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23 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
If you want to know who is an expert on vaccination programs, look for the people focusing on the supply chain side of the new vaccine as opposed to the 70% efficacy that they found in a clinical trial
The truth of the matter is that, while efficacy in clinical trials is important, a better supply chain may make the biggest difference in people actually getting the vaccine in real life
This is even more true when you consider that a cheaper supply chain makes the vaccine cheaper too, and most of the world probably will have trouble affording -80 degree cold storage
Also worth noting that a vaccine that is 70% effective in the real world is still good enough to reach herd immunity so in practice it is probably not the deciding factor

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
25 Nov
I added some very useful context

Tests take a short time to be recorded as cases. Cases take a while to go to hospital and then be recorded. Deaths take weeks to appear in the stats

The deaths reported today represent people who got sick ~3-6 weeks ago 😬 Image
The corollary, of course, is that we won't see deaths attributable to the enormous rise in cases for another few weeks, and that hospitalizations from the record-breaking days of new cases are still coming in
This is all very rough, and since @COVID19Tracking aggregates all the different states there's a lot of variance. Different places report differently!
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
25 Nov
A really fascinating paper looking at contact tracing in England that provides some convincing evidence that testing/tracing reduces infections and deaths

warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econom… Image
The authors used the now-famous Excel spreadsheet stuff-up to perform a quasi-experimental analysis of whether places where no contacts were traced had higher levels of infections

They did ImageImageImage
The estimates imply that, for every case that was not traced, there were an additional 25 cases down the track Image
Read 5 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
25 Nov
In the dissection of the Year That Was COVID-19, one of the most depressing failures will probably be the vast, almost uncountable sums we've spent proving over and over that HCQ doesn't work
Glad that these results are getting published, but it's still astonishing just how much effort we threw behind a single drug despite many early indications that it was a red herring
We should never really have been in a situation where, simply because it was popular, most of the urgently needed research funds (and patients) went to research a single medication
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
24 Nov
If the U.S. maintains current infections (~200k/day) of COVID-19, and assuming about 17% of the country has already been infected, it will be about a year before the country reaches herd immunity

Compare that to vaccine rollout schedules
Calculations:

US pop: ~328mil
17% infected: ~60mil (per serology and @youyanggu)
40% (low) HIT: ~131mil
131-60 = ~71mil
~71mil/200k = 356

Add a few weeks for everyone to be ~immune~, and it's a bit more than a year
Yes, this is assuming the 200k number is reliable, which we know it is not. It is likely that there are instead 400k infections per day, which halves this number. It is also likely that the HIT is 60-70%, which doubles it 🤷‍♂️
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
23 Nov
You have to wonder what the "herd immunity through everyone getting sick" people are saying now that there is likely to be an effective vaccine beginning roll-out within weeks/months
I mean, the entire IDEA of letting everyone get sick was that a vaccine was a distant future that we couldn't rely on

Well, now it appears that we probably can
It would be the height of hypocrisy to not shift your message given that the foundation of the argument has now completely changed
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
22 Nov
At the shops today, so thought I'd take a look at all of the "immune" supplements in the nonsense aisle

They are all so ridiculous, it's amazing
Look at this beauty. Immune support, packed with anti-oxidants!

Except it's just a bit of elderberry, some zinc and vitamin C. Some evidence that this might reduce cold symptoms, but that's about all
Another one which adds a couple of vitamins and some echinacea. Again, can't see how this "supports the immune system to fight illness" unless you've got a vitamin D deficiency
Read 9 tweets

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