Hard National Lockdown
Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a Hard Lockdown Through the Christmas Season until January 10.
Germany will go into a “hard” national lockdown, starting next week and continuing through the Christmas period, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday, after agreeing to stricter measures with state governments to stem a wave of coronavirus cases.
As of next Wednesday, all non-essential shops, services and schools will close until January 10, and Christmas Day gatherings will be reduced from 10 people to only five from two different households.
The new measures take aim at traditional festivities: Christmas church services will be subject to prior registration with no singing allowed, alcohol is to be banned from all public spaces and an annual New Year’s Eve fireworks display will be canceled. Some states are also implementing additional measures, such as Bavaria, which will have a 9 p.m. curfew.
New US Record for Covid-19 Hospitalizations
In the US, we keep breaking records. On Sunday, the US Set a New Record for Covid-19 Hospitalizations.
- The United States reported 109,331 current Covid-19 hospitalizations on Sunday, setting a new record high since the pandemic began, according to the Covid Tracking Project (CTP).
- This is the 12th consecutive day that the US has remained above 100,000 current hospitalizations.
- The US has seen record hospitalizations for eight days in a row.
Pfizer Begins Shipping Covid-19 Vaccine
The Wall Street Journal reports Pfizer Begins Shipping Covid-19 Vaccine
Trucks filled with Covid-19 vaccine vials pulled out of Pfizer Inc.’s Kalamazoo, Mich., production plant on Sunday morning, part of one of the largest mass mobilizations since the country’s factories were repurposed to help fight World War II.
The effort to vaccinate the nation relies on chemists, factory workers, truck drivers, pilots, data scientists, bureaucrats, pharmacists and health-care workers. It requires ultracold freezers, dry ice, needles, masks and swabs converging simultaneously at thousands of locations across the country.
“The biggest concern that I have is not that we don’t know what to do. We have contingency plans in place for just about everything,” said Shawn Seamans, a senior executive in charge of the Covid vaccine distribution program at McKesson Corp. , which is dispatching syringes and other supplies for administering Pfizer’s vaccine. “You don’t know if it’s going to work until you get there.”
“Everything has to come together—the packaging, the dry ice, the vials, the material itself. It all has to come together to the same place and have enough of it and exactly the right people there ready to take it,” said Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. “Right now, there’s no conductor to the symphony,” just many parts that each need to work.
The vaccine cannot come soon enough. But it’s amazing we are already where we are.
Mish
On the plus side, ER visits for influenza-like illness have flat-lined this year. Remember when ‘twindemic’ was in the quotes and headlines? –
Let’s hope that it works and that everyone is protected so that the number of cases may be driven down. This is a great opportunity to invest to make some dividends. I would recommend Bitcoin and https://www.mintme.com/
So Germany is just as dumb politically as most of the rest of the world. The politicians with the help of their captive health officers and the MSM helped build up the public fear and hysteria over Covid. But the lockdowns, SD and masks didn’t stop the virus originally and with resurgence upon resurgence, the politicians are between a rock and a hard place.
While everyone waits breathlessly for the magic vaccine to trickle down to the general public, the politicians have no option other than to repeat that which did not work before. Expecting different results this time around? Or they just need to do SOMETHING to keep the public quiet. I vote for the latter.
Speaking of voting, I hope everyone remembers which politicians destroyed their lives with useless lockdowns the next time elections come around.
It’s always a good time for the delivery of a safe and effective vaccine and with it the hope it will bring this dangerous and highly infectious flu to a much-anticipated end.
It won’t help those already hospitalized, but if successful it will greatly reduce the number of newly hospitalized in the coming weeks and minimize the potential to overwhelm our local healthcare systems.
The good news is that the growth in hospitalizations is slowing for most states, and many of the most significantly hit states in recent months are actually seeing steady declines in hospitalizations during the last few weeks (SD, ND, WY, IA, MT, MI, KS, CO, IL, etc.). The improvement on a national perspective is more evident by eliminating CA, which has made up 40% of the jump in national hospitalizations over the last 2 weeks yet represents less than 12% of the population.
WARNING: The vaccines may be a great solution, but they are not the most effective and safe. There is only one recommendation that is 100% effective and safe, social distancing. The problem is that like most things found effective and safe for your health, i.e., good nutrition, exercise, rest, etc., it is simply not as easy to implement as taking a pill, or in this case an injection or two.
So, after social distancing (100% effective, 100% safe), the best medicine being promoted are:
· Vaccines – 85-95% effective, long-term safety unknown
· Masks – Unknown effectiveness, but generally safe if properly used. Some masks may be effective (bandanas not so much, unless used for the purposes of robbing a bank) and only if worn properly (fitted to face, covering nose and mouth), and never a substitute for social distancing (don’t stand in a poorly ventilated room with the same individual for more than 15 minutes and believe any mask is going to be effective). Given how I’ve seen masks actually used they may prove more effective in spreading than prohibiting this flu.
· Hand-washing – ? like masks done correctly (and frequently) may be effective and certainly safe, but again never a substitute for social distancing.
The best medicine not being promoted (and in many cases censored) is probably a much longer list than this:
· Improve your immune system (nutrition, exercise, sleep, avoid stress, etc.)
· 1verm3ctin – multiple studies now find it may be close to 100% effective and safe both as preventive treatment, and also after exposure, with mild symptoms, with severe symptoms and even after recovery for those with lingering symptoms.
· Vitamin D (best naturally from the sun, but this time for most of us via supplement)
· Vitamin C
· Zinc
And of course, to avoid any of this craziness in the future, another 100% effective and safe practice would be to:
· Eliminate the manufacture, study, and testing of such hazardous material in BL-4 labs.
· Eliminate wet markets
· Eliminate unhealthy farming practices
· Conduct a proper audit and reform the WHO
And of course, to avoid any of this craziness in the future, another 100% effective and safe practice would be to:
Eliminate the manufacture, study, and testing of such hazardous material in BL-4 labs.
Thank you.. That last one needs to be mentioned a lot more.
Unfortunately, virology, and the scientific establishment, have their own kind of politics…..largely the politics of grant money and funding. They have a big financial incentive to make it all sound perfectly safe…and that is far from the truth.
Good luck w/ that. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
But you should write a book! This is what people with ideas do. Very few will buy/read the book but hey, you can feel that you did something.
Beginning to think you cannot discuss the Great Reset and your past unbiased commentary has been compromised.
We are at the beginning of the after, but is quite likely that less than 5% of the population will have received vaccines by the end of the first quarter 2021.
Having a vaccine that works should change the trajectory of the disease if enough get vaccinated and there probably will be. There is the before and the after and we are at the beginning of the after. The next month will be very interesting.
So my worry now is that I will have to shut down my office for quarantine because (for example) somebody we saw yesterday gets sick today and calls us to let us know.
That would mean that my entire staff would need to test and still quarantine for a week, the way I understand the current protocol.
This could have happened at any point up until now, but the community spread numbers were low enough to make the odds very low…..now that isn’t the case, really.
We also have to scrutinize any employee who has the slightest cold symptoms……sore throat…stay home and get tested. No help for it.
So what I’m getting at is that we might be shut down without a hard lockdown….just due to possible exposure risks.
Early report on reinfection rate….
incidence rate of reinfection of 0.36 per 10k person-weeks, equals about:
—One reinfection per 30k person weeks
—One reinfection per 1000 recovered patients followed for 30 weeks.
—One reinfection per 10k recovered patients followed for 3 weeks
Interesting, where did you find this?
A long thread on vaccines and reinfection
Go to twitter and run through the series of linked tweets.
….oh, but the DAX is up again, so that should be OK….Lala land is a great place !
As per Gates: “We might need lockdowns thru 2022. ” Also quoted as saying they don’t know if the vaccines will even work and that we many need ‘continual’ vaccinations.
Do you think your body can handle continual vaccinations? I know the virus is real I officially know someone has had died from it just last week. They had a lot of underlying health issues including lung problems.
So should we purposely ruin the lives of millions of others thru all these lockdowns? I’m fairly healthy and say no. I’m sorry for those that don’t survive but I don’t see why I should be ruined ‘for sure’ when there’s a chance i’ll be fine without all this crap. I am NOT convinced there are much bigger agendas involved with all of this and way more than meets the eye.
Millions of people get flu vaccines every year.
And still 600k die of the flu in an average year (year after year after year) and no one makes a big fuss over that number. What am I missing?
The lockdown argument fails to take into consideration that when the hospitals are overflowing and the dead are stacking up in reefer trailers people go into hiding, people absolutely minimize their exposure.
Re; herd immunity
Herd immunity is not reached at 11 or 12% of the population.
Scientists studying Manaus, Brazil estimate that herd immunity is being reached at about 60% having had the virus. But all that means is, not that there is no more possibility of illness, it is just less likely to happen…
….Sabino’s team’s assumption that the herd immunity threshold was reached in Manaus “is quite plausible”, Celso Granato, SoroEpi MSP coordinator, tells SciDev.Net.
“We believe that, theoretically, herd immunity for COVID-19 would be around 60 per cent of a population resistant to the virus, and this is why this research points to herd immunity in Manaus,” says Granato, a professor of infectious diseases at the Federal University of São Paulo, who did not participate in Sabino’s study.
These findings mean that the virus will find less new victims in Manaus. But, Granato warns, “there’s still more than 30 percent of the population to infect there.”
Sabino agrees: “Transmission might have slowed down in Amazonas state, but it’s still happening.”….
Not in favor of complete lockdowns. Bars, ok. Restaurants take out only. Gyms so greatly reduced capacity. What needs to happen is better enforcement of the local mask mandates, though there is some anecdotal evidence that usage has increased since the election (I guess it is no longer making a political statement?) People also got complacent with at home socializing outside of immediate family. Was ok when outdoors but less so indoors. Hopefully the winter holidays will not be a repeat of Turkey day.
We are seeing cases and hospitalizations dropping in the states with the most cases/million. The top states are North and South Dakota, followed by Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. What is unknown is if the drop is due to “herd immunity”, or due to people taking social distancing more seriously hospitals approach capacity, or if it is due to some of both.
If it is true that herd immunity is reached as cases approach 11-12% of the population testing positive, cases will drop, and stay down. If it is due to people taking social distancing more seriously, then as hospitals empty, cases will start up again, in a fourth wave. If it is due to some of both, then there may be a fourth wave, but it will be weak. My guess is that it is the last of these. I expect cases to fall once 11% of the population has been infected, but to rise and fall with social distancing, and creep higher towards a final total of 14-20%. I think the projections for final deaths in the 500k range are looking prescient.
Remember that guy who was lambasted for saying 2.2MM deaths if we did nothing? Well we did a LOT and here we are commonly accepting 500K. Do we think we prevented 75% of the deaths? Seems reasonable. What’s the economic value of 1.5 MM lives? A bit of an abstract but interesting.
“In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality. “
This also came with his prediction of IFR at 0.25-1%, which is where it looks like it is eventually heading based on CFR at 2.22% globally without a lot of cases being caught on a test.
500k or 2.2 million. Immaterial. We have plenty of mostly non-productive bodies to spare.
“herd immunity”
if there is SUCH will not attained at 11% but over 70%!
DREAM ON!
The math on herd immunity is not nearly as straight forward as you might think. The R0 value is highly variable depending on human behavior so the concept of herd immunity which was developed for childhood diseases, does not scale well to COVID-19.
Herd immunity requires a high number of people to be immune, 70-80%, perhaps less depending on social distancing, etc. However, there are multiple ways people could develop immunity:
We know for a fact that not all cases are diagnosed, but how many of those are there? Early speculation was that for every diagnosed case there were 8-25 undiagnosed cases. If the correct number was 25, then with 12% of the population having tested positive, that would mean the people of North Dakota have, on average, had Covid 3.1 times, which is obviously not right. If the number is 8, that means that 108% of the people of North Dakota have had it, so that can’t be right, either. What if the number is 5? Then, in addition to the 12% who have tested positive, another 60% would have had undiagnosed cases, meaning that 72% of the people have now it. They could be close to herd immunity.
The fact is that we won’t know we have reached “herd immunity” until we reach it, and even then, we won’t be sure. North Dakota, for example, was rocking along with very high levels of cases, and then cases dropped dramatically. At that exact point in time, they instituted a mask mandate. Was the drop in cases due to reaching herd immunity? Was the drop due to the mask mandate? Was the drop due to people hearing on the news every day that hospitals were over capacity, and finally deciding to take social distancing seriously? There is no way for me to know.
If cases continue to fall, and stay low, maybe it is herd immunity, meaning that about 5x as many people have immunity as have tested positive. If cases start back up again, we’ll know it was non-pharmaceutical interventions that caused the drop.
In addition, if herd immunity is actually reached, even then, we won’t know how long herd immunity will last. If immunity to Covid only lasts 5 months, then rather than reaching herd immunity, we may reach a point where as many people are becoming vulnerable again as are gaining immunity.
Let’s hope that what was promised is delivered.
With rapid rollout of vaccine, deaths by 4/1 expected to be 500 K (range of estimates 400 to 700K)