Why can't the US do the same now? The US is sitting on millions of AstraZeneca vaccines (that are not even approvad by the FDA), and doesn't want to share. How about sending plasma?
Oh, lol no, not cumulatively. I mean Yesterday. We administered 2.3 million doses in about 14 daytime hours on March 12th.
Naturally, the number of vaccinated individuals grows every day. That's what vaccinations do. But the number of doses we are administering every day is growing every day. One week ago, on March 8th, we administered about 2.05 million.
There's no point to harvesting plasma. Why would we, as a society, try to do that on any meaningful scale when we have working vaccines, produced and administered on a global scale that humanity has in our entire history as a species never before reached?
People give Trump shit for his statement that, one day, the virus will just magically disappear. He deserves it, but not because it won't disappear; it will disappear, but it won't be because of magic. The effort that the Trump administration, the Biden Administration, Project Warp Speed, the CDC, and other Federal and State Health Agencies, have put into this is something that, in 100 years, our history books will write paragraphs about. Its invisible to most of us. We still feel the legitimate and necessary fear that kept people isolated and society going over the past year. That fear isn't forever; the US was hard-hit, but the US will be one of the first countries back to normalcy, and the rest of the world will quickly follow.
I live in Australia. The country has been to normal for a long time now, and my state specifically had a lockdown at the start of the pandemic, and since August 2020, we have not had a major lock down (except for one week in Jan 2021 due to a outbreak scare) and have been living in normalcy since then.
Just saying because it seems like people erasing and forgetting history that somehow America is the first out of this. No, many countries have done fairly well and have managed to be relatively normal.
There are currently ~40,000 Australian citizens registered with the government who are trying to get back to Australia, receiving little to no assistance.
Flights are restricted into the country.
Australian citizens are banned from leaving the country.
This is not yet "normal", I hope.
We went out to a bar in a state capital on Sunday, just to sit outside and get some food and drinks. I went inside to use the restroom, and you literally would not think there's a pandemic. Fifty to sixty people, probably 120% capacity (our city is at 50% capacity on bars; they don't care). No one wearing masks. Someone had their year old baby with them (also, definitely not allowed even outside covid). This wasn't a bar in the middle of nowhere, it was in the middle of a city of millions of people.
Normalcy means different things to different people and in different places. When I say the US will be first back to normalcy, it isn't because we'll be the first country with no cases, or everyone vaccinated (though, our vaccination numbers are insane); its because the people and the government just care less. For many people, nothing has changed; the world has changed a bit around them, but for better or worse (read: for worse) life already is "normal". And, for even far, far more people, like me, the only part of life that isn't "normal" yet is that I throw on a mask when I go in the store or to work. There's plenty of places around the world where that WAS their normal even before covid.
The majority of the US is not NYC/LA/Seattle/SF. It dominates the externally facing image, but its a far more nuanced and complex situation than what is happening in the major cities.
Though I very much like this optimistic take, this is a bit revisionist.
Specifically, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and a few others (including parts of mainland China) have already returned to “normalcy” in that their economies are growing and that all have high public confidence that contagion has been controlled.
This was a smart play, of course, and ultimately the deciding factor, but this success is only being realized after a long string of failures and ongoing inefficiencies.
The "magic" part, I think, was about perception: Infection rates have been dropping almost worldwide for two months (more, in some places), but people seem to think infections are steady or still increasing despite vaccinations (concern about variants, old messaging (we still have signs up from November here), etc). For a lot of people, it will look like magic when it's suddenly no longer a concern.
>>There was no significant difference in 28-day mortality between the two groups:
[0] Or, at least, the Covid vaccine has not been proven to do anything to help a patient who is sick now. There are cases (such as rabies) where getting vaccinated after being infected is still beneficial.