BREAKING—Victoria🇦🇺 extends lockdown. Worse, Chief health officer Brett Sutton says cases now infected in ways “not seen before”. 📌One person infected at an indoor space “2 hours after infectious case had left” &📌another case in outdoor dining.🧵#COVID19
news.com.au/national/victo…
2) “(It) was therefore a substantial period of time but they had left two hours before the next exposed individual came in who has become a case.”
“That’s in the kind of measles category of infectiousness.” ⚠️
3) “It may be on surfaces but it could absolutely be through airborne transmission as well because of that indoor setting.”
4) Professor Sutton said there was another case where the virus had showed up “in places where normally it would be likely”.

“So the Brighton Beach Hotel, that was an outdoor dining setting, well ventilated, you wouldn’t expect transmission to occur,” he said. 👀
5) “We still had it as an exposure site, we still informed people to test and isolate until returning a negative, but in fact all of those people will need to be in quarantine because transmission has occurred there…”
6) “That’s not something that we routinely see and we didn’t routinely see it in 2020, but we have to bear in mind that all the variants of concern now are really a step up to some degree.
7) “This variant is not the most infectious, but it is more infectious than anything we saw in the beginning and middle of 2020, so we have to bear that in mind.”
8) He said at least one in 10 current cases in the 60-case cluster “caught this virus in those casual contact settings” outside the workplace or home.

➡️Victorian authorities say people are becoming infected with covid after just “brushing past” strangers with the virus.
9) Testing Commander said at least 4 of the state’s 54 locally transmitted cases have come from “fleeting” contact...
“What we’re seeing now is people are brushing past each other in a small shop, they are going to a display home, they are looking at photos in a shop”
10) Victoria is having many #B16172 variant cases. This “more airborne” phenomenon is also seen in Vietnam recently, in which new sister variants “spread quickly by air”. See thread of the new variant identified by Vietnam 🇻🇳 Health Ministry.
11) While not surprising for indoor, the outdoor transmission in outdoor dining setting is intriguing. But we know the virus can stay afloat for many hours. Many aerosol study indicates that coronavirus is persistent and stable for many hours. #COVID19
12) It is high time for world leaders and every minister of health and hospital director to now demand premium PPEs and advanced airborne precautions for all healthcare workers. The new virus variants are more contagious than ever. And #COVIDisAirborne damnit.
13) This statement from the Acting Premier of Victoria is sobering… not just 1 in 10 cases caught #COVID19 from a stranger, but that “brushing against each other” & “being in the same time for mere moments” have led to infections! That’s damn serious.

premier.vic.gov.au/statement-acti…
14) As I’ve said before, “Until we recognise that #COVID19 is airborne we are setting ourselves up for repeated failure”
15) VENTILATION is key. Both ventilation and masks needed to reduce risk indoors. But most buildings simply not ventilated well enough.

16) Update, the outdoor dining case at the Brighton Beach Hotel has now been declared a false positive. Which makes more sense.

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More from @DrEricDing

3 Jun
Vaccine efficacy of Pfizer-BioNTech in Denmark 🇩🇰 for >=7 days after 2 doses:

📍53% in Long Term Care Facilities
📍86% in >=65 years needing homecare
📍77% in >=85 years old
📍80% in frontline healthcare workers
📍73% with #COVID19 high risk factors.
medrxiv.org/content/10.110… Image
2) For hospitalization admissions overall, 93% efficacy with 2 doses. But 75% efficacy for hospital admissions among those living in long term care facilities. Image
3) For #COVID19 mortality, 94% efficacy with 2 doses after 7 days. For long term care facilities residents, 89% efficacy against covid mortality. 97% for >=65 needing homecare.

Also interesting 49% efficacy against all-cause mortality! Image
Read 4 tweets
3 Jun
CELL-to-CELL transmission that avoids antibodies—a new study shows that once cells are #SARSCoV2 infected, they can infect other cells in ways which are very difficult to inhibit with antibodies. Video shows how virus can move between cells. HT @sigallab.
2) So @sigallab wanted to text if antibodies against #SARSCoV2 can neutralize the virus.

Top row, with virus infection *not via cell to cell*, the more antibodies (left), the less virus leftover.

Bottom row: in cell to cell infection, antibodies made zero difference! 👀
3) The implication? Once the infection sets in, the virus can keep proliferating and transmitting cell to cell, avoiding the blood stream or wherever antibodies can access and directly neutralize the virus. #SARSCoV2 is a tricky beast.
Read 5 tweets
2 Jun
📍STUNNING-Brazil’s @jairbolsonaro apparently intended to lead 🇧🇷 to herd immunity by natural infection, **whatever the consequences**. That means (w/ 1% IFR, 70% herd threshold) by definition he planned for >1.4 mil deaths!

That was the plan!🧵 #COVID19
nytimes.com/2021/05/27/opi…
2) “Here is one example. In March 2020, a social media campaign called “Brazil Can’t Stop” was launched by [Bolsonaro’s] communications unit. Urging people not to change their routines, the campaign claimed “coronavirus deaths among adults & young people are rare.”
3) “The heavily criticized campaign was eventually banned by a federal judge and largely forgotten.
Then the plot thickened. Brazil’s former communications director, Fabio Wajngarten, told the inquiry that he didn’t know “for sure” who had been responsible for the campaign…
Read 23 tweets
1 Jun
Agonizing decisions for pregnant moms Brazil 🇧🇷 maternity wards as #COVID19 is killing hundreds of moms and babies—no exaggeration. “Remove baby too early and you risk them dying outside the womb, remove them too late & they die from a lack of oxygen.”😢🧵
wsj.com/articles/covid…
2) “doctors forced to deliver her baby son who was pressing up against her disease-ridden lungs.
It was too late. Ms. Souza, an otherwise healthy 30-year-old, died three weeks after the caesarean section.”
3) “She didn’t get to hold her newborn, who was whisked away for fear she would infect him, or say goodbye to her 4-year-old son.
“She was so young, I can’t make sense of it,” said her husband. “Our sons will have to grow up without the affection and protection of a mother.”
Read 10 tweets
31 May
KIDS TRANSMIT, damnit.

All those who said— “Kids are practically immune; Kids are “already basically a vaccinated adult”—are dead wrong.

Kids are just as likely to transmit as adults and daycare staff, even the youngest kids, with #B117 variant. Pretty solid study ⬇️. #COVID19
2) Another strong study of 3 million people in Denmark found that the more kids in a household, the higher the risk of #COVID19 in adults. And the trend seems clearly a linear trend for more kids, more risk. Another study supporting kids transmission.
3) And like the study described above by @DrZoeHyde, the Danish study found both older kids and young kids increasing risks similarly.
Read 4 tweets
31 May
💡8 BILLION DOSES IN ONE YEAR—it is possible! Here is how to globally produce over 8 billion mRNA #COVID19 vaccine doses by May 2022–enough to cover 80% of 🌍—for $36.6 billion.

➡️8 bil doses for just $4.58 per dose 👀

@Maybarduk @ZoltanKis85 @zainrizvi citizen.org/article/how-to…
2) “First, we describe the production process for mRNA vaccines, noting in particular the significant advantages of cell-free production. Crucially, mRNA production facilities can be smaller, cheaper, and faster to establish….”
3) “Many more manufacturing facilities can also be retrofitted to produce mRNA vaccines, compared to other kinds of vaccines, given both the small scale and “closed” nature of the process.
Read 6 tweets

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