#but even without that. with the vaccines not effective for newer variants | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

daniloqp · 3 years

Text

Olympics bar fans, Pfizer Eyes Boosters and more news about the coronavirus

https://theministerofcapitalism.com/blog/olympics-bar-fans-pfizer-eyes-boosters-and-more-news-about-the-coronavirus/

The Olympic bars viewers, the Delta variant continues to expand and Pfizer plans amplifiers and third doses. Here’s what you need to know:

Would you like to receive this weekly summary and other news about coronavirus? Sign up here!

Headlines

Tokyo Olympics ban spectator while other countries navigate the return of face-to-face events

Yesterday, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced that there will be no spectators in person the upcoming Tokyo Olympics due to the increase in Covid-19 cases. A new state of emergency will take effect in Tokyo on Monday and will last until August 22nd. The news is the reversal of an announcement a few weeks ago, when the International Olympic Committee said it would allow a small number of local fans to attend. the Games in person. Vaccination rates in Japan remain low compared to other countries such as the United States and Britain.

Meanwhile, as vaccinations continue to increase in other parts of the world, some countries are navigating the return of large face-to-face events, though not without some hiccups. Singapore has said yes allow larger meetings for people who are fully vaccinated when more than half of their population has been shot at the end of this month. In the US, concert venues fill up once more. And fans have flocked across England to watch the European Championship football tournament, although researchers think this could be linked to a sudden rise in cases.

The Delta variant causes an increase in cases in the US and around the world

As of this week, the Delta variant is officially the dominant strain of coronavirus circulating in the US. While current vaccines remain effective against mutation, unvaccinated Americans run a significant risk. Hospitalizations and new cases are over, especially in areas of the country where vaccination rates have remained relatively low. More than 99% of Americans who died of the disease in June were not vaccinated. All this happens as people are traveling more freely this summer, and other diseases overturned by pandemic prevention measures are able to return to their return.

The Delta variant continues to cause problems worldwide as well. South Korea, where the virus was thought to be largely controlled, is increase in social distancing measures in Seoul, as it faces what could be the worst wave the country has ever seen. And the WHO said yesterday that Africa is alive too its worst increase in some cases, with cases increasing in more than 16 countries on the continent.

Drug manufacturers investigate boosters and third doses amid new research on vaccine effectiveness

Pfizer recently announced that it intends to do so seek emergency permission from the FDA in August for a third dose of the vaccine to boost immunity, especially amid rising Delta variant. The pharmacist said the first data from his booster study indicate that antibody levels jump significantly after a third dose. That said, even if Pfizer is granted FDA approval, it will be up to public health authorities to determine if reinforcement is needed when many have not yet obtained the initial doses of the shot. Pfizer and BioNTech are also developing a reinforcement feature specifically points to the Delta variant.

Researchers are working hard to understand the new strain, as well as what continued mutations could mean for immunity. New research published this week found that fully vaccinated people are well protected against the Delta variant, but that only receiving one vaccine of the two doses offers little protection, another reminder of the importance of receiving the full course of vaccination.

Daily distraction

Amazon may be newer in the streaming game, but it follows one Hollywood Millennium Game Book.

Something to read

More than 20 percent of trans women have been imprisoned at some point in their lives, almost all according to the sex they were assigned at birth. In order for these women to be able to access the medical care they need, they must undergo evaluations with mental health providers. Know the a psychiatrist at the center of it all, whose answer is almost always “No”.

Sanity Check

There is nothing like a cold beer on a warm night. This summer, why not give it a try? crafting your own?

A question

How did the pandemic change sleep habits?

When many workers did not travel to the office and students did not go to face-to-face class, many people found themselves sleeping later and longer. For researchers looking at sleep, this provided an opportunity for real-time study and showed that work schedules often make people sleep less and increase earlier than they would if they listened to their body. Now, as more and more people return to work and school in person, some experts say that this new knowledge about how to sleep and wake people should inform schedules in the future.

Bigger cable stories

Source link

0 notes

jannas-world · 3 years

Text

COVID 19 vaccination roll out

COVID 19 outbreak pandemic has a great impact on peoples lives. Global and national economies are declining, interacting and the ways of work have been change, and Governments around the world implemented strict protocols to prevent the spread of the virus. Also this pandemic claimed millions of lives globally.

Fortunately, at the start of 2021, several vaccines were granted emergency clearance and began rolling out in countries all over the world. COVID-19 vaccine is now essential as a way to exit this stage of the pandemic and its is the way to restore the world to its normal status. Currently, a total of seven COVID-19 vaccines available across three platforms have been approved and are being rolled out across the globe. However some doubt the vaccines effectiveness. According to WHO "Research has demonstrated that the Moderna and the mRNA-based Pfizer vaccines are 94-95% effective, and these figures have proven true even in trials studying those at high risk and the elderly." This means that "The 95% effectiveness actually means that people with the vaccine have a 95% lower risk of COVID-19. " But sadly one challenge has been discussed it is the offering of the vaccine to those who need it the most. Well off countries and regions are more likely to gain more access for the vaccine than those who are in poorer communities that are high risk. Wealth should not establish access. Those people that are at high risk and the elderly should be vaccinated first than those less vulnerable. Major production efforts are needed to ensure that needs are met. Although the vaccine is successful, its effectiveness would be harmed if enough doses are not created in a timely manner. Luckily, unlike many other vaccines, COVID-19 vaccinations have not been underfunded, and this funding seems to be continuing to support the need for improved vaccines that cover the newer COVID-19 variants.

Even if the vaccines are rolled out people are still hesitant to get a shot. One major challenge of the success of COVID 19 vaccination is a negative public opinion about the vaccine. Because people are afraid about the side effects of the vaccine and they don't have the assurance that will make them feel at ease. But this problem can be solved by informing the public about the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination and being open about the vaccine's production as well as the occurrence of possible side effects. People's confidence in the decision to give vaccines is built through education, and without it, the world will be unable to solve the pandemic and return to "normal" life. Thats why if we want to achive and go back to the normal state we should be mindful and educated enough about the vaccine. Since vaccinations are still on going and since the WHO cannot allocate all the people around the globe at the same time. We should still follow safety protocols for us to help prevent the spread of the virus and so that we will not be harmed.

0 notes

orbemnews · 3 years

Link

A Virus Variant by Any Other Name … Please 20H/501Y.V2. VOC 202012/02. B.1.351. Those were the charming names scientists proposed for a new variant of the coronavirus that was identified in South Africa. The convoluted strings of letters, numbers and dots are deeply meaningful for the scientists who devised them, but how was anyone else supposed to keep them straight? Even the easiest to remember, B.1.351, refers to an entirely different lineage of the virus if a single dot is missed or misplaced. The naming conventions for viruses were fine as long as variants remained esoteric topics of research. But they are now the source of anxiety for billions of people. They need names that roll off the tongue, without stigmatizing the people or places associated with them. “What’s challenging is coming up with names that are distinct, that are informative, that don’t involve geographic references and that are kind of pronounceable and memorable,” said Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland. “It sounds kind of simple, but it’s actually a really big ask to try and convey all of this information.” The solution, she and other experts said, is to come up with a single system for everyone to use but to link it to the more technical ones scientists rely on. The World Health Organization has convened a working group of a few dozen experts to devise a straightforward and scalable way to do this. “This new system will assign variants of concern a name that is easy to pronounce and recall and will also minimize unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people,” the W.H.O. said in a statement. “The proposal for this mechanism is currently undergoing internal and external partner review before finalization.” The W.H.O.’s leading candidate so far, according to two members of the working group, is disarmingly simple: numbering the variants in the order in which they were identified — V1, V2, V3 and so on. “There are thousands and thousands of variants that exist, and we need some way to label them,” said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and a member of the working group. Naming diseases was not always so complicated. Syphilis, for example, is drawn from a 1530 poem in which a shepherd, Syphilus, is cursed by the god Apollo. But the compound microscope, invented around 1600, opened up a hidden world of microbes, allowing scientists to start naming them after their shapes, said Richard Barnett, a historian of science in Britain. Still, racism and imperialism infiltrated disease names. In the 1800s, as cholera spread from the Indian subcontinent to Europe, British newspapers began calling it “Indian cholera,” depicting the disease as a figure in a turban and robes. “Naming can very often reflect and extend a stigma,” Dr. Barnett said. In 2015, the W.H.O. issued best practices for naming diseases: avoiding geographic locations or people’s names, species of animal or food, and terms that incite undue fear, like “fatal” and “epidemic.” Scientists rely on at least three competing systems of nomenclature — Gisaid, Pango and Nextstrain — each of which makes sense in its own world. Updated March 2, 2021, 10:34 a.m. ET “You can’t track something you can’t name,” said Oliver Pybus, an Oxford evolutionary biologist who helped design the Pango system. Scientists name variants when changes in the genome coincide with new outbreaks, but they draw attention to them only if there is a change in their behavior — if they transmit more easily, for instance (B.1.1.7, the variant first seen in Britain), or if they at least partly sidestep the immune response (B.1.351, the variant detected in South Africa). Encoded in the jumbled letters and digits are clues about the variant’s ancestry: The “B.1,” for instance, denotes that those variants are related to the outbreak in Italy last spring. (Once the hierarchy of variants becomes too deep to accommodate another number and dot, newer ones are given the next letter available alphabetically.) But when scientists announced that a variant called B.1.315 — two digits removed from the variant first seen in South Africa — was spreading in the United States, South Africa’s health minister “got quite confused” between that and B.1.351, said Tulio de Oliveira, a geneticist at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in Durban and a member of the W.H.O.’s working group. “We have to come up with a system that not only evolutionary biologists can understand,” he said. With no easy alternatives at hand, people have resorted to calling B.1.351 “the South African variant.” But Dr. de Oliveira pleaded with his colleagues to avoid the term. (Look no further than the origins of this very virus: Calling it the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus” fed into xenophobia and aggression against people of East Asian origin all over the world.) The potential harms are grave enough to have dissuaded some countries from coming forward when a new pathogen is detected within their borders. Geographical names also quickly become obsolete: B.1.351 is in 48 countries now, so calling it the South African variant is absurd, Dr. de Oliveira added. And the practice could distort science. It is not entirely clear that the variant arose in South Africa: It was identified there in large part thanks to the diligence of South African scientists, but branding it as that country’s variant could mislead other researchers into overlooking its possible path into South Africa from another country that was sequencing fewer coronavirus genomes. Over the past few weeks, proposing a new system has become something of a spectator sport. A few of the suggestions for name inspiration: hurricanes, Greek letters, birds, other animal names like red squirrel or aardvark, and local monsters. Áine O’Toole, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh who is part of the Pango team, suggested colors to indicate how different constellations of mutations were related. “You could end up with dusty pink or magenta or fuchsia,” she said. Sometimes, identifying a new variant by its characteristic mutation can be enough, especially when the mutations gain whimsical names. Last spring, Ms. O’Toole and her collaborators began calling D614G, one of the earliest known mutations, “Doug.” “We’d sort of not had a huge amount of human interaction,” she said. “This was our idea of humor in lockdown No. 1.” Other nicknames followed: “Nelly” for N501Y, a common thread in many new variants of concern, and “Eeek” for E484K, a mutation thought to make the virus less susceptible to vaccines. But Eeek has emerged in multiple variants worldwide simultaneously, underscoring the need for variants to have distinct names. The numbering system the W.H.O. is considering is straightforward. But any new names will have to overcome the ease and simplicity of geographic labels for the general public. And scientists will need to strike a balance between labeling a variant quickly enough to forestall geographical names and cautiously enough that they do not wind up giving names to insignificant variants. “What I don’t want is a system where we have this long list of variants that all have W.H.O. names, but really only three of them are important and the other 17 are not important,” Dr. Bedford said. Whatever the final system is, it also will need to be accepted by different groups of scientists as well as the general public. “Unless one really does become the kind of lingua franca, that will make things more confusing,” Dr. Hodcroft said. “If you don’t come up with something that people can say and type easily, and remember easily, they will just go back to using the geographic name.” Source link Orbem News #Variant #Virus

0 notes