All of CDC previous forecasts are here: Previous COVID-19 Forecasts: Cases | CDC Well, if CNBC said that, they were wrong. CDC did NOT forecast it going up in May, 3 weeks ago, at least not at the national level. May 5th forecast:
As of tonight MN is lifting all indoor restrictions. I was just in Nashville and Asheville, NC and they also appeared to have lifted restrictions although it seemed to be a hodgepodge of mask requirements.
From what I'm seeing in Uruguay, Seychelles, Chile, there seems to be a big problem with the Sinovac vaccine, the cases, and deaths are way too high considering the number of doses administered, China's plan to gain good faith by helping with vaccines might backfire if they are this ineffective. Edit - Bahrain and Maldives too
Once again, we have talked about this: Commodore posts...something something...it's most likely false or at best totally misleading @Major
This is probably the CNBC article the tweet referred to https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/05...sharp-decline-.html?__twitter_impression=true
The Sinovac vaccine has a lot less efficacy than Pfizer, Moderna, J&J or even Astrazenica, that said it's not clear yet if the problems with those countries is due solely to the low efficacy of as some reports say that even though those countries are heavily vaccinated there still are some 40% of their population not. In the case of the Seychelles they were using the Sinopharm (a PRC developed vaccine) and Astrozenica. While the Seychelles has had a bad outbreak it appears the worst symptoms have been controlled. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...in-seychelles-are-rising-despite-vaccine-push Seychelles’s Covid Mysteries Pit Anti-Vaxxers Against Scientists Cases in the world’s most vaccinated nation are ticking up, forcing researchers to wage war against misinformation on whether jabs are effective. By Antony Sguazzin and Jason Gale For epidemiologists, the past year and a half has been a voyage of discovery. Recently their journey aboard SARS-CoV-2 took an unexpected turn toward Seychelles, a palm-fringed archipelago in the Indian Ocean with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants. A country that few could pinpoint on a map suddenly became internet-famous as the most vaccinated nation on Earth, with 64% of the population having received the requisite two shots. Yet to the surprise of virologists—and the dismay of the government, which had been counting on the immunization drive to reopen the tourism-dependent economy—the infection count has been ticking up. As of May 13 a third of active cases—about 900 in all—were among residents who’d been fully vaccinated. Vaccine skeptics pronounced themselves vindicated, while international health experts have been scrambling to answer a host of questions without the benefit of robust data. Did one or both of the vaccines used in Seychelles fail? Has herd immunity not been reached? Is the nation grappling with a more infectious variant capable of evading the defenses that certain types of vaccines provide? “So what’s going on?” asked Raina MacIntyre, professor of global biosecurity at the Sydney campus of the University of New South Wales, during an online presentation on May 18. “It’s probably that the herd immunity threshold hasn’t been reached, plus or minus, if it’s the South African variant in there.” The answers to the questions MacIntyre and other experts are posing may influence the future course of the pandemic. For starters, the tiny nation has become a test case for two of the world’s most widely used vaccines. In the Seychelles, 57% of the vaccinated population received Sinopharm’s shot, and 43% got the Covishield vaccine developed by AstraZeneca Plc. Sinopharm’s inoculation has been donated or sold to countries around the globe, including Indonesia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe; Covishield makes up the bulk of shots distributed to poor nations in Africa and elsewhere through the Covax initiative, which seeks to make vaccine distribution more equitable. What’s happening in Seychelles is very different from the experience of Israel, the second-most vaccinated nation, where Covid-19 infections have plummeted. The contrast could yield crucial insights into the efficacy of the different types of immunizations. In Israel the dominant vaccine was the messenger ribonucleic acid shot made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE. The pandemic has seen mRNA vaccines— Moderna Inc. makes another—being used in scale for the first time. Data from clinical trials so far suggest they are better at stopping Covid, tackling variants, and preventing the virus from spreading in the community. Sinopharm’s and AstraZeneca’s vaccines rely on more traditional methods, and their shots have been shown to have lower efficacy in studies. What’s also apparent, so far, is that though there’s been a surge in cases in Seychelles, very few people are getting seriously ill. “We have only a few people needing intensive care. Two out of 40” in hospitals, said Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan in a May 10 interview. “The vaccine will protect people from getting serious symptoms.” Still, more answers are needed. The government hasn’t disclosed what vaccine was administered in the breakthrough cases that make up a third of the total count. No agency has done any genomic sequencing to determine which variant is dominant on the islands, though the one first identified in South Africa, B.1.351, was detected in Seychelles in February. On May 13, Jude Gedeon, the country’s public-health commissioner, said samples were to be sent to the Kenya Medical Research Institute for testing. The World Health Organization is also taking action. “We are very concerned, and we are sending a multidisciplinary team there to help the Seychelles government address the situation,” says Richard Mihigo, program area manager for immunization and vaccine development at the WHO’s regional office for Africa in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo. “We are also in discussion with the government to conduct a vaccine effectiveness study.” The situation in Seychelles also offers a fresh reminder that our understanding of herd immunity—the theoretical threshold at which the virus can’t find enough hosts to keep spreading—continues to evolve. Scientists once estimated that 55% to 82% of the population would need to have immunity against SARS-CoV-2, either from recovering from an infection or through vaccination. But 17 months into the pandemic, there’s recognition that the threshold may vary depending on the susceptibility of a population to the circulating strains, adherence to physical distancing, mask-wearing, and other practices known to reduce transmission, as well as the season—epidemics typically worsen as either colder or hotter weather encourages people to congregate indoors. “It’s probably not likely that we are going to drive to zero the transmission of this virus or have it disappear,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. Still, she see vaccines “doing the thing that we care most about, which is preventing serious illness.” Lessons from Seychelles could be valuable to other countries in assembling their own vaccine arsenals, through purchases or donations—or a combination of the two, as the tropical nation did. “It’s about quality vaccines that are shown to be effective against your variant,” says Glenda Gray, president of the South African Medical Research Council and co-lead of a Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine trial in the country. Finance Minister Naadir Hassan, who had to steer Seychelles’s economy through a 13% contraction in 2020, says the government cannot afford to stand still while it awaits answers to these Covid riddles. The country is “an open, vulnerable economy,” he said in a May 13 interview. “The country needs to be safe, and the country needs to be open.”
There are very vulnerable people in hospitals who are too medically fragile to get vaccines. The last thing they need is to pay out thousands of dollars for services and be put at risk of getting Covid from the person payed to care for them. I totally agree with requiring medical workers to be vaccinated. They need a new line of work if they can't understand that their job is to care for the sick, without putting them at risk.
Houston story makes the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/29/texas-hospital-vaccine-lawsuit/
"'Hero Pay' for Grocery Workers Is Terrible for Grocery Workers": https://reason.com/2021/05/30/hero-pay-for-grocery-workers-is-terrible-for-grocery-workers
"West Virginia Giving Away Guns During Vaccine Lottery": https://www.wtrf.com/news/west-virg...inia-giving-away-guns-during-vaccine-lottery/
