Tag: covid-19

-

A Third Vaccine Success – Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

Daniel Katz

Very promising news — and now some of the key questions for 2021 …

What is the Venn between these candidate vaccines?
Hopefully it is not perfectly overlapping so a patient can take one vaccine if another vaccine proves to be ineffective.

Where is the testing regime to allow folks to explore the efficacy at the personal level?
While it is helpful to offer a characterization of the mean-field performance of a vaccine, we cannot expect folks to ‘get back to normal’ unless they have some personal assurance that the vaccine has actually worked for them.

How long does immunity last ?
This is still unknown. 6 months, 1 year, etc. Also, even if the vaccine ‘fails’ or wanes how much does it reduce the severity of COVID-19?

What about Children?
Trials for Children have yet to begin (or have only recently started). While Children appear to have had less issues with COVID-19 (perhaps because of exposure to other coronaviruses, etc.), there is still the question of how well the vaccine will perform on Children.

-

Good Judgment Project – When Will COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Begin ?

Daniel Katz

Over on the Public Dashboard of Good Judgement Project, their aggregated SuperForecasters have been predicting a wide range of geo-political and other events including critical questions associated with COVID-19. A key question is When will enough doses of FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine(s) to inoculate 25 million people be distributed in the United States? Note: For purposes of this prediction — “Compassionate use” and “emergency use” authorizations would count as approval.

-

Visual Epidemic Calculator

Daniel Katz

From the Epidemic Calculator – “The clinical dynamics in this model are an elaboration on SEIR that simulates the disease’s progression at a higher resolution, subdividing I,RI,R into mild (patients who recover without the need for hospitalization), moderate (patients who require hospitalization but survive) and fatal (patients who require hospitalization and do not survive). Each of these variables follows its own trajectory to the final outcome, and the sum of these compartments add up to the values predicted by SEIR. Please refer to the source code for details. Note that we assume, for simplicity, that all fatalities come from hospitals, and that all fatal cases are admitted to hospitals immediately after the infectious period.”