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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

I think that is going to depend on your definition of "significant". I think at best we would have similar numbers to Israel right now by then. That would still represent >250 deaths per day.

(EDIT: If there is some reason that our rates will fall more quickly, I'd love to hear it.)

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That's on the order of a bad flu season, right? So not enough that it should affect our behavior in major ways.

The argument for our lifestyle changes was always to "slow the spread" or "bend the curve". It seems we've done that about as well as we can.

I think that would still that would still be 40% or more higher than our worst flu season?

Its definitely getting into the same order of magnitude at that point, though. It'd be hard to argue for stringent lockdowns, IMO.

That's the with-lockdowns rate, is it not? The without-lockdowns rate would be much higher.

Current Israeli death rates are with some social distancing measures, but nowhere near lockdown. They're having concerts and (vaccinated-people-only) indoor dining.

Wait until you hear about Florida and Texas.

But with much higher infection and fatality rates, because that is not a good idea without mass vaccination.

Texas and Florida deaths per day are under 100

Note that deaths are a very lagging indicator. Here in Ireland we have a massive spike at Christmas, and some of the people infected then are still dying.

Florida schools have been open since August.

Yeah, it does appear that relative to other activities, schools are less risky. France appear to be having issues though, and apparently that's related to schools.

The UK numbers have stopped decreasing since they re-opened schools, but that could be due to the B.1.7 variant.

By May, not really. Assuming by mid-May 50% of people are vaccinated and some more have had natural immunity the total immunity rate is likely to be around 70%, and much of the remainder is children and young teens. At that point you could do nothing and not worry much. Especially when the only excuse for being old or at risk and not being immune is your own anti-vax tendencies, not a realistic supply limitation.

There are entirely too many assumptions in that statement, especially with the complete lack of evidence cited. There is a lot of concern right now amongst scientists that our uneven rollouts could cause new variants to spread, and that this could turn into more of a yearly flu vaccine with a constant fight to stay in front of it.

The problem is that those 70% numbers assume even distribution, but that isn't turning out to be the case. Not only are different countries going at very different rates, but even inside of the US you can see a huge spread. This isn't just about where the vaccine is being delivered but we're it's being ignored. It's not hard to imagine that LA County might not ever get up to the 60% to 70% threshold needed for herd immunity due to a large community of antivaxxers who can support and spread new variants that spread further out.

This very article we're reading briefly mentions this, as pfizer is already working on boosters. Covid is not going to just disappear in the next six weeks.

I'm actually more optimistic than that.

I read an interesting article arguing that "the people who deserve the vaccine the least, should be the ones getting it first". As in, the kid who irresponsibly goes to Miami on spring break, should be the person getting the vaccine first- because vaccinating super spreaders would save more lives than vaccinating someone who stays home anyways. So arguably, the people who are most likely to transmit the disease should get vaccinated first.

The flip side of the coin is people who are most likely to catch the disease- probably already did. I can name a handful of people who I'm facebook friends with, who gave no shits about staying at home and caught covid already a few months ago.

So now, 1 year into the lockdown, the people who are most likely superspreaders- already got infected and are mostly immune. On the other hand, we're going to have 1/3 or 1/4 of the population still stay at home regardless of what the govt says.

So a significant percent of the population isn't contributing to spread anymore, even if they're not vaccinated.

Covid won't disappear but the risk of mass casualty events from the virus certainly will, and that should be enough to remove the pandemic restrictions. We've lived with endemic infectious disease for a long time, and we will continue to live with them for the rest of our lives.

dont forget that flu deaths are _after_ vaccinations, of which there are now billions annually.

The CDC estimates the flu vaccine prevents 6,500 deaths per year in the US. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/keyfacts.htm#effectiveness

Given that flu vaccine is needed annually, we don’t have nearly the coverage we are trying for with COVID. Hopefully, COVID vaccines (and natural immunity for those who recovered) hold for much longer than flu vaccines, so that we can actually get closer to true herd immunity.

I’m not optimistic we can rid ourselves of COVID completely, but pushing it to the fringes would be great.

Flu vaccines are less effective than what we're seeing with the covid vaccines as well as they're more of a guess as to what will become the biggest flu variant vs after the fact of the covid vaccines. Not really comparable.

Once every adult has had the chance to get vaccinated, there is no reasonable argument for lockdowns.

Sure there is, there could be new variants that the vaccines don't protect against. The criteria for the various levels of reopening were set at the beginning. Those are what should determine the reopening according to public health experts.

Surely you understand there are more considerations than just what public health experts say right? They are a part of the answer, not the whole.

The vaccines have proven highly effective at protecting against COVID and its highly transmissible variants, and it's unlikely that we'll see a new variant arise that exhibits sufficient immune escape to result in severe infections in vaccinated people.

The criteria for the various levels of reopening at the beginning were due the need to protect vulnerable people who did not have the opportunity to magically protect themselves by getting vaccinated.

The other aspect is that negative side effects are much more prevalent with COVID. So keeping cases down is still important

But how widespread are the negative side effects, do you have data on this ?

There have been a bunch of studies that have come out, with a range of quality in case selection methodology eg. biased sampling, so its still early days. I've seen estimates ranging from 2% - 33% for effects up to 7 months after infection for mild-moderate symptomatic cases. But generally, it seems quite a serious issue.

This is a good review on whats out there: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01283-z

Seems about right. Israel appears to have twice the percentage of their population vaccinated and half the death rate compared to US. Current deaths in US is ~900/d, so half that is ~450.

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countri...

There is absolutely no way we will get vaccine update like Israel, there are far too many antivaxxers in the states for that to happen. They will just catch it sometime between now and year's end I will guess.

Israel had a fair number of antivaxxers, as well as people who aren't quite antivaxxers but are very wary of vaccination. The "green passport" (proof of vaccination that is required to take part in much of normal life there currently) has been doing a decent job of fixing that... Although I'm skeptical that the US will follow suit to the same degree.

I think Israel is kind of plateuing at around ~55% of the population vaccinated? I'm sure it will continue to increase, but the rate of increase seems to be slowing. I'm not seeing much evidence that the US will stay lower than that.

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