The deadly reality of America’s bitter battle against coronavirus was obvious to families that gathered across the country for Thanksgiving dinner: There were empty seats around the table. In Deer Park, New York, Vivian Zayas replaced a seat from the table at her home with her late mother’s walker. She scrolled through photos of last Thanksgiving, when her mother, Ana Martinez, who died in April of COVID-19, stood at the stove making a pot of rice and beans. For Jessica Franz, a nurse who works the graveyard shift at Olathe Medical Center in a Kansas suburb, a typical year would have her mother-in-law laying out a feast for her children. That didn’t happen this year: Elaine Franz died of the coronavirus on Nov. 10, a day before her 78th birthday. The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations continues to rise, hitting a record for the 17th straight day Thursday with more than 90,400 admissions, according to the COVID Tracking Project. Tuesday and Wednesday saw record deaths of over 2,100 each day, according to John Hopkins University data. Every minute, 114 Americans are testing positive for COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Every hour, 65 Americans are dying. The turnaround time for test results is lagging, too. Amid a record demand ahead of the Thanksgiving weekend, Quest Diagnostics said this week that it’s taking up to three days to complete a test after receiving a sample. LabCorp, another large private lab company, reported tests now taking up to two days. The U.S. has reported more than 12.8 million cases and over 263,400 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. This week week, five states set death records and 23 states had higher case counts than last week. The global totals: more than 61 million cases and 1.4 million deaths.
LONDON (AP) — AstraZeneca and Oxford University on Wednesday acknowledged a manufacturing error that is raising questions about preliminary results of their experimental COVID-19 vaccine. A statement describing the error came days after the company and the university described the shots as “highly effective” and made no mention of why some study participants didn’t receive as much vaccine in the first of two shots as expected. In a surprise, the group of volunteers that got a lower dose seemed to be much better protected than the volunteers who got two full doses. In the low-dose group, AstraZeneca said, the vaccine appeared to be 90% effective. In the group that got two full doses, the vaccine appeared to be 62% effective. Combined, the drugmakers said the vaccine appeared to be 70% effective. But the way in which the results were arrived at and reported by the companies has led to pointed questions from experts. The partial results announced Monday are from large ongoing studies in the U.K. and Brazil designed to determine the optimal dose of vaccine, as well as examine safety and effectiveness. Multiple combinations and doses were tried in the volunteers. They were compared to others who were given a meningitis vaccine or a saline shot.
DID RESEARCHERS MEAN TO GIVE A HALF DOSE?
Before they begin their research, scientists spell out all the steps they are taking, and how they will analyze the results. Any deviation from that protocol can put the results in question.
In a statement Wednesday, Oxford University said some of the vials used in the trial didn’t have the right concentration of vaccine so some volunteers got a half dose.
The university said that it discussed the problem with regulators, and agreed to complete the late stage trial with two groups. The manufacturing problem has been corrected, according to the statement. Experts say the relatively small number of people in the low dose group makes it difficult to know if the effectiveness seen in the group is real or a statistical quirk. Some 2,741 people received a half dose of the vaccine followed by a full dose, AstraZeneca said. A total of 8,895 people received two full doses. Another factor: none of the people in the low-dose group were over 55 years old. Younger people tend to mount a stronger immune response than older people, so it could be that the youth of the participants in the low-dose group is why it looked more effective, not the size of the dose. Another point of confusion comes from a decision to pool results from two groups of participants who received different dosing levels to reach an average 70% effectiveness, said David Salisbury, and associate fellow of the global health program at the Chatham House think tank. “You’ve taken two studies for which different doses were used and come up with a composite that doesn’t represent either of the doses,″ he said of the figure. “I think many people are having trouble with that.″
WHY WOULD A SMALLER FIRST DOSE BE MORE EFFECTIVE?
Oxford researchers say they aren’t certain and they are working to uncover the reason. Sarah Gilbert, one of the Oxford scientists leading the research, said the answer is probably related to providing exactly the right amount of vaccine to trigger the best immune response. “It’s the Goldilocks amount that you want, I think, not too little and not too much. Too much could give you a poor quality response as well,” she said. “So you want just the right amount and it’s a bit hit and miss when you’re trying to go quickly to get that perfect first time.” Details of the trial results will be published in medical journals and provided to U.K. regulators so they can decide whether to authorize distribution of the vaccine. Those reports will include a detailed breakdown that includes demographic and other information about who got sick in each group, and give a more complete picture of how effective the vaccine is. Moncef Slaoui, who leads the U.S. coronavirus vaccine program Operation Warp Speed, said Tuesday in a call with reporters that U.S. officials are trying to determine what immune response the vaccine produced, and may decide to modify the As results. AstratraZeneca study in the U.S. to include a half dose. “But we want it to be based on data and science,” he said.
As millions of Californians are traveling and gathering for Thanksgiving, the state is experiencing an unprecedented surge in infections and hospitalizations. The state has seen its three highest tallies of new cases ever in the past five days. On Tuesday, the number of new infections was 15,329. That’s down slightly from what was the all time high of 15,442 on Saturday, but Wednesday’s number dwarfed them both at 18,350. That’s a 17% jump in cases in 24 hours and a rise so steep that the state’s line graph for daily cases is nearly vertical.
“Statewide, I don’t think we’ve ever seen hospital admissions increase like we did just over the past 24 hours,” said California Director of Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly on Tuesday. “I hope but don’t expect that it’s the highest we’ll ever have.”
Los Angeles Places New Limits On After-Hours Filming: It’s “Taillights At Ten” As FilmLA Rescinds Existing Overnight Permits
Ghaly was right. Just 24 hours later, the number of hospitalizations jumped another 5%, with 408 new patients recorded. As Deadline reported Tuesday, the daily number of hospitalizations due to the virus in California had increased 81% in the 14 days prior, to 6,641. Wednesday’s number brought the number of Covid-19 patients hospitalized in the state to 7,049, which is approaching the all-time high of 8,820 hospitalizations seen on July 21.
California COVID-19, By The Numbers:
🔹 Confirmed cases to date: 1,144,049
🔹 Note: Numbers may not represent true day-over-day change as reporting of test results can be delayed
Ghaly reminded that today’s hospitalizations are the result of the number of infections seen two weeks prior. So Tuesday’s patients are based on a case number of 7,000 that we saw on November 10. Tuesday’s daily new case count was 15,329, more than double that from two weeks ago. “We’re concerned,” said Ghaly about what lies ahead. According to Ghaly and others, Covid-19-related hospitalizations down the road have worked out to be 12% of the daily infections number. That means the number of new hospitalizations resulting from Tuesday’s new case count will be 1,839. The number of new hospitalizations resulting from Saturday’s new cases will be 1,853 in two weeks. According to Gov. Gavin Newsom, 44,369 of the state’s 73,867 hospital beds were occupied on Monday. That seems like a good cushion, but even just a week of new admissions in the range of 1,800 is another 12,600 beds occupied. Two weeks at that rate is another 25,200 beds taken up. Adding that to the Monday’s total would have about 70,000 of the state’s 73,867 beds full. And those are just Covid-19 cases. That number does not account for the state’s usual daily demand due to other maladies. Test positivity rates present more evidence of the state’s crisis. In the past week, California is delivering far more tests per day than it ever has, yet the positivity rate continues to grow. That means the actual number of infections in the population is growing. The 14-day test positivity rate is now 5.9%. That’s up 2% over the past two weeks. California has 40 million residents. A 2% jump in infections in a population that size could represent up to 800,000 additional cases. Despite pleas from state and local officials urging residents not to travel for Thanksgiving due to the coronavirus, millions of Southern Californians are still expected to do just that, with this afternoon anticipated to be the busiest time on Southland freeways. The Automobile Club of Southern California estimated that 3.86 million Southern California residents will be traveling for the holiday weekend, a 13% drop from last year. Health authorities have been recommending against travel this Thanksgiving due to surging COVID-19 cases. The state has issued a travel advisory, urging people who do travel to quarantine for 14 days upon their return. Travelers coming through Los Angeles International and Van Nuys airports and Union Station beginning Wednesday will be required to sign a form acknowledging California’s recommended 14-day self quarantine in response to rising coronavirus rates. During a Monday briefing, Mayor Eric Garcetti urged people to not travel over the Thanksgiving holiday, not even to go across town because of how widespread Covid-19 cases have been recently.
We’re asking everyone to cancel non-essential travel. If you must travel, travelers arriving at LAX or Van Nuys Airport from another state or country will be required, starting tomorrow, to fill out an online form to acknowledge California’s recommended 14-day self-quarantine.
There were other dosing issues, too, that haven’t been explained even though dosing is the centerpiece of the press release. There are many different regimens in these trials—the UK study has more than two dozen arms, meaning the volunteers were divided into that many groups according to age and how much of the vaccine would be administered and when. The doses are measured by the number of altered viral particles they contain, and the developers decided that the standard dose would be 5 x 1010 viral particles. But for many of those arms in the UK trial—as well as everyone who got the vaccine in the Brazilian trial—publicly available trial information shows that the standard dose could be between 3.5 and 6.5 × 1010 viral particles. The lower end of that range isn’t far off from a half-dose. How did Oxford-AstraZeneca end up with this patched-together analysis instead of data from a single, large trial? After all, this vaccine went into Phase 3 testing before either BNT-PFizer’s or Moderna’s did. But in the UK, where that testing started, the Covid-19 outbreak happened to be receding. That meant results would be coming in very slowly. A month later, a second Phase 3 trial for the vaccine started in Brazil. That one was for healthcare workers, for whom the risk of being exposed to Covid was far higher than it was for the people in the UK trial. But the two trials had other substantive differences. In the UK, for example, the volunteers who did not get the experimental Covid vaccine were injected with meningococcal vaccine; in Brazil, those in the comparison group were given a saline injection as a placebo. Meanwhile, BNT-Pfizer and Moderna began Phase 3 trials for their coronavirus vaccines on the same day in July: Both planned to include 30,000 volunteers at the time, and both trial plans were approved by the FDA. Oxford-AstraZeneca then announced they, too, would run a 30,000-person trial in the US. But that research on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine quickly fell behind the others’. The US trial was approved by the FDA, but it didn’t start recruiting people until the end of August; and just a week later, it was put on hold so the FDA could investigate a serious adverse event in the UK trial. It wasn’t clear what caused the volunteer to get sick, but the FDA did not give the all-clear for Oxford-AstraZeneca’s US trial to resume until Oct. 23. By then the protocol for the trial had been publicly released. It says the plan is to inject the vaccine in two standard doses, a month apart; and two people will be vaccinated for every one who gets a placebo saline injection. So here we are at the end of November. BNT-Pfizer and Moderna have offered up a masterclass in how to do major vaccine trials quickly in a pandemic, while Oxford-AstraZeneca has, for the moment, only an assortment of smaller ones ready to look at. But wait, more red flags! Last week, Oxford-AstraZeneca published some results from earlier in the development of the UK trial. That paper included a trial protocol for the UK study, attached as an appendix.
Deep in that document, and apparently overlooked by reporters and commentators, was an eyebrow-raising suggestion: Under a section marked “Interim and primary analyses of the primary outcome,” the trialists outline a plan to combine and analyze data from four clinical trials (only half of which are Phase 3), carried out in different ways on three different continents.
The plan, they wrote, was to pull out results only for the people across these four trials who had gotten “two standard-dose vaccines,” and then pool those together for what’s called a meta-analysis.
Nick Bit: One of member who was involved in clinical studies told me his boss said the following:
“If you torture the data enough it will confess to anything”
Weekly jobless claims ticked up for the second week in a row to 778,000 (on a seasonally adjusted basis), significantly more than the 733,000 claims experts were expecting—the data is a discouraging sign that the record-breaking surge in Covid-19 cases is beginning to impact the labor market.
Claims have been falling steadily—with the exception of a few weekly jumps—since March, but the pace of the recovery has slowed significantly over the last few months as coronavirus relief provisions from the spring began expiring.
Lawmakers in Washington have so far been unable to agree on another tranche of federal aid, despite a consensus among policymakers and experts that more stimulus is necessary to prop up the economy during the winter months before a coronavirus vaccine becomes widely available. Another 311,675 people filed claims through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program last week, which covers people not eligible for traditional state benefits like freelancers and gig workers.
20.5 million. That’s how many people received some form of government unemployment benefit last week. A recent report from the Century Foundation showed that when the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program and another emergency unemployment aid program expire at the end of December, 12 million people will lose benefits. Coronavirus cases continue to surge in the United States ahead of the holiday season. Two million cases were reported in a span of just two weeks, the New York Times reported, and more states and cities are imposing new restrictions to curb the spread of the virus.
Airlines have loudly insisted that it’s safe to fly during the coronavirus pandemic, and U.S. travel is surging before the Thanksgiving holiday despite a nationwide spike in virus cases.
Yet top U.S. infectious-disease experts say the findings underpinning the carriers’ safety claims aren’t that conclusive.
Concerned about the “misinterpretation” of their findings, researchers on a Defense Department study that has been widely cited by the industry added a cautionary revision.
A senior expert in travel-health issues declined to participate in an airline trade group’s news conference, citing what he called their “bad math.”
“The airline industry got a little ahead of itself trying to say the risk is zero,” said David Freedman, a University of Alabama at Birmingham professor emeritus who balked at appearing with an International Air Transport Association event that cited his work. U.S. airlines, hit with an unprecedented drop in demand since the virus began spreading widely in March, are enjoying their strongest week since then. Even as health officials warn against travel during the Thanksgiving holiday because of a surge in covid-19 cases, more than 4 million people traversed airports between Friday and Monday. The risk of being infected with the novel coronavirus on planes, which have highly effective filters that remove virus from the air and where mask usage is required, is probably fairly low, scientists say.
But the research is far from clear and some recent cases have documented transmission on flights even when passengers wore masks and sat far apart, according to a review of recent cases and interviews with academics and disease specialists.
“I definitely can say it’s premature to say that air travel is very safe,” said Qingyan Chen, an engineering professor at Purdue University in Indiana who’s written extensively on disease transmission on planes. Airline officials, responding to the historic drop in passengers, repeatedly have defended the protections against infection on flights. “Flying is safe,” Nicholas Calio, president of Airlines for America, a trade group for large carriers, said at a Nov. 12 briefing. “I will state that categorically.” A4A declined to add additional comments. It has highlighted the efforts to force passengers to wear masks and to remain apart during boarding and exiting, and to disinfect aircraft. Montreal-based IATA defended its use of Freedman’s data on confirmed in-flight transmissions, saying it never characterized the results as definitive. A4A frequently has cited a study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which was funded by the trade group and other aviation industry sources, that concluded the risk of transmission on an airliner was “very low.” But authors cautioned that their projections depended on adherence to mask usage and they also urged airlines to improve ventilation while planes are parked at the gate. Another study airlines point to was conducted by the Defense Department with the assistance of United Airlines Holdings Inc. and Boeing Co. It attempted to measure how aerosol virus particles were exhaled by a simulated masked passenger. United said in promotional materials released Oct. 15 the study “determined the risk is almost nonexistent.”
However, after news coverage of the study, the authors added a revision, saying they were “concerned about the potential misinterpretation of the findings.” They also acknowledged they based their results on a person exhaling relatively few virus particles, anamount well below levels documented in some cases.
The airplane filters and mask usage “significantly reduces” exposure to infectious aerosols, they wrote. “However, the current established scientific understanding of SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics is not sufficient to calculate definitive SARS-CoV-2 transmission risk from these measurements of aerosol transport The U.S. Centers for Disease Control summarizes the risks from air travel this way on its website: “Most viruses and other germs do not spread easily on flights because of how air circulates and is filtered on airplanes. However, keeping your distance is difficult on crowded flights, and sitting within six feet of others, sometimes for hours, may increase your risk of getting covid-19.” Purdue’s Chen said he’s been following news reports in China of possible infection between passengers on a Nov. 9 Air China flight from Los Angeles to Tianjin. Ten people who weren’t connected to one another and resided in different parts of the U.S. tested positive for the coronavirus after arrival. All the passengers had tested negative for the disease before the flight, suggesting at least some of the transmission occurred on the plane, he said.
Such incidents are confounding because they seem to contradict Chen’s own earlier research showing mask usage can dramatically lower risks of infection, he said.
“That’s why I’m having doubts about what’s going on in airplanes,” he said. Government researchers in Ireland documented as many as 13 cases linked to a single flight last summer, according to a paper published in October. The infections in five of the cases were genetically linked, “strongly suggesting a single point source of infection,” the authors said. The widebody jet was largely empty, people were spaced out on the plane and almost everyone whose activity could be documented said they wore masks. Nevertheless, the authors estimated that 10-18% of passengers became infected. “It is interesting that four of the flight cases were not seated next to any other positive case, had no contact in the transit lounge, wore face masks in-flight and would not be deemed close contacts under current guidance from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control,” the authors said.
In Pennsylvania, if you’re having friends over to socialize, you’re supposed to wear a mask — and so are your friends. That’s the rule, but Barb Chestnut has no intention of following it.
“No one is going to tell me what I can or not do in my own home” said Chestnut, 60, of Shippensburg. “They do not pay my bills and they are not going to tell me what to do.”
As governors and mayors grapple with an out-of-control pandemic, they are ratcheting up mask mandates and imposing restrictions on small indoor gatherings, which have been blamed for accelerating the spread of the coronavirus. But while such measures carry the weight of law, they are, in practical terms, unenforceable, and officials are banking on voluntary compliance instead. While many are undoubtedly heeding public health advice — downsizing Thanksgiving plans, avoiding get-togethers, wearing masks when they’re around people who don’t live with them — it’s inevitable that a segment of the population will blow off new state and local restrictions and socialize anyway. Experts say that could put greater stress on overburdened hospitals and lead to an even bigger spike in sickness and death over the holidays
“When this started in early March, we weren’t staring at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we didn’t have the disease reservoir that we have. And that, to me, is the biggest concern in the next few weeks,” said Dr. David Rubin, the director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He called the risk of a Thanksgiving spike “extremely high.”
“I think you’re seeing a lot of resistance here,” Rubin said. “I can’t speculate on what people are going to do, but I can say that to the degree that there isn’t a collective buy-in here, it sort of blunts the impact of the measures themselves.” The nation is averaging 172,000 new virus cases per day, nearly doubling since the end of October, according to Johns Hopkins University. Hospitalizations, deaths and the testing positivity rate are also up sharply as the nation approaches Thanksgiving. In response, elected officials are imposing restrictions that, with some exceptions, fall short of the broad-based stay-at-home orders and business shutdowns seen in the spring. Utah and Vermont have banned all social gatherings. So have local governments in Philadelphia and Dane County, Wisconsin. In Kentucky, no more than eight people from two households are permitted to get together; in Oregon, the gathering limit is six. California has imposed an overnight curfew. More states are requiring masks, including those with GOP governors who have long resisted them. The nation’s top health officials are pleading with Americans to avoid Thanksgiving travel. AAA projects Thanksgiving travel will fall by at least 10%, which would be the steepest one-year plunge since the Great Recession in 2008. But that still means tens of millions of people on the road. On social media, people defiantly talk about their Thanksgiving plans, arguing that nothing will stop them from seeing friends and family.
More than 1 million people thronged U.S. airports on Sunday, according to the Transportation Security Administration — the highest number since the beginning of the pandemic.
Dr. Debra Bogen, the health director for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which includes Pittsburgh, said that too many have been ignoring public health guidance and that the result has been unchecked spread of the virus. “For the past few weeks, I’ve asked people to follow the rules, curtail gatherings and parties, stay home except for essentials, and wear masks. I’m done asking,” Bogen said at a news conference, her frustration palpable. She announced a stay-at-home advisory that she said would turn into an order if people didn’t comply.
Some people are underestimating the risk to themselves and their friends and families, said Baruch Fischhoff, a Carnegie Mellon University psychologist who has written about COVID-19 risk analysis and communications. Others doubt what health officials are telling them about the virus. And still others are simply irresponsible.
Fischhoff said the lack of a cohesive national pandemic strategy; patchwork and seemingly arbitrary restrictions at the state and local level; and ineffective, politicized and contradictory public health messaging have sown confusion and mistrust. “It has been a colossal, tragic failure of leadership from the very beginning that we didn’t find the common ground in which we were working to protect the weakest among us. And once you’ve lost that coordination, you’re scrambling to get it back and that’s the tragic mess that we’re in now,” he said. In upstate New York, some sheriffs say they have no intention of enforcing Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recent mandate barring private gatherings of more than 10 people.
It took 10 years for the Polio vaccine to work. It took 15 years for Smallpox and they want you to believe a vaccine that will have to go to 300 million people in America will wipe out the Coronavirus in 4 months… REALLY?
WASHINGTON – With nationwide coronavirus hospitalizations topping 80,000 and case counts on the cusp of 200,000 a day, officials and experts are giving their final pleas for caution in the days before Thanksgiving.
Average cases reported each day in the United States have jumped nearly 15% in a week, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. Deaths are also on the rise, with some communities overwhelmed by the bodies
– in El Paso County, Texas, the National Guard was called in to help the morgues. With the holiday travel rush underway, public health leaders warned this weekend that “herd immunity” from promising vaccines remains months away and that every American’s choices this week will shape the country’s virus trajectory. In an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, said he understands that many Americans are experiencing “covid fatigue” after months of pandemic restrictions, now tightening again in many parts of the country. But traveling over the holidays and ignoring public health guidelines are “going to get us into even more trouble than we’re in right now,” he said. Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser to the White House’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine effort, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that about 70% of the American population will need to be vaccinated for true herd immunity to occur. That will probably happen around May, he said, based on health officials’ current plans. “Most people need to be immunized before we can go back to a normal life,” he said. Some the front lines of the country’s pandemic response are not sure that months of messaging have gotten through to the public, however.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised Americans against Thanksgiving travel and get-togethers just days ago, when many people’s plans were already set.
“Absolutely not,” said Utah physician Sean Callahan when asked whether the urgency of the country’s situation has sunk in. He said soaring cases are already straining the quality of care at the University of Utah, where he works in one of the hospital’s intensive-care units and is an assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care. His own message for people is about more than Thanksgiving plans. Callahan said he is concerned that nurses and physicians are already being asked to treat patients outside their usual areas of expertise. He thinks the problem will worsen. “I’m worried that we are going to be asking a lot of providers to do things that are probably outside of their comfort zone, and care is going to suffer, because we’re stretched and doing things we should not be doing,” he said in an interview Sunday. The pressure on health-care resources has spurred leaders nationwide into action. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, said this month that he was mandating face coverings statewide in public settings and for people within six feet of anyone outside their household. (The mandate does not apply to houses of worship.) The reversal, following months of reluctance, came after hospitals warned that they may have to ration care. Nevada Gov. Sisolak, a Democrat, on Sunday announced a “statewide pause” of at least three weeks starting Tuesday, with stricter capacity limits for many businesses, a decreased limit on gatherings and a more extensive mask mandate. Sisolak said people must wear face coverings even in private settings when they are around people outside their household. Ten percent of Nevada’s coronavirus cases were reported in the past week, he said, warning that hospitals could become overwhelmed. “You saw it in New York, you can see it in El Paso right now,” he said. “This can’t become our reality.” Los Angeles County, home to 10 million people, also announced new restrictions Sunday, ordering restaurants and bars to shift to takeout, drive-through and delivery only. As the alarms about hospital capacity mount, holiday travel and gatherings threaten to make health-care workers’ jobs even harder. Now holiday travel and gatherings threaten to make health-care workers’ tasks even harder. “If you look at the map of spread across the country, you can see the risk; it’s very visible. And moving through airports or travel hubs, I think that will increase people’s risk,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Even if they’re driving from point to point, unfortunately, we don’t know if we’re infected when we walk into a gathering.” He referred to recent data released by the CDC that said most infections are spread by people with no symptoms. “The message for everyone is: You can’t assume you don’t have the virus, and you can’t assume the people whose homes you’re about to enter don’t have the virus at this point in our pandemic,” Inglesby said. For those who plan to travel and be with others for the holiday, he recommended keeping gatherings small, spending as much time outdoors as possible, keeping mealtimes short, wearing masks indoors and removing masks only while eating.
More than 1 million people went through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints in airports nationwide on Friday, according to data released daily by the agency, and more than 980,000 travelers were screened Saturday. The number of travelers screened Friday was the second-highest single-day rush since March 16. In an interview aired on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Fauci was full of optimism about a vaccine but emphasized the virus’s continued threat.
“Traditionally and historically, highly efficacious and effective vaccines have crushed epidemics like smallpox and polio and measles,” Fauci told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We can do that with the vaccines that are going to be coming online. So we should make them be . . . an incentive to have us double down even more with public health measures until we get the full component of the help that’s on its way.” Pfizer filed for emergency authorization for its vaccine Friday. The FDA has announced that a committee of external advisers will meet Dec. 10 to make recommendations to the agency on whether to authorize Pfizer’s vaccine. Slaoui said the advisers will meet Dec. 17 to review the shot developed by Moderna, which has not filed for clearance for its vaccine. Officials’ calls to heed public health guidelines came as two more members of Congress, Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., and Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said Sunday that they tested positive for the coronavirus after experiencing mild symptoms and are isolating.
Oxford-AstraZeneca announce their vaccine is up to 90% effective and can be stored in a normal fridge
Trials found the jab to be 90% effective when given as a half-dose then a full dose one month later
This dropped to 62% when someone was given a full dose then another full dose a month later
Oxford University and pharma company AstraZeneca say no serious virus cases in 20,000-person trial
Vaccine costs between £2 and £4 per dose and can stored in normal UK fridge without specialist equipment
Jabs being developed by Pfizer and Moderna in the US have produced 95% protection but more expensive
(CNN)) Drugmaker AstraZeneca announced on Monday that its experimental coronavirus vaccine has shown an average efficacy of 70% in its large scale trials — the latest of several vaccine trials worldwide to post their results this month. The vaccine, developed with the University of Oxford, showed 90% efficacy in one dosing regimen — when the vaccine was given as a half dose, followed by a full dose at least a month later — and 62% efficacy in a second regimen — when two full doses were given at least a month apart.
That averages to a 70% efficacy, AstraZeneca said.
The company said in a news release that its vaccine was “highly effective in preventing COVID-19, the primary endpoint, and no hospitalisations or severe cases of the disease were reported in participants receiving the vaccine.”
The interim analysis included a total of 131 Covid-19 cases, according to the release.
Monday’s news comes after Moderna announced earlier this month that its vaccine was 94.5% effective against coronavirus, and Pfizer announced its vaccine was 95% effective.
Here is the story as reported in the UK:
The study, involving more than 24,000 volunteers, found there were no serious cases of Covid-19 among those who were given the vaccine, including no hospitalisations. Data also suggests the vaccine might stop the virus transmitting even among people who never get symptoms of the illness. Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said his team’s jab would play a key ‘part in getting the world back to normal’. Health Secretary Matt Hancock hailed the results this morning, saying millions of doses will be ready to go by the end of December. He told the BBC: ‘We hope to be able to start vaccinating next month. The bulk of the vaccine rollout programme will be in January, February, March. And we hope that sometime after Easter things will be able to start to get back to normal.’
Oxford’s jab is viewed as Britain’s best chance of mass-inoculation of the population by the end of spring because Boris Johnson has ordered 100million doses, enough to inoculate 50million people. The UK already has 3million ready to go, which could see 1.5million people vaccinated before the end of 2020.
The Prime Minister said this morning: ‘Incredibly exciting news the Oxford vaccine has proved so effective in trials. There are still further safety checks ahead, but these are fantastic results.’ Results from Oxford’s trials will be sent to the British drug regulator, the MHRA, so it can assess the vaccine’s safety, effectiveness, and that it is manufactured to high standard. The MHRA has been doing a ‘rolling review’ of the vaccine and could, as a result, complete the approval process within a matter of days of receiving the data. The London stock market edged up today following news of the breakthrough vaccine and as the City awaits Mr Johnson’s plans for a strengthened three-tier system of coronavirus restrictions to replace the national lockdown in England.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock (left) hailed the results this morning, saying millions of doses will be ready to go by the end of December. Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said his team’s jab would play a key ‘part in getting the world back to normal’ A coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University can prevent 70.4% of people from getting Covid-19, data shows
