In the past couple of days, the top story has been the inconvenience and drama caused by the 6-hour global outage…
of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – OMG! Social media has been “victimised” during this pandemic as the main propagator of COVID-19 related misinformation. Given the “size” of the main social media platforms, it is not surprising. The basis of these “platforms” is the enabling of essentially anyone to broadcast a thought or an opinion – of course, there will be a spectrum of good stuff and BS generated.
In general, noticing social media there is definitely some good information about pretty much any topic, including COVID-19. There are some “funny” observations to made – 1) lifestyle coaches and gurus can’t cut the crap no matter what is happening around them – pandemic or not… say something substantial for once, 2) same with influencers, same tune, pandemic or not – “bish” people are not in the mood for BS right now, and 3) for dirty stuff it’s business as usual J. Anyway, as it relates to COVID-19, thankfully, there are the experts that generating good information and messaging – most of the time to the best of their understanding given that we are dealing with a novel, mutating coronavirus. Of course, there are people with agendas and simple fools that don’t know what they’re on about – but hopefully most people have common sense.
Given the vaccination rates around the world (in affluent countries with relatively easy access to vaccine), it pretty clear that the majority of people are sensible. Although globally where in the midst of third major wave driven largely by the highly transmissible delta variant, people are getting vaccinated and it appears that new COVID-19 cases in the US, Canada, Europe and much of Asia are falling fast. Although controversial, it looks like vaccine mandates are also working – not sure about the ethics or relevance of those but that’s another story. An important thingis to work out exactly how effective vaccines are with time – we know immunity wanes so we probably don’t want to be giving vaccine passports to people that were vaccinated a few months ago; the data is kind of confusing – I’ve read that for the Pfizer vaccine effectiveness drops to 47% after 5 months and also that it remains 90% effective at preventing severe COVID-19 and death at 6 months; the reporting has to be clearer. It is clear that boosters will be needed and apart from the main mRNA-based vaccines, J&J is also clearance for a booster dose. In other good news new antiviral treatments are definitely on the way with Merck announcing a very promising oral drug that can decrease deaths by 50%; other therapeutics are also in advanced stages of development.
Unfortunately in Australia we are in the worst phase of the pandemic (a record 1763 case were recorded in Victoria yesterday), however, vaccination rates are very promising and an “open day” is predicted in the next few weeks when the double vaxxed population surpasses 70%. Like other countries we have pockets of people fighting against vaccine mandates – some school teachers are takin the matter to the Supreme Court – highest court in Victoria, with only the High court of Australia being able to override. A mask mandate for all school children which is on the agenda will also be highly controversial I feel.
For now it looks like, contrary to original thoughts, Australia and New Zealand have decided to drop the COVID-0 ambition. Given, that virus will be around (and will probably explode following “open da”), the decisions on vaccine mandates and public health measures will be critical into the future.
It will be interesting to see how court cases play out; tricky! Hopefully they don’t get as ugly as the Theranos trial!
Until next time …