statefan91 said:

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While the allocations are likely increasing, the Winter storm is definitely impacting delivery and administration of doses. It was reported on the local news last night that NC will not be receiving as many doses as previously expected, due to the Winter storms blanketing much of the US. Additionally, in many states, they have had to shutdown all administration sites, due to the storms. We should start to recover in the coming weeks, but I do expect to see some decreases this week in the US tracking. I do believe we are getting to a point where we will see at least 150M doses administered by the end of April.

As to overall supply, Dr. Fauci is signaling that the J&J vaccine supply may not be as high as originally projected. This is why he has moved his timeline for the general public supply to June. What I really do not get is President Biden saying it will be Christmas until we return to normal. Most projections I have seen indicated the US will have administered enough shots to vaccinate 300M people by the end of Summer to early Fall. If this is the case, the US will have administered enough doses to be at the herd immunity threshold. If we see deaths and hospitalizations at the same levels of the flu (or something close to it), I would think most people would expect to be returning to normal.

Personally, based on supply projections, I expect most adults (18+) will be able to get the vaccine by July. The testing trials continue for ages below the age of 18, so I do not know when the vaccines will be available to those age groups. For example, I am 100% certain my son and most of the other college athletes nationwide will be able to have been vaccinated by the June/July timeframe, if not sooner. I expect all college students will be required to have been vaccinated before returning to campuses in the Fall. There will be exceptions for students with health issues and for religious reasons, but for all others, the vaccination guidelines in effect for students in effect now will apply.

I thought this deserved as separate post. A recent article in Nature confirms what I and others have been saying about the Covid-19 virus and its future. In the article, they say the virus is here to stay and is likely to become endemic. I personally believe we will be getting a Covid-19 vaccination for years to come - just as we currently get the flu vaccine yearly.

Read the full article at the following link:

The coronavirus is here to stay - here's what that means

It appears the reports that I posted a little over a month ago were accurate and J&J did have issues with manufacturing of their Covid-19 vaccine. Despite some reports from one of their board members, they will not be able to supply 100M doses until the end of June. If earlier reports I saw are correct, they will be able to only supply less than 10M doses when an EUA authorization is granted (likely end of February).

As far as the impact Winter storms are going to have on vaccinations, here's a recent article from Bloomberg. I do expect vaccinations to fall behind for the rest of this week and begin to return to more normal levels mid to late next week.

Massive Storms Stall U.S. Vaccine Campaign as Clinics Close

RunsWithWolves26 said:

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Not the best news for sure but an extra 10 million doses of the J&J vaccine means an extra 10 million full vaccinations with the one shot. So even though it's not the best news, it's still a positive in my eyes.

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We should all hope for 10M. The last numbers I saw were 6-7M. The big issue is - they were paid a lot of money to have a lot of doses ready at the time the vaccine was approved (commitment was 12M by end of February). Publicly they have been saying one thing, but insiders have said the news was not as good as their public information. To meet the 100M by end of June, they will need to produce close to 1M doses per day between now and end of June. If they can produce 30M by the first of April, they will be on track to meeting their supply commitments. The US needs to get to 3M doses administered per day (this is the real goal) and to do this, they have to get the J&J vaccine approved and manufacturing ramped up.

johntom said:

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I saw yesterday where Biden won't commit to things back to normal this year. I still have a hard time understanding why everyone has to get vaccinated before we get back to normal. If the at risk population is vaccinated and cases with severe reactions plummet (assumption obviously), I'm not sure why we wouldn't get back to normal.

I mentioned this earlier in the thread but this virus is never going away. We have to get the spread and death rate down to an "acceptable" level. If 100 million people are vaccinated by June, why would that not be enough to start opening bars and stadiums?

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One of the things that was not part of the vaccine studies when they went through approval is whether a person could still transmit the virus, even if they have been vaccinated. So, they are being very cautious right now to say everyone should still continue to wear a mask, even if they have been vaccinated, to protect those who have not been vaccinated.

Personally, I think when we get to the end of Summer/early Fall and we have vaccinated 60-70% of the population, it will be very hard to get people to continue to wear masks and social distance. I think if deaths and hospitalizations can be drastically reduced and approach levels we see with the typical flu, the guidelines of wearing masks and social distancing should end.

There is a very good article (Q&A format) I read yesterday with Dr. Michael Mina. He is a Harvard epidemiologist that has some very good ideas and opinions about what should happen going forward. You can read the entire article at the following link:

How Long Can Covid Cases Keep Plummeting?

There is a lot more on vaccinations, vaccine efficacy, mutations, etc that are in the article, which is why everyone should try to read it. Some key quotes from the article:

On Seasonality:
"my personal feeling is we are seeing the benefits of seasonality hit, which I know some of my colleagues don't necessarily agree with. But it's not uncommon for coronaviruses to essentially start dropping around now. Most of the known coronaviruses have something on the order of a three-month window where they're really infectious when they're really transmitting."

On Vaccinating Healthcare Workers before the more vulnerable populations:
"Because of the extremely medical-centric view of prioritizing doctors and health staff above everyone else especially considering the mantra for so long has been that doctors don't even need to get tested regularly, PPE is working, don't worry about it. Then the moment the vaccine comes out, it's like doctors are at extremely high risk and need to get vaccinated immediately. We spent weeks vaccinating health-care workers we could've spent vaccinating the most vulnerable. "

On Policy to End Lockdowns:
"I still to this day have not heard a goal for testing and for vaccination. More broadly, are we trying to get COVID to zero or are we trying to get COVID to a point where it's palatable for society, it's not overburdening the hospitals, and it's essentially looking like flu? Those are really different things. If it's to get it to zero, we're in for a really long haul."

On What Should Be Policy to End Lockdowns:
"And I don't think zero is what we should be aiming for. It's really easy to just continue being afraid, but at some point we need to take a step back and say, "Okay, where are we now, and where are we going?" If the goal is just to stop the vast majority of hospitalizations, that might not take very long. At that point, do we keep society shut down just to stop a small number of hospitalizations and deaths?"

On Use of Rapid Testing to Stop Future Lockdowns:
"But rapid testing is another. I've been so angry at people like Mike Osterholm saying the only approach is to lock everything down. We have other solutions, we just haven't used them. We could've at least tried, back in May, to get these rapid tests out. We didn't do it in May. We didn't do it in August, November, December. We still haven't done it, but it is one of the only tools that could have actually allowed us to open up safely and gather safely. People talk about COVID fatigue, but then they say, yeah, there's COVID fatigue, but we need to lock down anyway, because we need to control the virus."

statefan91 said:

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I don't have a problem with them vaccinating HCWs and 75+ in first groups and then 65+ in second groups like NC did. PPE does work for the most part, but I got COVID from a friend who is a pediatrician and she is in PPE when meeting patients in their office. It's not fool proof and I would rather they be protected and able to minimize transmission amongst other HCWs and ensure that there aren't staffing issues that cause COVID to become a bigger problem if things spike.

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I do not agree with him totally, but I do agree there were people classified as essential healthcare workers that got the vaccine, when it could have gone to people at much higher risk. You have to read the full article to understand what he means. This was also not the main point of the article, so I am not going to spend any more time debating it.

Please make sure you read the full article - it is very detailed and touches on a lot of very key topics. Fundamentally, we all have to recognize a couple of things:

1. The virus is not going away for many, many years (may never go away).
2. Getting to zero or close to zero with regards to infections, hospitalizations, and deaths should not be the end goal. If it is, we are screwed as a society.
3. We need to establish right now what the goal is and make it publicly known now - so it can be debated and settled. I am not sure why this is not a topic of discussion by the new administration and will only lead to further anger on the part of people who are fatigued and tired of the disruption to their lives.
4. The vaccines may not be enough to stop the virus, long term. Mutations are a very real threat and the researchers and government are acting like we have more time to develop enhancements to the current vaccines. We do not have time to waste.
4. We are wasting valuable time to put in place measures now (ie., rapid testing) that can be used when the virus flares back up. If we do not make those plans now, we could be faced with more lockdowns in the future.
5. We are not doing an adequate job to prepare for the next virus that could be just as deadly, if not more, than what we are dealing with now.

PackMom said:

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My husband told me he heard something on the radio about how people of our age group (65+) would likely be wearing masks in public for the rest of our lives.

Between vaccinations and "covid fatigue," it won't surprise me if a lot of people quit wearing masks once the weather gets hot.

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Thanks. This is exactly my point. We do not have a stated policy for ending lockdowns, so talking heads on the radio and television are making things up to go along with what they think the policy should be. If the policy is close to zero infections, deaths, and hospitalizations, then wearing a mask all the time in public fits this policy. If the policy is to keep those things in a similar range to yearly flu, then a policy of always wearing a mask makes little sense.

statefan91 said:

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Yeah, my main interest is how we transition from locking things down for 2 weeks at a time when someone gets a case of COVID vs. treating it similar to flu. If school goes back in the fall but they still shut down for 2 weeks when there's a case, it's going to be a really rough time getting back to normal.

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I agree. There have to be reasonable policies that are similar to what we use today. For example, when schools have cases of the flu, they do not shutdown for two weeks and this should be the same for Covid going forward. The former head of the CDC was interviewed a couple of weeks ago about Covid and schools. He said when Covid first hit last Spring, they expected transmission from child-to-child and child-to-adult would be very similar to how the flu is transmitted and actually, this seems to have been a wrong assumption. He said schools were shutdown at that time, since we did not know how transmission would take place. He said the evidence we have now is that schools should not have been closed, since they are not a transmission vector that is similar to the flu and it was the wrong decision.

Dr. Ohl (an infectious disease doctor from Wake Forest Baptist Hospital that I follow and have quoted in the past) has said we should not be closing down entire schools when there are a few cases of Covid-19. He said we should treat it like we have done infectious diseases in the past and he highlighted whopping cough. He said the schools have very good systems already in place for dealing with these types of cases and the same protocols should be used for Covid-19 cases.

The practice of shutting down entire schools for a few cases should not be the policy. It should be to isolate and quarantine the sick kids, test the people they came in contact with and isolate them if infected and let the rest of the school remain open. Yes, it is scary, but at some point we have to find a way to keep kids in school. What we (as a society) are doing to our kids now can not be the policy long term. So much damage is being done to the kids today and some of it will not be reversible.

AlleyPack said:

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PackMom said:

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My husband told me he heard something on the radio about how people of our age group (65+) would likely be wearing masks in public for the rest of our lives.

Between vaccinations and "covid fatigue," it won't surprise me if a lot of people quit wearing masks once the weather gets hot.

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If the mask-wearing is the main reason the flu has been cut wayyy down this year, then honestly I have no problem wearing a mask in public places like the grocery store (and in my job, which is high-personal-contact) during the winter months.
Getting the flu sucks.

Basically, I think some people may simply CHOOSE to wear masks at times in future years. Heck, that's been the partial norm in places like Japan for quite awhile now.

(and I'm not trying to make any sort of "policy statements/predictions" at all -- just thinking out loud)

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Correct. People who are "sick" wear masks in Japan and some other Asian countries. For many years, I traveled to Japan a couple of times a year, many times in the Winter months when infections were higher. People who were sick wore masks to work, on the train, and everywhere else they went in public. It was helpful, since it was a clear signal of who to avoid in public. People who are healthy and not sick do not wear masks (expect for this most recent outbreak).

Civilized said:

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metcalfmafia said:

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Hell yeah!!

I can taste that cold beer with some peanuts at the Doak already!!

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Hopefully it does open up some fan options for the smaller stadiums, like Doak and the other baseball stadiums. I do believe Duke will allow fans, even if the governor relaxes fan restrictions. They have not allowed fans, including parents, at sporting events all year. Even though I am not able to attend games as a sports photographer (been shutdown since the men's ACC basketball tournament last year), I would like to go to some games as a fan.

I think a lot of the push to relax attendance restrictions is being driven by the high school football parents who are strongly urging the Governor to allow more than 100 fans at high school football games. We went through the same thing during the early days of the college football season (remember the 50 person limit for the first couple of weeks). I really hope the parents are successful and the governor relaxes the numbers so parents and a limited number of fans can attend high school games.