Happy New Year!
I have a much more substantial post on the coming of the industrial android (human-ish shaped robots that can navigate human architecture and use human tools), but in the mean time, I wanted to highlight a hopeful fact. We’re vaccinating people really quickly.
Israel is currently the stand out performer, having administered the first dose of the vaccine to close to 10% of its population in ten days, but the absolute numbers are impressive everywhere. 2.79 million Americans have been vaccinated up to 30 December. Close to a million brits.
Our World In Data’s COVID-19 Vaccination page is an enormously useful resource, and I’d recommend everyone to give it a browse if they want to be a little more hopeful.
Of course the nature of COVID vaccines delay the impact of these vaccinations somewhat - vaccines usually contain two doses administered several weeks apart (21 days for the Pfzier vaccine, 28 days for the Oxford-AstraZenneca vaccine and the Moderna vaccine), with the vaccine becoming effective soon but not immediately after the second dose (reaching 90% efficacy a week after the second dose for the Pfzier vaccine). So while the impact of these December vaccinations won’t begin to be felt until mid january, the impact will become noticable very quickly from that point.
The other hopeful thing about COVID vaccinations is that they have extremely high efficacy across all age groups, especially compared to flu vaccines, which usually have much lower efficacy ratings - I refer you to this rather comprehensive US CDC article for a much more comprehensive take on this, but the short of it is that flu vaccine efficacies are highly variable, being as high as 91% for children if the vaccine is well matched, and as low as 36% for older people if it’s not.
The fact that both the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines have reported efficacies of 94-95%, and the Oxford-AstraZenneca vaccine has reported a efficacy of around 90% then is really good news, especially when considered alongside the fact that COVID-19 mutates a lot slower than seasonal flu:
But sequencing data suggest that coronaviruses change more slowly than most other RNA viruses, probably because of a ‘proofreading’ enzyme that corrects potentially fatal copying mistakes. A typical SARS-CoV-2 virus accumulates only two single-letter mutations per month in its genome — a rate of change about half that of influenza and one-quarter that of HIV, says Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Other genome data have emphasized this stability — more than 90,000 isolates have been sequenced and made public (see www.gisaid.org). Two SARS-CoV-2 viruses collected from anywhere in the world differ by an average of just 10 RNA letters out of 29,903, says Lucy Van Dorp, a computational geneticist at University College London, who is tracking the differences for signs that they confer an evolutionary advantage.
Between those two factors, the potential for us to pursue national elimination strategies based off mass vaccination is a lot better than it is for flu, where the large number of strains, high rate of mutation and low vaccine effectiveness makes it pretty much impossible to eliminate. The emergence of the South African and UK variant strains are concerning, but the overall stability of COVID-19 will make it easier for us to nail with vaccines over the long run.
This means that we will hopefully begin to see the impacts of vaccination campaigns faster than we might think. While vaccinating the entire eligible and willing population will take longer, vaccinating healthcare workers, aged care workers, the elderly and other at risk populations will increase the capacity of the healthcare system to respond and dramatically reduce COVID-19 mortality rates in areas where it is now endemic, such as the UK, Europe or the US.
Domestically within Australia, vaccinations of quarantine staff and air crew will hopefully substantially reduce the risk of further quarantine breaches in Australia’s hotel quarantine system, which will remain relevant throughout most of 2021.
Australia hasn’t yet authorised any vaccines for use- the TGA announced that they expected to be in a position to approve a vaccine in late January or early February on 3 December, with the Government currently planning to begin vaccine rollout in March. On Christmas Eve, Greg Hunt the Commonwealth Minister for Health, said that he expected that by the end of March every Australian who wants a vaccine would be able to have one, which indicates that the Australian vaccination process from March onwards may also be very quick.
The next three months will still be incredibly brutal across much of the Northern hemisphere, with peak infections likely still to be some weeks ahead of us, and peak deaths to be many weeks after that. The next few months are going to be very bad for an unimaginably large number of people.
And while the vaccine outlook now looks good for wealthy countries, vaccine distribution to the rest of the world will be slower. The Pfzier vaccine in particular, while being the fastest acting and having the highest efficacy on current trials, is expensive and needs to be stored in super-cold freezers using dry ice or similar coolants - not exactly a viable strategy in many parts of South Asia or Sub Saharan Africa. But even so, we’re still likely to see widespread global vaccination by the end of 2021, and the pandemic will be ending- unevenly, yes, but also definitively.
And that’s something to be thankful for in the new year.