42 million Americans have been vaccinated!
Warp Speed gets
vaccine into rural arms.
One afternoon this past December, a package arrived at Mora Valley Community Health Services in northern New Mexico. The rural clinic, which serves a county of 4,521 people, is nestled beside a pasture with a flock of chickens and a few goats. A mile up the road sits the town of Mora—a regional hub just big enough for a trio of restaurants, two gas stations, and a single-building satellite office for a nearby community college.
Shortly after the package arrived, clinic staff received an email explaining that this “ancillary convenience kit” was a test of the system designed to transport SARS-CoV-2 vaccines from the state’s warehouse to Mora and other rural communities across the state. While this package contained supplies for administering the vaccine — syringes, needles, alcohol swabs, and more—the real challenge would occur the following week. That’s when 100 doses were scheduled to be delivered, and the clinic’s staff would have 30 days at most to administer the doses before they spoiled.
As promised, the vaccine arrived on December 21. Staff worked in phases, stationing patients in exam rooms in numbers to match the doses coming from each vial. Each patient completed a health questionnaire, received a shot, and then was monitored for 15 minutes to be sure the vaccine did not trigger an adverse reaction. Within a few weeks, all 100 shots were in arms.
Info: shpr.fyi/warprural
Rapid Implementation
of a Vaccination
Superstation
On January 6, 2021, a short call between key leaders at UC San Diego Health and the San Diego County public health services resulted in a conceptual agreement to open a coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine superstation with a target of vaccinating 5000 health care workers daily.
Five days later on January 11, the teams opened the first large-scale vaccination site in California, and 2 weeks later more than 58 000 community members had been vaccinated.1
This report describes lessons learned in this rapid implementation with the hope this experience will catalyze similar centers across the country at a time when COVID-19 has become a leading cause of death in some age groups.2
The first key decision was to identify an aligned partner and location large enough to handle 5000 vaccinations daily. UC San Diego Health had an existing relationship with the community-minded San Diego Padres. The San Diego Padre parking lots offered a large size (280 000 square feet) in an outdoor location that is centrally accessible to both personal and public transportation with controlled access during the day and ability to be secured overnight. The city police were familiar with traffic flows associated with large events.
San Diego County provided vaccine supply and funding, along with essential contacts for police, fire marshal, and traffic control.
The Padres provided the land and extensive event planning experience, including expertise in hosting drive-through activities during the COVID-19 pandemic with access to tents, trailers, signage, fencing, and restrooms, security and parking vendors to manage on-site flow.
A critical component of any vaccine superstation is IT (information technology) infrastructure. In parallel, the technology team installed 5000 feet of power cable and deployed 85 laptop computers. The San Diego Padres provided wireless internet for the entire parking lot. Since the EHR was already integrated with the state immunization registry, all administered vaccine doses would be visible to other sites around the county to assist second-dose logistics.4
The initial delivery model required more than 300 personnel each day, approximately 120 in clinical and 180 in administrative roles.
Hopefully U.S. new cases/infections per day will continue dropping
The new cases number per day apparently peaked on Jan. 7 at 227,970 cases.
On Feb. 7 the number of new cases was 91,762.
Our intestines may be important in COVID
The small bowel may serve as a viral entry site
SARS-CoV-2 uses the ACE2 receptor as its main attachment point to invade human cells. ACE2 receptors are present in various tissues including the oropharynx, nose, lungs, kidneys, pancreas and the small bowel.
Thus, the small bowel may serve as a viral entry site.
The virus infecting the intestines might be directly causing autoimmunity like other viruses breaking the body’s tolerance to itself, setting people up for autoimmune diseases.
Ivermectin no longer prohibited for COVID
Ivermectin is a 45-yr-old cheap medication used to treat many types of parasite infestations including head lice and scabies but also intestinal roundworms.
Reports from in vitro studies suggest that ivermectin acts by inhibiting the host importin alfa/beta-1 nuclear transport proteins, which are part of a key intracellular transport process that viruses hijack to enhance infection by suppressing the host antiviral response. In addition, ivermectin docking in vitro may interfere with the attachment of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein to the human cell membrane.3
“It is important to stress that no one should try to self-medicate with versions of ivermectin that are for veterinary purposes or head lice.” The only safe way to get ivermectin is by prescription from a doctor, he says.
Excerpted from Medscape
Why COVID kills
Reduced innate antiviral defenses coupled with exuberant inflammatory cytokine production are the defining and driving features of COVID-19.
SARS-CoV-2 blocks one virus-fighting set of genes but allows another set to launch, a pattern never seen with other viruses.
“Most other viruses interfere with some aspect of both the call to arms and the call for reinforcements,” the researcher said.
COVID, however, uniquely blocks interferons, a cellular defense but activates the other, the inflammatories, he and his colleagues reported in a study published last week in Cell.
The result is essentially no brakes on the virus’s replication, but a sometimes fatal storm of inflammatory molecules in the lungs, which is what the researcher calls a “unique” and “aberrant” consequence of how SARS-CoV-2 manipulates the genome of its target.
They found that within three days of infection, the virus induces cells’ call-for-rein-forcement genes to produce cytokines. But it blocks their call-to-arms genes — the interferons that dampen the virus’ replication.
Dave Bunting