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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 9, 2021 8:55:07 GMT
Case numbers were more important when there weren't a bunch of different variants. But now we have "mild" covid viruses that spread easily and others which are much more deadly.
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Post by lagatta on Aug 10, 2021 0:03:33 GMT
The Twin Otters I've taken were in northern Canada. Thank the flight goddess that there was no Covid back then - though there were other infections.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 11, 2021 4:45:46 GMT
Highest death rates from Covid-19 per capita:
1. Peru (6159 per million) 2. Hungary (3075) 3. Bosnia & Herzegovina (2916) 4. Czechia (2858) 5. Brazil (2690) 6. North Macedonia (2645) 7. Bulgaria (2602) 8. Colombia (2469) 9. Argentina (2426) 10. Slovakia (2302) 11. Belgium (2213) 12. Paraguay (2202) 13. Slovenia (2144) 14. Italy (2122) 15. Croatia (2023)
This lists only countries with a population of at least one million.
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Post by tod2 on Aug 11, 2021 12:48:18 GMT
Case numbers were more important when there weren't a bunch of different variants. But now we have "mild" covid viruses that spread easily and others which are much more deadly We learned yesterday that my sons partner's father who contracted Covid while in hospital. has the "mild" dose of Covid. That's probably why they both came back with the negative result after a test. Now the doctor is worried about his kídney function. Not the Covid.
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Post by mich64 on Aug 11, 2021 14:51:09 GMT
Apparently how our COVID numbers are being reported in Ontario is going to change very soon. From what I understood they will no longer be reporting daily cases but instead report the number of unvaccinated cases and also the breakdown of the unvaccinated that are hospitalized. They will further breakdown that number by general hospitalization, ICU, and intubated cases.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 11, 2021 15:12:48 GMT
Pointing fingers at the unvaccinated is mean but becoming more and more necessary. They need to start saying things like "everything is fine for the fully vaccinated, but here are the appalling disease and death figures for the unvaccinated...."
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Post by tod2 on Aug 12, 2021 7:22:15 GMT
I don't think it's mean Kerouac. What's mean is the unvaccinated allowing themselves to become incubators for all the Covid variants. Putting stress on the hospitals and health workers and in one case I know of, boasting that "Ï've had worse 'flu" after luckily recovering from Covid. I cannot wait for the 1st September when everyone from 18 upwards may go and have the jab. That includes foreigners from Zimbabwe etc etc. as long as they have some kind of ID document or show their passport. This is great news for us as we do have Zim staff. Roll on 1st Sept.!
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Post by onlyMark on Aug 14, 2021 6:48:59 GMT
Saw recently a new term. As 'woke' is mainstream now I wonder if the term for the unvaccinated/anti-vaxxers, their beliefs and lifestyle, those who are 'awake' will catch on. Awake, my arse.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 14, 2021 10:09:55 GMT
The media are having a field day interviewing hospitalised antivaxxers who are confessing the error of their ways as they gasp for breath. Unfortunately, it is reminding me more and more of confessions in Chinese re-education camps. You have to know how to dose such information correctly.
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Post by mickthecactus on Aug 14, 2021 18:38:44 GMT
Unfortunately I can’t give the link but I’ve just read a great article in The Times about the WHO and Chinese influence. Maybe somebody can find it.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 14, 2021 19:07:10 GMT
I don't know what the article said, but as the new #1 country in the world, China will have the most influence in many domains as the previous #1 country had in its day.
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Post by mickthecactus on Aug 14, 2021 19:50:13 GMT
Basically the WHO is a waste of space as it’s actions have been dominated by China for some years now ever since the WHO severely criticised China for it’s action over SARS.
It seems the WHO team that went to China to investigate Covid were picked by China which was why their report was so weak.
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Post by mickthecactus on Aug 14, 2021 20:49:34 GMT
With huge respect to my American friends on here but just watching a CNN report and the crass stupidity of some Americans over masks and vaccination is breathtaking.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 14, 2021 21:37:16 GMT
You said it, Mick. It's not just the unforgiveable stupidity, it's the deliberate ignorance and hateful selfishness that is also mind-boggling.
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Post by tod2 on Aug 15, 2021 10:09:50 GMT
South Africa is having severe problems getting people to come and be vaccinated. The numbers are dropping so drastically that it looks as if they will open the 18 upwards age group. It was only supposed to start on 1st Sept. but that seems to be a waste of time as we need the vaccinated number to go up. I will feel unsafe as long as there are unvaccinated people near me everywhere - supermarket, garage, doctors rooms, etc etc. I am going for an eye test on Tuesday. I need a letter to OK my drivers license for another 5 years.
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Post by questa on Aug 15, 2021 13:27:50 GMT
Every 5 years? after 70 we have to do them every year. Just did mine and nearly bombed out not so much for vision as the seized=up muscles in my neck make it difficult to turn my head to see traffic on my right.
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Post by tod2 on Aug 15, 2021 14:06:22 GMT
Oh Good grief Questa! Every year! NOoooo! My mother updated her drivers until well over 90. Our dear Dr. simply asked if she felt confident to drive, and issued the required letter. Alas, as you might know, she passed away at 93 but could have gone on driving until she was about 97. She only drove from the supermarket and hairdresser to her home which was about 1/4 mile. Never to my home 7km away and back. That ended years ago.
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Post by mich64 on Aug 15, 2021 15:05:16 GMT
Once you have your full G licence to drive, you have to renew it every 2 years (fee) and sometimes they make you go in to the Drive Centres on the Government ministry office to update your photo that is on your driver's license. Other than that, no retesting until the age of 80 and then every 2 years thereafter. The testing consists of watching a video then doing a written rules of the road test and an eye test. Both my dad and father-in-law were due for their test but due to COVID I was allowed to renew their licenses on line and sent them updated cards as usual, no testing available.
They were allowing people to drive with expired licenses, then they decided to send out renewals only to be done on-line so people did not get behind in paying the annual fee.
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Post by questa on Aug 16, 2021 15:09:20 GMT
Sydney has a mess of statistics and is out of control, Melbourne is in lock down for its 3rd 3 week time and is in BIG TROUBLE. Two separate groups of idiots had huge parties on Friday last week. Hundreds of attendees. Guest lists confiscated and all available police sent to the venues where everyone had gathered. Police lined them up then said that they will all get the $1000 fine and the organisers $12,000. All have to do the 14 days isolation with frequent checks by army officers. In sleepy Adelaide They opened the bookings for the 16 to 40 year olds. huge crowds and phones meltdown....more tomorrow.
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Post by tod2 on Aug 16, 2021 15:32:18 GMT
Oh holy Johosaphat! I thought we were in meltdown with a slow vaccination and some of the vaccines exceeding their "sell-by-date". What is it with these people??? So glad the new lower age group is able to go for the jab!
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 16, 2021 16:25:55 GMT
Hardly news, but we're back in the red zone in Oaxaca. If anyone is interested, here is a short online self-assessment for covid. It says it's for the US, but I used it with my Mexican IP with no problem: landing.google.com/screener/covid19
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Post by lagatta on Aug 16, 2021 18:23:48 GMT
I'm not surprised that there are far-right, antisemitic/racist forces among the vaccine pass protesters (this time in France), but they seem very organised: www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/16/hate-speech-inquiries-launched-in-france-over-antisemitic-protest-bannersThere is unfairness in the pass rollout here, as the standard seems to be a gizmo on cellphones. I don't have a smartphone; I think that is far more common here than in Europe. I have certificates for both my vaccinations and an attestation that I tested positive in hospital, but all of that is on paper.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 16, 2021 18:35:40 GMT
Plenty of (mostly) older people in France prefer to use the paper version of their pass instead of their telephone because it's faster for them not to fumble with an electronic device. It's the same QR code so no big deal. At the movies I see that many of them have slipped their paper pass into a protective plastic sleeve. I carry a paper version in my wallet in case I forget my phone or discover that the battery is dead.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 17, 2021 0:32:59 GMT
I'm glad I got Moderna as my second shot -- apparently it is much better than Pfizer against the Delta variant.
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Post by bjd on Aug 17, 2021 11:39:17 GMT
I just went to the library -- it turns out I need a health pass to get in! There were 2 people in there. Meanwhile, I can go to the supermarket without one. Of course, I had neither my phone nor a printout with me.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 17, 2021 15:38:35 GMT
Now you know.
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Post by bjd on Aug 17, 2021 15:46:20 GMT
Libraries are not listed as places where you need one on the government website! Not that I looked at it before I left but I did after I got home. The librarian apologized and told me they had only learned about it yesterday when they reopened after the 2-week summer break. And they had put shelves just inside the door where I could leave my pile of books.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 17, 2021 16:05:22 GMT
And as you know, the rules can change every day.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 17, 2021 16:57:04 GMT
Most of you have probably seen this story, but ~ Johnson & Johnson is sending shots from South Africa to other parts of the world.African countries are waiting for most of the doses they’ve ordered. (click text below if you can't open link) {Covid Vaccines Produced in Africa Are Being Exported to Europe}Johnson & Johnson is sending shots from South Africa to other parts of the world. African countries are waiting for most of the doses they’ve ordered.
By Rebecca Robbins and Benjamin Mueller Aug. 16, 2021 Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine was supposed to be one of Africa’s most important weapons against the coronavirus.
The New Jersey-based company agreed to sell enough of its inexpensive single-shot vaccine to eventually inoculate a third of the continent’s residents. And the vaccine would be produced in part by a South African manufacturer, raising hopes that those doses would quickly go to Africans.
That has not happened.
South Africa is still waiting to receive the overwhelming majority of the 31 million vaccine doses it ordered from Johnson & Johnson. It has administered only about two million Johnson & Johnson shots. That is a key reason that fewer than 7 percent of South Africans are fully vaccinated — and that the country was devastated by the Delta variant.
At the same time, Johnson & Johnson has been exporting millions of doses that were bottled and packaged in South Africa for distribution in Europe, according to executives at Johnson & Johnson and the South African manufacturer, Aspen Pharmacare, as well as South African government export records reviewed by The New York Times.
Glenda Gray, a South African scientist who helped lead Johnson & Johnson’s clinical trial there, said companies needed to prioritize sending doses to poorer countries that were involved in their production. “It’s like a country is making food for the world and sees its food being shipped off to high-resource settings while its citizens starve,” she said.
Many Western countries have kept domestically manufactured doses for themselves. That wasn’t possible in South Africa because of an unusual stipulation in the contract the government signed this year with Johnson & Johnson. The confidential contract, reviewed by The Times, required South Africa to waive its right to impose export restrictions on vaccine doses.
Popo Maja, a spokesman for the South African health ministry, said the government was not happy with the requirements in the contract but lacked the leverage to refuse them. “The government was not given any choice,” he said in a statement. “Sign contract or no vaccine.”
Johnson & Johnson had always planned for some vaccines produced by Aspen to leave Africa, but it has never disclosed how many doses it was actually exporting. The export records reviewed by The Times show that Johnson & Johnson shipped 32 million doses in recent months, although that does not capture the full number that have left South Africa.
Germany in April received shots produced by Aspen, a spokesman for Germany’s health ministry said. In June and July, Spain received more than 800,000 doses, according to the country’s health ministry.
Critics say the shortfall in South Africa partly reflects a power imbalance between a giant company and a desperate country.
“The disproportionate amount of power that Johnson & Johnson has exercised is really concerning,” said Fatima Hassan, a human rights lawyer in South Africa. “It is harming our efforts to get speedy supplies into the system.”
The picture is bleak across the continent. While several African countries received small initial shipments of Johnson & Johnson doses last week, they are a sliver of the 400 million doses that the African Union has ordered or has the option to order for its member countries. About 2 percent of Africans are fully vaccinated.
Johnson & Johnson’s chief scientific officer, Dr. Paul Stoffels, said the Aspen plant is part of a production network in which vaccines are routinely shipped between countries for manufacturing, quality inspection and delivery.
“We have done our best to prioritize South Africa as much as we can,” he said. He noted that Johnson & Johnson early this year provided about 500,000 doses to vaccinate South African health care workers. He said the Aspen plant would exclusively supply doses to African countries later this year.
Aspen is responsible for the final stage of vaccine production, a process known as “fill and finish.” The company receives mass quantities of the vaccine, bottles it into vials and then packages it for final inspections and delivery.
Some of Aspen’s doses were never used because of worries they might have been contaminated at the Baltimore plant that handled their first stage of production, according to Johnson & Johnson and Aspen executives. The problems at that plant, run by Emergent BioSolutions, wreaked havoc on Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine supplies, leading the company to fall behind on orders all over the world.
Stephen Saad, Aspen’s chief executive, blamed the lack of South African doses on the Emergent plant. He said Aspen could not control where its doses were sent, but “I would have liked to see it all go to Africa.”
Aspen is now finishing doses that were made at a plant in the Netherlands, with 40 percent of those doses going to Europe and the remaining 60 percent to Africa through the end of September. Previously, the plan was for only 10 percent to go to the continent, but the European Union agreed to change the distribution in light of South Africa’s crisis, said Daniel Ferrie, a spokesman for the European Commission.
South Africa’s vaccination campaign has accelerated in recent weeks, thanks largely to Pfizer doses ordered by the government and shots donated by the United States. But about four million of the country’s 60 million residents are fully vaccinated.
That left the population vulnerable when a third wave of cases crested over the country. At times in recent months, scores of Covid-19 patients at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg were waiting in the emergency department for a bed, and the hospital’s infrastructure struggled to sustain the huge volumes of oxygen being piped into patients’ lungs, said Dr. Jeremy Nel, an infectious-disease doctor there.
“The third wave, in terms of the amount of death we saw, was the most heartbreaking, because it was the most avoidable,” Dr. Nel said. “You see people by the dozens dying, all of whom are eligible for a vaccine and would’ve been among the first to get it.”
Critics say South Africa’s government shares blame for the low rate of vaccinations. Early on, the government relied on a United Nations-backed clearinghouse for vaccines that has fallen behind on deliveries. South Africa was slow to enter negotiations with manufacturers for its own doses. In January, a group of vaccine experts warned that the government’s “lack of foresight” could cause “the greatest man-made failure to protect the population since the AIDS pandemic.”
Johnson & Johnson’s deal with Aspen was announced in November. Aspen’s facility in Gqeberha, on South Africa’s southern coast, was the first site in Africa to produce Covid vaccines. (Other companies subsequently announced plans to produce vaccines on the continent.)
South African officials hailed Aspen’s involvement as indispensable.
Aspen “belongs to us as South Africans, and it is making lifesaving vaccines,” South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said during a visit to Aspen’s plant in March. He said he had pushed Johnson & Johnson to prioritize the doses made there for Africans.
“I want them now,” Mr. Ramaphosa added. “I’ve come to fetch our vaccines.”
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine became even more important in February when the results of a clinical trial suggested that the vaccine from AstraZeneca offered little protection from mild or moderate infections caused by the Beta variant that was circulating in South Africa.
Weeks later, Johnson & Johnson and the government signed a contract for 11 million doses. South Africa ordered another 20 million doses in April. That would be enough to vaccinate about half the country.
South Africa agreed to pay $10 per dose for the 11 million shots, according to the contract. That was the same price that the United Statespaid and slightly more than the $8.50 that the European Commission agreed to pay. The South African contract prohibited the government from banning exports of the vaccine, citing the need for doses to “move freely across national borders.”
Mr. Maja, the South African health ministry spokesman, said that absent that stipulation, the government might have stopped vaccine doses from leaving the country.
But the requirement put South Africa at a disadvantage compared with other places that were producing Covid vaccines.
The European Union introduced export controls this year to conserve scarce supplies. India halted exports produced by the Serum Institute, which was supposed to be a major vaccine supplier to poor countries. In the United States, officials said they didn’t ban exports, but they didn’t need to. The combination of the extensive vaccine production on American soil and the high prices the U.S. government was willing to pay meant that companies made the delivery of shots for Americans a priority.
Other benefits for Johnson & Johnson were embedded in the South African contract.
While such contracts typically protect companies from lawsuits brought by individuals, this one shielded Johnson & Johnson from suits by a wider range of parties, including the government. It also imposed an unusually high burden on potential litigants to show that any injuries caused by the vaccine were the direct result of company representatives engaging in deliberate misconduct or failing to follow manufacturing best practices.
“The upshot is that you have moved almost all of the risk of something being wrong with the vaccine to the government,” said Sam Halabi, a health law expert at Georgetown University who reviewed sections of the South African contract at the request of The Times.
Mr. Halabi said the contract’s terms appeared more favorable to the pharmaceutical company than other Covid vaccine contracts he had seen. South African officials have said Pfizer, too, sought aggressive legal protections.
The contract said Johnson & Johnson would aim to deliver 2.8 million doses to South Africa by the end of June, another 4.1 million doses by the end of September and another 4.1 million doses by the end of December. (The government expects the 20 million additional doses to be delivered by the end of this year, Mr. Maja said.)
The company has so far fallen far short of those goals. As of the end of June, South Africa had received only about 1.5 million of the doses from its order. The small number of doses that have been delivered to the African Union were on schedule.
The difficulties in procuring doses have revealed the limits of fill-and-finish sites, which leave countries dependent on vaccines from places like the European Union or the United States, said Dr. Salim Abdool Karim, who until March was co-chairman of South Africa’s ministerial advisory committee on Covid.
“Ultimately,” he said, “the solution to our problem has to be in making our own vaccines.”
Lynsey Chutel and Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting.
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Post by rikita on Aug 17, 2021 20:12:22 GMT
my second vaccination is three weeks ago, so for a week now, i shouldn't need tests anymore, but i can't find the paper they gave me with the qr code, so i got another test today (to accompany agnes to her recorder class) - well, from next week, there is no testing requirement for the recorder class, which seems strange to me, considering numbers are rising ...
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