Recently the health undersecretary was asked how long the vaccine being given here, Sinovac, will work. She said we can't be fully sure yet, but similar vaccines tend to be effective for only 6 months. They really got us a great vaccine, didn't they? 50% effective and it probably only lasts 6 months. There will still be community transmission and it will be used as a excuse for lockdowns.


I do worry about how these variants are going to affect the attempts to control the virus as well. Here, they say they have only found something like 28 cases of the Brazilian variant, but I have no clue how much they are looking for it. I have a feeling it is here and making the rounds. We have many daily flights between the two countries and they only recently instituted stricter quarantine requirements on arrivals from Brazil. From what I was reading about Brazil, doctors were saying that they used to see maybe 2 members of a family getting COVID, but with the Brazilian variant it's normally the whole family. It's that much more transmissible. We've had various mass contagion events lately - nearly a whole soccer team got it, and a whole theater group. The theater group was allowed to practice, because they were in an area in phase 3, which is less strict. In the theater group, one actor died and the hairdresser is intubated in the ICU. The man that died had received his first vaccine dose several weeks before. He was in his 80s, so high risk . The government also just closed down an entire market indefinitely due to an outbreak. These cases make me wonder if the Brazilian variant was involved.