Dr. Henry's Covid update for the past weekend:
1236 new cases (428 + 465 + 343)
13 deaths
69 in ICU
-increase in Covid variant (mix of UK and South African) from 24 to 40 cases in the past two weeks.
-rollout of Astra Zeneca halted in South Africa. I found out about this article today:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/astraze...in-11612700385
JOHANNESBURG—South Africa said Sunday it would temporarily halt a planned rollout of AstraZeneca PLC’s Covid-19 vaccine after a small clinical trial found that it doesn’t appear to protect recipients against mild and moderate illness from a fast-spreading new strain of the coronavirus first detected in the country.
The trial, which enrolled around 2,000 volunteers with a median age of 31 in South Africa, was too small and its participants too young to draw broad conclusions on the vaccine’s overall efficacy in protecting against the disease caused by the coronavirus, especially when it comes to hospitalizations or death. However, its findings contribute to concerns that a mutating virus is rendering existing Covid-19 vaccines less effective and that shots will need to be updated to protect against new virus strains.
Of the 39 volunteers in the AstraZeneca trial that were found to be infected with the new South African variant, 19 had received the vaccine, while 20 had received a placebo, said Shabir Madhi, the trial’s principal investigator and dean of the medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Those numbers would imply an efficacy rate of around 10% at protecting against mild and moderate Covid-19 from the new variant, said Dr. Madhi, although he added that the data were too limited to be statistically significant.
One thing to keep in mind is the small sample size of 2000 volunteers for the Astra Zeneca vaccine clinical trial in South Africa.