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[Reelya]

I don't know if there's anything really substantial a Biden Presidency can do to stymie the pandemic, it seems to have already reached a critical mass that there's no hope of ever containing it again. The shit that would be tossed into his lap is a truly unfair scenario for a president to enter, and the most he could hope for is damage control.

How long before FOX is calling it the Biden Plague?

[misko27]

Mark Meadows, White House Chief of Staff, is infected.

[misko27]

mfw we're dying but it's been a week since last post and I'm still doubleposting. We've had Pfizer announce a possible vaccine and still no interest in thread.

National
Anyway have I mentioned shits fucked? Of course i have, but if you weren't entirely sure, here's the US graph:

Spoiler: Source: NY Times (click to show/hide)

181,000 cases yesterday in the US. This isn't an ideal map because it's well into the "ah everything is terrible" stage but it does help you picture the current wave, which originated in the upper midwest and has spread from there to cover the whole heartland of the country.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Several governors in those regions have started enforcing rules no matter how desperately they tried to avoid them: North Dakota broke finally and issued a mask mandate and other restrictions on occupancy (of note: North Dakota never enacted a lockdown in the spring.) North and South Dakota are the epicenter of the new wave, last I checked something like 6.5% of their populations were infected, and hospital occupancy has reached 100%. Elsewhere other states are taking even stricter measures: Oregon has enacted a partial lockdown (of note that Oregon is a coastal state and not red on the map I posted earlier), while New Mexico has gone further and enacted a two week stay-at-home order. Hospitalizations are also up: "hospitalizations for Covid-19 also set a national record on Friday for the fourth-straight day, reaching 68,516, according to the Covid Tracking Project — a figure that has more than doubled in just five weeks." Deaths, while a lagging indicator, have raised to 1,400 on some days.

Me, myself and I
Locally my area is panicking over a small but sustained general increase in transmission, as well as a few more specific areas where there is an ongoing outbreak (Staten Island, some neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn). Some restrictions on capacity and opening hours on gyms and restaurants have been added (note: we didn't ever remove all of our restrictions in the first place). We're under 3% positivity rate so our schools will stay open for now; there was a possibility they'd close on Monday. But overall there's still an expectation that there will be another lockdown eventually. A map of places getting more specific restrictions in NYC:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[MetalSlimeHunt]

This kills the NYC retail market

[Frumple]

mfw we're dying but it's been a week since last post and I'm still doubleposting. We've had Pfizer announce a possible vaccine and still no interest in thread.

I mean, yeah, we're just kinda' fucked; situation fucked, continues to be fucked doesn't make for much engagement sometimes

... anyway, for what it's worth I've seen it mentioned repeatedly the pfizer thing probably shouldn't be, like, associated with them that much. Apparently basically the only thing they've been involved with is marketing, with all the actual development being done by, uh. Some german company I've forgotten the name of. Bio something?

Remains to be seen whether the claims of 90% effectiveness hold true, in any case... though even if it does, the infrastructure issues related to distribution is probably going to cause problems.

[Starver]

My main involvement (well back from the supporting sidelines) with Pfizer was in their clinical studies. I imagine people a bit like my former colleagues (who did work for most of the companies[1] like Pfizer, Novartis, Sanofi and Merck, to name some of the still-big names in the business, even while we were a small independent concern with barely two-score employees spread across a handful of UK offices) have been doing much of the data-crunching.  On the other side of the 'sponsor' I imagine that there are many of independent or semi-independent small labs doing the same in bringing candidates to fruition, especially towards this moonshot project where probably every lab of postgrad biochemists would love to get their teeth into this problem, but it would need Pfizer/the rest to amplify any progress gained.

Also, they and their partners (and the others and their partners) should have the experience to stop problems like that which befell TeGenero, even with expedited phases of testing. So long as the FDA/MHRA aren't being over-pressurised by anyone, that's another thing I'd be relying upon. (Not so sure about non-'western' regulators like Roszdravnadzor and whatever the local Chinese equivalent is. They're doing things, I know, but it's sometimes hard to know what exactly.)

To this extent, I don't really care if it's Pfizer's own waged lab technicians or not. It's the whole thing that matters and I imagine there should at least be credit where its due even if some Rosalind Franklin figure never gets the full public acclaim.



[1] Stretching Bback before GlaxoSmithKline was still separately Glaxo-Wellcome and SmithKline-Beecham, and in fact back before then when Glaxo and Wellcome and SmithKline and Beecham were all separate and mostly competing companies who still sent work our way. All those jokes usually told about the PriceWaterhouseCoopers type of ineffibly diverse accountancy/management/advertising firms merging their various names were also quite obvious to us in our field. Well, definitely anyone who had an admin's-eye view on our whole backup and archival system logs and saw various directory names hyphenating and changing every few years as greater or lesser degrees of cooperation occured due to specific projects or overarching aquisitions.

[MrRoboto75]

Nobody will tell me how much the vaccine will cost me

[ChairmanPoo]

I think Rosalind Franklin has gotten both too little and too much acclaim. We've gone from ignoring her existence altogether to all but claiming that she single-handedly discovered the structure of DNA and W&C purposefuly stole her idea (there was more nuance to the whole thing. While Franklin's work was far more important to W&C's model than it was acknowledged, she was actually quite skeptical of the model itself). 

Re: pfizer vaccine: all we have to go on is a corporate press release but there's something significant: unlike previous press releases which only talked about surrogate markers like antibody levels, etc... in this one they're making claims about effectiveness in the field. So I'm cautiously optimistic.


Something else about the vaccine: there are serious concerns about whether ANY country in the world has the infrastructure to deliver it. Apparently it must be kept frozen at -70° to keep it stable. I dont know to what extent that's the usual overkill for clinical grade stuff, but it does make storage tricky

[Rolan7]

mfw we're dying but it's been a week since last post and I'm still doubleposting. We've had Pfizer announce a possible vaccine and still no interest in thread.

I saved up for a month's worth of groceries on election day.  I managed to stay engaged for about a week, including a street protest, then hid to recover/quarantine as is my privilege.  I'm currently re-watching *The West Wing*, that's how deeply I'm trying to just survive all this.

Not to mention dreaming about hugging my family - and even posting about it.

I'm not mad at you whatsoever, just amazed at how incredibly fucked this all is.

[Starver]

One soul. You might even get change.


@Chairman: (Not going into how much Franklin got overlooked, it was the time that it was, etc.)
...Depending upon the actual thing (and the Pfizer one is delicate RNA, if I'm bringing the right one to mind) there's cold-chains and cool-chains set up around most of the world for the needs of various vaccine distributions.  I believe this one needs the more limited "colder-chain", which doesn't reach far outside the 'developed' world (not routinely/in bulk, anyway) but does exist.

The problem will be volume(/'bandwidth'), but then the manufacturing end is already having to be ramped up, so it's not like there's suddenly 14 billion doses waiting for suitably equipped transport tomorrow morning.

[Rolan7]

Nobody will tell me how much the vaccine will cost me

I *really* should have been tested on two occasions, but I'm uninsured and have little incentive to pay for it out of pocket.  This administration has reaped what it sowed in human life.

[ChairmanPoo]

Well, the issue has been raised by several folks, including the WHO. https://www.businessinsider.com/vaccine-cold-chain-why-coronavirus-shot-needs-to-be-cold-2020-11?r=US&IR=T


Bear in mind it´s not just the undeveloped world: you need to get the vaccine to everyone. I´m guessing the "colder chain" is not present in every region in the developed world either. In my own experience: in the hospital I did my training in we had a liquid nitrogen freezer for stem cells because we did transplantation. Most haem departments I´ve worked in don´t. I don´t actually know if other departments have their own nitro freezers but I´m  leaning on "no" and am finding out as we speak...

[Starver]

It won't remain the only[1] vaccine, for long, and others in the pipeline are of the kinds that are non-colder in nature. It'll probably be a matter of "supply(, transport) and demand", and an opportunity for a not-entirely-randomised inter-product clinical trial which might even find something that works and supplies better.

I don't think the big problem will be that anyone is forever isolated away from the right infrastrtucture based on temperature requirement alone. There'll still be geographic, political, social, financial and and conflict-based barriers, of course. People currently suffering from things like the anti-Polio propoganda and activities are going to be potential stuffed even if it can be delivered simply alongside fizzy drinks.


(The detail is getting beyond where I feel like stretching my current armchair-expertise. You're far closer to the medical front line than I've been for a while in any capacity.)


[1] Not yet counting the Russian one.

[Dostoevsky]

Well, the issue has been raised by several folks, including the WHO. https://www.businessinsider.com/vaccine-cold-chain-why-coronavirus-shot-needs-to-be-cold-2020-11?r=US&IR=T


Bear in mind it´s not just the undeveloped world: you need to get the vaccine to everyone. I´m guessing the "colder chain" is not present in every region in the developed world either. In my own experience: in the hospital I did my training in we had a liquid nitrogen freezer for stem cells because we did transplantation. Most haem departments I´ve worked in don´t. I don´t actually know if other departments have their own nitro freezers but I´m  leaning on "no" and am finding out as we speak...

From what I've heard, at least, the temperature requirement is going to be an issue in many parts of the US as well.

[Iduno]

Numbers here didn't really drop much, but they're spiking back up to the point where you're turned away from the hospital for anything that won't kill you in the next day or 2. Cancer? You'll live a few more days. Organ Transplant? You'll probably live a while without it, otherwise we're sending you home to recover and hoping you don't get an infection. Chronic Pain? Walk it off.

And it's still impossible to convince anyone here that it's serious.