Interesting question, I guess, but the world CANNOT WAIT for studies of long term effects.
If this turns out to work in the short run, we should deploy it. Not wait 2 years while the pandemic rages to produce the perfect science paper.
If this turns out to work in the short run, we should deploy it. Not wait 2 years while the pandemic rages to produce the perfect science paper.
We said that before, and we got Pandemrix.
Vaccination is safe. It's important we get as many people vaccinated as possible, and one of the ways we do that is by maintaining the safety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix
https://www.narcolepsy.org.uk/resources/pandemrix-narcolepsy
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
That is obviously much better than the current Covid situation.
Somewhere in the middle things would get iffy and ethically interesting. The front-line medical worker is probably well-compensated. The essential workers at the grocery stores and warehouses are not.
Hopefully the vaccines are safe and effective and all of this remains a hypothetical.
Because it’s only “eradicated” in New Zealand so long as they wish to remain shut off from the rest of the world.
Trade and communications are running normally. Outgoing international travel is allowed, but of course hardly anyone wants to until the overseas COVID situation settles down. Inbound international travel is bottlenecked on the quarantine system while NZers overseas keep returning here, but that won't last forever because there is a finite number of them, so at some point non-citizens/residents will be able to travel here with a 14-day quarantine requirement and an associated cost (about $4K each). That will work for students, immigrants and long-term visitors. Short-term international tourists are really the only group that will be effectively blocked long term if we don't get a vaccine.
You may have misunderstood my point.
I may not have articulated my point well.
The death toll from COVID lockdown is so much higher - from excess suicides, poverty, crime and violence - that anything we can do to alleviate the panic and get back to normal life is worth it.
That's the same false dichotomy we've been hearing since the pandemic began.
I mean, in an ideal population set where people acted rationally, it might be. In the real world, where fear motivates counterproductive behavior, it’s hard to imagine a different scenario where you don’t slow the economy (associated harms) while trying to mitigate the virus.
Another topic on HN that showed up today was "any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious," which I would broaden to, as the kids say: "bring receipts." If you're going to implicitly (or explicitly) claim that the harms of a lockdown in response to a pandemic are greater than the harms caused by the pandemic itself, you should at least put a little effort into explaining why, and include at least some links to studies or informed discussion that support your claim. Just backing it up with "the truth of my claim should be clearly obvious to even the most casual of observers" is rarely good enough.
I don't think anyone has seriously claimed you can mitigate the virus's spread without slowing the economy, or that slowing the economy doesn't come with associated harms. The question was and remains what the balance is. Is there any evidence to back up the claim in the thread above that "the death toll from COVID lockdown is so much higher?" Higher than what? The projected death toll from no lockdown at all? When someone makes a claim about the economic damage from the lockdown, are they taking into account studies that try to project the economic damage that no lockdown would have caused?
We know that many people do not have comorbidities.
The mean age of patients admitted to ICU is 60.6 years (white people), 55.4 years (non-white).
88% / 93% of people were able to live without assistance in daily activities before admission.
How much more can we expect if things simply “get back to normal”. Hard to say but obviously a gigantic loss. I’m also highly skeptical of claims that #1 suicide, crime, violence have increased significantly. Source? Poverty/economic disruption is obviously a massive damage that cannot be understated either.
But I’m highly highly skeptical that countries who try to ignore the problem like Brazil, USA will end up economically more successful than countries with strong countermeasures like South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and many others. Beat the virus to fix the economy.
At some point there is an inflection point where it makes sense to “give up” and accept that countermeasures are more costly than the benefit they provide. Clearly every day we delay and have high rates of infection, and the longer the vaccine takes, we move closer to the “give up” side of the calculation. I’m not at all convinced we’ve reached that point yet and we certainly hadn’t reached it at the point the federal administration gave up.
https://mobile.twitter.com/erictopol/status/1276153119492186...
Except those people don't pay with money, they pay with blood.