COVID-19: Vaccine and testing procedures Megathread Part 2 [Mod Warning - Post #1]

nommm

Does anyone know how the Israelis are getting their hands on so many vaccines? Can’t make sense of it, no other county seems to have been allocated as much? Or have they?

Stheno

nommm wrote: »

Does anyone know how the Israelis are getting their hands on so many vaccines? Can’t make sense of it, no other county seems to have been allocated as much? Or have they?

They paid a premium to Pfizer

hmmm

nommm wrote: »

Does anyone know how the Israelis are getting their hands on so many vaccines? Can’t make sense of it, no other county seems to have been allocated as much? Or have they?

The story I've read is that Israel agreed with Pfizer to authorise it early, and pay over the odds for as much product as Pfizer could supply.

Pfizer were happy to do this, as they were manufacturing vaccines and no other country had approved it for use.

While it looks good on the face of it for Israel, they had to do this as they had failed to agree a pre-purchase agreement in time.

Now that the countries who have agreed pre-purchase agreements with Pfizer are approving it for use, Israel are going to see their supplies drastically cut.

Stheno

hmmm wrote: »

The story I've read is that Israel agreed with Pfizer to authorise it early, and pay over the odds for as much product as Pfizer could supply.



Now that the countries who have agreed pre-purchase agreements with Pfizer are approving it for use, Israel are going to see their supplies drastically cut.

Ah is that a factor as to the speed of rollout?

marno21

Water John wrote: »

Not sure how much EU have booked with Moderna. Think it's lowish.

80 million + I believe they’ve exercised an option for 80 million more

880k + 880k for Ireland then.

Amirani

stephenjmcd wrote: »

I work in the IT industry and know some of the engineers involved in said company, they've done work with me before. They were involved well before Christmas eve, you couldn't get them from early November.

The planning stage had been going on for a good while. As far as I was aware the plan was to bring it into service over the Christmas period.

It's also just IBM implementing a Salesforce CRM system for vaccination, it's not being developed from scratch.

Gael23

Amirani wrote: »

It's also just IBM implementing a Salesforce CRM system for vaccination, it's not being developed from scratch.

I work for Salesforce!

Water John

marno21 wrote: »

80 million + I believe they’ve exercised an option for 80 million more

880k + 880k for Ireland then.

So enough about a quarter of the pop, that's a big enough slice.

Stheno

Gael23 wrote: »

I work for Salesforce!

You have my sympathies

Stheno

Water John wrote: »

So enough about a quarter of the pop, that's a big enough slice.

Is supply of Moderna not being prioritised to the US though?

marno21

Water John wrote: »

So enough about a quarter of the pop, that's a big enough slice.

Indeed. If Moderna is approved next week Ireland will have access to 5.06 million doses of approved vaccine (3.3m from Pfizer/BioNTech and 1.76m from Moderna).

Van.Bosch

hmmm wrote: »

The story I've read is that Israel agreed with Pfizer to authorise it early, and pay over the odds for as much product as Pfizer could supply.

Pfizer were happy to do this, as they were manufacturing vaccines and no other country had approved it for use.

While it looks good on the face of it for Israel, they had to do this as they had failed to agree a pre-purchase agreement in time.

Now that the countries who have agreed pre-purchase agreements with Pfizer are approving it for use, Israel are going to see their supplies drastically cut.

So their progress may stall if they don’t have more coming. I assume they have second doses for the 1mln they have started with?

Goldengirl

stephenjmcd wrote: »

Oh in general the IT systems in the HSE are god awful. Every consultant in the industry thats dealt with the HSE gives out crap about them, even now its just throwing money at them to keep them working.

Would have been cheaper in the long run to have updated them years ago. Anyway I digress

System where I work is so bad that it freezes with fright if you try to go too fast .
Held together with elastoplast and monthly downtime for servicing every six weeks
Major hospital .

Stheno

Goldengirl wrote: »

System where I work is so bad that it freezes with fright if you try to go too fast .
Held together with elastoplast and monthly downtime for servicing every six weeks
Major hospital .

The fact they have monthly downtime every six weeks says it all

It once took me over an hour to book a physio appointment in Beaumont as the system kept crashing

And a former peer tole me they worked in a hospital and bought parts for the mainframe on ebay as it was so old

Still unsure if they were taking the piss

hmmm

Van.Bosch wrote: »

So their progress may stall if they don’t have more coming. I assume they have second doses for the 1mln they have started with?

Don't know about the second dose, but I think they've pulled off a similar trick with Moderna so supply will keep coming.

Considering the cost of shutdowns, throwing money at vaccines sounds like a good strategy. Thankfully the EU agreed to move as one bloc - even if it's slower. Otherwise smaller countries like ourselves would have been completely muscled out of it.

Goldengirl

Stheno wrote: »

The fact they have monthly downtime every six weeks says it all

It once took me over an hour to book a physio appointment in Beaumont as the system kept crashing

And a former peer tole me they worked in a hospital and bought parts for the mainframe on ebay as it was so old

Still unsure if they were taking the piss

No . Sounds about right

Miike

Stheno wrote: »

The fact they have monthly downtime every six weeks says it all

It once took me over an hour to book a physio appointment in Beaumont as the system kept crashing

And a former peer tole me they worked in a hospital and bought parts for the mainframe on ebay as it was so old

Still unsure if they were taking the piss

You should see the system to access lab reports. Seriously.

ixoy

hmmm wrote: »

Can we at least get a webpage up somewhere with number of vaccinations completed, number of vaccines delivered to date, progress vaccinating the various groupings.

Excellent idea and one we should absolutely get - a page posting positive news. Hopefully, their new IT system will do this and then we can get folks here scrapping the data and presenting it in nice fancy charts or whatever. At least they're adapting an "off the shelf" product so it should come together faster

I'd like to think it'd be a kick up the backside for them to invest in IT properly but that's probably a forlorn hope - IT is only appreciated when it suddenly stops working for far too many.

Stheno

Miike wrote: »

You should see the system to access lab reports. Seriously.

I can imagine

I work in process design, and after a deeply unpleasant stint in a and e led me to discharge myself ama, I spent several days reorganising the whole process of how I was treated and all the holes, a major one was getting ultra sound results

I was feeling optimistic about the vaccine rollout

hmmm

Professor Iwasaki is apparently a leading immunologist and has some interesting ideas on the one vs two-dose question. Her conclusion after considering the situation is in line with what the UK has decided - delay the second dose, give as many people as possible the first dose.

https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1345086669607890945

CrabRevolution

Goldengirl wrote: »

System where I work is so bad that it freezes with fright if you try to go too fast .
Held together with elastoplast and monthly downtime for servicing every six weeks
Major hospital .

I worked in the HSE for a while and sometimes get a bit annoyed seeing blatantly false and exaggerated stories people make up to criticise it, but IT is definitely one area where it's impossible to exaggerate how useless it can be.

The current Covid App and Dashboards (obviously not really related to the HSE's main operations) are pretty good though.

Stheno

ixoy wrote: »

Excellent idea and one we should absolutely get - a page posting positive news. Hopefully, their new IT system will do this and then we can get folks here scrapping the data and presenting it in nice fancy charts or whatever. At least they're adapting an "off the shelf" product so it should come together faster

I'd like to think it'd be a kick up the backside for them to invest in IT properly but that's probably a forlorn hope - IT is only appreciated when it suddenly stops working for far too many.

From the little I know of systems like Salesforce it should have built in dashboards that can be published directly on the web to present all sorts of data

Requires fairly minimal configuration

hmmm

ixoy wrote: »

Excellent idea and one we should absolutely get - a page posting positive news. Hopefully, their new IT system will do this and then we can get folks here scrapping the data and presenting it in nice fancy charts or whatever. At least they're adapting an "off the shelf" product so it should come together faster

I'm picturing the old Space Invaders game, but instead of aliens it has each of the vaccination groups in different colours, and the ship you are controlling at the bottom of the screen is shooting syringes. That's the metric we need.

Hopefully the above is part of the contract with IBM.

Gael23

Did someone post a sheet with the number of people in each priority group?

Stheno

CrabRevolution wrote: »

I worked in the HSE for a while and sometimes get a bit annoyed seeing blatantly false and exaggerated stories people make up to criticise it, but IT is definitely one area where it's impossible to exaggerate how useless it can be.

I worked with IT staff in the HSE as a supplier some years ago across the country

There were some astonishingly bright people there. Key problem appeared to me that IT never truly moved on from being IT for the health boards so it was very siloed, I'd literally sit im discussions and have Jim from Galway IT tell me black while Peter from Dublin IT would tell me white

I'll shut up before I completely derail the thread

Melanchthon

CrabRevolution wrote: »

I worked in the HSE for a while and sometimes get a bit annoyed seeing blatantly false and exaggerated stories people make up to criticise it, but IT is definitely one area where it's impossible to exaggerate how useless it can be.

The current Covid App and Dashboards (obviously not really related to the HSE's main operations) are pretty good though.

Ireland doesn have patient unique identifiers does it or am misinformed? Presume if they don't going to be a issue.

Stheno

Melanchthon wrote: »

Ireland doesn have patient unique identifiers does it or am misinformed? Presume if they don't going to be a issue.

We don't but there is a patient id used for tests so that might be the workaround

Gael23

Stheno wrote: »

From the little I know of systems like Salesforce it should have built in dashboards that can be published directly on the web to present all sorts of data

Requires fairly minimal configuration

Yes you can do this quite easily

Geuze

Can I ask a few questions?

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/operation-vaccination-hses-plan-for-care-home-residents-39902805.html

We know that the HSE will have up to 345 staff to deploy the vaccine across 583 nursing homes over six weeks, that covers 70,000 staff and residents.

We know that a vaccinator does 35 per day / 12 mins each.

Each team will have minimum of two, three or four vaccinators, an administrator and "observation clinician" .

So each team has 4 or 5 or 6 members, okay.

But it will take a team of four (2 vaccinators) a day to do the 30 residents of a small nursing home.

That seems like low productivity to me? If one person can do 35 per shift, why does it take a team a shift to do 30 people? That looks like 50% productivity to me.

Q2 - will there be parallel programmes going on during Jan/Feb, or just the 580 nursing homes?

Q3 - 70,000 in two months seems slow, at that rate 3.5m will take 100 months - so it seems we need way more than 345 staff?

wheresthebeef

You haven't factored in that for nursing homes, they will vaccinate every resident and every staff member. The number of staff usually matches or slightly exceeds the number of residents taking into account 24/7 shift patterns and non-clinical staff. So 30 bed nursing home will have approximately 30 staff too, which is why they'd need 2 vaccinators.