COVID-19 — Coronavirus

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And today's death total for UK is 478. HIghest since early May.

Last week the total was 406 - so the rise is under 20% week to week - which is encouraging.

That 406 became an all settings total of 492 when England out of hospital cases were added.

It will be almost certainly a second wave record today maybe pushing toward 600. Scary.
 
Healdplace said:
So today's three nation case total (without England) is 2980.

Versus 3740 (3 wks ago) v 3456 (2 wks ago) v 3314 (last wk)

So a steady if unspectacular fall over the month.

Last week's 3314 became 25, 177 when the England cases were added.
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Cases not far off 25% down on 3 weeks ago. Good news.
 
Healdplace said:
I posted last night what Matt Hancock said on the storage issues. Regions are being asked to set up by 1 Dec GP surgeries that DO in every region covering up to 3 surgeries - so most patients will likely have to go further afield than their own local surgery.

In the first run though it will be care home patients and staff and over 80s so most of them likely cannot even get to surgeries.
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Correct. Clearly in the case of care homes and the likes the vaccinations will have to come to them, you can't inject a solid block of ice so of course they have to thaw them. Never would a candidate be taken further if it was so incredibly unstable that being at RT caused instantaneous degradation.

I think the Government will use their initiative and step in to ask pharma companies to help with storage in order to spread the load if required. I've never worked or been to a site that didn't have multiple -70-80c storage. If this in shipped in 5 DRAM vials or similar then everything I've ever seen would be enough to store 1000s of doses.
 
mosssideblue said:
Lost me a little. Are you saying places that will administer the vaccine will have to have dry ice storage conditions?
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GPs that are doing it will by the gist of what Hancock was saying. I forget the details as I posted them when he was speaking of this last night in here.
 
mosssideblue said:
Lost me a little. Are you saying places that will administer the vaccine will have to have dry ice storage conditions?
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Dry ice is used for transport mainly, it's conveniently ~-80c so it's a fantastic choice for that. You can make ice cubes and pack a polystyrene box containing the vaccine to chill it.
 
kaz7 said:
How is it going to go from 70c to. 2-8 c ? This is meant to be rolled out in the next few weeks . Not point saying there are not going to be problems in distribution, storage and administration because they are obvious , people will have to be patient
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Because if arguably the largest pharma company in the world are doing their job correctly (they are) they will be running stability studies in parallel to determine what temperature to store and transport at. The starting point is always cold as possible and work from there for biologics.

Order of importance:
RT > Fridge (2-8c) > Freezer (-20c) > Ultra low (-70-80c)
 
mosssideblue said:
What's the significance of the transportation temperature as oppose to the storage temperature?
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They are one and the same. You want to move it without affecting the temperature.

When we work these storage temperatures out what we do is set non-arbitrary values we aren't willing to go beyond.
For example, we know that the degradation pathway of A is to become B. Therefore we set a maximum amount of B before we know it impacts the effective level of A.
Then we run that test. We place it under various conditions to see how quickly it becomes B. It's a natural progression to go from 24 to 72 hours to 1 week. When the clinical trials are designed they have to account for the time it'll likely be out of ultra cold storage - this is a risk assessment borne of a worst-case-scenario.

In this case I'd bet my life they know 5 days is adequate for use of the vaccine (2-8c) and that -70c doesn't give rise to degradation. Why go further? There's no reason to. It may not have even passed clinical trials p1. You don't invest time and money into whatiffery.
 
03 March 2002 said:
They are one and the same. You want to move it without affecting the temperature.

When we work these storage temperatures out what we do is set non-arbitrary values we aren't willing to go beyond.
For example, we know that the degradation pathway of A is to become B. Therefore we set a maximum amount of B before we know it impacts the effective level of A.
Then we run that test. We place it under various conditions to see how quickly it becomes B. It's a natural progression to go from 24 to 72 hours to 1 week. When the clinical trials are designed they have to account for the time it'll likely be out of ultra cold storage - this is a risk assessment borne of a worst-case-scenario.

In this case I'd bet my life they know 5 days is adequate for use of the vaccine (2-8c) and that -70c doesn't give rise to degradation. Why go further? There's no reason to. It may not have even passed clinical trials p1. You don't invest time and money into whatiffery.
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I'll say thanks for your detailed reply, although haven't a clue what that all means.

No doubt you can tell this wouldn't be my Mastermind subject.
 
03 March 2002 said:
They are one and the same. You want to move it without affecting the temperature.

When we work these storage temperatures out what we do is set non-arbitrary values we aren't willing to go beyond.
For example, we know that the degradation pathway of A is to become B. Therefore we set a maximum amount of B before we know it impacts the effective level of A.
Then we run that test. We place it under various conditions to see how quickly it becomes B. It's a natural progression to go from 24 to 72 hours to 1 week. When the clinical trials are designed they have to account for the time it'll likely be out of ultra cold storage - this is a risk assessment borne of a worst-case-scenario.

In this case I'd bet my life they know 5 days is adequate for use of the vaccine (2-8c) and that -70c doesn't give rise to degradation. Why go further? There's no reason to. It may not have even passed clinical trials p1. You don't invest time and money into whatiffery.
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Are you saying that the vaccine doesn't deteriorate at - 80, but as son as you bring it up to normal fridge temperatures, the clock is ticking before it goes off, and that is about 5 days?
 
mosssideblue said:
I'll say thanks for your detailed reply, although haven't a clue what that all means.

No doubt you can tell this wouldn't be my Mastermind subject.
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No problem.

If I can try to add some more explanation to my post, it would be that storage is a method of preventing loss of a product. Loss mostly occurs a result of degradation in biological systems and therefore storage is another way of saying control of degradation.

Unless we find a way of hitting absolute zero some level of chemistry will always occur and therefore freezing something merely slows down the progression of degradation.

I'm sure your mastermind subject would put me on the other side of the table.
 
mosssideblue said:
Are you saying that the vaccine doesn't deteriorate at - 80, but as son as you bring it up to normal fridge temperatures, the clock is ticking before it goes off, and that is about 5 days?
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Doesn't is not correct but for all intents and purposes that's true yes. You description here is probably quite spot on for the average person to understand what's happening here.

Also, scientists will rarely ever say this happens at this time. What's more correct is that it has only been tested up to the 5th day and such we can only say it's stable for 5 days.
 
Weird that now Trump has been voted out, new cases are surging (at least locally) How can that be? Everyone knows it was a democratic plot to take down Trump
 
03 March 2002 said:
Because if arguably the largest pharma company in the world are doing their job correctly (they are) they will be running stability studies in parallel to determine what temperature to store and transport at. The starting point is always cold as possible and work from there for biologics.

Order of importance:
RT > Fridge (2-8c) > Freezer (-20c) > Ultra low (-70-80c)
Click to expand...
I'm quite interested in this.

Are you saying they've likely not had time to work out what temperature it has to be stored at yet and -70C is just the default position they take until they've worked out how long it takes to degrade at -20 or 2-8?

I would have thought that would be something they'd do straight away because of its ramifications for the logistics of widespread rollout.
 
03 March 2002 said:
No problem.

If I can try to add some more explanation to my post, it would be that storage is a method of preventing loss of a product. Loss mostly occurs a result of degradation in biological systems and therefore storage is another way of saying control of degradation.

Unless we find a way of hitting absolute zero some level of chemistry will always occur and therefore freezing something merely slows down the progression of degradation.

I'm sure your mastermind subject would put me on the other side of the table.
Click to expand...

By this are you saying that they would need it to be at -70C for long term storage but that it's possible it is delivered out to inoculation centres from a regional hub and kept at -20C for a few hours while the vaccine doses are being administered?
 
Only 24 of the 361 England hospital deaths today were under 60 and none were under 40.

More than half were over 80.
 
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