Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Virus’s rampage unrelenting
Average daily toll hits 2,200
Deaths from covid-19 in the U.S. have soared to more than 2,200 a day on average, matching the peak reached in April, and cases per day have eclipsed 200,000 on average for the first time on record.
Virtually every state is reporting surges just as a vaccine appears days away from getting the go-ahead in the U.S.
“What we do now literally will be a matter of life and death for many of our citizens,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Tuesday as he extended restrictions on businesses and social gatherings, including a ban on indoor dining and drinking at restaurants and bars.
While the impending arrival of the vaccine is reason for hope, he said, “at the moment, we have to face reality, and the reality
is that we are suffering a very dire situation with the pandemic.”
Britain on Tuesday started dispensing the Pfizer vaccine, becoming the first country in the West to begin mass vaccinations.
The first 800,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for Britain were transported in recent days from a manufacturing plant in Belgium to government warehouses in Britain and then to hospitals.
Fifty hospitals will be administering the shots until the government can refine a plan for delivering them at nursing homes and doctor’s offices. The vaccine must be transported at South Polelike temperatures before it can be stored for five days in a normal refrigerator, Pfizer has said. First to receive the vaccine will be doctors and nurses, certain people aged 80 and over, and nursing-home workers.
Some doctors and nurses have received invitations in recent days to sign up for appointments, with the first shots intended for those at the highest risk of severe illness. The government has indicated that people aged 80 and older who already have visits with doctors scheduled for this week, or who are being discharged from certain hospitals, also will be among the first to receive shots.
Nursing-home residents, who were supposed to be the government’s top priority, will be vaccinated in the coming weeks, once health officials start distributing doses beyond hospitals.
Hundreds of people are still dying in Britain each day from the virus, and the country has made allowances for travel over the Christmas period that scientists fear will seed another uptick in infections.
“It is amazing to see the vaccine, but we can’t afford to relax now,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said Tuesday morning as he visited a London hospital.
On Thursday, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel is widely expected to authorize emergency use of Pfizer’s covid-19 vaccine, and shots could begin almost immediately after that.
‘WE MESSED UP’
Meanwhile, North Carolina’s governor imposed a 10 p.m. curfew, and authorities in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley sent a mass cellphone text alert Tuesday telling millions about the rapid spread of the virus and urging them to abide by the state’s stay-at-home orders.
The virus is blamed for more than 285,000 deaths and 15 million confirmed infections in the United States.
Many Americans disregarded warnings not to travel over Thanksgiving and have ignored other safety precautions. On Saturday night, police in Southern California arrested nearly 160 people, many of them not wearing masks, at a house party in Palmdale that was held without the homeowner’s knowledge.
Before his death Friday from complications of covid-19, 78-year-old former Alabama state Sen. Larry Dixon asked his wife from his hospital bed to relay a warning. “Sweetheart, we messed up. We just dropped our guard. … We’ve got to tell people this is real,” his friend Dr. David Thrasher, a pulmonologist, quoted him as saying.
Although Dixon had been conscientious about masks and social distancing, he met up with friends at a restaurant for what they called a “prayer meeting,” and three of them fell ill, Thrasher said.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, offered a rebuke of the way President Donald Trump and others in the administration have downplayed the disease and undercut scientists.
“Messages need to be critically consistent,” Birx said Tuesday at a Wall Street Journal conference of CEOs. “I think we need to be much more consistent about addressing the myths that are out there — that covid doesn’t really exist, or that the fatalities somehow are made up, or the hospitalizations are for other diseases, not covid, that masks actually hurt you.”
Any vaccination campaign will take many months, and U.S. health experts are warning of a continuing surge of infections in the coming weeks as people gather for the holidays.
California officials painted a dire picture as more than 22,000 residents test positive for the coronavirus each day, with about 12% inevitably showing up at hospitals in two to three weeks. They fear the spike could soon overwhelm intensive-care units. Southern California’s Riverside University Health System Medical Center went so far as to open an ICU in a storage room.
For the sixth day in a row and 11 of the past 12 days, North Carolina hit new highs in the number of people in the hospital with covid-19. The patient count has doubled over the past month to nearly 2,400.
In Georgia, the number of confirmed or suspected coronavirus infections has soared more than 70% in the past week, and hospitals are sounding alarms about their ability to absorb new covid-19 patients.
The state is averaging more than 5,000 confirmed or suspected cases per day. Even then, Georgia ranks only 44th among the states for the most new cases per capita in the past 14 days because infections are spreading so rapidly everywhere else.
More than 2,500 covid-19 patients were hospitalized Monday statewide. That’s below the summer peak of 3,200 but more than double the most recent low point in mid-October.
“We are effectively reversing the gains we made after the summer surge,” said Amber Schmidtke, an epidemiologist who does a daily analysis of Georgia’s covid-19 numbers.
ROBUST PROTECTON
The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration.
The finding is one of several significant new results featured in the briefing materials, which include more than 100 pages of data analyses from the agency and from Pfizer. Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95% after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier.
What’s more, the vaccine worked well regardless of a volunteer’s race, weight or age. While the trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects.
“This is what an A-plus report card looks like for a vaccine,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.
New coronavirus cases quickly tapered off in the vaccinated group of volunteers about 10 days after the first dose, according to one graph in the briefing materials. In the placebo group, cases kept steadily increasing.
The vaccine’s swift impact could benefit not just the people who get it but the country’s strained hospitals, curbing the flow of new patients into intensive-care units.
Despite the early protection afforded by the first dose, it’s unclear how long that protection would last on its own, underscoring the importance of the second dose. Previous studies have found that the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine gives the immune system a major, longterm boost, an effect seen in many other vaccines.
The efficacy of the vaccine after the first dose is about 52%, according to Dr. William Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development. After the second dose, that rises to about 95%.
“Two doses of vaccine provide maximum protection,” he said.
Separately, scientists at AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford on Tuesday became the first vaccine developers to publish their full data in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, confirming earlier claims that the vaccine is 70% effective overall.
The study results, published in the British medical journal Lancet, answered many questions — but not all — about the AstraZeneca vaccine.
It remains uncertain how well the vaccine works in those older than 55, a crucial group because most serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths from covid-19 occur among the oldest patients.
Researchers also are still studying which dose regimen can produce the greatest protection.
Still, the results show a safe, well-tolerated and effective vaccine, and one that is cheaper — at $2 or $3 a dose — and easier to manufacture, transport and store than its competitors, wrote Maria Deloria Knoll of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a commentary accompanying the article in Lancet.
The researchers said they are now submitting their data to regulators for approval to deploy the vaccine in mass immunization campaigns in Brazil, Britain, India, countries in Europe and other places.
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines require special handling and must be kept on dry ice or in high-end freezers.
The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, however, can be stored long term at ordinary refrigerator temperatures, which could ease its distribution throughout the world.