading 2021-04-15 General

2021-04-14 BC

Vaccinations The province did a whole-of-community vaccination of Prince Rupert, and we can now see the results: that vaccinations work! Here’s a graph that Justin McElroy made: Note that the line hasn’t even bottomed out. This reminds me of a graph Dr. Henry showed in 11 March 2021 presentation which showed that it took about… Continue reading 2021-04-14 BC

2021-04-14 General

Vaccines Health Canada today said that the AZ vaccine was okay for all ages. Note that this does not mean that provinces can immediately start using AZ for all ages — the National Advisory Committee on Immunizations (NACI) needs to change its advice before the provinces can do that. A company in Seattle making an… Continue reading 2021-04-14 General

2021-04-13 BC

Measures The BC Restaurant says that Minister Dix told them that in-restaurant dining would continue to be prohibited through to May. Statistics The case count is lower today, which looks extremely encouraging, except there’s a note saying that these numbers are only provisional because of *sigh* a problem with their data system. So wait before… Continue reading 2021-04-13 BC

2021-04-13 General

Mental Health The pandemic has clearly been a mental health disaster for many people. Interestingly, though, the number of suicides has not increased according to this study. Vaccines They have now found some problems with clotting with the J&J vaccine also. The alarm was first raised on Friday (the day this blog was ah impaired… Continue reading 2021-04-13 General

2021-04-12 General

Vaccines This preprint describes some early work on a vaccine which could work against ALL coronaviruses. This preprint found B.1.1.7 wasn’t more able to reinfect people, didn’t give different or longer symptoms, that it was more transmissible, and that lockdown was able to bring Rt below 1 even in the presence of lots of B.1.1.7.… Continue reading 2021-04-12 General