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Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+New climate commitments from China, the UK, and US bring the world closer to the Paris goals. +

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+A series of announcements over the weekend at a United Nations climate summit has bolstered hope that global emissions may still fall in line with the goals of the Paris agreement, heading off the more severe effects of climate change. These new pledges come in a year that was bound to be a significant test for the global agreement, even before the Trump administration's withdrawal from it and the global spread of Covid-19. +

+

+First, let’s rewind. Five years ago, 195 countries came together to forge the Paris accord after decades of failed attempts to comprehensively address climate change. The countries — including the US — collectively agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with holding average global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (with an aim of 1.5 degrees) to keep climate change in check. +

+

+But even with that goal established, whether countries voluntarily pursued it in earnest was always a gamble. The nonbinding agreement is structured so that countries themselves determine how fast to cut their emissions; there is no top-down enforcement of benchmarks for each country. The idea is that transparency will boost action: Countries submit their own pledges called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) every five years, and these plans are supposed to be increasingly ambitious, with the hope that they become strong enough to hold warming below 2 degrees. +

+

+Unfortunately, when Paris was adopted in 2015, the first round of pledges missed the mark. Climate Action Tracker estimated that the pledges would lead to 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming — to say nothing of what countries would actually manage to achieve. Which means a lot has been riding on the next round of pledges in 2020. +

+

+Obviously, this hasn’t been the 2020 that anyone had planned. Although all countries are supposed to submit new targets by the end of the month, many won’t file their plans until next year, ahead of the next major United Nations climate negotiations that were delayed due to the pandemic. +

+

+So far, only 22 countries have updated their NDCs, while 125 countries have pledged that they intend to improve their targets, according to Climate Watch. +

+

+But major new climate commitments from the European Union and the United Kingdom, among others, at last weekend’s virtual Climate Ambition Summit — held to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris agreement — have increased the momentum heading into the new year. Chinese President Xi Jinping also announced updated NDC targets, which are a step forward, but not as ambitious as climate advocates had hoped. +

+

+“We are now seeing that countries are in fact ramping up ambition over time, and they are doing this despite some incredible hurdles that have been thrown up over the last few years, including the obviation of leadership from the US for a critical period of time,” said Taryn Fransen, a senior fellow in international climate governance at the World Resources Institute. +

+

+These new pledges from some of the world’s top emitters bring us closer to the Paris agreement goals, but a gap remains. In a video posted on Twitter last week, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said, “the action needed is still nowhere in sight.” At this critical five-year anniversary, here’s where the agreement stands. +

+

+The world’s top historical emitters have stepped up (minus the US) +

+

+When it comes to cumulative emissions over time, the US, the EU, and China have contributed the greatest share, so they are key players in the Paris agreement. Since Trump announced the US would withdraw from it in 2017, the EU and China have helped ensure its survival. And at last weekend’s UN summit, European leaders made their biggest emission reduction commitments yet. +

+

+The UK — now broken out of the EU via Brexit — will host the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP 26), the major UN climate negotiations to be held in 2021. So its government was under particular pressure and scrutiny to come up with an ambitious new pledge. +

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+Just before the summit in early December, the government announced a target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 68 percent from 1990 levels — a target it officially submitted as part of its new NDC during the Climate Ambition Summit. +

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+According to Climate Action Tracker, this places the UK among the first countries to have an NDC that is compatible with the ambition of the Paris agreement, to keep temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. +

+

+At the summit, the EU also committed to an aggressive new goal, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 55 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, up from the previous pledge of 40 percent. +

+

+EU leaders celebrated the commitment as a sign of Europe’s climate leadership. However, it falls slightly short of alignment with the Paris agreement’s 1.5 Celsius target, according to Climate Action Tracker (which estimates that a reduction somewhere between 58 and 70 percent would be needed). +

+

+Nonetheless, experts said these new commitments might help spur other countries to take more aggressive action than they’d been planning to. +

+

+“With the COP delayed to next year, ending this year with as many major economies that have seriously enhanced their NDC [as possible] is really important to put pressure on others to do that next year,” said Thom Woodroofe, a senior adviser to the president of the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former climate diplomat. +

+

+Is China the climate leader of 2020? +

+

+Of course, since China is the top emitter globally, its climate actions are central to the success of the Paris agreement. +

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+In 2014, the US and China laid the foundation for the Paris agreement together, jointly announcing their targets ahead of the negotiations. Climate experts were relieved when China forged ahead after Trump announced the US would withdraw from the agreement. +

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+Last weekend, Xi Jinping continued to make progress on climate, presenting a new set of targets at the Climate Ambition Summit. +

+

+These new pledges shouldn’t be taken for granted given the disruption of the pandemic and the breakdown in US-China relations, said Li Shuo, a senior climate policy officer at Greenpeace East Asia, during a webinar hosted by the Wilson Center China Environment Forum on Monday. “If we go simply back for a few months, many probably wouldn’t foresee any of those announcements, including the NDC enhancement, but also the carbon neutrality pledge,” he said, referring to Xi’s surprise announcement at the UN General Assembly in September that China will aim to be carbon-neutral by 2060. +

+ +

+The updates Xi announced at the Climate Ambition Summit on Saturday are more complex than the EU and UK emissions reduction numbers, because China’s NDC spans four targets. Woodroofe summarizes the changes from China’s original NDC in the handy chart below. +

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+
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+Xi Jinping just confirmed China will update all four quantifiable goals in its 2030 NDC, not just the peaking date. Here is my attempt to quickly put in context. Very little ambition overall - nothing on coal, BRI or non-CO2. Next Five Year Plan can do more. #ClimateActionSummit pic.twitter.com/MNKDUdqpLu +

+— Thom Woodroofe (@thomwoodroofe) December 12, 2020 +
+
+

+While the updates are a step forward, they could have gone further, said Woodroofe. “Really they are not headlining increases in ambition, and in many ways, they frankly replicate the trajectory that China is already on,” he said. +

+

+As he points out, Xi only committed to a subtle shift in the date when China will reach peak emissions from “around 2030” to “before 2030.” According to a study published by the Asia Society Policy Institute and Climate Analytics in November, China needs to peak its emissions by 2025 to be in line with the Paris agreement and its long-term emissions goals. +

+

+The carbon intensity target (a measure of carbon emissions per unit of GDP) would also have to be stronger than the new 65 percent baseline level Xi announced to be aligned with a 1.5-degree future. +

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+On the more ambitious end, the new target for non-fossil fuel energy to reach 25 percent by 2030 (up from 20 percent) could spur much more aggressive renewable energy development, Lauri Myllyvirta wrote in Carbon Brief. +

+

+While the targets may be a boon for clean energy growth, they probably won’t cut significantly into fossil fuel use, Li said. China still has the largest number of coal power plants under development globally, which will lead to higher emissions, and none of the targets directly confront that issue. +

+

+The question remains: “How do we really find the political courage to say no to the long-standing development model that we have, which is heavily based on infrastructure investment and development?” according to Li. +

+

+China is likely to submit these new targets in an official NDC to the UN by the end of the year, he said, but there may be room for even more aggressive targets to be set in 2021. China will release its 14th Five-Year Plan in March, setting new economic, social, and environmental goals. And with President-elect Joe Biden taking office in January, China and the US are expected to reinstate diplomatic channels on climate change again. If the Biden administration can carry out bold climate action, that may give China the assurance it needs to be more ambitious as well. +

+

+But for now, “there is a big gap between what Xi has outlined China will do by 2030 and what he has outlined is his vision for China by 2060, and there is not an obvious way to reconcile that gap,” Woodroofe said. +

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+Closing the emissions gap +

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+Because the pandemic has disrupted the normal UN climate commitment cycle, it’s impossible to do a full accounting of how the Paris agreement has held up at its five-year anniversary. Countries will likely continue submitting updated NDCs until the next UN climate conference, COP 26, is held in November 2021. +

+

+But it is clear that China is not the only large economy to have a gap between its short-term targets and the long-term vision of decarbonization in line with the agreement. +

+

+In a statement published Saturday, Biden pledged that the US will rejoin the Paris agreement “on day one of my presidency”; he also committed to a long-term target of net-zero emissions by 2050. But the short-term target the US will put forward as its updated NDC once it rejoins Paris next year has yet to be announced. +

+

+“They are in a tough position because we have lost, essentially, four years under the current administration of going backward on climate action. So the Biden administration is going to need to come forward with something that will be viewed as ambitious enough to be credible by the international community,” said WRI’s Fransen, but “they will also need to come forward with something they can implement.” +

+

+Other Paris agreement laggards include Brazil and Russia, which submitted new NDCs but did not increase their stringency. Brazil actually submitted a new NDC that is weaker than its previous one, according to Fransen. Indonesia and Australia have also said they will not increase their ambition, Climate Action Tracker reports. Some significant emitters have committed to proposing higher targets but have yet to, including India. +

+

+The inaction — and in some cases backpedaling — from these countries is why Thunberg said on Saturday that the measures to make good on the Paris agreement are still not in sight. An increasing number of countries have committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, but, for Thunberg, these are merely “‘hopeful’ distant hypothetical targets,” while more ambitious short-term targets are needed to get the ball rolling. +

+

+Meanwhile, Fransen noted that countries particularly threatened by climate change continued to put forward ambitious targets at the summit. These countries, including island nations like the Maldives, are a “moral beacon” for the rest of the world, she said. For several island nations, the Paris agreement’s success is an existential quest: Many may become uninhabitable if the global temperature rises by 1.5 degrees. +

+

+The UN Environment Program’s latest emissions gap report, based on NDCs as of November, shows that without further action we are heading toward 3 degrees Celsius of warming. +

+

+For the countries and communities around the world most vulnerable to climate change, whether that gap is closed by new pledges over the coming months will be the real test of the Paris agreement. +

+ +

+A vote on Tuesday was the latest flashpoint in the debate over the proper role for billionaire philanthropy. +

+

+Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s adopted hometown of San Francisco on Tuesday formally condemned the naming of a major hospital after him and his wife, the latest flashpoint in the debate over the proper role for billionaire philanthropy. +

+

+The city’s board of supervisors approved the condemnation, a move that reflects the new, increasingly controversial politics of both the tech industry and of its founders. Activists on both the left and the right have grown sharply critical of big tech companies like Facebook. And simultaneously, there is a building backlash movement to charitable gifts from the mega rich. +

+

+The 10-1 vote is a manifestation of each of those crosscurrents, which both run particularly strong in liberal San Francisco. The measure has no legal force and is merely symbolic. +

+

+Five years ago, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital, the city’s sole public hospital, where Chan was a pediatrician at the time. As part of the donation, the hospital was formally renamed the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. +

+

+Since then, Zuckerberg has emerged as a political piñata as Facebook grew in size and has been dogged by cascading scandals. And Zuckerberg’s troubles in his corporate life have increasingly boomeranged onto his charitable gifts, most notably at his and his wife’s eponymous philanthropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. +

+

+And so after years of fits and starts, a group of hospital nurses, anti-Facebook activists, and progressive lawmakers on San Francisco’s board of supervisors began to mobilize this summer to push back against the hospital’s name. Rather than moving to officially rename it — which contractually could require returning the $75 million gift — the group decided to push for a middle ground: to condemn the name while leaving it in place. +

+

+The final vote on Tuesday followed an earlier vote this month by the Committee on Government Audit and Oversight, a panel on San Francisco’s board of supervisors. That’s when the measure was debated more fully. +

+

+“San Francisco’s only public hospital should not bear the name of a person responsible for endangering public health in our country and around the world — and yet it does,” said Gordon Mar, the lead sponsor of the measure. “These are policy choices, and they have a body count.” +

+

+“We’re of course thankful for the gift and we’re thankful for any gift to our most important institutions during this time,” said Matt Haney, another supervisor backing it. “But that doesn’t mean that we should for forever essentially have given away advertising rights on this most essential public institution.” +

+

+That session quickly became a pop-off session on the Facebook founder, with activists pillorying him for any corporate transgressions and downplaying the significance of his gift, which was the largest single private gift to a public hospital ever. The comments became quite caustic — for instance, one San Franciscan called him a “rich, amoral egotist who runs an extraction corporation.” +

+

+Meanwhile, charity leaders voiced concern over the precedent that the resolution could set. Defenders of high-dollar philanthropy often argue that regardless of any tax advantages or public-relations boons that the donation offers the giver, their money also does real good for the disadvantaged. And the hospital agreed in 2015 when it accepted the $75 million that it would keep the Zuckerberg name for at least 50 years. +

+

+Kim Meredith, the head of the hospital’s foundation, stressed that the “heartfelt gift” from Zuckerberg and Chan had made the city “a model of care” during the coronavirus pandemic. +

+

+“This resolution of condemnation on the naming of [the hospital] has the potential of unintended consequences and a chilling effect on past, present, and future gifts to the city,” she said. “We will need philanthropies to continue to tackle the challenges of Covid-19, health equity, and recovery in future years.” +

+

+Meredith added in a later statement that she was “proud that the hospital now bears their names.” +

+

+It is not unusual for an institution to name something after a donor who makes a particularly large gift. Another San Francisco hospital is named after a different tech billionaire, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. San Francisco officials signed off on the Zuckerberg naming contract in 2015. +

+

+But for an institution to formally condemn a donor is unusual, if not unprecedented. +

+ +

+Vox reporter Umair Irfan joins Today, Explained to discuss the latest Covid-19 vaccine news. +

+

+It’s been a busy week in vaccine news: The FDA authorized the first Covid-19 vaccine in the US on December 11, and the vaccination campaign is underway. The first US health workers received the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on December 14. +

+

+With all of the news around coronavirus vaccines, of course, comes a lot of questions. Vox science reporter Umair Irfan joined Today, Explained in a live conversation with host Sean Rameswaram to answer some of the biggest questions from our podcast listeners. (A transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows below.) +

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+The live podcast event also featured a conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci. The nation’s leading infectious disease scientist spoke about everything from his personal reflections on the past year to what it will take to get to “true herd immunity.” +

+

+The Fauci segment of this live podcast event will air next week as part of the Today, Explained upcoming podcast series “You, Me, and Covid-19,” which looks back on how the coronavirus has fundamentally reshaped our world. Through reporting, listener reflections, and interviews, the team will examine how Covid-19 changed our relationships with one another and with the places we live, upended our livelihoods, and redefined what we think of as “normal.” +

+

+The first episode of the series drops on Monday, December 21, and continues throughout the week. Subscribe to Today, Explained wherever you listen to podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify — so you don’t miss an episode. +

+
+

+How is the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine different from existing vaccines for other diseases? And how does the vaccine work? +

+

+The one thing to highlight is the unprecedented speed at which we have developed this. Vaccine development is something that typically takes decades. The fastest vaccine ever developed was the mumps vaccine that took four years. This was a disease we only discovered last year around this time. +

+

+And now about a year later, we already have a vaccine that’s starting to be distributed. So this is something that’s unprecedented in terms of science. And the other big thing to highlight is that this is also using a completely new technology. Both the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and the Moderna vaccines are using an approach [with] the RNA-based genetic material. This is something that we’ve never tried on large scales in humans before. +

+

+So the old-fashioned way of doing viruses or vaccines was you would take the virus — weaken it, kill it, or snip off a piece of it — and inject it into the body. And then your immune system would read that and develop a response. They would use it as sort of a punching bag to essentially prepare for when the virus actually invades. +

+

+What these new generations of vaccines are doing is you don’t need the virus at all. In fact, all you do is you start with the genetic material. That is the information used to code for how to make the virus. And you don’t even need to know how to make the whole virus. You only need to know how to make a piece of it, like the spike proteins. +

+

+So with the coronavirus, the spike proteins are really important because that’s what they use to break into cells. They’re kind of like lock picks. And so what [companies] like Moderna and Pfizer have done is they took the instructions in RNA and they basically inject those into the human body, into muscles, and then your own cells will read those instructions and then manufacture their own copies of those specific spike proteins. Then, your immune system will use that as target practice. +

+

+And so this is, again, something that we’ve never done before, but it’s extremely fast. The first mRNA vaccines were developed within days of the genetic sequence of the coronavirus being released publicly. And then within two months, they were tested in the first humans. +

+

+Who qualifies for getting the Covid-19 vaccine now? And when might everyone else actually be able to get it? +

+

+Let’s start backwards and work towards where we are now. Ultimately, we want everybody to be vaccinated against this as much as possible because this is a disease that can infect just about everybody. So that’s the ultimate goal post, trying to get as close to saturation. +

+

+But, of course, we can’t do that right away. So the Centers for Disease Control convened an advisory committee, and they looked at where would these vaccines be most effective, not just in terms of preventing deaths but also in terms of preventing spread. +

+

+If we can inoculate [people who are most likely to spread the virus to other people], we can control transmission. They found out that those people are likely going to be health workers. So the first priority on the list are logically going to be health workers, but also people who live in long-term care facilities, older adults, and particularly the people that work around them. +

+
+ +
+

+The idea is that these people can act as sort of firebreaks against this inferno of a pandemic. The problem, though, is when you add up those people just in those high-risk groups, that’s 24 million people. And we’re not going to have 24 million doses right away. The Operation Warp Speed estimates that will have just about 20 million Americans inoculated by the end of December. And that’s if everything goes perfectly well, which means that there will still be some people that will have to wait. +

+

+So it really is going to vary from state to state and even from region to region. Different states and different hospitals have their own guidelines. Some of them are developing an algorithm which sorts out who is at highest risk. Some of them are awarding vaccines based on a lottery system. Your odds of getting a vaccine — or when you will get it — really depend on your city, your state, how many vaccines they received, and how effectively they’re distributing them. +

+ +

+Can people get Covid-19 between the two doses? +

+

+Yes. Both the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine are two-dose vaccines administered about several weeks apart. +

+

+Last week, before Pfizer/BioNTech received their emergency use authorization from the FDA, they released some of their data showing their trial pool. The data showed that they had about 160 some people who got infected with Covid-19 in the placebo group and about nine people that got infected in the group that got the vaccine. +

+

+But if you look at when they got infected, most of those nine people were infected just a few days after they received the first dose of the vaccine. So between the first and second dose, building up an immune response is something that can take several days up to a couple of weeks. It’s likely that they were still vulnerable in that window where they were infected. Basically, the vaccine hadn’t kicked in yet, and so they were able to get infected and get sick in that specific time frame. +

+

+Can people get Covid-19 after receiving both doses of the vaccine? +

+

+Yes. There were a couple of people that, I think, were reported to have received the vaccine to have come down with Covid-19 after getting the second dose. Those will have to be investigated further; that’s why we don’t say this vaccine is 100 percent effective. Ninety-five percent effective is still very high. But it also means that not every single person who gets a vaccine is ultimately going to have protection, which means we still have to take some precautions even after getting vaccinated. +

+

+What do we know about long-term health effects of the Covid-19 vaccine? +

+

+We’re still learning about them. Generally, we would expect most complications with vaccines to happen shortly after you get the vaccine. Even though we’re only getting the results of the phase 3 clinical trials in the past few weeks, you know, we’ve had phase 1 and phase 2 trial results for several months. So, we know for the most part that most people don’t really have a severe reaction to this. +

+

+The main side effects after getting the vaccine are going to be muscle pain, weakness, some redness and soreness, and a mild fever. Those are the most common complaints. We don’t really have good long-term safety data just simply for the fact that this virus and this vaccine [have] not been around very long. In order to get the emergency use authorization, Pfizer had to provide two months of safety data. But they’ve also committed to following their candidates in their phase 3 clinical trial for up to two years, basically actively monitoring them and tracking them. They’re also going to continue paying attention to people in the general population as they receive the vaccine. +

+

+Now, it’s very likely that any risks associated with this are very, very low, because vaccines are drugs that are tested to a very high standard. They go out of their way to make sure that complication rates are very low. Generally, these are some of the safest pharmaceutical drugs that we have ever developed. But again, the risk is not zero. There are some people that may experience some complications, and it’s worth trying to take steps ahead of time to try to minimize them, to see what risk factors lead to complications, and then also helping out the folks that do actually have any kind of trouble with them afterwards. +

+

+How might having a Covid-19 vaccine change behavior in the US? +

+

+These vaccines are very effective against disease, meaning that they will prevent you from getting sick. But we don’t really know how well they prevent infection or transmission. It’s likely that the people who get vaccinated may be able to still spread this virus to other people. And that’s why behavior can’t really change that much from where it is right now. +

+

+[The vaccine is] useful in that we can keep people out of hospitals and from dying or getting seriously ill. But precautions like wearing masks and maintaining social distance, those are all going to be important even after the vaccines start rolling out. Even after you and I get vaccinated, we’re going to have to maintain that until transmission lowers enough to the point that we can start letting our foot off the accelerator here. And so that’s why we need to be really paying attention to this. +

+
+ +
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+The other thing is, with vaccines, you don’t want to necessarily use that as an excuse to engage in risky behavior because, again, it’s 95 percent effective, not 100 percent effective. There’s potential for somebody who’s vaccinated to still get seriously ill, so it’s important to take precautions, even for your own sake. +

+

+Over time, we do expect some behavior change, things like allowing kids to go to school in person or allowing certain kinds of events or gatherings that are urgently needed, certain kinds of, like, academic programs or other things like that. And then allowing some people to go to work, for instance. Those changes will eventually start to happen as we get transmission down and as vaccination rates go up. But both of those things need to happen at the same time, and that’s going to take some time to do. +

+

+If someone’s had Covid-19 before and already has antibodies, should they still get the vaccine? +

+

+The recommendations right now are likely going to be that you still get the vaccine. The reason is that while being naturally infected with the virus gives you some degree of immunity and protection, it’s not necessarily targeted. The vaccines are optimized specifically to neutralize the virus and its infection and how it causes disease, whereas with your own natural infection, you will produce antibodies, but they’re more scattershot. They’ll target some of the parts of the virus that cause infection, but they’ll target other parts that don’t necessarily interfere with its reproduction cycle. So it’s very likely that most people, even if they have gotten sick with this, it would be useful for them to still get vaccinated. +

+

+How is it possible to still spread the coronavirus after someone’s been vaccinated? +

+

+What we’ve seen with the coronavirus in general is that most people don’t get seriously ill. And there’s a number of people that can have the virus and spread it without showing any symptoms at all. That means your immune system doesn’t even mount a response, and the virus doesn’t really do much damage to you. +

+

+It’s likely that even after your body gets coached to fight off this infection, the infection might be so low grade that it doesn’t really do anything. It doesn’t even trigger the alarm bells in your body, but it still allows you to spread the virus to other people. And that low level of infection or transmission still poses a risk. +

+

+Now, there’s some evidence, especially with Moderna’s data that was just put out today, that seems to indicate that their vaccine actually does lower transmission. So it’s very likely we would actually see a dent in transmission by getting this vaccine, but it’s not as steep of a drop as we saw with reductions in disease. You’ll likely have a lower risk of making other people sick, but not as low as the risk of keeping yourself from getting sick. +

+

+Do kids need to get the Covid-19 vaccine? Is it safe for them to get it? +

+

+That’s really hard to say because children were explicitly excluded from these clinical trials. In fact, that was one of the big sources of contention during the meeting last week with the advisers to the Food and Drug Administration. They were looking at trial data, and they said that the youngest people in the trial were 16 years old and there weren’t that many of them. [The advisers] were wondering: “Is this a vaccine that we can approve for everyone over the age of 16, or should we raise that to everyone over the age of 18?” +

+

+They eventually approved language saying everyone over the age of 16. And it’s very likely that it will be safer in younger people. But with an emergency use authorization, you’re balancing risk and reward, because you’re looking at the potential benefit but you’re also looking at any potential harm. +

+

+Now, we know, for instance, that children are much less likely to get severely ill from this virus compared to, say, adults and much older adults. And looking at that risk-reward calculation right now, it seems that it doesn’t really weigh in favor of vaccinating children, [though] that could change in the future, as they do more trials and testing and as we learn more about the disease. But for now, we’re looking mainly at health workers and older adults. +

+

+Is the Covid-19 vaccine going to be something like the flu shot, where we need to get something every year? +

+

+It depends on how fast the virus mutates. What we’ve seen so far is that it tends to be pretty stable in the parts of the virus that we’re most concerned about. That likely means that protection will last for a few years. Our experiences with SARS and MERS show that protection against those viruses also lasts for a few years. But eventually, the virus will change enough, and you’ll have to restart the process. You might need a booster a few years from now if there is still an outbreak or an epidemic. But it’s very likely that once you get the vaccine, you’ll have some room to breathe easy for a while. +

+

+What is most important for people to remember now that this vaccine is out there, and we’re also in this terrible position where the country hit 300,000 Covid-19 deaths? +

+

+The [thing] to remember is that our actions do matter. I use the firebreak analogy. The vaccines are like cutting firebreaks, cutting clearings in a forest so that the fire doesn’t spread. But that really doesn’t do much if there’s already a huge inferno that’s blazing. Our goal right now is to reduce transmission as much as possible so that when a vaccine does roll out, it becomes that much more effective. +

+

+There’s this herd immunity threshold of 80 to 90 percent of people being immune … where the pandemic starts to fizzle out. But we start to see reductions around 30 to 40 percent. And that can happen if we do a good job of controlling transmission. Our actions right now to try to limit the spread of the virus will make it easier and more effective for when a vaccine does start being administered to people who are in the low-risk pools, maybe next spring and maybe into early summer. +

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+You can listen to this full conversation — and all episodes of Today, Explained — wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

+ + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/index.html b/index.html index f2c150a..14bb93c 100644 --- a/index.html +++ b/index.html @@ -13,9 +13,9 @@ Archive | Daily Reports
  • Covid-19

    • Daily Dose

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