Covid-19 Discussion (moderated)

I was reading also what Macron said today in  Charlie Hebdo but it was not about the variants. In The Guardian rather. And you will have a new vaccine  in France https://www.nouvelobs.com/vaccination-anti-covid-19/20210203.OBS39726/le-vaccin-russe-spoutnik-v-peut-il-arriver-en-france.html

Hungary has already vaccinated with Sputnik 

This webpage covers it pretty well without being too long:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cdcresponse/about-COVID-19.html

Portugal attributes a worsening of the pandemic  in part on the UK  variant https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/health/coronavirus/with-pandemic-worsening-portugal-reports-nearly-half-of-all-covid-19-deaths-in-january-1.5290547

We have data for vaccination https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

And that's what's happening in Canada regarding vaccination https://www.mccarthy.ca/fr/node/68526

Guess you'll be taking a break, too. 

This is actually why this thread is "only" 108 pages compared to some of the others that have been locked in the past...it's just the lack of people on the forums that can manage to disagree directly long term without eventually letting it get out of hand.  Direct confrontation is okay, some minor sniping is okay, responding snarkily to a direct attack is justifiable to some kind of degree at least...but just attacking someone without even a pretense of any other reason for posting, as above, or as "forearm tattoos guy" did recently (can't be bothered to dig up his username)...it's just not defensible.

Clinical trials previously suggested that B.1.1.7 wouldn’t be able to evade the vaccines. But real-world data is reassuring

Israel's rapid rollout provides the first real-world proof that COVID vaccination works as well as promised (msn.com)

Yeah, I saw this article.  Being a small country (or state or city, etc.) has its advantages.

The Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, whilst a self-governing British Dependancy rather than a nation, announced an end to lockdown measures a couple of days ago. No masks, no social distancing, but travel restrictions remain in place. 

So, I wanted to know more about Israel and typed ''....nightmare.'' What I 've found is the small country, which I have no doubts is probably relatively well organized, might not be so different from the rest of us: First, the British variant of the virus is circulating widely in Israel, accounting for around half of recent cases, and second, Staff at Jerusalem hospital says it's collapsing under wave of COVID infections | The Times of Israel

 In Latin America --quite a larger geographical entity compared to Israel--  we're talking about a ''disaster'' instead of a ''nightmare'' but I guess it's the same kind of situation under another name, on  September 1, 2020:

Latin America’s COVID-19 Disaster (foreignaffairs.com)

Latin America is now the part of the world most affected by COVID-19, both by confirmed cases and by deaths. The region is reeling from overburdened health systems, worsening economic conditions, and increasingly, popular unrest. But where news reports have painted a picture of a failed continent, we see a pattern of infection and government response that varies markedly among countries. There is nothing inherently “Latin American” about the region’s experience with COVID-19, and there has been wide variation even within countries—just as there has been in North America and Europe.

COVID-19 thrives in institutional vacuums. The countries that have fared worst in Latin America, as elsewhere, struggle with severe inequality and low state capacity.

More on the ''disaster'' with graphic, here:  COVID-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Data Review - Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net)

  Post 2139......"Ok how did where did COVID-19 come from? Is it a mutation of another virus"?       That's what the WHO is looking into now. That was news a few days ago, that they arrived in China. The're trying to figure out if it came from animals and went to humans,...or if it came from humans and went to animals.

Another day, another block.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/why-are-cases-rising-in-israel-the-most-vaccinated-country.html

Science doing its part 

 But maybe it's your blood type Genes May Leave Some People More Vulnerable to Severe Covid-19 - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Wondering what people think of :

1) The fast spreading UK variant

2) The Pfizer development upgrades claiming they will output more vaccines (how much more?)

Stay home 🏠 Stay Safe 🏠

Seems that the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine is a huge failure. South Africa stopped using it after discovering that it is ineffective against its variant. On the other hand, the Russian Sputnik V seems to be good enough, but I don't know how it works against new variants.