31dec2019 30 covid19 cases (5 community, 25 imported)

[MichealScott]

Wah routine pilot testing also can kenna 5..

 

[MichealScott]

With the vaccines, will have even more asymptomatic, because the vaccines still do not prevent infection or transmission, only prevents symptoms.

SMLJ bro? Really full of crap..

 

[junjie433]

New year for incoming double digits.

 

[appletarts]

Let’s hope the 5 com cases didn’t spread to others

 

[pclow59]

ya i think so too

just treat it as flu ... so little deaths

Not dead also half-life(不死也半条命)
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.html

 

[pclow59]

Guys for most people covid is just normal flu...Many no symptom at all.


Economy more important..No economy whole Singapore die...Open n whole kena covid most will come out alive

Maybe one day you will kena then you come here to post again!

 

[item2sell]

Guys for most people covid is just normal flu...Many no symptom at all.


Economy more important..No economy whole Singapore die...Open n whole kena covid most will come out alive

Yes. We should open up big big.

Die of covid is rare.

Better than Singapore die.
Peasants can die is a blessing

 

[Food_Lover]

Lol. All the 5 cases are linked to previous infectors.

 

[Potato_Wedges]

I have let the nation down . . .

 

[Senna Wales]

Don't talk rubbish lah. Where's your source?

https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03166-8

It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.

New York City-based drug company Pfizer made the announcement on 9 November. It offers the first compelling evidence that a vaccine can prevent COVID-19 — and bodes well for other COVID-19 vaccines in development. But the information released at this early stage does not answer key questions that will determine whether the Pfizer vaccine, and others like it, can prevent the most severe cases or quell the coronavirus pandemic.

“We need to see the data in the end, but that still doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm. This is fantastic,” says Florian Krammer, a virologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, who is one of the trial’s more than 40,000 participants. “I hope I’m not in the placebo group.”

The vaccine, which is being co-developed by BioNTech in Mainz, Germany, consists of molecular instructions — in the form of messenger RNA — for human cells to make the coronavirus spike protein, the immune system’s key target for this type of virus. The two-dose vaccine showed promise in animal studies and early-stage clinical trials. But the only way to know whether the vaccine works is to give it to a large number of people and then follow them over weeks or months to see whether they become infected and symptomatic. These results are compared with those for a group of participants who are given a placebo.

In the press release, Pfizer and BioNTech said they had identified 94 cases of COVID-19 among 43,538 trial participants. The companies did not indicate how many of those cases were in the placebo group or among those who got the vaccine. But they said that the split of cases between the groups suggested that the vaccine was more than 90% effective at preventing disease, when measured at least one week after trial participants had received a second vaccine dose 3 weeks after the first. The trial will continue until a total of 164 COVID-19 cases are detected, so initial estimates of the vaccine’s effectiveness could change.

Although the vaccine might not turn out to be quite so effective once the trial is complete and all the data have been analysed, its effectiveness is likely to stay well above 50%, says Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California. This is the threshold that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says is required for a coronavirus vaccine to be approved for emergency use. “I think this is an extraordinary achievement, even without many details, because there was no assurance of vaccine efficacy before we got the first read-out from a trial,” Topol says.

Questions remain

What’s missing, say Topol and other scientists, are details about the nature of the infections the vaccine can protect against — whether they are mostly mild cases of COVID-19 or also include significant numbers of moderate and severe cases. “I want to know the spectrum of disease that the vaccine prevents,” says Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania who sits on a US Food and Drug Administration advisory committee that is set to evaluate the vaccine next month. “You’d like to see at least a handful of cases of severe disease in the placebo group,” he adds, because it would suggest that the vaccine has the potential to prevent such cases.

It’s unclear whether the vaccine can prevent people who show no or only very mild symptoms of COVID-19 from spreading the coronavirus. A transmission-blocking vaccine could accelerate the end of the pandemic. But it will be difficult to determine whether the Pfizer vaccine, or others in late-stage trials, can achieve this, says Krammer, because it would involve routinely testing trial participants. “You can’t do that with 45,000 people,” he says.

Another missing detail is how well the vaccine works in different groups of trial participants. “We don’t know yet if it works in the population that needs it most, which is elderly,” says Krammer. Because of the small number of cases it will accrue before ending, the Pfizer trial is unlikely to conclusively determine the vaccine’s efficacy in particular demographic groups, such as over-65s or African Americans, says Offit. But he adds that if the trial enrolled enough participants from such groups, it could be possible to generalize the vaccine’s probable effectiveness in them from its overall efficacy. In the press release, Pfizer and BioNTech reported that 42% of participants had “racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds”.

Lasting immunity?

One key unanswered question is how long the vaccine’s effectiveness will last. On the basis of when the trial started and previously published data on immune responses in early-stage trials, many trial participants are likely to still have high levels of protective antibodies in their blood, says Rafi Ahmed, an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “To me, the main question is what about six months later, or even three months later,” he says.

There will be a chance to answer that question if the trial continues for several more months, says Ahmed. Answers could also come from analysis of the immune responses of people who took part in early-stage trials of the Pfizer vaccine, some of whom might have been given the vaccine up to six months ago. And although little is known about the vaccine’s long-term effectiveness, that is unlikely to hold up its use, says Ahmed. “I don’t think we should say, ‘Well, I’ll only take a vaccine that protects me for five years.’ I mean, that could be crazy.”

The results are a boost for other COVID-19 vaccine candidates. That includes an mRNA vaccine being developed by Moderna, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, says Krammer. “I expect Moderna stocks will go up today.”

Shane Crotty, a vaccine immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, thinks that Moderna isn’t the only developer that should celebrate Pfizer’s preliminary results. Several other candidate vaccines triggered immune responses similar to those elicited by Pfizer’s vaccine in early-stage trials, so they should work well, too.

One thing about Pfizer’s vaccine is certain: regulators will soon decide whether it’s ready for roll-out. The company said it would seek an emergency use authorization from the FDA around the third week of November, at which point half of the participants will have been followed for two months — an FDA safety requirement for COVID-19 vaccines.

And although researchers want to see the data behind Pfizer’s vaccine trial, they are prepared to accept caveats that come with them. “Right now, we need a vaccine that works,” says Krammer, even if it works for only a few months or doesn’t stop transmission. “That’s what we need in order to get half-way back to normal.”

 

[icansing]

Maybe one day you will kena then you come here to post again!

Why your mouth so smelly?

 

[Wizard88]

Let’s hope the 5 com cases didn’t spread to others

Very very very unlikely

 

[rachdanon]

No 10 community no talk.

 

[Potato_Wedges]

Another KNEE JERK reactions from MOH. Really CMI.

""We are aggressively tracing and testing the close contacts of the community cases so as to ringfence these cases and prevent further transmission," said MOH.

MOH added that it will start "special testing operations" to test individuals who boarded the ships that the harbour pilot and marine surveyor recently worked on.

Harbour pilots, marine surveyors and ship repair workers will also be tested in the coming days, regardless of their rostered routine testing schedule, to determine their COVID-19 status, said MOH. "

 

[lifeisinforashock]

SG economy too reliant on global demand, itself has nothing. Other countries at least got domestic market.

 

[pclow59]

Why your mouth so smelly?

Why smelly, thought you said is just the flu, not life-threatening?
So you mean for Singapore Economy, other people can get get Covid-19 but not YOU?

 

[Senna Wales]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/health/covid-vaccine-mask.html

The new Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna seem to be remarkably good at preventing serious illness. But it’s unclear how well they will curb the spread of the coronavirus.

That’s because the Pfizer and Moderna trials tracked only how many vaccinated people became sick with Covid-19. That leaves open the possibility that some vaccinated people get infected without developing symptoms, and could then silently transmit the virus — especially if they come in close contact with others or stop wearing masks.

If vaccinated people are silent spreaders of the virus, they may keep it circulating in their communities, putting unvaccinated people at risk.

“A lot of people are thinking that once they get vaccinated, they’re not going to have to wear masks anymore,” said Michal Tal, an immunologist at Stanford University. “It’s really going to be critical for them to know if they have to keep wearing masks, because they could still be contagious.”

In most respiratory infections, including the new coronavirus, the nose is the main port of entry. The virus rapidly multiplies there, jolting the immune system to produce a type of antibodies that are specific to mucosa, the moist tissue lining the nose, mouth, lungs and stomach. If the same person is exposed to the virus a second time, those antibodies, as well as immune cells that remember the virus, rapidly shut down the virus in the nose before it gets a chance to take hold elsewhere in the body.

The coronavirus vaccines, in contrast, are injected deep into the muscles and stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies. This appears to be enough protection to keep the vaccinated person from getting ill.

Some of those antibodies will circulate in the blood to the nasal mucosa and stand guard there, but it’s not clear how much of the antibody pool can be mobilized, or how quickly. If the answer is not much, then viruses could bloom in the nose — and be sneezed or breathed out to infect others.

“It’s a race: It depends whether the virus can replicate faster, or the immune system can control it faster,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “It’s a really important question.”

This is why mucosal vaccines, like the nasal spray FluMist or the oral polio vaccine, are better than intramuscular injections at fending off respiratory viruses, experts said.

The next generation of coronavirus vaccines may elicit immunity in the nose and the rest of the respiratory tract, where it’s most needed. Or people could get an intramuscular injection followed by a mucosal boost that produces protective antibodies in the nose and throat.

The coronavirus vaccines have proved to be powerful shields against severe illness, but that is no guarantee of their efficacy in the nose. The lungs — the site of severe symptoms — are much more accessible to the circulating antibodies than the nose or throat, making them easier to safeguard.

“Preventing severe disease is easiest, preventing mild disease is harder, and preventing all infections is the hardest,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. “If it’s 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease, it’s going to be something less than that in preventing all infections, for sure.”

Still, he and other experts said they were optimistic that the vaccines would suppress the virus enough even in the nose and throat to prevent immunized people from spreading it to others.

“My feeling is that once you develop some form of immunity with the vaccine, your ability to get infected will also go down,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “Even if you’re infected, the level of virus that you replicate in your nose should be reduced.”

The vaccine trials have not produced data on how many vaccinated people were infected with the virus but did not have symptoms. Some hints are emerging, however.

AstraZeneca, which announced some of its trial results in November, said that volunteers had been testing themselves regularly for the virus, and that those results suggested that the vaccine might prevent some infections.

Pfizer will test a subset of its trial participants for antibodies against a viral protein called N. Because the vaccines have nothing to do with this protein, N antibodies would reveal whether the volunteers had become infected with the virus after immunization, said Jerica Pitts, a spokeswoman for the company.

Moderna also plans to analyze blood from all its participants and test for N antibodies. “It will take several weeks before we can expect to see those results,” said Colleen Hussey, a spokeswoman for Moderna.

The trials have so far analyzed only blood, but testing for antibodies in mucosa would confirm that the antibodies can travel to the nose and mouth. Dr. Tal’s team is planning to analyze matched blood and saliva samples from volunteers in the Johnson & Johnson trial to see how the two antibody levels compare.

In the meantime, Dr. Bhattacharya said, he was encouraged by recent work showing that people who received an intramuscular flu vaccine had abundant antibodies in the nose. And a study of Covid-19 patients found that antibody levels in saliva and blood were closely matched — suggesting that a strong immune response in the blood would also protect mucosal tissues.

Only people who have virus teeming in their nose and throat would be expected to transmit the virus, and the lack of symptoms in the immunized people who became infected suggests that the vaccine may have kept the virus levels in check.

But some studies have suggested that even people with no symptoms can have high amounts of coronavirus in their nose, noted Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, who represents the American Academy of Pediatrics at meetings of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The first person confirmed to be reinfected with the coronavirus, a 33-year-old man in Hong Kong, also did not have symptoms, but harbored enough virus to infect others.

Vaccinated people who have a high viral load but don’t have symptoms “would actually be, in some ways, even worse spreaders because they may be under a false sense of security,” Dr. Maldonado said.

Dr. Tal said she was concerned by monkey studies showing that some vaccinated animals did not get ill, but still had virus in their nose.

But those monkeys were intentionally exposed to massive amounts of virus and still had less virus than unvaccinated animals, said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

“The more you reduce viral load, the less likely you are to be transmissible,” Dr. Moore said. But “all of these are things where data trumps theory, and we need the data.”

 

[HirotoXeno]

No 10 community no talk.

You think is a joke ,? You better wake up your idea.

 

[coolmyth]

Phase 3 won't last too long, eh?

 

[IceHoneyLemon]

Later at 12am 1/1/2021, will I hear people shouting PAP wansui or covid wansui ?!