This Israeli study has apparently been grossly mischaracterized by the press. The study actually shows that the Pfizer vaccine is highly effective against this variant, after the 2nd dose. Here’s a twitter stream by the PI:
- We think that this reduced effectiveness occurs only in a short window of time (no B.1.351 cases 14+ days post 2nd dose), and that the S.A. variant does not spread efficiently. Thus, even more of a reason to get vaccinated and drive down cases to zero!
Another sign of America getting back to “normal”
Limited number of COVID-19 vaccination appointments available. Bookings open Tuesday, April 13 at 8:30 a.m.
Okay, something is happening tomorrow. Don’t know what or for whom, and it’ll probably be fully booked before 9am.
A scant two weeks after Ontario 
's Premier Doug Ford finally admitted failure (well, that everyone around him had failed 
anyhow) our Provincial 1-week moving average case rates have finally set a new record. This explosion was predicted by modelling done in February at the University of Waterloo.
[Ford] said Sunday that Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, has said schools remain safe, and that all public elementary and secondary schools “will remain open” …
…but today…
“Numbers down” last time meant under 1000 cases a day (edit: /14m people provincially), which was a month ago. I note that our current a community case rate, by population, is over 100 times higher than the total case rate in 
(all but one NZ case this month were travellers in quarantine)… three community cases in a single day in NZ prompted the last lock-down.
I think the Toronto Star has once again hit the nail on the head…
Okay, sometimes the writers of this satirical simulation succeed in raising a snicker out of me.
I feel like that company actually wants a hyphen in their name, though I wouldn’t want to guess where. Otherwise they’re just a teir-3 porn site.
No hyphen, but interesting that a GOP guy would want to work at a company that has a donkey for its logo.
You’d think there’d be enough money in the industry, or at least in the pockets of actors, to keep these on life support until we recovered from the pandemic. If people who live and work literally in Hollywood don’t have enough local commitment to preserve the best local movie theater, then why should anyone else care about their industry?
Good news!
Wait.
Earlier in March, research published in The BMJ found that people over age 30 had a 64 percent higher risk of death from the U.K. variant than from earlier strains.
So…
“The new findings don’t nullify the other papers — they just make you think,” he said. “Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. This study says there’s no higher death rate, but they did find more need for oxygen, so there’s something going on there with respect to this variant.”
And as to the big question revolving around the Johnson variant:
Although there have been some indications that the B.1.1.7 variant is affecting young people more than previous strains, there is not enough data to know for sure, Topol said. And it can be difficult to separate out other factors that may account for the trend.
Movie theaters were built specifically for use by distributors. They’re the ones who should be footing the bill. I don’t know, maybe send out some Girl Scouts to hawk $25 buckets of popcorn at your local supermarket?
I have a feeling movie studios are actually perfectly willing to let everyone fold so they can go back to the “good old days” when they owned the theaters as well as the distribution channels and the movies themselves back before they got anti-trusted out of that particular bit of vertical integration.
That generation of progressives got us the “dealer” system for buying cars, which everybody hates, so there is really no constituency for blocking vertical integration anymore. It just introduces middlemen that people perceive as even worse than the monopolists.
That’s for the whole province for you?
Are there numbers on lower admin/geographical units, weighted for population?
Germany uses the seven-day incidence per 100.000 inhabitants on a Landkreis-Ebene, i.e. municipality (communal administration level).
Mask collecting in Nurmijärvi
Ilta-Sanomat reports on a runner from Nurmijärvi who has managed to collect some 4,000 face masks discarded during the pandemic.
Last August Kaisu Paulanto had noticed an accumulation of the face coverings on the ground during her runs through central Uusimaa, and decided a while ago that it would make sense to pick them up.
So now she dons gloves, shoves the respiratory protectors into a plastic bag and then deposits them in the bin.
She’s kept count over the last six months, and it seems like she’s gathered some 4,000 masks chucked away by Nurmijärvi’s careless litterbugs.
THL advises people to put used face masks in the bin without touching the outside surfaces, and to wash hands before and after mask removal.
