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Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2021 10:24 am
by shpalman
It's gone up to 4157600 AstraZeneca doses available now.

It might be an issue with certification of boxes or batches but I don't know why the number would go down a bit before it goes up.

Also over the past three days the number of available Pfizer doses has gone 11814660, 11836890, 11845080.

More than 383,000 doses were administered yesterday (of all kinds of vaccine but probably mostly Pfizer), or at least got registered in between early Friday morning and early this morning.

based on the past 7 days we'll have 80% of the population done by... the end of January next year

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2021 11:04 am
by shpalman
Roberto Burioni, who doesn't take no sh.t from not nobody, has summarized the latest pharmacovigilance from the Italian regulator covering 27th December 2020 to 26th March 2021:

Of a total of 9,068,249 doses administered in this period (of which 77% Pfizer, 18% AstraZeneca, and 5% Moderna), there have been 46,237 events flagged - 510 events per 100,000 doses - of which 92.7% refer to non-severe events which resolve themselves completely such as pain at the injection site, fever, asthenia/tiredness, muscle aches, usually occurring on the day of vaccination or the day after (87%). 7.1% correspond to severe events - 36 events per 100,000 doses - independent of the type of vaccine, whether it's the first or second dose, and of the possible causative role of the vaccination.

Note that a fever of over 39°C would count as a severe event let alone something that would require a trip to the hospital.

Most events flagged are from Comirnaty (81%), which so far is the most used, with increasing events flagged for Vaxzevria (17%) following its increased use. Events associated with Moderna are in proportion, which represent 2% of the total out of 5% of doses.

Regarding thromboembolic events following an Astrazeneca dose: within two weeks of vaccination, out of 62 cases inserted into Eudravigilance in Italy, 7 cases (with two deaths) have been verified of CSVT up to the 22nd of March 2021, and 4 cases (with two deaths) of atypical thrombosis out of 24 cases inserted in the European surveillance system in the same period.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2021 4:25 pm
by shpalman

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2021 5:47 pm
by shpalman
Despite the EMA saying it's ok, Italy will only recommend the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for over-60's.

Although I would suggest this is more because we still have millions of them left to do and can't be dicking about with certain professions claiming priority. The 7-day average is still 360 deaths per day in Italy but coming down through 160 cases per 100,000 per week.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 7:47 pm
by shpalman
Nearly 2 million doses of vaccine arrived in Italy today. 400,000 AstraZeneca and 1.6 million Pfizer...

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Thu Apr 22, 2021 10:03 am
by shpalman
Italy administered 376740 doses yesterday, which isn't the highest ever, but maybe the average is slowly increasing.
rollout-210422.png
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This awful graph shows that Pfizer is so far respecting its increased rollout pace, Moderna was always going to be mostly irrelevant, and AstraZeneca is teh fail.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2021 12:42 pm
by shpalman
Italy's national R_t is has apparently dropped to 0.81. Most of Italy apart from the very southern bits will be Yellow next week; the southern bits will be Orange. Sardinia will be Red of course, which is what happens a few weeks after you try to have a White zone.

I'm sure the new Decreto says universities should also get back to teaching in presence but I'm also sure there's no way our timetable could be completely reorganised around the availability of real lecture theaters with the necessary (i.e. double) capacity or the rules from autumn about mixed online and in-presence-to-half-the-students mode. So I'm assuming, since there haven't been any new communications, that we'll go back to the mode we spent months discussing over the winter and which lasted exactly two weeks at the beginning of term in February.

(It will alternate between a week in which the three 2-hour lectures are online and the two 2-hour exercise classes are split between two lecture rooms, and a week in which one of the exercise classes is replaced by me lecturing in person, and then the other exercise class is replaced by me giving the same lecture in person to the other half of the students, while the second exercise class is given online instead of one of my online lectures. So I've set up a calendar to organize that until the end of term in June which will of course barely last two weeks until we get shut down again. It's not like the vaccine rollout to teachers and older people will make the blindest bit of difference to outbreaks amongst young people.)

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2021 7:20 pm
by shpalman
My colleague got Pfizered today, so, we've gone from giving AstraZeneca to younger priority professionals because it's not recommended for older people, to basically ignoring the national guidelines to maintain a strict age-based rollout.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2021 6:40 pm
by shpalman
2.2 million doses of Pfizer arrived yesterday; 410,000 doses were administered yesterday. So the half-million-per-day target is getting closer.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 6:58 am
by shpalman
shpalman wrote:
Wed Apr 28, 2021 6:40 pm
2.2 million doses of Pfizer arrived yesterday; 410,000 doses were administered yesterday. So the half-million-per-day target is getting closer.
The news keeps going on about how we're never quite reaching half a million per day, but it seems yesterday we had more than 530,000.

A whole load of AstraZeneca vaccines are expected in the next day or two, maybe not the 5-6 million which would put them back on their delivery target, but possibly more than 2 million. Just looking at the demographics to figure out who would still be eligible to receive them. About 1 million teachers/educators need to be second-dosed but I assumed that doses had already been set aside for us (and I still don't know under what rules my colleague was recently given a first dose with the Pfizer).

(There are 6 million Italians in the 70-79 age range, and 4 million doses have so far been given in this age range; 2.9 million of these as part of the age-related rollout; there are 7.4 million in the 60-69 range and 2.7 million doses have been given, but out of these less than a million doses have been given as part of the age-related rollout rather than because they're in some other priority category.)

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:13 am
by shpalman
Whether to give people like me the second AstraZeneca dose is apparently still a question the local regulator hasn't decided on. There are four possibilities:

1. Give the second AstraZeneca dose on schedule.
2. Give a second dose with some other vaccine, probably Pfizer at this point.
3. Delay the second dose by a month while we think about it.
4. Not give the second dose at all.

I mean, I'm assuming that it's very unlikely that someone will have a serious reaction to their second AstraZeneca dose if they didn't have a reaction to the first one. But maybe that's something we don't know yet since we haven't had that many younger people getting second-dosed.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 12:25 pm
by shpalman
Since Lombardy is such a populous region, a major part of why the national rate has been so high the past few days is because the rate in Lombardy has accelerated, to around 100,000 a day for the past few days. That corresponds to 1% of the population per day.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 8:02 am
by shpalman
Did 530,000 doses yesterday too. Will pass 20 million total doses and 6 million people double-dosed today.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sun May 02, 2021 4:03 pm
by shpalman
Yesterday was Saturday so only 427,000 doses given, but today we have nearly 2 million new AstraZeneca doses to give. I think they arrived a day or two ago but they're now registered on the counter. That takes the delivered AZ doses to 6.5 million, while the target for this point would have been more like 12 million what with them having said that they would have delivered about 22 million in the second quarter of the year.

They were a bit late with their first-quarter target of 4 million and they don't seem to have stepped up production.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Wed May 05, 2021 6:12 pm
by shpalman
The rollout is being opened up to teachers. Again. Presumably Pfizer or Moderna.

Not counting today's incomplete data, 3.1 million doses were given in the seven days up unti yesterday. At this rate we'll be done by the end of October plus or minus that we should keep accelerating but will probably be slower in August.

Still, it remains the case that anyone who didn't die from the AstraZeneca back when it was being given to younger people can have the second dose; mine will be on the 17th.

I do reckon I'm seeing a clear signal that deaths are continuing to drop at a steeper rate than cases are, so it's working, even if we still have about 250 deaths per day.

Normalized curves (day 316 is actually the 1st of January):
italy-case-rate-20210505.png
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italy-death-rate-20210505.png
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There's no death data at the province level which is why Como is on the upper graph only. Also, it's not obvious to me if case or death data stratified by age is readily available.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Fri May 07, 2021 6:56 am
by shpalman
570,000 doses yesterday, but some of those may have been from the day before which only registered 470,000.

Italy has decided to extend the time to the second dose of Pfizer (and Moderna, as if anyone has had Moderna) to 42 days (from 21 and 28 days, respectively) so as to give more first doses. Meanwhile the rollout is moving towards over-50's, or at least, booking is open for them.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Tue May 11, 2021 11:12 am
by shpalman
450,000 doses yesterday; Lazio is basically going to have to slow down since they gave people the choice of which vaccine to have so all their supply of Pfizer is booked for the whole month while they have AstraZenecas nobody wants.

Meanwhile the young woman who accidentally got an entire phial of Pfizer (i.e. 6 doses) is fine.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Tue May 11, 2021 4:44 pm
by shpalman
shpalman wrote:
Fri May 07, 2021 6:56 am
Italy has decided to extend the time to the second dose of Pfizer (and Moderna, as if anyone has had Moderna) to 42 days (from 21 and 28 days, respectively) so as to give more first doses.
The scientific-technical committee said no - stick to the regime which Pfizer specifies.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Tue May 11, 2021 5:14 pm
by shpalman
shpalman wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 4:44 pm
shpalman wrote:
Fri May 07, 2021 6:56 am
Italy has decided to extend the time to the second dose of Pfizer (and Moderna, as if anyone has had Moderna) to 42 days (from 21 and 28 days, respectively) so as to give more first doses.
The scientific-technical committee said no - stick to the regime which Pfizer specifies.
No wait it's the CTS which advises that a longer interval is ok while Pfizer says to not mess about with their protocol.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Thu May 13, 2021 12:13 pm
by shpalman
Another couple of million Pfizers have arrived, over-40's will be able to book from Monday although in Lombardy it might be a few days later depending how many more Pfizers show up.

Lombardy is actually going much faster now that the regional administration has gotten out of the way of the people who know what they are doing.

If Italy can maintain a rate of half a million doses per day (the past 7 days average something like 430,000) then we'll be mostly done in September, but Figliuolo has indicated he now wants to reach a million a day. This would however require that AstraZeneca actually deliver the doses they said they would and that people want to receive them.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sat May 15, 2021 11:53 am
by shpalman
Lazio for example is basically offering an "open day" on the AstraZeneca vaccine today, which I think means anyone over 40 can just turn up and they'll be vaccinating people until midnight.

Italy wants people to get vaccinated of course, but it also needs people to go on holiday (for most of August usually) so there's a discussion going on generally about whether people will be able to get their second doses while on holiday in another part of Italy, so that they can both book the first dose now and book the holiday without worrying about them clashing.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sat May 15, 2021 7:30 pm
by shpalman
So Lombardy will open booking for over 40's on the 20th, the following week for over 30's, and then on the 2nd of June everybody else.

Well, they'll be able to book, doesn't mean that they'll have the appointment before September.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Sat May 15, 2021 8:26 pm
by shpalman
(Lombardy has received some of the AstraZeneca doses which other regions didn't want).

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Mon May 17, 2021 12:33 pm
by shpalman
shpalman wrote:
Sat May 15, 2021 11:53 am
Lazio for example is basically offering an "open day" on the AstraZeneca vaccine today, which I think means anyone over 40 can just turn up and they'll be vaccinating people until midnight.
It apparently went so well (walk-in vaccinations for a certain age group at the weekend until late) that Lazio will repeat the experiment and other regions might try it themselves.

Re: Vaccine rollout in Italy

Posted: Wed May 19, 2021 5:20 pm
by shpalman
I was able to log in to my health records on the website of the Lombardy region, using my digital identity (a kind of certified two-factor authentication which has now become mandatory and free for Italians although I set it up a while ago). I was then able to look at my vaccination record, and download a pdf of it which has a QR and instructions for how to validate it for anyone I show it to who doubts me.

Not that it entitles me to do anything which non-vaccinated people can do at the moment (until mid June) but Italy is talking about a "Green Pass" valid from 15 days after the first vaccination to 9 months after the second one (if applicable). Otherwise, 6 months after recovering from a covid infection. Or 48 hours after a negative PCR test.

(The Green Pass won't actually indicate anything about your medical history, just that you fulfil one of the criteria.)