We're all familiar with Clap for Carers, particularly during the first wave of Covid-19 last Spring where the NHS and Care workers worked heroically to save lives under huge stress. Having watched Horizon last night on BBC2 "Coronavirus: What We Know Now", we are also hugely in debt to scientists who have managed to deliver a vaccine in an incredibly short space of time. I only watched it once, and didn't make notes, so what I've typed below may not be 100% accurate but the gist is there, more or less. Advances in genetic engineering over the last decade have been instrumental in the fight against delivering a vaccine so quickly. Although genetic engineering can be viewed with suspicion, the ability to determine the genetic sequence of the protein spike (?) on a virus cell meant that scientists were able to come up with a vaccine by May 2020. The trialling took 6 months, hence roll-out was possible in November. While all viruses mutate, as we have seen by all the variants kicking around, we will be able to keep up with its mutations fairly quickly and modify the vaccines accordingly. It's highly likely that we will all need annual booster/update jabs. While flu viruses can mutate quite quickly, coronavirus does not (?) which is to our advantage. If you end up in hospital with Covid your chances of surviving are a lot better than a year ago. Rather than rely on ventilators there's a newer system of blowing oxygen in your face (?) which is not as invasive as ventilating. If you get as far as ICU, the new drugs (Dexamethasone isn't new) will give you a better chance of survival as will putting patients on their stomachs. If I understood correctly, the objective is to achieve 'Herd Immunity'. A lot was made of this last March. You could, perhaps, achieve herd immunity by letting the virus run riot in the population (survival of the fittest?). This would have been at the cost of a huge number of lives (half a million in UK I think was mentioned at the time). With lockdowns we have bought ourselves time, and now herd immunity can be achieved through vaccination of the population, which, thankfully, the government has done an excellent job on. The percentage of people that need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity is about 84% (?). This is based on a fairly simple mathematical equation involving R(0), how many other people the virus is passed on to by an infected person, taken to be 3, and the efficacy of the vaccine, how successful the vaccine is, which is taken to be 77%. However, with unknown variants transmitting more quickly the value of 3 could become 4 or 4.5 and then the percentage of people requiring vaccination to achieve herd immunity increases substantially. Chris Whitty (I do like him, says it as it is) said some months ago that the only way to get ourselves out of this Covid hole was through science and I believe he is correct. The programme is well worth a watch and I came away from it thinking that our futures are actually in the hands of a very small group of extremely clever and dedicated people. Well done the scientists!
For one frightening moment I thought that STDs had become resistant to penicillin soley affecting the medical profession
