[conspire] A more-effective face mask as a DIY project

[Nick Moffitt]

On 28Dec2020 10:14pm (-0800), Rick Moen wrote:
> In checking this story occasionally, I get the impression that
> California is least generally following the published guidelines from
> CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which suggested
> these priorities:
> 
>   Phase 1a: Front-line health care workers and people in long-term care
>   facilities.
> 
>   Phase 1b: People 75 and older and front-line essential workers.
> 
>   Phase 1c: People 65 to 74, people 16 to 64 who have high-risk medical
>   conditions, and other essential workers. 
> 
>   Phase 2: All other persons who are 16 years and up.
> 
> How vaccines are allocated in the USA is, in an operational sense, up to
> each state, and CDC thus may offer states only advice and opinions.  For
> CDC's current Word of God[tm], as far as I understand the situation,
> please see: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm695152e2.htm

In the UK, we of course still have the NHS (despite Johnson's efforts to undermine it, right after using its salvation as a reason for Brexit, but I digress and I've already had an emergency filling from grinding my teeth this year).  This means that we have a single UK-wide institution that can manage distribution and administration of the vaccine.  

This also means that we've had some rather posh folks suddenly realise they never had an ID number in the NHS's systems, because they'd been paying squillions of pounds for private insurance all this time.  I am perfectly happy to serenade these people with the tiniest violin in the world.

My brother is a union shop steward in the US, and he has just recovered from COVID-19 because the stay-at-home bosses and management needlessly put him and all of his fellow front-line workers at risk.  So I am extremely inclined to get really upset at the people with cushy home-office jobs getting groceries delivered who decided they should be vaccinated before the people interacting face-to-face with the public.  That was absolutely my first instinct.


But in the US, I have been won over to the argument that spending *too much* effort trying to optimise the administration of a vaccine with a short shelf-life could cost more lives than simply forcing states to administer it quickly to as many new people as possible.  The benefits of a vaccine are diminished through delay anyway: the sooner you get someone immunised, the more likely you are to break a link in an infection cluster.

Boxes of vaccines are being shipped to the lackeys of the suckups to Trump appointees in sparsely-populated "red states" with high infection rates, and worrying that someone was vaccinated who "shouldn't have been" only stands to harm long-term public health goals.

Should Phase 1a front-line health staff get it absolutely first?  That seems easy enough to administer, since those people are working at places affiliated with the vaccine-administrating institutions to begin with!  Finding all the 1b/1c cases, however, seems like a bureaucratic nightmare that the US isn't equipped to handle.  For one thing, "essential worker" has turned out to have two meanings:

	1. Someone for whom the daily function of their profession is essential to society.
	2. Someone for whom society has made the daily function of their profession essential to basic survival.

So many states have determined all sorts of seemingly-frivolous jobs "essential" simply because they can't afford to pay them not to go into high-risk work environments, and they only eat if they get paid doing their job.

So maybe there are some easy wins in subsets of the 1b/1c populations, but I don't think the US vaccine programme should wait for those categories to be "finished" before just saying "VACCINES OVER HERE GODDAMMIT COME GET SOME!" as loudly as possible.