COVID-19 Pandemic (Coronavirus)

Trojan 24

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what's yo routine breh ? I aint never had to cut in my life until now , could lose a good 5-10 , I'll be at welterweight again :wow:

I'm trying to keep it simple, dropped my calories around ~250 then added 25/30 minutes on the stairmaster after I lift. I hit the gym to lift about 5 days a week. I'm not a body building breh, so I don't really ever get down to Macros and all that
 

Mr. Jack Napier

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Good article on efficacy & what the numbers really mean

What Do Vaccine Efficacy Numbers Actually Mean?

This week, Johnson & Johnson began delivering millions of doses of its coronavirus vaccine across the United States after receiving an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. Central to getting the green light was a trial that Johnson & Johnson ran to measure the vaccine’s efficacy.

Efficacy is a crucial concept in vaccine trials, but it’s also a tricky one. If a vaccine has an efficacy of, say, 95 percent, that doesn’t mean that 5 percent of people who receive that vaccine will get Covid-19. And just because one vaccine ends up with a higher efficacy estimate than another in trials doesn’t necessarily mean it’s superior. Here’s why.

For statisticians, efficacy is a measurement of how much a vaccine lowers the risk of an outcome. For example, Johnson & Johnson observed how many people who received a vaccine nevertheless got Covid-19. Then they compared that to how many people contracted Covid-19 after receiving a placebo.

The difference in risk can be calculated as a percentage. Zero percent means that vaccinated people are at as much risk as people who got the placebo. A hundred percent means that the risk was entirely eliminated by the vaccine. In the United States trial site, Johnson & Johnson determined that the efficacy is 72 percent.

Efficacy depends on the details of a trial, such as where it took place. Johnson & Johnson ran trials at three sites: in the United States, Latin America and South Africa. The overall efficacy was lower than that in the United States alone. One reason for that appears to be that the South Africa trial took place after a new variant had swept across that country. Called B.1.351, the variant has mutations that enable it to evade some of the antibodies produced by vaccination. The variant didn’t make the vaccine useless, however. Far from it: In South Africa, Johnson & Johnson’s efficacy was 64 percent.

Efficacy can also change when scientists look at different outcomes. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine had an 85 percent efficacy rate against severe cases of Covid-19, for example. That’s important to know, because it means that the vaccine will prevent a lot of hospitalizations and deaths.

When scientists say that a vaccine has an efficacy of, say, 72 percent, that’s what’s known as a point estimate. It’s not a precise prediction for the general public, because trials can only look at a limited number of people — in the case of Johnson & Johnson’s trial, about 45,000 volunteers.

The uncertainty around a point estimate can be small or large. Scientists represent this uncertainty by calculating a range of possibilities, which they call a confidence interval. One way of thinking of a confidence interval is that we can be 95 percent confident that the efficacy falls somewhere inside it. If scientists came up with confidence intervals for 100 different samples using this method, the efficacy would fall inside the confidence intervals in 95 of them.

Confidence intervals are tight for trials in which a lot of people get sick and there’s a sharp difference between the outcomes in the vaccinated and placebo groups. If few people get sick and the differences are minor, then the confidence intervals can explode.

Last year, the F.D.A. set a goal for coronavirus vaccine trials. Each manufacturer would need to demonstrate that a vaccine had an efficacy of at least 50 percent. The confidence interval would have to reach down no lower than 30 percent. A vaccine that met that standard would offer the kind of protection found in flu vaccines — and would therefore save many lives.

So far, three vaccines — made by Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — have all been authorized in the United States after their trials demonstrated they surpassed the F.D.A.’s threshold. AstraZeneca and Novavax, which have ongoing U.S. trials, have published efficacy results from studies in other countries. Meanwhile, the makers of the Sputnik V vaccine have published results based on their trial in Russia.

For a number of reasons, it’s not possible to make a precise comparison between these vaccines. One vaccine may have a higher point estimate than another, but their confidence intervals may overlap. That effectively makes their results indistinguishable.

Making matters more complicated, the vaccines were tested on different groups of people at different stages in the pandemic. In addition, their efficacy was measured in different ways. Johnson & Johnson’s efficacy was measured 28 days after a single dose, for example, while Moderna’s was measured 14 days after a second dose.

What’s clear is that all three vaccines authorized in the United States — made by Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer and BioNTech — greatly reduce the risk of getting Covid-19.

What’s more, all the vaccines look as if they have a high efficacy against more serious outcomes like hospitalization and death. For example, no one who got Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine had to go to the hospital for a Covid-19 infection 28 days or more after getting an injection. Sixteen people who got the placebo did. That translates to 100 percent efficacy, with a confidence interval of 74.3 percent to 100 percent.

A clinical trial is just the start of the research on any vaccine. Once it goes into widespread use, researchers follow its performance. Instead of efficacy, these scientists now measure effectiveness: how much the vaccine reduces the risk of a disease out in the real world, in millions of people rather than thousands. Early studies on the effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines are confirming that they provide strong protection.

In the months to come, researchers will keep an eye on this data to see if they become less effective — either because the immunity from the vaccine wanes or because a new variant arises. In either case, new vaccines will be created, and manufacturers will provide new measures of their efficacy.
 

Malcolmxxx_23

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there is going to be a lot of disappointed people, you only need to look at israel as an example. worlds most vaccinated country and things are still not back to normal
only ones who are getting covid in Israel is those who did not get vaccinated
and they havent vaccinated everyone
 

Kurt off them percs

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Tested negative for covid but i still feel like shyt. Probably just the flu :francis: still im not going anywhere and i have a lot of sick time at work.
 

DaRealness

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The vast majority of people want bans on non-vaccinated people travelling on planes - and would be happy to share their vaccination details to be shared for a digital travel health app, an exclusive survey has revealed.

More than six in ten (61 per cent) say they are in favour of flights which only accept passengers who have been vaccinated, according to the survey of more than 2,100 people for the travel think tank Thrive.

Eight in ten (79 per cent) said they were happy for their vaccination details to be passed on by the NHS to a digital health app, for examination by airport officials in other countries.

The findings come as EU leaders indicated that the UK would be included in the EU-wide “vaccine passport” scheme which is designed to open up travel in time for this year’s summer holidays.

Watch: Should I book a holiday in 2021?


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The public also appear resigned to the continued need for measures such as mask wearing to protect against Covid even after the roll out of the vaccine.

Three-quarters of UK adults interviewed (74 per cent) felt it would be reasonable to be expected to wear a facemask on a plane, even after having had the vaccine.

Nine in ten UK adults said they intended to fly abroad at some point in the future, with over two-thirds (69 per cent) saying they would fly abroad this year if the vaccination programme is fully rolled out. This is up from 53 per cent when last surveyed in December 2020.

Sania Haq, Research Director for Thrive, said: “These findings suggest consumers are now conditioned to ongoing social distancing measures which reduce transmission and prevent the spreading of Covid-19.

“It is also clear that few are worried about any privacy issues regarding their vaccination details if it means they can seamlessly access other countries and travel for business or leisure.”

The survey also raised concerns over the level of compliance with quarantine: 80 per cent said they would actively try to get around the rules in order to avoid hotel quarantine for 10 nights.

Some 78 per cent of those intending to fly abroad this year said they would consider the option of re-routing their return journey to avoid having to spend time in an hotel and avoid the cost of up to £1,750 per person.
 

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The vast majority of people want bans on non-vaccinated people travelling on planes - and would be happy to share their vaccination details to be shared for a digital travel health app, an exclusive survey has revealed.

More than six in ten (61 per cent) say they are in favour of flights which only accept passengers who have been vaccinated, according to the survey of more than 2,100 people for the travel think tank Thrive.

Eight in ten (79 per cent) said they were happy for their vaccination details to be passed on by the NHS to a digital health app, for examination by airport officials in other countries.

The findings come as EU leaders indicated that the UK would be included in the EU-wide “vaccine passport” scheme which is designed to open up travel in time for this year’s summer holidays.

Watch: Should I book a holiday in 2021?


6aaa1680-3fbe-11eb-9dff-32f45cbaf93a

Scroll back up to restore default view.
The public also appear resigned to the continued need for measures such as mask wearing to protect against Covid even after the roll out of the vaccine.

Three-quarters of UK adults interviewed (74 per cent) felt it would be reasonable to be expected to wear a facemask on a plane, even after having had the vaccine.

Nine in ten UK adults said they intended to fly abroad at some point in the future, with over two-thirds (69 per cent) saying they would fly abroad this year if the vaccination programme is fully rolled out. This is up from 53 per cent when last surveyed in December 2020.

Sania Haq, Research Director for Thrive, said: “These findings suggest consumers are now conditioned to ongoing social distancing measures which reduce transmission and prevent the spreading of Covid-19.

“It is also clear that few are worried about any privacy issues regarding their vaccination details if it means they can seamlessly access other countries and travel for business or leisure.”

The survey also raised concerns over the level of compliance with quarantine: 80 per cent said they would actively try to get around the rules in order to avoid hotel quarantine for 10 nights.

Some 78 per cent of those intending to fly abroad this year said they would consider the option of re-routing their return journey to avoid having to spend time in an hotel and avoid the cost of up to £1,750 per person.

These articles are part of a wider push to massage public opinion to allow laws to be enacted which were unthinkable just one year ago.

quote 1: "More than six in ten (61 per cent) say they are in favour of flights which only accept passengers who have been vaccinated"

quote 2: "The findings come as EU leaders indicated that the UK would be included in the EU-wide “vaccine passport” scheme which is designed to open up travel in time for this year’s summer holidays."

is the vaccine passport planned for "flights" only? answer: no.

so why is one being used to tacitly support the other?
 

DaRealness

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These articles are part of a wider push to massage public opinion to allow laws to be enacted which were unthinkable just one year ago.

quote 1: "More than six in ten (61 per cent) say they are in favour of flights which only accept passengers who have been vaccinated"

quote 2: "The findings come as EU leaders indicated that the UK would be included in the EU-wide “vaccine passport” scheme which is designed to open up travel in time for this year’s summer holidays."

is the vaccine passport planned for "flights" only? answer: no.

so why is one being used to tacitly support the other?

:manny:
 

DaRealness

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RIO DE JANEIRO — COVID-19 has already left a trail of death and despair in Brazil, one of the worst in the world. Now, a year into the pandemic, the country is setting another wrenching record.

No other nation that experienced such a major outbreak is still grappling with record-setting death tolls and a health care system on the brink of collapse. Many other hard-hit nations are, instead, taking tentative steps toward a semblance of normalcy.

But Brazil is battling a more contagious variant that has trampled one major city and is spreading to others, even as Brazilians toss away precautionary measures that could keep them safe.

Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

On Tuesday, Brazil recorded more than 1,700 COVID-19 deaths, the highest single-day toll of the pandemic.

“The acceleration of the epidemic in various states is leading to the collapse of their public and private hospital systems, which may soon become the case in every region of Brazil,” the national association of health secretaries said in a statement. “Sadly, the anemic rollout of vaccines and the slow pace at which they’re becoming available still does not suggest that this scenario will be reversed in the short term.”

And the news just got worse for Brazil — and possibly the world.

Preliminary studies suggest that the variant that swept through the city of Manaus is not only more contagious, but it also appears able to infect some people who have already recovered from other versions of the virus. And the variant has slipped Brazil’s borders, showing up in two dozen other countries and in small numbers in the United States.


Although trials of a number of vaccines indicate they can protect against severe illness even when they do not prevent infection with the variant, most of the world has not been inoculated. That means even people who had recovered and thought they were safe for now might still be at risk and that world leaders might, once again, be lifting restrictions too soon.

“You need vaccines to get in the way of these things,” said William Hanage, a public health researcher at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, speaking of variants that might cause reinfections. “The immunity you get with your cemeteries running out of room, even that will not be enough to protect you.”

That danger of new variants has not been lost on scientists around the world. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pleaded with Americans this week not to let their guards down. “Please hear me clearly,” she said. “At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we’ve gained.”

Brazilians hoped they had seen the worst of the outbreak last year. Manaus, capital of the northern state of Amazonas, was hit so hard in April and May that scientists wondered if the city might have reached herd immunity.

But then in September, cases in the state began rising again, perplexing health officials. An attempt by Amazonas Gov. Wilson Lima to impose a new quarantine ahead of the Christmas holiday was met with fierce resistance by business owners and prominent politicians close to President Jair Bolsonaro.

By January, scientists had discovered that a new variant, which became known as P.1, had become dominant in the state. Within weeks, its danger became clear as hospitals in the city ran out of oxygen amid a crush of patients, leading scores to suffocate to death.

Dr. Antonio Souza remains haunted by the horrified faces of his colleagues and relatives of patients when it became clear his Manaus hospital’s oxygen supply had been exhausted. He thinks about the patient he sedated, to spare her an agonizing death, when the oxygen ran out at another clinic.

“Nobody should ever have to make that decision,” he said. “It’s too terrible.”

Maria Glaudimar, a nurse in Manaus, said she felt trapped in a nightmare early this year with no end in sight. At work, patients and their relatives pleaded for oxygen, and all the intensive care beds were full. At home, her son caught tuberculosis after contracting COVID-19, and her husband shed 22 pounds as he fought the virus.

“No one was prepared for this,” Glaudimar said. “It was a horror film.”

Since then, the coronavirus crisis has eased somewhat in Amazonas but worsened in most of Brazil.

Scientists have scrambled to learn more about the variant and to track its spread across the country. But limited resources for testing have kept them behind the curve as they try to determine what role it is playing.

Anderson Brito, a Brazilian virus expert at Yale University, said his lab alone sequenced almost half as many coronavirus genomes as all of Brazil had. While the United States has done genetic sequencing on roughly one in 200 confirmed cases, Brazil sequences about one in 3,000.

The variant spread quickly. By the end of January, a study by government researchers found it was present in 91% of samples sequenced in the state of Amazonas. By the end of February, health officials had reported cases of the P.1 variant in 21 of 26 Brazilian states, but without more testing it is hard to gauge its prevalence.

Throughout the pandemic, researchers have said that COVID-19 reinfections appear to be extremely rare, which has allowed people who recover to presume they have immunity, at least for a while. But that was before P.1 appeared and doctors and nurses began to notice something strange.

João Alho, a doctor in Santarém, a city in Pará, a state that borders Amazonas, said that several colleagues who recovered from COVID-19 months ago had fallen ill again and tested positive.

Juliana Cunha, a nurse in Rio de Janeiro who has been working at COVID-19 testing centers, said she assumed she was safe after catching the virus in June. But in November, after experiencing mild symptoms, she tested positive again.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Cunha, 23, said. “It must be the variants.”

But there is no way to be sure what is happening to people who are reinfected, unless both their old and new samples are kept, genetically sequenced and compared.

One way to tamp down the surge would be through vaccinations, but the rollout in Brazil, as in so many countries, has been slow.

Brazil began vaccinating priority groups, including health care professionals and the elderly, in late January. But the government has failed to secure a large enough number of doses. Wealthier countries have snapped up most of the available supply, while Bolsonaro has been skeptical both of the disease’s impact and of vaccines.

Just over 5.8 million Brazilians — roughly 2.6% of the population — had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Tuesday, according to the health ministry. Only about 1.5 million had received both doses. The country is currently using the Chinese-made CoronaVac — which laboratory tests suggest is less effective against P.1 than against other variants — and the one made by British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

Margareth Dalcolmo, a pulmonologist at Fiocruz, a prominent scientific research center, said Brazil’s failure to mount a robust vaccination campaign set the stage for the current crisis.

“We should be vaccinating more than a million people per day,” she said. “That is the truth. We aren’t, not because we don’t know how to do it, but because we don’t have enough vaccines.”

Other countries should take heed, said Ester Sabino, an infectious disease researcher at the University of São Paulo who is among the leading experts on the P.1 variant.

“You can vaccinate your whole population and control the problem only for a short period if, in another place in the world, a new variant appears,” she said. “It will get there one day.”

Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello, who called the variant a “new stage” of the pandemic, said last week that the government was ramping up its efforts and hopes to vaccinate roughly half of its population by June and the rest by the end of the year.

But many Brazilians have little faith in a government led by a president who has sabotaged lockdowns, repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus and promoted untested remedies long after scientists said they clearly did not work.

Just last week, the president spoke dismissively of masks, which are among the best defenses to curb contagion, claiming that they are harmful to children, causing headaches and difficulty concentrating.

Pazuello’s vaccine projections have also been met with skepticism. The government last week placed an order for 20 million doses of an Indian vaccine that has not completed clinical trials. That prompted a federal prosecutor to argue in a legal filing that the $286 million purchase “puts millions of lives at risk.”

Even if it proves effective, it will be too late for many.

Tony Maquiné, a 39-year-old marketing specialist in Manaus, lost a grandmother, an uncle, two aunts and a cousin in the span of a few weeks during the latest surge of cases. He said time has become a blur of frantic efforts to find hospitals with free beds for the living, while arranging funerals for the dead.

“It was a nightmare,” Maquiné said. “I’m scared of what lies ahead.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2021 The New York Times Company
 

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