Maybe COVID doesn’t cross the caution tape.
Joe Nocera: I ve just finished a couple of weeks in Delray Beach, Fla., and I have to tell you: It s a whole different pandemic down here. The restaurants are full; the stores are hopping. Waiters and salespeople wear masks, but most other people don t, not even in crowded bars. South Floridians are acting as if the pandemic is over, even though it plainly isn t.
Most of my friends in New York tend to view Floridians as idiots, at least when it comes to COVID-19. They re convinced that Gov. Ron DeSantis is hiding the true number of fatalities, and that his refusal to impose a mask mandate and his insistence on keeping the economy relatively open are the irresponsible acts of a Trump wannabe.
Thursday, 8 April 2021, 8:28 am
At last! After 10 months working on the issue, New
Zealand’s Director-General of Health has graciously
decided that Australia is now a sufficiently low-risk
Covid19 country that “quarantine free travel is safe to
commence” between the two countries – a mere six months
after Australia made the same decision in respect of New
Zealand. But we still had to endure weeks of Prime
Ministerial teasing about when such a decision might be
made, and another tediously and unnecessarily long press
conference before the announcement occurred.
According
to Dr Bloomfield, part of the reason for the process taking
so long was because “the systems have not been in place to
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HAKAN NURAL/UNSPLASH
SOMETHING SOUNDS FISHY when public health experts advise us to take whatever vaccine is available even though some vaccines show much more promising efficacy numbers than others. And it’s understandable that people would want to shop for the best vaccine. Americans are accustomed to the idea of consumer choice in pharmaceuticals why else would we have so much direct-to-consumer drug advertising? But cut through the noise and there’s only one thing that really matters: all three FDA-authorized vaccines seem to work equally well close to 100% at preventing hospitalization and death.
That message has gotten diluted in the reporting around the efficacy numbers for different vaccines. The efficacy numbers associated with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines came in at around 95%, while the newly approved Johnson & Johnson vaccine has shown a less impressive 72% in the US, and even lower in other countries. As risk communication expert Peter Sandman says, people
(Bloomberg Opinion) Something sounds fishy when public health experts advise us to take whatever vaccine is available even though some vaccines show much more promising efficacy numbers than others. And it’s understandable that people would want to shop for the best vaccine.