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The day after California began its Covid-19 vaccination rollout, the state activated its “mass fatality” program, including the purchase of 5,000 body bags.

In a press conference Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said the activation of the program, which coordinates mutual aid activity between state and local agencies in a crisis, is in direct response to the surge of Covid-19 cases and deaths.
Sixty refrigerated storage units, each more than 50 feet long, will be used throughout the state for emergency overflow for coroners and morgues.

Newsom said the program addresses what he called “sobering realities” in the state’s battle against the pandemic.

“I don’t want people to scare folks, but this is a deadly disease. And we need to be mindful of where we are in this current journey together, to the vaccine. We are not at the finish line,” the governor said.

Abstract

Governments are attempting to control the COVID-19 pandemic with nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). However, the effectiveness of different NPIs at reducing transmission is poorly understood. We gathered chronological data on the implementation of NPIs for several European, and other, countries between January and the end of May 2020. We estimate the effectiveness of NPIs, ranging from limiting gathering sizes, business closures, and closure of educational institutions to stay-at-home orders. To do so, we used a Bayesian hierarchical model that links NPI implementation dates to national case and death counts and supported the results with extensive empirical validation. Closing all educational institutions, limiting gatherings to 10 people or less, and closing face-to-face businesses each reduced transmission considerably. The additional effect of stay-at-home orders was comparatively small.

Worldwide, governments have mobilized resources to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. A wide range of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) has been deployed, including stay-at-home orders and the closure of all nonessential businesses. Recent analyses show that these large-scale NPIs were jointly effective at reducing the virus’ effective reproduction number (1), but it is still largely unknown how effective individual NPIs were. As more data become available, we can move beyond estimating the combined effect of a bundle of NPIs and begin to understand the effects of individual interventions. This can help governments efficiently control the epidemic, by focusing on the most effective NPIs to ease the burden put on the population.

A promising way to estimate NPI effectiveness is data-driven, cross-country modeling: inferring effectiveness by relating the NPIs implemented in different countries to the course of the epidemic in these countries. To disentangle the effects of individual NPIs, we need to leverage data from multiple countries with diverse sets of interventions in place. Previous data-driven studies (table S8) estimate effectiveness for individual countries (2–4) or NPIs, although some exceptions exist [(1, 5–8); summarized in table S7]. In contrast, we evaluated the impact of several NPIs on the epidemic’s growth in 34 European and seven non-European countries. If all countries implemented the same set of NPIs on the same day, the individual effect of each NPI would be unidentifiable. However, the COVID-19 response was far less coordinated: countries implemented different sets of NPIs, at different times, in different orders (Fig. 1).

Even with diverse data from many countries, estimating NPI effects remains a challenging task. First, models are based on uncertain epidemiological parameters; our NPI effectiveness study incorporates some of this uncertainty directly in the model. Second, the data are retrospective and observational, meaning that unobserved factors could confound the results. Third, NPI effectiveness estimates can be highly sensitive to arbitrary modeling decisions, as shown by two recent replication studies (9, 10). Fourth, large-scale public NPI datasets suffer from frequent inconsistencies (11) and missing data (12). Hence, the data and the model must be carefully validated if they are to be used to guide policy decisions. We have collected a large public dataset on NPI implementation dates that has been validated by independent double entry, and extensively validated our effectiveness estimates. This is a crucial, but often absent or incomplete, element of COVID-19 NPI effectiveness studies (10).

Our results provide insight on the amount of COVID-19 transmission associated with various areas and activities of public life, such as gatherings of different sizes. Therefore, they may inform the packages of interventions that countries implement to control transmission in current and future waves of infections. However, we need to be careful when interpreting this study’s results. We only analyzed the effect NPIs had between January and the end of May 2020, and NPI effectiveness may change over time as circumstances change. Lifting an NPI does not imply that transmission will return to its original level and our window of analysis does not include relaxation of NPIs. These and other limitations are detailed in the Discussion section.

莫德纳是新加坡政府已付订金的其中一家疫苗制造商，而美国制药商辉瑞的首批冠病疫苗，本月底将运到新加坡。

美国生物科技公司莫德纳证实已与新加坡卫生部签署协定，为新加坡提供疫苗。

莫德纳（Moderna）昨天发布文告说，这么做是为了“确保新加坡人能获得安全有效的冠病疫苗”。它没有透露会提供多少剂疫苗，也没有透露疫苗价格。

莫德纳总裁邦塞尔（Stéphane Bancel）说：“应付全球疫情需要几种疫苗与治疗选项，我们为莫德纳在全球抗疫工作中扮演的角色感到骄傲。”

莫德纳是新加坡政府已付订金的其中一家疫苗制造商，而美国制药商辉瑞的首批冠病疫苗，本月底将运到新加坡。与辉瑞疫苗相同，莫德纳是以信使核糖核酸（mRNA）技术研发疫苗，让人体细胞制造类似病毒的蛋白质，引发免疫系统产生抗体且会攻击病毒的T细胞。

莫德纳疫苗须注射两剂，两者间隔28天。辉瑞疫苗同样须注射两剂，间隔21天。

根据文告，有3万多人在美国参与莫德纳的临床试验，其中196人染病，疫苗效能（efficacy），即接种疫苗的群体与没接种群体相比，病例减少为94.1％，预防严重冠病效能则为100％。

李显龙总理前天宣布，新加坡卫生科学局已批准在本地使用辉瑞与其德国伙伴BioNTech联合生产的疫苗。

根据辉瑞网站资料，疫苗运输时须储存在比北极冬天冷的零下70摄氏度长达10天，送达后可存放在医院常见的冰箱（2至8摄氏度）长达五天。

莫德纳疫苗则可在零下20摄氏度维持稳定长达六个月，在冰箱内可储存长达30天。

莫德纳正在加产疫苗，从明年开始，每年可供应5亿至10亿剂。

为确保供应充足，新加坡政府准备以10亿元向多家厂商采购疫苗，除了两家美国制造商，也与中国的北京科兴生物制品公司（Sinovac）签署预购协议。