“Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And, weak men create hard times.”
Covid Iceland – Bing video
With vaccination rates well above 80 per cent,
Iceland has become a case study for the rest of the world.
But the Delta strain is causing problems.
Iceland is experiencing its worst Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. That’s despite near-total vaccination levels. And what Delta’s doing there may now be a sign of things to come for Australia. The small island nation of 357,000 citizens has become a case study of the effectiveness of vaccination against the Delta mutation. Some 96 per cent of all Icelandic women over 16 have received at least one vaccine dose.
The figure for men is about 90 per cent.
In total, 86 per cent of the population has been fully vaccinated.
It is an outstanding result – so much so, the Reykjavík government felt they had this pandemic beaten. In June, they rolled back social distancing, mask and travel restrictions.
But those restrictions have been reimpose as a Covid-19 Delta outbreak has sent case numbers soaring. And even with a significantly reduced rate of severe illness, the explosive outbreak is seriously straining the tiny nation’s health system.
Reykjavik’s raw numbers
A public address by epidemiologist Kamilla Jósefsdóttir in the capital Reykjavík late last week laid out the stark situation. Iceland’s medical infrastructure is being pushed to its limits. Contact tracing will become impossible if the rate of Delta’s spread continues to grow, she warned. And this would trigger yet another spike in the infection rate. She was one of a panel of experts warning local media that even the dramatically reduced percentage of critical cases might not be enough to save Iceland’s healthcare system.
A month ago, the country had just two active Covid-19 cases.
Now, the sparsely populated island has more than 1590 active cases. About 20 are in hospital, with a quarter of those in intensive care. While that doesn’t sound like many, in such a small country even that number puts a strain on its healthcare resources. “A significant number of people are at risk of needing hospitalization due to Covid-19 at the moment,” Dr Jósefsdóttir told reporters. But the director of the National University Hospital, Páll Matthíasson, warned his hospital’s staff were “burnt out” and that there were already Covid cases waiting for beds.
Staff shortages meant expanding treatment facilities was proving a challenge.
“Previous experience and data tell us that this wave has not reached its peak yet,”
Dr. Matthíasson warned. Reykjavík hospital data reveals infections remain proportionately far higher among the unvaccinated. But vaccination only offers moderate resistance to contracting the disease. The big difference, however, is in the severity of the symptoms. Previous outbreaks of non-Delta variants among much lower vaccination rates claimed 29 Icelandic lives. The latest outbreak – despite its size – has so far claimed none.
Vaccination Arms Race
Early indications are that the much-desired goal of vaccination-induced herd immunity remains out of reach. But it is limiting hospitalization and death. Iceland’s government is not discouraged. “Evidence shows that the vaccines used in Iceland protect about 60 per cent of those fully vaccinated against any kind of infection caused by the Delta variant of the virus and over 90 per cent against serious illnesses,” Iceland’s Director-General Bryndís Kjartansdóttir said. “About 97 per cent of those infected have mild or no symptoms.”
Meanwhile, Iceland is racing to prepare a rollout of the Pfizer vaccine among 12 to 15-year-olds. It’s doing this to both limit Delta’s more severe effects among the young and to reduce the rate of spread. But it’s also reintroducing travel and social distancing restrictions. And masks are again mandatory. Such measures had been lifted in June once vaccinations had reached an acceptable level. But vaccination hasn’t proved to be the silver bullet many hoped it to be.
“This and other pandemics are here to stay,” Dr Matthíasson told the Icelandic community. “We must strengthen the healthcare system so that it is not always on the brink of collapse. We are all in the same boat in this society. It’s a pretty good boat despite everything, but we must work together to ensure success.”
Body battlefield
A Public Health England (PHE) study found both the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines effective against Delta variant hospitalisation. And the UK’s Delta infection rate has begun to fall. But, last week, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US published a new case study of a Delta outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It prompted the CDC to advise even fully vaccinated people to continue wearing masks.
About 75 per cent of those who contracted Delta in that town were fully vaccinated. About 470 cases were detected. Five were hospitalised. None died. But the study found the same levels of Covid Delta virus living in the noses and throats of both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. That may be because existing vaccines are good at generating antibodies in the body’s bloodstream, but not the mucus membranes of the nose and throat. And that may cause a delay in the body’s immune response – creating a window where Delta can replicate and spread.
But a separate Singapore study indicates that a vaccinated immune response accelerates much faster once it realises the infection is present. This produces a rapid drop-off of Delta viral loads a few days into the disease, and that reduces symptoms. The upshot of both studies is that Delta is beaten back by vaccines – but only after it has had enough time to infect others. COVID-19 Data Explorer – Our World in Data
Iceland is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world.
But that didn’t stop the tiny island nation from catching a whole lot of COVID in recent weeks. Although the natural, immediate response to this news might be panic, experts who spoke to The Daily Beast said that Iceland’s recent surge in infections—fueled by the new Delta variant of the novel coronavirus—is probably a sign that herd immunity is within reach over there. What’s happening in Iceland right now might be one of the final stages in the long, often painful process by which a country achieves some form of population-level “herd immunity” against a dangerous virus.
Once COVID vaccines hit the market early this year, Iceland quickly secured enough doses for almost everyone. And people dutifully lined up to get their shots. Today, the country has administered 477,000 doses and 275,000 people have gotten at least one jab—77 percent of the total population. Add in people with natural immunity from past infection, and it’s likely that more than 80 percent of Iceland has some level of protection. The 20 percent of Icelanders who didn’t get vaccinated or haven’t already had COVID are the ones now catching Delta, with the exception of a few breakthrough cases of vaccinated people. (Children under 16, who aren’t yet eligible for vaccination, make up most of the unvaccinated group.)
A couple thousand people have tested positive in recent weeks, a spike in cases far exceeding the worst weekly case-rates from 2020. But hospitalizations have not surged to the same degree as cases in this latest Icelandic surge. That’s because older Icelanders, as a group, are highly vaccinated. Younger people, who as a group are less vaccinated, are the ones getting infected now. They have a better chance of weathering COVID without serious symptoms. And the antibodies and T-cells their immune systems are producing could represent the last—or close to last—brick in Iceland’s wall of immunity.
Now consider what happened in the United States while Iceland was working toward a minimally painful, population-level immunity. Tragically, the U.S. is probably many, many months from achieving the same herd immunity. And as it does, the final surge—or surges—in infections could be much deadlier. That’s because Iceland has done almost everything right to get to herd immunity with the least possible pain. The United States, by contrast, has done almost everything wrong.
Iceland’s health department didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Likewise, epidemiologists at Iceland’s biggest universities either didn’t respond or declined to comment. But American experts were eager to weigh in on what they described as an effective response to the pandemic. “This is a success story for Iceland,” Eric Bortz, a University of Alaska-Anchorage virologist and public health expert, told The Daily Beast. To be clear, no one knows for sure what proportion of a population has to get vaccinated, or get infected and recover, before SARS-CoV-2 runs out of transmission pathways.
In other words, no one knows exactly where herd immunity really begins.
Epidemiologists once assumed that, with the novel coronavirus, it might take two-thirds of the population. New and more aggressive lineages that began appearing late last year convinced some experts to bump up their expectations. Maybe population-level immunity would require vaccination or natural immunity in three-quarters of people, they posited.
Delta’s rapid spread starting this summer compelled some epidemiologists to revise their threshold estimates even higher. “There is no question that the Delta variant has changed the goalposts,” Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global health expert, told The Daily Beast. Wherever the threshold is—80 percent, 90 percent, whatever—Iceland is much closer to crossing it than the United States is.
Indeed, Iceland might be crossing that threshold right now. Bortz said Iceland, along with the United Kingdom, is one of the few countries where “a modicum of herd immunity against severe infection may be achievable” in the short term. Getting there required discipline, sacrifice and mutual care on a national scale. When the pandemic first struck in the spring of 2020, the Icelandic government reacted swiftly. “Just letting the virus spread freely through society, no one said that,” explained Þórólfur Guðnason, the country’s chief epidemiologist. “We need to have some restrictions both at the border and domestically.”
Authorities limited travel to the rocky, volcanic country and got busy tracing contacts and quarantining exposed residents while also enforcing strong social-distancing measures. Mask-wearing was widespread and uncontroversial. There were waves of infection, but they were never very bad. The first wave, in the spring of 2020, resulted in a few thousand confirmed cases. A second wave that fell added a few thousand more. Going into its third and most recent wave starting mid-July, the country had tallied around 7,000 cases (2 percent of the population) and just 30 deaths (.008 percent).
Meanwhile, while Iceland was locking down, Americans were taking to the streets to protest even the most modest social-distancing measures. Where Icelanders dutifully wore masks, right-wing media in the United States convinced millions of followers that masks were symbols of oppression. Heading into this summer’s Delta surge, the United States had registered 34 million confirmed infections (10 percent of the population) and around 600,000 deaths (.18 percent).
Cases & Deaths are orders of magnitude worse in the U.S. than in Iceland.
As Iceland steadily vaccinated three-quarters of its people, the U.S. vaccination campaign started strong, then hit a wall of right-wing obstinance. The same misinformation-peddlers who castigated masks also conned millions of Americans—Southerners, Westerners and conservatives, mostly—into believing vaccines were part of some liberal plot. Today, just 59 percent of the U.S. population has gotten at least one jab. The United States is sitting on tens of millions of unused doses of world-class vaccines while poorer, less privileged countries practically beg for access to shots.
Now, it’s true that tens of millions of Americans have caught COVID and recovered. Their antibodies and T-cells count toward herd immunity. But even taking into account widespread natural immunity still leaves somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million Americans—a third of the population—with zero immunity. No vaccine. No antibodies or T-cells. Nothing. Icelanders are so highly vaxxed—and so open to the country’s ongoing vaccination campaign—that a few thousand cases, mostly mild, could push the population into herd immunity any day now.
Iceland is proof that COVID-19 vaccines work, a leading US expert said. Infections are at record highs, but the nation hasn’t recorded a single virus death since May. (msn.com)
Considering that as many as one in four American adults say they won’t ever get vaccinated, it could take millions of additional infections to get the U.S. through that same threshold. It’s anyone’s guess how long it will take for Delta or some future lineage to spread that widely, and how much damage it will do while getting there. It’s possible, even likely, that most of those infections will be mild. But even a low rate of serious illness could kill thousands of Americans and leave thousands more with long-term complications—so-called “long COVID.”
“We have to be careful about what our expectations are with herd immunity,” Jeffrey Klausner, a former professor of medicine and public health at UCLA, told The Daily Beast. And in the time it takes the United States to rack up the extra infections it needs to get to herd immunity, the novel-coronavirus could produce variants—“lineages” is the scientific term—that are even more transmissible and virulent than Delta. It’s even possible some future lineage could partially evade the vaccines, thus imperiling vaccinated individuals alongside the unvaccinated.
“By allowing the virus to test a myriad of new variants in unvaccinated individuals, we may be naturally selecting the worst strains putting us all at risk—both in the U.S. and abroad,” Elias Sayour, a University of Florida professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics and director of the school’s Pediatric Cancer Immunotherapy Initiative, told The Daily Beast. “We’re in trouble,” Bortz said. “The U.S. vaccination rate is nowhere near what is needed for broad immunity in the population, to limit the spread and consequences of [variant-of-concern] Delta and other COVID-19 variants.”
As Americans brace for another infectious fall, many of them might glance toward Iceland with envy. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that the United States, despite possessing every material advantage, would fail so badly to build widespread immunity against the novel coronavirus. Its possible to do better. Iceland is proving that.
Face the Nation = Government Propaganda.
Dr. Anthony Fauci says recent COVID-19 outbreaks in states like Mississippi and Louisiana are “entirely predictable, and yet on the other hand, entirely preventable.” Face the Nation is America’s premier Sunday morning public affairs program. The broadcast is one of the longest-running news programs in the history of television, having debuted November 7, 1954 on CBS. Every Sunday, “Face the Nation” moderator and CBS News senior foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan welcomes leaders, newsmakers, and experts to a lively round table discussion of current events and the latest news.
Fauci — ‘Forget about your personal liberty’…
Fauci says COVID-19 surges “entirely preventable,” urges vaccinations – YouTube
We’ve got to do mitigation, put aside all of these issues of concern about liberties and personal liberties, and realize we have a common enemy, and that common enemy is the virus.
That common enemy is Fauci
White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci called on vaccine-hesitant Americans to “put aside” their “concerns about personal liberty” and just take the experimental COVID vaccine.
“You have to get the overwhelming proportion of people vaccinated, but you also have to do mitigation, and that gets to the controversial issue of mask wearing, and the mandating of things. Mandating vaccines, for example, for teachers and…personnel in the school,” Fauci said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“It’s the unvaccinated that are doing that, so we have a lot of tasks. We’ve got to do mitigation. Put aside all of these issues of concern about civil liberties and personal liberties and realize we have a common enemy and that common enemy is the virus,” Fauci said. “And we really have to go together to get on top of this. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to suffer as we’re seeing right now.”
Fauci has been more brazen in his support for vaccine and mask mandates in recent months in tandem with the rise of the so-called “delta” COVID variant. Others, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been more blunt in demanding compliance from Americans as local authorities in blue cities weigh imposing more mandates. “Screw your freedom,” he said last week in response to mask mandate pushback.
So far, ten states have banned vaccine mandates as blue states New York and California are preparing to impose vaccine and mask mandates for businesses, schools, and government jobs. Alex Jones breaks down the censored video of Rand Paul exposing Fauci’s lies and the uselessness of masks to fight Covid-19 as Biden pushes the possibility of Federal mask mandates.
See the Censored Rand Paul Video on the Fraud of Masks as Biden Pushes Federal Mask Mandate (banned.video)
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