Is this necessarily a bad thing? If it protects the vast majoriy of people from going into the hospital and they gain additional immunity from covid, then I don't really see a downside.
No, it didn't.
> (I am not a China fan or defender)
Then why are you making B.S. “rah rah China” claims that even Chinese state media doesn't?
The plague wiped out 1/2 of Europeans and Smallpox maybe the majority of Aboriginals. Or something like that.
Yes, 'we can survive' I don't think anyone doubts that.
The question is, is it going to kill several million Americans or more during it's run.
Hopefully not but I'm also someone can show us what the light at the end of this tunnel looks like.
The US has 622K fatalities on 37M cases, which is a 1.68% CFR (and is an undercount, because some current cases that will be fatalities aren't yet.) Of course, CFR isn't a constant, it varies with current healthcare overload and the lethality of different strains, among other factors.
In reality the fatalities are ‘people who died within a certain period after being tested positive’ and an enormous amount of cases without any symptoms go undetected.
Cases are a certainty basically by definition (now, if you want to do the usual thing and argue that we should look at IFR and not CFR, that’s a different story, but I’m not the one who introduced a false claim about CFR.)
> an enormous amount of cases without any symptoms go undetected.
By definition, if an infection goes undetected, its not a case.
Up to 90% of Native Americans died from smallpox and other imported diseases (3) and it's clear that their societies were in fact overcome.
They died a lot. To handwave "learn to live with" is naïve and facile. A virus can't care if we lose a double-digit percentage of population, but we're not choosing that course.
Don't mistake a disaster remembered 500 years later for "eh. it worked out ok" Don't confuse mass death with "learn to live with".
1) https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death
2) https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-Death/Effects-and-sig...
3) https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-...
Please stop comparing the two.
The question really isn't whether vaccinated people get sick, or even whether they spread the virus, but whether they end up in the hospital. Right now, if you're vaccinated, you are extraordinarily unlikely to end up in the hospital.
> What is clear is that “breakthrough” cases are not the rare events the term implies. As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older.
This is a bad interpretation by the article's author. At some point (at 100% vaccination rate) we'd expect 100% of people in hospital to be vaccinated.
Talking about "breakthrough" cases and how rare they are depends on the absolute number of infections. This article doesn't have that data but it does say this:
> Yet the country is now logging one of the world’s highest infection rates, with nearly 650 new cases daily per million people.
The population is 3.9m, so 2500 cases per day. According to https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/israel it is actually up to 6000 cases per day.
So there are probably 100K+ active cases. 303 (ie, 0.59 * 514) cases of vaccinated people is 0.26%. That's a pretty low rate.
The population is 9.3 million, so 650 cases/million is indeed about 6000 cases per day.
I swear it said 3.9M before, but maybe I'm wrong.
Indeed it is a lot, but it's comparable to the worst flu seasons. Exact numbers on ICU utilisation are hard to find, but US hospitals have struggled in the past:
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-flu-demand-2018...
https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20190205/bad-...
That should cut down the fatality rate, along with the rest of the lifelong damage the virus causes, by at least an order of magnitude.
The goal was also to avoid the hospital system and ICUs collapsing, which should be a natural result of everyone getting vaccinated.
Vaccine boosters yearly or every other year were also always discussed as early as March 2020 to deal either with waning immunity or reformulations to address antigenic escape.
I'm not an expert in this, so I cannot say how significant that issue is, but this is at least one potential downside that I am seeing to the vaccination being weaker for that variant.
EDIT: To clarify since some have misunderstood: I did not assert that the vaccination causes higher mutation, quite the opposite. I asserted that the absence of vaccination (entirely or effectively) gives more opportunity for mutation. I understand now that there are higher order effects that make this more complex.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
I'm gladly corrected if I missed something!
Even if that variant is more lethal (from which you might expect a smaller R0), it might be prevalent because of an augmentation in R0 from vaccination (which might be lesser had people developed a more complete natural immunity).
Considering cross-immunization between variants with natural immunity, it might be more efficient to refrain from vaccines to give cross-immunity with a weaker variant.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/11/immunocompr...
1. Likelihood of breakthrough infections.
2. Mutation rate.
3. Initial volume of infections.
For instance, if the likelihood of breakthrough infections is low enough to overcome the reproduction rate, the mutation rate is slow enough, and the initial volume of infections low enough, you'd expect that the virus would die out if enough people have had the vaccine, right?
On the other hand, if the likelihood of breakthrough infections were high, mutation rate were high, initial volume of infections high, makes sense that you would expect to see ongoing mutation.
Another way I think this might go is that mutations happen & breakthrough infections happen, but the breakthrough infections further boost immunity, and the severity never re-approaches the original severity of covid.
I now understand that there are second order effects that make this more complex, but I don't see the contradiction right here.
One interesting thing about covid is that it seems to be the first time humanity has collected so much data (eg. contact tracing, phylogenetics through genome sequencing, etc.) about this kind of virus, and applied modern medical knowledge in trying to combat it.
It's very apparent that the overall response hasn't been nearly good enough, but it's probably also the best response there's ever been. (perhaps not the best ROI, though?)
That is not what I have written, please reread!
It's an "ounce of prevention, pound of cure" type of situation
The number of children who are dying of covid has been ridiculously low for a virus that spreads so easily. Hasn't covid deaths for children under the age of 12 been under 1000 since the pandemic started?
The level of social isolation the elderly have unilaterally imposed on the youth is a travesty.
Our leaders however are not letting this crisis go to waste.
I find a lot of the discourse / antilockdown sentiment to be really confusing.
I understand lockdowns are a bad experience but are we not agreed that they save lives, and the quality of life (long covid)?
It's just that we're in a global plague right now and a large chunk of people just want to do whatever they want no matter if others are affected by their actions. Basically a stage of development such as children before they realize others are also people. It's like ten people walking a tightrope and the last one is jumping up and down. A non-infantilized society is one where we can expect everyone to be a grownup and avoid the bad quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma, and guess what? We've found out that you get an infantile society if people are just asked nicely
The elderly and well off want to minimize their risk at the expense of the young and the poor. Who do you think delivered your Amazon packages while you worked from home?
At both extremes a part of the population is unwilling to compromise and is willing to force another part to pay for their "freedom." In my opinion the yuppies obessively using instacart and Amazon are just as selfish as the Trump supporters and rednecks who may have denied covid existed. Both groups want what they want the cost be damned.
Edit: Looks like they had a huge spike in May but are now around 7-day avg of 20 cases. With 7 day average of deaths around 2-3. Vax rate 1st - 40% 2nd 2.9%
Looks pretty good.
Sweden has a rolling 7 of 500 ~ 700. Rolling seven of deaths 0. Vax rate 1st 69.5% 2nd 59.2%
Interesting because they never locked down.
To be clear, I don't mean some coordinated cabal, I just mean that society's views have drifted that way, we haven't had anything bad happen for years, the significance of individual freedom has been forgotten, we're well into turning on ourselves anyway. And so now with a push, there is a new majority, and we're seeing politicians take advantage of strong views and fall in line to represent them, disregarding safeguards and norms that we previously had in place but were not updated to contemplate something like this.
And now viewpoints that would have been intolerant and completely out of line with western democracy, and ridiculed as some mid 20th century authoritarianism are suddenly applauded all over social media.
My sister had a very mild case of Covid last year after lockdowns started lifting and she went to the hairdresser (masked, obviously not vaccinated). She had the telltale loss of taste, but really no other symptom, and she recovered.
I saw her yesterday in person for the first time in a number of months and she looked so skinny I had to say something, it was worrying to me. She told me she has trouble eating anymore because everything tastes like shit. She says that things she used to love now taste the way cigarettes smell, and she simply can't stomach it.
Her words: "People need to realize that even if you don't die from Covid, it can change your life. I wish I never got this."