Why Opening Restaurants Is Exactly What the Coronavirus Wants Us to Do
propublica.org
propublica.org
Who here is ready to wear a mask in public from now on?
The current production capacity for mRNA vaccines isn't enough to quickly give much of the planet a booster shot, but it isn't unimaginable to scale it to that point.
We could also just use social distancing to eradicate it. Not a mix of half measures, real lock downs and tracing and quarantines. It would vanish in a puff of coordinated effort.
Or... people could just give up, and our death rates will skyrocket, and it'll just be the US's national shame. I also think that's a real possibility.
A lot of conditions render you ineligible for ever obtaining certain vaccines.
This is usually accounted for through herd immunity.
It's a big world. You may lock down a city. That's easy(ish). A country is harder, but do-able for one with either a strong central government or strong social cohesion. But the whole world? All two hundred plus countries? And if any one country fails, if the borders aren't 100% tight, it can get out. That leaves you with tracing and quarantines in the countries that had eradicated it, which is do-able if it doesn't cross the border too frequently.
Is Afghanistan going to fully lock down? Is Yemen? Syria? How many countries are going to fail? How many countries do we have to quarantine every single visitor, and for how long?
The vaccine may get us out of this. Social distancing without the vaccine might be kind of workable, if everything goes right, but it would leave us in less-than-ideal circumstances for a very long time.
Still, it would be better if we could avoid exposing a huge population of immunized people to a huge population of infected people. It's obvious everything would be better with fewer infected people, but it's still dawning on some that benefits include fewer strains and maybe more effective vaccination impacts."
(We can do the same with the Russian and Chinese vaccines if they are suitable; but the point is that it would be nice to see world leaders start talking about widespread vaccination as a global issue)
TIL that covid 19 is a sentient being capable of high level thought.