Open or Close

 

(Personal opinion - have not cross checked this with actual data)

The last school year started after the first wave. 

Some places started with schools open with a virtual option, some started with a virtual only option. 

Places with schools that started virtual saw a lot of debates on the best time to open, teacher and kid vaccinations etc. Then the second wave hit and most decided to wait it out. Most ended the year with majority of kids in virtual classes. 

Places with schools that started open saw more kids return to in person classes throughout the school year, even through the second wave, and ended the year with most kids attending school. 

Clotty matters!

Through all the AstraZeneca vaccine clot pauses and mess, I heard the numbers being compared to lightning strikes and shark attacks to show how rare it was. Covid is known to cause blood clots. Never saw numbers being compared to covid clot count. Was searching for data and it is hard to come by. While vaccine side effects are rigorously monitored, actual disease stats do not seem to be. The only study I could find was this from UC San Diego (https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2020-11-23-study-covid-19-infection-combined-with-blood-clots-worsen-patient-outcomes.aspx) which was on 8000 patients. This is miniscule compared to the millions of points of data we have on the vaccine. 

Anyway, listing all the data points I could find to compare numbers here. Please do message back with criticism / comments / more data. 

From UC San Diego Study: 

Blood clot in Covid patients: 1 in 5

Blood clot in severe Covid cases: 1 in 3

From UK Astra Zeneca Numbers (https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/medicine/covid-19-vaccination-and-blood-clots-by-the-numbers/): 

Blood clots reported- 79 in 20 million: 1 in 253,000

Deaths reported - 19 in 20 million: 1 in 1,052,631

How do we compare those numbers now? 

From CDC website: Deaths from blood clots annually in the USA: 60,000 to 100,000

Taking 80,000, this is approximately 1 in 4,375 people die every year due to blood clots (irrespective of COVID or vaccines)

Now if you take the covid death rate of 1 in 100 (before vaccinations started)

and use that with 1 in 3 severe cases have clots from UCSD study, 

Chance of death from Clot in Covid of around 1 in 300. 

So final numbers from above: 

Chance of dying from blood clots for a normal human: 1 in 4,375

Chance of dying from blood clots due to covid: 1 in 300

Chance of dying from blood clots after getting AZ Vaccine: 1 in 1,052,631

Vaccine News

 Vaccine news: it started with the trials and things that went wrong...and once vaccinations started, it switched to who is refusing to get vaccinated, who got an adverse reaction...new strains...etc.

More than 68 million vaccine doses have been administered in the United States so far and the count of vaccinated people who got hospitalized for / who died of COVID-19 is ZERO!

It has been 100% effective at preventing serious illness and death.

Am sure whenever the first vaccinated patient is hospitalized, the news will be there, having a field day with it...till then they will try their best to stay away from that one stat that really matters

The 2nd Wave

The initial outbreak in Wuhan was so tightly clamped down that we never got to know how it was managed. But back in June, there were big headlines everywhere about a  a "2nd wave in China".

What happened with that?
Nothing!

This time the information flow was not restricted and we can look back and see what was done. Beijing is a city of 20 million people.

After the initial Wuhan outbreak time lock-downs, cases in Beijing went down to zero. Everything opened back up. They had a 55 day streak with 0 new cases. Then 35 new cases were found on the first day of this outbreak.
 - it was very easy to identify the source - a wholesale sea food market.
 - neighborhoods using the market were put in lock-down.
 - everyone was tested quickly using batch testing (more on batch testing below).
 - based on test results, further targeted lock-downs were imposed while everything else was back open to normal business
 - total cases in this outbreak - 335!

This is one place where fundamental democracy vs. authoritarian styles may come into play. Both USA and India are doing a pretty bad job with virus management. India at least has the ability to perform China style lock-downs, but that definitely will not work in the USA.
 - Both USA and India opened everything back up just as cases were going up in most places and never got under control.
 - We cannot do batch testing in both places because again we never got to the fully controlled state  and positive rates are very high.

Batch testing example: 

 - you take all the samples from an apartment block and do a single test. If negative, move on.

 - if positive, test floor by floor samples in a single test...etc.

Talking Sense....

What these doctors say are based on their individual experience and probably 100% true. We (both federal and many states) have huge stockpiles of HCQ created at the beginning of the pandemic and there is no restriction on any doctor who believes in it to prescribe it. Things have moved on from initial HCQ days and they have much better outcomes observed with other drugs like Remdesivir and simpler treatment protocols like oxygen for lung issues which have already shown improved survivability in current hospitalized patients. While officially there are no treatment protocols yet (none scientifically proven), CDC points to most current research on this for interim management and it is always updated with new findings. You can go see the actual results from early HCQ trials in NYC and every drug they tried there on the NIH page.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/therapeutic-options.html
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/whats-new/

If we step back and look at it there are two very different issues here that I feel we should not mix. The vaccine and The Cure.

1. the vaccine - lots of folk are working on it, it will come some time in the future, hopefully this year, maybe next, worst case 2 years down. I find it best not to worry about it for now. It is a preventative measure. Daily news on vaccine trials and hope do not really help. This will be a big money maker for whoever wins that race.

2. The cure - this has two parts to it. Am summarizing as a very simple average math here - not exact percentages.
part a - about 90/100 folks get better with no intervention.
part b - about 10/100 get hospitalized. Out of the 10, about 9 survive and 1 dies.

For the 10 people hospitalized, we are seeing much better outcomes with current treatment protocols as opposed to initial days (March) where at one point almost every single patient hooked up to a ventilator in both UK and NYC were dying. These protocols will get revised whenever someone tries something new, and enough numbers are behind it to support a recommendation.

Given that 99 out of 100 make a recovery, this is where I believe claims come in. For a doctor seeing patients at clinic, they could be prescribing anything they believe in, and they saw 100 or 500 and there is a good chance all of them recovered. This does not become sceintific basis that the treatment was the cause of the cure. But overall, NIH and others around the world are monitoring the numbers and if there is a statistical significance in a treatment, it will get updated.