Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will completely eliminate COVID measures? Is it just me or is there no clear exit criteria anymore? This will go on forever without exit criteria.
Next door in Kansas City Missouri I stopped at a gas station and an employee was shouting at a woman to put on a mask, then was yelling at the same woman to leave because she refused to comply. I’m glad she didn’t see me because I literally didn’t think to bring a mask with me and needed to run to the restroom.
I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious.
The sky isn’t falling. Hospitals aren’t being overrun. Life is good, and I can remember the last time I worried or had anxiety about Covid.
There seems to be a group of people who still believe we can ‘beat’ Covid. That somehow we make it go away, with endless restrictions. In reality, it is here to stay, and we will have to live with it for the rest of our lives.
Doesn’t look too bad so far as the USA goes, although if legal gun owners or Mexican cartel members were out there killing 40 people a day, you’d be screaming bloody murder about it
It hasn't been doing all that great on death rates, either [2]. A bit worse than the Southern average, and quite a bit worse than the other regions of the US.
South Carolina has now reached the same death total per capita as the Northeast [3], which is quite astounding.
The Northeast got there by having a large number of people die early in the first couple of months of the pandemic as it tore through high density communities of especially vulnerable people while we were still trying to figure out basic things like how to treat it and what measures were practical and effective for limiting spread.
That should have cemented the Northeast as the US COVID death leader for the rest of the pandemic. But South Carolina in the last couple of months, despite over half the people being vaccinated, as managed to get a death rate that looks almost like an early pandemic Northeast death rate, eliminated the death gap.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
[2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
[3] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
And I'm fully vaccinated. Not because I was scared of getting sick (i already contacted COVID twice before the vaccine, including the Delta variant), but because I was shamed into getting it (think about the immunocompromised!!!). And now I'm being told that vaccine doesn't prevent transmission? So now I'm being shamed into wearing a mask.
And now the govt is trying to bully the 10% teachers who are not vaccinated. They might lose their jobs if they don't get the shots. Think about the children!!! But wait a minute, the vaccines don't prevent transmission. So even if the teachers get vaccinated, how is it going to help the children?
Vaccines significantly reduce transmission, so if someone is telling you they don't, you need to re-evaluate whether you should trust that person and any information they're giving you.
(P.S. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with airborne transmission that loves nasal passages, so it's probably pretty important that your mask cover your nose. So far, there's no evidence that the virus cares at all about how much money you have in your hand.)
None of these sources are trusted by the people who don't want the vaccine.
“Individuals who have had two vaccine doses can be just as infectious as those who have not been jabbed.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59077036
Study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
You're leaving out the context: they can be just as infectious once they become infected, which is significantly less likely for those who are fully vaccinated.
Vaccines significantly reduce the transmissability of the virus by making it less likely for those vaccinated to become infected, NOT by making them less infectious if they are infected.
No, 5 miles means you have a different government with a different policy response. (The difference itself doesn't justify either side.)
That's just inherent in the existence of political borders.
The parent statement was not literal, making your expansion meaningless and honestly a little stunning.
Correct. Instead it was agenda driven sarcasm, which while not forbidden on HN, adds nothing to, and always lowers the quality of discussion.
Rather than take the emotional bait and be sarcastic in return, the person who responded pointed out the misrepresentation that was behind the sarcasm, which is the most civil way to address it.
Their response was far more measured and constructive than the "take it to Reddit" response that the parent comment type usually elicits. There was absolutely nothing stunning about it - rather it was a standard civil response method in a debate whose civility has been lowered through sarcasm.
Of all the problems in your story, the employee shouting is the least 'wrong'. You've got a woman who won't wear a mask, yourself who sneaked in without a mask, and that's just in that moment of time, but somehow the employee who has to deal with that behavior all day every day is the bad person because they lost their cool.
It's one of those 'everyone sucks here' stories.
By being a vaccinated unmasked person in a crowd of non-vaccinated people, you possibly become a super spreader.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v...
The idea that once you are vaccinated you don't need to social distance or wear a mask is wrong and is getting people sick. In fact a vaccinated infection appears to have the same viral load as an unvaccinated. https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...
If I'm out in public, I wear socks everyday (well most), I wear a shirt, I wear pants. Its not much of a stretch to wear a mask out in public too.
Vaccinated people also have a lower rate of transmission.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... (table 5 page 19)
Your second statement is categorically false. See my comment above... you know the one you responded too. It actually links to a study showing the viral load is the same. Or here is another study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Please stop spreading misinformation. Saying vaccinated people have a lower chance of getting covid is a true statement. However both of your statements are straight up misinformation.
Please take a look at the rest of the thread for sources that vaccinated individuals spread covid at lower rates than the unvaccinated.
Please stop spreading antivax FUD.
I wasn’t making any judgment about the woman yelling at people, I’d be mad if I was being threatened with fines by the local government for having maskless people in my establishment too.
Ha. Perhaps she was mad because she was at risk of being exposed to Covid all day long due to boneheads who were incapable of reading, or wearing a mask, and some of them turned around and gave her grief for it?
In my nearest town (in the UK) there are two supermarkets. In the budget one (Aldi) nobody wears a mask, in the upmarket one (Waitrose) everybody does.
In addition to the mask mandates, which are more bothersome than you make out (e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask), there are other restrictions. Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wind instrument classes.
Those restrictions are on their way out:
https://abc7news.com/amp/face-masks-mask-mandates-bay-area-i...
> Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wood wind instrument classes.
Not sure where you are but in my very urban CA city, except for testing which is a very good thing IMO, none of these rules are in place.
This morning, the parent community met for donuts at the elementary school campus, where kids were playing close-contact basketball. The local middle school jazz band - with plenty of wind instruments - played recently at the local street fair as a fundraiser, and it's clear they had been practicing.
Then again, around here vaccine and mask wearing rates are extremely high, so we basically had very little in the way of outbreaks and community transmission. It seems like when a critical majority of people are civically considerate and voluntarily mask and vaccinate, life can go on pretty close to normal.
I'm in the East Bay, and most of what you have described - people at the park wearing masks, riding bikes or skateboards with masks, nannies wearing masks - are voluntary behaviors not mandated by any authority.
Why does it matter to you what measures others take to protect themselves from the virus voluntarily, and which is totally within their personal liberty to do? Does it offend your sensibilities somehow? Should they not be wearing masks to make you feel like things are "normal" per your definition?
The other cases you raise -retail, restaurant, and daycare - all have very specific risks either due to density or because unvaccinated children are present.
It is "normal" now because I can go shopping or to a restaurant, have a drink at my neighborhood bar, take my kids to school, fly somewhere on vacation, have a gathering in my house, attend public events (Halloween was huge in my neighborhood) - everything I did before the pandemic - with the tiny inconvenience of getting vaccinated and wearing a mask when indoors in public.
Well, based on case and death counts between the two states, this is true. Kansas has significantly higher case and death rates than Missouri.
Thus, COVID precautions are necessary to reduce the rate of infection to levels that do not overwhelm the healthcare system.
And all those areas that have "returned to normal" are sending their COVID patients to regions that are still masking because they've exhausted their local ICU capacity.
This has been my experience as well. My state is pretty strict overall, but my area of my state is not.
Our hospital has been operating at capacity for 6 months or so, but nobody is talking about it. Because we can just ship to where they have stricter COVID control measures.
We're causing problems for other people because we can't be bothered to be part of society.
It's a joke all around. The entire world. Nihilism is almost impossible to escape right now.
I used to think that one of the worst things in the USA was that 100 people per day die in preventable car accidents, but now we’re getting 10x that from a virus and people pretend that it isn’t happening
I told my wife I used to think we'd be one of the first to die in the Zombie Apocalypse because her and my kids are all high-anxiety people that typically crumble with too much psychological pressure. Yet covid has shown me we'd actually be one of the longest survivors given our resilience so far and how we haven't caved into the pressures of society itching to get back to normal. My dad - a self-proclaimed "survivalist" and doomsday prepper didn't make it even two months before he gave up on quarantining. He said the psychological stress was too much, he couldn't handle it lol
It couldn't mass produce fighter pilots, though.
I live in South Carolina & their Department of health website has great data. As of today, there are currently 551 Covid patients hospitalized statewide. 1280 ICU beds are occupied for a 76% utilization rate. Of those beds, 150 are Covid patients. That means 88% of folks in ICU are non-covid related.
https://scdhec.gov/covid19/covid-19-data/acute-hospital-bed-...
This data doesn’t exactly corroborate what your saying. The way you tell it, the ICUs are still overflowing with Covid, and they just aren’t. Not in SC at least. And we’re not exactly known for our stringent Covid restrictions.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...
Also, there's been a couple of big hoaxes that have circulated like the one about how ERs were full of Ivermectin ODs and they were turning away car accident victims.
Here's the actual real-time-ish data of ICUs for the country:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...
Right now the national average for ICUs is 68% occupancy. Also from that article:
>The national average I.C.U. occupancy in 2010 was 67 percent, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, though the occupancy baseline changes depending on the place, time of year and size of hospital.
>I'm sure it's true that there's places in the country where ICUs are full up with pandemic patients.
If you are operating at your normal capacity factor but have reason to predict that you are on a trajectory to be completely overwhelmed along with every hospital within reasonable driving distance, it's different than if you are operating at your normal capacity factor and have to send a patient or two to the nearest hospital with more spare capacity.
Covid is still very real. And there are still very real risks. But this fear of overrun ICUs is irrational nonsense. We are back to pre-pandemic ICU utilization. And we have been since before the Delta variant hit.
But maybe the media called every hospital in the state to find her or something.
We are scraping by with the measures we do have in place, we can't use the fact that we are successfully scraping by as evidence that we have too many measures in place.
I don't understand why you extrapolated that data to suggest something about how many measures we have in place. Is your position that we should lie to the public so they will do what you want?
2021 is already "mostly normal", for me. I hope sometime in 2022 we will be back to "100% normal", but I'm not confident.
When it's absolutely unbearable for healthcare system, government also introduces soft lockdown where restaurants / cafes / public places are closed. Then everything goes back to "normal".
I really don't see how it can be 100% normal next year. At least in here.
This tracks with Dr. Vanden Bossche's assessment [2] from March of this year that mass vaccination with prophylactic vaccines will actually prolong and worsen the pandemic due to shedding of infectious variants.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/ [2] https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...
They are only "necessary" if you are optimizing the metric "make sure hospitals run smoothly" over any other concerns.
I hate this framing that Covid restrictions are ever forced on us, rather than being a policy choice with pros and cons.
That also doesn't account for the damage people contracting the virus accumulate that doesn't register on that metric.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/11/what-amer...
- Vaccinate everyone who can be vaccinated, at gunpoint.
- Allow everyone who is vulnerable to die, at which point the death rates will drop.
Choose. Which one do you want?
In the US, this is a very bad idea, indeed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w In the US, 340 children under 17 have died from Covid. Total. During the same period, 187 have died from the flu, and over 51,000 children have died from all causes:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
Sweden halts Moderna: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-moderna-sweden-ha... The reason the vaccines aren't being approved for children is that there is compelling evidence that children are at greater risk from the vaccines than the virus. This is why (for example) approval for vaccination of children and teenagers is split across Europe, and the UK has restricted access to only children with known vulnerabilities:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-19/u-k-to-gi...
A high population of vaccinated is mathematically more likely to produce more virulent strains with a non sterile vaccine in a fast mutating virus.
Not so. Lots of cases produce worse variants, not vaccines.
https://theconversation.com/massive-numbers-of-new-covid-19-...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
We're talking about covid vaccines here.
Somewhat less likely; on average if you're vaccinated you won't be infectious for as long a time if you do get it.
“The low rate of severe acute disease is important news, but this does not have to mean that COVID does not matter to children,” says paediatrician Danilo Buonsenso at the Gemelli University Hospital in Rome. “Please, let’s keep attention — as much as is feasible — on immunization.”
> "according to data reviewed by the CDC's advisory panel on vaccines, as of Oct. 10, almost 2 million 5- to 11-year-olds have gotten ill from COVID-19, and 94 have died."
That's a laughably low death rate. Driving your child to school is more dangerous for them than Covid.
>In Pfizer's clinical trial for 5- to 11-year-olds, there were no cases of myocarditis, although the company acknowledged that the trials were not big enough to pick up such rare events.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/11/03/1051299...
(Time to check my pfizer stock...)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
- What would the properties of vaccines need to be (efficacy, etc.), for experts to deem the vax mandates not reasonable?
- Same about face masks. How low the estimated efficiency must be for mandates to not be acceptable?
- Bonus point: how more soul-crushing the curfews and other movement limits need to be for them to remain in the realm of personal choice?
In other words, I would like to gauge how "falsifiable" is the "scientifically-informed" reasoning behind covid-enthusiasts' defense doctrine.
been going to packed bars, house parties, restaurants, music festivals, concerts all with no masks
You are not forced to take any vaccine, though many (public and private) institutions will require you to do so to participate in their functions (e.g. attending public school, serving in the military, working in hospitals, etc...).
In any case, the will being applied is that of the people (indirectly) through its (mostly) elected representatives (who could abolish the public health organization any time it chose), not some nefarious government.
Can we please just stop? “Take this or lose your job and pension” is not a choice.
But in general society has rules and we must abide by them if we want to participate. For instance I'm sure most people wouldn't appreciate if I walked around naked, which does not harm anyone unlike needlessly having an increased risk of contracting and/or spreading COVID.
I hope you understand how ridiculous this is.
> All 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) mandate diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, measles, rubella and chickenpox. In addition, every state except Iowa mandates immunization against mumps.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/08/states-have...
FWIW I believe Florida is in the process of relaxing mandates for some of the other required vaccinations -- certainly there is now political hay to be made from doing so because the concept has been so poisoned by the Covid vaccine mandaters.
That doesn't seem all that narrow; 90% of the population goes through the public school system. (Side note: I'm in NY, and our vaccination mandate covers private/religious schools, too.)
> well-tested and -understood vaccines
Like the COVID vaccines, sweet.
> illnesses far more threatening to them than Covid
Missed the chickenpox one, did you? Killed ~100/year before the vaccines. COVID's killed 805 children in the US so far, per https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics.
> Like the COVID vaccines, sweet
More gaslighting. The publications from the manufacturers themselves are chock full of unanswered questions and risks they say we must wait years for the answer to.
In what way are the COVID vaccines not well-tested or not well understood? I understand many laypeople want to declare an arbitrary length of time that they can pretend means a new drug is safe. But the professionals who have informed opinions on the matter are essentially in unanimous agreement that these vaccines have been proven safe.
They have tried making MRNA shots for a long time with consistently negative results. Maybe they got it right this time, but still there is reason to be skeptical, as a "lay" person you have to trust the system that this shot was produced properly, tested properly, stored properly, and administered properly. Even if on a large scale there are low risks, something can go wrong on any one of those steps.
We also have never had a shot like this brought to market in such a short period of time. There is barely a year of data in the public, and that data is heavily politicized. It's nearly impossible to ask an honest question as someone who may be worried for fear of being labeled a lunatic or a "walking bio-weapon" as someone said before in this very thread.
And then we see how much money a company like pfizer has made off of this, and their track-record in the past as well as the track record of many other pharmaceutical companies, and you have a recipe for people to be worried. Remember, public health looks at outcomes on a population level. If they push something and they think it will have a net benefit overall, they are not thinking about you and your own risk profile. You have to do that and unfortunately we're increasingly telling people that doesn't matter, that you must do what is right for the group and by-the-way, you can't possibly know what's right for you anyway.
Like most people, I have done this for dozens of drugs developed during my lifetime. Until it became politically charged I never saw much pushback. How many years had Cialis or Claritin or Wellbutrin been in use before people starting taking them without a second thought? And those drugs likely had much smaller trials.
This is a common argument, and honestly it's garbage.
Vaccines are never tested "for decades" either, because people kind of assume that it is highly unlikely that there are super-long-term side effects from small acute doses. I would tend to agree.
The argument is therefore not garbage at all.
Obviously during the first years they were in use these vaccines had not been "distributed for decades". That's the era we're in with COVID.
Children are now eligible for a vaccine. It'll take a few weeks for this to trickle through the population, but we're pretty close to the point where everyone who wants a vaccination will have one.
At that point, I expect restrictions to swiftly ease up. In Massachusetts, things are already mostly back to normal. With children protected, there's definitely a light at the end of the tunnel.
When hospitalization and community transmission is "low" based on the CDC definition of low, and when 80% of the total population is vaccinated or eight weeks from yesterday, whichever comes first. They also publish a dashboard with the information so anyone can see how we are progressing: https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboards
We were at almost 80% vax rate for 12+ already and hospitalizations are currently low and have been for a while, however community transmission remains high.
So at least in our county they have specific standards as to when the restrictions leave. Other than a mask mandate, there are no other restrictions anymore, except for school kids.
Some businesses require their employees to all be vaccinated. Governor appears to be fighting against that, would not be surprised if those same businesses just don't hire unvaccinated people going forward and the situation is resolved via attrition.
I am almost certain they will mandate the vaccination of children 5 and older.
Now we're JUST starting to talk about relaxing again. If this is any barometer, not to mention the rate of which we are seeing pills/vaccines/what have you, I imagine 2022. Outside of work, things are largely "normal".
For what it's worth - I live in a dense Northern state not seeing a surge of cases.
Some places will do that earlier than others, and quite a few practically already have.
I frankly don’t mind that. It’s only for a limited time (while you feel ill, or suspect you are coming down with something), it’s very cheap and only mildly annoying. There is the side benefit that it makes you think twice before you go out if you think you might be infectious (is this trip really necessary?).
The local pharmacies that administer the vaccines are not validating your eligibility. Those I know who are interested in the 3rd round, and beyond 6 months from their 2nd, have received it.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
They are more likely to be injured by these vaccines and neurotic parents stuffing them into masks for hours at a time.
Sweden halts Moderna: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-moderna-sweden-ha...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-08/iceland-j...
117 children murdered for profit. https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/we-will-kill-117-kids-to-...
fixed that for you
The guy above literally said "Children aren't at risk from Covid AT ALL".
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-...
> This will go on forever without exit criteria.
It will go on without an exit decision, but the exit criteria that have been issued have frequently been adjusted anyway, because understanding of how current metrics project the future have evolved. Which is probably why their are fewer announced criteria and more reliance on periodic, holistic review.