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Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 (nCoV-2019)

PinkLucy said:
It’s amazing to me how many people don’t know what is going on around them. In our local FB group, every day someone asks where the clinics are, how to get an appointment etc.
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I wonder if it's because a lot of us have been staying at/working from home? This weekend we walked into Metro(?) and saw that they also did vaccine shots!, because we never go there for there pharmacy, it completely slipped our mind they even had it. I do think making the shots available in these daily businesses is a fantastic idea.

Like I said though, I feel something needs to be done to get our percentages that bit higher. Although I'm at a lost as to what exactly that would be. :( More TV/radio/social media adverts is an easy answer, but I'm not sure if it's the right one. Back to the door-to-door salesmen days?
 
tripwire said:
I wonder if it's because a lot of us have been staying at/working from home? This weekend we walked into Metro(?) and saw that they also did vaccine shots!, because we never go there for there pharmacy, it completely slipped our mind they even had it. I do think making the shots available in these daily businesses is a fantastic idea.

Like I said though, I feel something needs to be done to get our percentages that bit higher. Although I'm at a lost as to what exactly that would be. :( More TV/radio/social media adverts is an easy answer, but I'm not sure if it's the right one. Back to the door-to-door salesmen days?
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I'm all out of patience for those stragglers. Considering what the pandemic has cost us in lives, livelihoods, general suffering and just plain money, the vaccines should be mandatory for everyone who is eligible and has no medical exemption. Enough already.
 
WislaHD said:
Little off-topic to COVID but I've been thinking about this in the last day too especially given how many social media (instagram) posts that I have seen pop with the "What is going on in Afghanistan" threads in recent days.

Usually I don't mind such social media explainer posts because if there is civil unrest in say Myanmar or somewhere, as I can understand it isn't really a place that is on the radar to the vast majority of people. However, the Western world has spent two decades at war with and putting boots on the ground in Afghanistan. How are so many people still so ignorant of the War in Afghanistan?

I guess this is the world we live in, most people live their lives blissfully unaware of the world around them. I just have to accept that, since I can't relate to it at all. It is impossible for me to turn off the part of my brain that stays cognizant of world events, even if I am not actively paying attention to any news.


They were giving out vaccines at the National Bank Open last week, even giving out $50 gift cards to people who received it. My father got his second dose there since they had Pfizer and my dad did not want to mix shots with Moderna. So yes, I think if Canada's Wonderland had a clinic on-site, that would be a great idea.
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Same here. With all of the news feeds these days, journalistic and social, it almost seems that people have to work at not being aware. I don't expect everyone to have an in-depth knowledge of everything. I don't closely follow events in Israel, and during the break-up of Yugoslavia I had a hard time keeping track of who's who, but at least I kept aware of the events, and I do it via TV news and an old-style newspaper..
W. K. Lis said:
In Afghanistan, as of 2 days ago, 1.81M doses were administered, 219K people were fully vaccinated, or 0.6% of the total population.
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In their defence, they have had a lot on their plate lately. No doubt the vaccines were foreign funded. I wonder how much went into the black market.
 
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Bayer said:
I'm all out of patience for those stragglers. Considering what the pandemic has cost us in lives, livelihoods, general suffering and just plain money, the vaccines should be mandatory for everyone who is eligible and has no medical exemption. Enough already.
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As am I.

And I don't get the recent Ontario government position. Rather than a short term push to get everyone vaccinated, let's tie up more healthcare workers standing at the door administering tests (for how long?), and more cost providing enhanced PPE. Actually, I'd be a fan of those who refuse to be vaccinated w/o exemption providing their own PPE.
 
Bayer said:
I'm all out of patience for those stragglers. Considering what the pandemic has cost us in lives, livelihoods, general suffering and just plain money, the vaccines should be mandatory for everyone who is eligible and has no medical exemption. Enough already.
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I just hate that so many have zero concept of the Social Contract.
 
This from The Economist's daily Newsletter of today is quite interesting.

On May 12th Mike DeWine, the state governor [of Ohio], announced the launch of the Vax-A-Million programme. Between May 26th and June 23rd individuals who received at least one dose of any covid-19 vaccine could opt into a lottery that would reward five with $1m each and five youths aged 12-17 with full scholarships to an Ohio public university of their choice. The initiative cost $5.6m. According to a new study, it averted around $66m in healthcare costs.

Andrew Barber and Jeremy West of the University of California, Santa Cruz, set out to evaluate the success of Vax-A-Million against the hypothetical scenario in which Ohio hadn’t introduced any incentives. To do this the economists used a statistical method called synthetic control. By creating a weighted average of states that are similar to Ohio in various ways, such as in their rates of vaccine hesitancy, but did not implement a lottery, the authors created a control state—“synthetic Ohio”—to use as a point of comparison.

The researchers found that Vax-A-Million increased vaccination rates in Ohio by 1.5%, meaning that an additional 82,000 people received their first jab during the lottery period. The effects of this were seen in the state’s rate of infections and days spent in intensive-care units (ICU) receiving treatment for covid-19, which decreased by 1.3% and 2.6% respectively, compared with the synthetic Ohio. With the average hospital bill of a covid-19 patient in an American ICU clocking in at $13,500 per day, Ohio’s lottery programme managed to avoid $66m in hospital charges. That figure doesn’t include the additional social benefits of averted covid-19 cases, such as fewer people suffering from “long covid” and fewer deaths.
 
DSC said:
This from The Economist's daily Newsletter of today is quite interesting.

On May 12th Mike DeWine, the state governor [of Ohio], announced the launch of the Vax-A-Million programme. Between May 26th and June 23rd individuals who received at least one dose of any covid-19 vaccine could opt into a lottery that would reward five with $1m each and five youths aged 12-17 with full scholarships to an Ohio public university of their choice. The initiative cost $5.6m. According to a new study, it averted around $66m in healthcare costs.

Andrew Barber and Jeremy West of the University of California, Santa Cruz, set out to evaluate the success of Vax-A-Million against the hypothetical scenario in which Ohio hadn’t introduced any incentives. To do this the economists used a statistical method called synthetic control. By creating a weighted average of states that are similar to Ohio in various ways, such as in their rates of vaccine hesitancy, but did not implement a lottery, the authors created a control state—“synthetic Ohio”—to use as a point of comparison.

The researchers found that Vax-A-Million increased vaccination rates in Ohio by 1.5%, meaning that an additional 82,000 people received their first jab during the lottery period. The effects of this were seen in the state’s rate of infections and days spent in intensive-care units (ICU) receiving treatment for covid-19, which decreased by 1.3% and 2.6% respectively, compared with the synthetic Ohio. With the average hospital bill of a covid-19 patient in an American ICU clocking in at $13,500 per day, Ohio’s lottery programme managed to avoid $66m in hospital charges. That figure doesn’t include the additional social benefits of averted covid-19 cases, such as fewer people suffering from “long covid” and fewer deaths.
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A curiosity of this situation is that Ohio is not in the business (as a state government) of providing hospital care, except as an insurer through Medicaid.
That would suggest the majority of the hypothetical 66M benefit would have gone to individuals, insurance companies and hospitals.
I don't suppose either of the latter two kicked in any $$ for the lottery?

*****

I have to say, I'm not really keen on bribing people to take vaccines; the problem from my point of view is not so much the moral hazard in real-time, as it is w/the culture in the U.S. that people expect to be paid to 'donate' blood, sperm, eggs, etc etc.
Which is to say, this can have the perverse effect, that in the future, people will be even more hesitant to get a vaccine early, because they won't want to miss out on a potential pay day when uptake is low.

I also question whether the beneficiary of the savings is the one paying the lottery or if this looks more like privatizing reward/nationalizing loss.

At the end of the day, I'm not 100% opposed, and I'm all for studying the phenomenon..........but I'm a tad queasy about the whole thing.
 
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I find it less objectionable to have a sweepstakes approach than to have a direct compensation for doing civic duty.
 
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