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Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 (nCoV-2019)

AlvinofDiaspar said:
Brazil and US are practically the failed-states of pandemic - everyone with half a sane government would look good compared to them, but that doesn't tell us anything about where we went wrong.
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Yes, US and Brazil (and UK) have certainly handled covid less well than most but I suggest every country (with the benefit of hindsight) could have done better. In Canada, the Feds should gave closed the borders (or insisted on testing) much sooner, governments )Federal and Provincial) going back decades should have ensured we maintained some vaccine production facilities and that adequate stock-piles of ppe were maintained . Ontario should have shut down much faster and opened up much slower, the situation on LTC was (and is) a disgrace and the mixed messaging was (and is) certainly not helping. All in all Canada has done pretty well but there are lots of lessons that should have been learned. I guess we will not know how well until the NEXT time!
 

Is it possible to mix-and-match COVID-19 vaccines?​


Vaxx Populi: Some scientists think using different types of vaccines might confer more protection against variants of concern. A study could provide the evidence.

From link. Dated February 22, 2021

“I think we’re having a global science lesson,” says Dr. Alan Bernstein, CEO of CIFAR, a Toronto-based global research organization. The pandemic has “made science all of a sudden not some esoteric, abstract thing, but has made it important to all of our lives on a daily basis….[including] the really complicated intricacies of our immune system.”

As vaccine shortages continue—even as rollouts increase in size and scale—scientists are asking whether it’s possible to mix-and-match the two-dose COVID-19 vaccines that are approved or near approval in Canada, in essence starting the vaccination process with one approved vaccine and ending with another.
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Bernstein, who is a member of Canada’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, is in favour, in theory, and is pushing for research, perhaps a study that includes Canadian volunteers, to see if the theory works in real life. For him, one reason for such a mix-and-match strategy is that, with the new variants of concern spreading in Canada, “we have to be a little more sophisticated” in our vaccination approach, and that may mean “activating a few different branches of our immune system” through a heterologous prime boost (or mix-and-match) rather than a homologous prime boost (using the same vaccine for both doses or, as Bernstein says, two similar vaccines, such as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which both use mRNA technology and which he thinks are “kinda twin brothers” that look a lot alike).
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“Think of vaccination as presenting our immune system with a red flag—here is something you should be on the lookout for,” he says. “And so if you go with the mRNA vaccine first, you’re going to activate one branch of our immune system.” (We have three different branches.) Bernstein suggests thinking of this first vaccine as our “air force.” Then, he says, you introduce one of the viral vector vaccines, such as the ones by AstraZeneca/Oxford or Johnson & Johnson/Janssen a couple of weeks later, and, it tells the immune system: “ ‘You saw this guy before, but I’m going to present him in a different format,’ ” says Bernstein. “And so it’s going to activate a different branch of our immune system, think of it as our navy. And so now you have the air force and the navy activated and so you’ve got a double threat against this incoming virus.”

“At least on paper, it’s worth trying the trial to see what happens to our immune system,” he says.
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Such efforts are already underway. On Feb. 4, the British government announced the world’s first “COVID-19 alternating dose vaccine study,” involving 800 volunteers and testing eight different combinations of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, including all the variations of which goes first and second, and also having the doses 28 days apart and 12 weeks apart (the latter is the current British standard, as it focuses on getting as many first doses into arms as possible).

The British study should only take a couple of months, Bernstein explains, as its end point is “to measure the immune response against the virus.” So researchers will need to wait a few weeks after the second dose before looking for antibodies and immunity and then analyzing the results.

Britain isn’t waiting for the results of the study. While acknowledging that “there is no evidence on the interchangeability of the COVID-19 vaccines,” the government issued last-resort guidance in January allowing a mix-and-match vaccine strategy for someone who has been issued a first dose and who goes “for vaccination at a site where the same vaccine is not available, or if the first product received is unknown, it is reasonable to offer one dose of the locally available product to complete the schedule.”
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But Bernstein says that a mix-and-match strategy should not be adopted here without a full successful trial and Health Canada approval. “We risk losing the confidence that we’ve built up with Canadians over a long time now if we start willy-nilly [saying,] ‘Lets try this, or let’s try that.’ ”

Like Bernstein, other scientists think Britain is gambling with public confidence by going ahead with the policy without results from a completed study. “None of this is being data driven right now,” Dr. Phyllis Tien, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, told the New York Times. “We’re kind of in this Wild West.”

Eventually, Canada will be awash in vaccines, as more vaccines are approved and promised shipments of millions of doses arrive. While the impetus to use a mix-and-match strategy to deal with localized shortages may subside, the threat posed by variants of concern will still exist. So the British mix-and-match study may only be one part of examining new ways to keep the world safe from this novel coronavirus.
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When anti-Liberal hate gets in the way...

Alberta engineer suggests province (Alberta) adopt federal COVID-19 contact tracing app​


From link.

Despite the urging from public health officials and politicians, the use of smartphone apps that warn people of potential exposure to COVID-19 is low in Alberta and across the rest of Canada.

Contact tracing is critical in fighting against the virus and Calgary engineer Ziad Fazel said Alberta’s tracing app, ABTraceTogether, has been a failure.

“I think the Alberta app should be thrown in the garbage and I think the province should do what was promised last summer, which is move over from the Alberta app to the federal app,” Fazel said.

The app has been under fire since it launched in May. This week, Global News reached out to Alberta Health for updated contact tracing numbers but not none were made available.

According to the most recent numbers released on Jan. 13, the app had been used to track 32 positive COVID-19 cases. As of March 18, there had been a total of 140,823 positive cases identified in Alberta.

“We’ve found out twice over the 10 months that ABTraceTogether has been in operation how many have used it to submit a log to the province,” Fazel said.
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More than 300,000 people have downloaded Alberta’s contact tracing app but that does not mean all those people are using it, Fazel said.

“The Alberta app, if I download it and that’s the only number the Alberta government is releasing, it doesn’t work at contact tracing or tracking exposures, not any better than my calculator or Fruit Ninja,” he said. “The Alberta app only starts working when you register it.”
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But some experts have soured on the federal contact tracing app as well. Public health data indicates three per cent of 535,000 Canadians who have tested positive for COVID-19 have used the federal COVID Alert app to warn others about exposure.

University of Calgary microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases professor Dr. Craig Jenne argues the federal app has also been ineffective at combatting the spread of the virus.

“They are essentially completely useless and that is because if you have the app installed, the odds are the person who has the virus and is going to transmit to you does not have the app, so you will never receive a notification,” Jenne said.

“This technology only works when the vast majority of the population has it.”
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However, Fazel said he has been researching both apps and believes the federal app is gaining traction while Alberta’s version is slowing down.

“The Alberta app is not able to keep up, so the growth in usage of the Alberta app is not keeping up in the growth of cases in Alberta, whereas federal app the growth in its usage is outpacing the growth of the pandemic,” he said.

“There’s signs the federal app is making gains on reducing the spread from the pandemic.”

Fazel said Alberta needs an app that provides more information to its users if the province is going to make a stand against the virus.

“The federal app works and the provincial doesn’t work. It’s a no-brainer which app we should be using.”
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Jenne said if the majority of Canadians were using contact tracing apps, it would make an enormous impact on the country’s battle against COVID-19.

“It would really very much enable us to safely undertake some activities while identifying rapidly potential cases, notifying people that have been exposed before they themselves become infectious and really put an end to much of the transmission that we see in the community,” he said.
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"According to the most recent numbers released on Jan. 13, the (Alberta) app had been used to track 32 positive COVID-19 cases. As of March 18, there had been a total of 140,823 positive cases identified in Alberta.

"Public health data indicates three per cent of 535,000 Canadians who have tested positive for COVID-19 have used the federal COVID Alert app to warn others about exposure."

“There’s signs the federal app is making gains on reducing the spread from the pandemic.”

COVID Alert is Canada's free COVID-19 exposure notification app. It can alert you to possible exposures before you have symptoms.
See link.
 
Towered said:
Is this common? My mom's second dose is scheduled for July and I thought it must be a mistake...
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It’s not common. The decision was made to get more people vaccinated sooner. Doctors and scientist appear divided on the subject. Some say it appears to be ok to do, while others say they can’t say for sure.


I dunno how I feel. But some of the early data shows vaccines to be very effective even with one dose.
 
We have a lot of seniors in the building, some not too mobile. I don't think it is any kind of outbreak though. redacted moderna clip.jpg
 
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