I suspect that we should tone down the outrage over the edge cases (end-of-day left-over doses). The Atlantic article points to the need in the U.S. for a more consistent online queue/registry for timely left-over doses while the CBC piece makes clear that Ontario is way behind the U.S..
Perhaps the concept of continuous improvement should be discussed more widely during these trying times.
Three people I know (1 in her 20s, 2 in their 30s) fit the description of hospital staff who got vaccinated despite doing non-patient facing work, entirely or mostly from home.
Schools are being pushed to open back up, and why shouldn't they, right? Teachers have been eligible to be vaccinated for a while now! But I know of plenty of teachers who still haven't been able to get an appointment.
I've been playing the "refresh 7 different websites" game to find appointments for my family and I finally managed to snag ONE yesterday! Except it's in Cumberland, which is technically Maryland but might as well be West Virginia. So now I have to decide whether it's worth spending 4 hours in a car on Monday to get one of us a shot. And presumably do that again in a few weeks for the second dose.
Why didn't Maryland simply create a MarylandVaxAuth site, where you create credentials and enter all your details like insurance and age.
Then their distribution centers can still have a scheduling system, but the first step is to log in with MarylandVaxAuth SSO and the 2nd step is to pick a time slot. If you already have a valid session cookie then you wouldn't need to type in your password. Just click yes allow Safeway Covid Vaccine Scheduling access to my vaccine related health details. Just need to give each partner an API key so they can set up sso and fetch patient details in case they want to automate things like checking for double-bookings or eligibility.
I think back in March people were expecting that we might need to vaccine our way out of this. It's been 10 months. Why do we only have shitty web applications? I think this is the most outrageous part. I don't understand how complicated it is to create and expand a distribution network for vaccines but I understand that building out an SSO system would dramatically help and it doesn't take 10 whole months to develop.
Germany is "already" discussing to losen the lockdown and open schools again. It's really stupid in terms of epidemiology, fully understandable socially, and actually necessary in terms of economy. Germany has vaccinated a measely 2 million people, only 900k got the second dose (https://esri-de.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html...)
There's a wave of suicides coming from people who have lost a lot during the lockdowns.
Maybe US will quickly get the stuff done, if anybody you guys have the potential, and now also the leadership. But here in Europe, it looks beyond pathetic. Vaccines nowhere, cases stagnant for at at least a month during current lockdowns. My 93 year old grandparents had first jab (this one maybe 30% immunity), second nowhere to be seen, so not much protection. Our friend who works in intensive care in biggest hospital in Switzerland (exactly with all the covid patients on ventilation), wants to protect herself and her family and also get pregnant soon, can't get any.
I expect, and desperately hope that I am wrong, that in 2-3 months, we will be at exactly same place as right now, just more tired and desperate.
At the same time I understand that pregnant people don't get vaccines, as the vaccine was not tested on pregnant people and it's hard to know the effects on the babies. It makes sense to skip them and get to herd immunity without them instead of harming the baby.
This is not in line with any projections.
In the US it's around summertime.
In Canada, it was 'by end of summer' - and now - it's 'anyone who wants a vaccine by end of 2021'.
And that's without the vaccine delays which have flatlined the roll-out, meaning, that timeline is now optimistic.
There is a material chance that many segments won't get vaccinated until way into the fall in Canada, supposedly a '1st nation' which is cause for revolutionary rethink of the incompetence of bureaucracy in face of an existential problem.
The opportunity cost of: 'lives lost, living conditions suppressed, massive economic damage' of the ongoing situation imply we should have been spending billions to refactor production sites and build out supply chains long before vaccine trials were complete. Even with the distinct likelihood that most vaccines wouldn't work or be deemed unsafe, it would still have made sense to at least ramp up manufacturing many months ago. Several billion dollars 'wasted' towards bad vaccines only to get a single good one, is orders of magnitude less than the 'wasted' lives and billions faced by many months delay in roll out.
It's a very simple calculation actually - spend a billion today to ramp up early, most of which might be wasted - to save 10 billion tomorrow in terms of early vaccination rollout.
In times of crisis, the press becomes a little bit propagandistic - what everyone is suppressing right now (because we plebes can't fathom to see it) is that governments around the world are spending the equivalent of an entire generation of deficit just in a few months. Frankly, the Capitol Hill Riots were a giant distraction from the severe underlying reality.
In that context, the speed and efficiency of the roll out is exceedingly consequential.
These are generational issues, this is our 'World War', the stuff that will define our era, and be studied for decades.
> This is not in line with any projections.
Sorry, I meant a month or two for someone 65 or older. Most of the story's gripes were among that group; outside of those with compromised immune systems or preexisting conditions, people seem resigned to waiting 4+ months.
Start delivering on demand and the manufacturing supply will take care of itself.
Also, governments have handed virtually all authority over lifting lockdown to their health ministers, who generally prioritize saving every possible life above all else. Most of the population will, at some point or another, be willing to accept some number of deaths in order to reopen the economy and freedom of movement, but they legitimately worry that their voices aren't being heard.
This does worry me, but in Europe and the US, the consensus seems to be that it's not possible to stop it, so settle on some sort of a "live with it" strategy. During the fall, I remember Europeans looking at the US and saying "they just needed a real lockdown." As winter came and case counts rose again in Europe, there wasn't much of an appetite for another round of hard lockdowns.
My best guess for developed countries is that things start getting back to normal by late summer one way or another because either vaccines are effective enough and bring down the case counts or they weren't, but people are willing to accept the risk and move on. Support for strict government policies only works if there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
COVID spreads pretty easily, we've taken quite a number of measures to keep it wrapped up. If people get lazy, it will get out of hand.
There's a kind of American hubris and self-belief, sometimes confused with 'courage and independence' (and sometimes not) that leads to this kind of activity.
It's very easy to think 'it's not going to affect me' when problems are on the margins, especially if there are vaccines at the ready.
In a way, it's a very dangerous time - even as rates start to climb, authorities may have a really hard time reeling people's behaviours in.
Most Canadians are under a curfew right now and vaccines are not coming. We may not reach critical mass until Sept/Oct and there will be riots if we have to do another curfew.
It's not a good situation - we need to be thinking in WW3 terms about getting those vaccines made and out.
Any rich country that doesn't get it done by Sept. should re-think their status as a developed nation.
Conveniently remove your own relatives from nursing homes and long term care facilities, then institute forced lock downs and mandate that they accept Coronavirus patients.
The people can't get out, but do your best to guarantee that the virus will get in.
It's incomplete (to the point of being irrelevant) to say that communists did Covid response better and not to mention all the other things they do worse.
Given the choice, I'd still take a 10x worse Covid-19 over living under Xi or Kim.
That's the entire point - the fact that many contemporary liberal societies can no longer use such tools is worth introspection. Many countries had quarantine act or equivalent emergency power structure designed for pandemics, but what good are they if current political climate make them infeasible. This overlooks the fact that harsh authoritarian responses have been in line with epidemic response playbooks drafted by the CDC. It was what was expected.
The myopia is thinking this is a choice between authoritarianism and liberalism, but between society where you can rely on leadership to do difficult things for the greater good versus one that cannot.
I don't see how a capitalist distribution system (if you have money you get it earlier) is in any way more fair than a system which is based on need.
Capitalism's strength is in extracting resources and increasing production and efficiency in things there is a good market for. But it's not good at all in distributing things.
In an ideal world, we would vaccinate every single person at the same time. But we can't do that so we have to prioritize based on varying strategies.
The EU and the US have both been entirely inept when dealing with SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. The rollout has to happen FAST on a planetary scale. Mutations happen as we speak and if we are in bad luck, one of those will knock-out the vaccines and get us back to square one.
We need to vaccinate countries that we usually just don't give a shit about because they may be a mutation source in the future.
Both my grandparents that still live are over 80 and I worried about them the most. They both were vaccinated in the beginning of January.
Maybe if you micro-benchmark it, but capitalism tends to have the food to distribute in the first place.
Amazon, FedEx, Wal Mart, others might disagree.
However, we can give approximately 4x the rate of people getting 100% protection from ICU/death.
First dose first gives you approximately 2x the throughput (all first doses from all vaccine candidates thus far are fully protective from death).
Approving Astrazeneca, J&J, and Novavax today would give you a group of vaccines that don't rely on cold storage, so can be run through different distribution channels.
At 4x the rate, these prioritization concerns are much less important.
The US is flatlining in its number of doses administered, which means that by prioritizing 2nd doses, we will start to vaccinate very few new people soon (choosing instead to administer 2nd doses). We can see a looming shutdown of any progress towards herd immunity, and urgent action is needed.
I take the existence of this system at-all to be emblematic of the general failure of government vaccine distribution.
I’ll offer up my reasoning if asked, but I would like you to think about why I say this and what type of accounting we should actually be practicing.
If the trials were successful in the UK, it's a complete waste of time to insist that they be duplicated in the US. Especially when thousands die every day. It's not like biology works different in the Western Hemisphere. This is just another example of bureaucrats flexing their power to aggrandize their own importance.
Frances Kelsey is just another example of bureaucrats flexing their power to aggrandize their own importance.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/04/how-vaccine-ap...
Because their production schedule is behind on their orders for the UK and the EU.
