It really seems like it's safe to say that a fully vaccinated person's risk of dying from covid is low enough where based on the pre-2020 accepted societal standards for risk there should be next to no behavior modification expected.
Edit: this study in the lancet says 50% reduction in long COVID according to the summary. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
And suddenly, I'm not worried anymore, unlike now where the regional hospitals are massively backed up or closed due to low vaccination rates.
My compassion is completely fatigued. All I can think about now is getting back to the gym when my youngest is fully vaccinated.
That's really not going to fly from a political, legal, or medical ethics standpoint. Like, just letting the unvaccinated die and shielding the health system would be an option if societies worked completely differently than they actually do, but given how societies actually are, this is simply not an option.
I honestly think there's a small percentage of society which would, we've all come across people out there with the personality trait of being utterly unable to resist wagging their fingers at their fellow human beings. Whatever your opinion on the restrictions and their effectiveness, nobody with eyes can deny that this social finger-wagging has been a huge part of the zeitgeist of the last two years.
I'm hoping that this attitude starts to die off as covid becomes endemic because aggressive moral authoritarianism rarely ends well for people who have a less black-and-white view of the world.
Honest question: Why not?
2019 is not some magical single gold standard Right Amount Of Personal Freedom. Behaviors become subject to restriction all the time (and also some other restrictions become lax or disappear over time). Taboos come and go. Society changes and the set of acceptable behaviors can also change with time.
I remember similar arguments being used back when seat belt laws were introduced. "I'll never wear those things!" "They wrinkle my clothing!" "They're tyranny!" "People will not tolerate making them mandatory!" But... now we do tolerate it. Same with anti-smoking laws. Society is very flexible and capable of changing.
There are a lot of dangerous things that were regularly done in the past, but are now forbidden, or even taboo. I don't see why things like masks, distancing, and limits to indoor occupancy are un-changeable special cases.
We tolerate all kinds of restrictions indefinitely - that's quite literally what laws are. Well, most laws that aren't based on age criteria.
> In September, unvaccinated persons had a 5.8X risk of testing positive for COVID-19 and a 14X risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to vaccinated persons.
Source: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
Medical research indicates VE against infection of about 50% after 6 months, which is 2:1.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/t...
* People who have symptoms of COVID-19.
* People who have come into close contact with someone with COVID-19 should be tested to check for infection:
* Fully vaccinated people should be tested 5–7 days after their last exposure.
* People who are not fully vaccinated should get tested immediately when they find out they are a close contact. If their test result is negative, they should get tested again 5–7 days after their last exposure or immediately if symptoms develop.
* Unvaccinated people who have taken part in activities that put them at higher risk for COVID-19 because they cannot physically distance as needed to avoid exposure, such as travel, attending large social or mass gatherings, or being in crowded or poorly-ventilated indoor settings.
* People who have been asked or referred to get tested by their healthcare provider, or state, tribal, localexternal icon, or territorial health department.
Thankfully, this is wrong on both counts.
1) Vaccinated people are significantly less likely to contract the virus
2) Breakthrough infections are significantly less contagious than infections in nonimmune persons
There's a good article diving into this at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/22/most-pern...
Recently vaccinated people are significantly less likely to contract covid than totally naive folks. Efficacy against infection seems to wane pretty heavily over time.
> Breakthrough infections are significantly less contagious than infections in nonimmune persons
This seems to be in dispute (by a study referenced in your linked article). I think it would be fair to say they are at least contagious for a shorter duration though.
I think fixating on the limits of vaccination rather then the benefits is misleading. Vaccination works, yet many people think it does not due to this rhetoric.
"Vaccines work" (or the constantly repeated "these vaccines are safe and (remarkably/fantastically/stupendously) effective) isn't trying to educate you on the vaccines so you can make the right decision on your own, it's meant to get you to take the vaccine. They're stronger statements than are justified, and they make people suspicious as a result.
Some people are going to read " vaccinations work" as "you take this vaccine and you can't get covid, can't spread covid", which is not even close to accurate. We're all better off (IMO) being honest and humble and careful with our language, so we don't get caught overplaying our case and further galvanizing people.
Societal standards for risk still need to take into account far, far more than just "Am I, personally, going to die from exactly this one risk factor?"
The number of hard to get nurses? Or say - funding for building hospitals that operate on profit? System still and likely seems to perpetually be broken.
Nobody could even get society to do basic pandemic stuff like wear masks or take vaccines. How would they ever coordinate "build more hospitals and train more nurses" ?
Also, what is this "society" you speak of? There are very very few hospital facilities in the USA built as public institutions, or even with (much) public funding. That's now how things work in capitalism.
The answer is pretty simple. You don't need mass coordination to build more hospitals.
It requires 1 person (the president) to agree to build emergency hospitals, or at worst 51% of 535 people in congress.
Compare this to requiring 330 million people to continually agree and coordinate basic pandemic behavior like masks and vaccines.
There are less than 1000 covid ICU patients in California today and 12,000 in the entire country. China built a 1000 bed covid hospital in 10 days and staffed it with army nurses.
At worst, it takes 60% of the Senate (because cloture), 218/435 in the House, plus the President to pass the law to do it federally, and then someone invokes the judiciary via lawsuits over federal authorities (“building hospitals is not an enumerated power”).
But if we want to be pedantic, you are assuming a filibuster and controversy.
I think that could be done entirely by executive action, using administrative actions, like 900 billion dollars of other covid spending that had no legislative approval.
I suppose states and governors could sue to have federal hospitals treating their residents torn down in the middle of a pandemic, but that would be terrible PR.
Worse than suing to prevent schools or towns from requiring masks? Worse than suing to prevent "vaccine mandates"?
I'm sure you'll see it differently than I do.
> But if we want to be pedantic, you are assuming a filibuster and controversy.
I don't think you have to assume much to believe that at the present time, not a single Republican senator would vote in favor or such a measure if it was backed by the current president.
Since we're talking about what it takes to force a preferred solution in the absence of consensus, and you specifically said you were targeting the worst case, yes, I’m doing exactly what you called for.
Compare this to requiring 330 million people to continually agree and coordinate basic pandemic behavior like masks and vaccines.
Costs are largely irrelevant. Perhaps 100 million for such a hospital. This is 0.0001% of the 6+ trillion the government has spent on other covid actions.
It's not going to work if the entire country, continent or planet is in the same situation.
And if you have a time machine, that's a great solution. Just go back about 7 years and tell them "we'll be needing a lot more medical staff around 2020, get training them, please". It's not really a wonderful solution now, though, due to the very long lead times for training staff.
> the same way that China did in 2020
While China did build more hospitals in 2020, it leaned heavily on redeployment of staff from non-impacted regions, because it was always largely able to keep covid a regional problem. It wasn't just producing new doctors and nurses in a week; they were coming from elsewhere. When covid is endemic, this option doesn't work very well.
So, there are a few things here.
Purely from an individual point of view, for the average vaccinated (and especially the average boosted person), this is probably largely true.
And indeed if the whole population was vaccinated then this would probably largely be true for everyone.
But the elephant in the room is the hospitals. If rates are high enough that the ICUs are full (typically, in heavily vaccinated countries, mostly of unvaccinated people and severely immunocompromised people) then that is a big, big problem. If you're in a nasty car accident, say, you may, under normal circumstances, end up in ICU. However, if ICU is full of covid patients, you won't, even if you need it. And, less dramatically, overcrowded hospitals mean a lot of routine stuff gets cancelled. Many countries' hospital systems have, in practice, been in a reduced normal capacity for the last two years, and there are significant backlogs; it can't go on forever.
But yes, if you, personally, are vaccinated and boosted (and not immunocompromised), then you, personally, are unlikely to die regardless of how bad your behaviour is. Not of covid, anyway. Perhaps avoid ending up in a situation where you need to go to hospital for something else, indefinitely, though.
I know that there's a shortage of personnel, but it just seems that this would've been something to work towards since the beginning. I don't know what is practically needed from the personnel to nurse <60 year old Covid patients (couldn't less trained staff, 6 month quick course do the bulk of it?), the vast majority of which who go home, while it's the older ones who won't return home, and will likely require constant and/or prolonged care.
Solve the equation for the younger patients and boom, you can increase hospital capacity (or setup new "Covid ICU:s") and just let the wave hit. Seems it would be such a better solution than whatever we're doing now (prolonging the backlogs forever).
Many of them have. In general, equipment isn't the problem today in rich countries; it's staffing.
> I don't know what is practically needed from the personnel to nurse <60 year old Covid patients (couldn't less trained staff, 6 month quick course do the bulk of it?)
If they're in ICU (which is the main concern), multiple specially trained nurses per bed, plus various doctors and other support staff.
I'm not quite following the distinction you're making here between young and old; the main relevant distinction is ICU (mostly either unvaccinated or immunocompromised) or non-ICU (most vaccinated patients of all ages who require hospitalization land here; also lots of unvaccinated). Many countries are seeing fall-offs in the numbers of elderly people in ICU as the boosters go down the list, but ICU numbers are still growing.
What I was getting at is that the vast majority of people dying in the ICU are 60+. So scaling up ICU's isn't gonna do much for them. Scaling up ICU's to cater for the <60 group (plus non-Covid hospitalizations) on the other hand, which you as well mention are more represented now with boosters, we could simply ease up on restrictions, not worry about the minority of unvaccinated people, and let this run its course much quicker than what the current "plan" allows for.
> multiple specially trained nurses per bed
How much training? Just brainstorming here: Wouldn't a 2-6 month (paid) intensive course be enough? It's not like you'd need to specialize in everything, just common symptoms/issues related to Covid hospitalizations. And after that you'd have a guaranteed well-paid* job for as long as this lasts. Throw in a college education like the military, if we're talking the US, for good measure.
Just seems like there could be more done so much more in this area.
*) this would of course include paying these people properly, which could be done through government subsidies
edit: We thought the vaccine would take care of this whole thing but now after it's apparent it won't, we need to think of better solutions.
People can still and will keep on buying cigarettes and smoke and give themselves cancer. Governments still permit their sale in a lot of places. I think the ship has sailed on support for the 'give up freedoms such as traveling to see your friends and family and engaging in social activities' preventative measure.
> 0.2 percent of American's have already died from this. Or put another way, 99.98% is the current best real live actual number of how survivable Covid-19 is.
Side note: 1 - 0.2% is 99.8%, not 99.98%.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Vaccination pushes the survivability rate closer to 100%. We also have some improved treatments that have recently boosted the survival rate.
But ... COVID19 IS a public health emergency. It is contagious enough and causes a need for hospitalization enough that it is fairly easy for it to overwhelm our public health care systems. This means that when you next cut your hand with a turkey carving knife, are involved in an automobile accident, turn out to have cancer, or suffer from any of an almost innumerable number of medical conditions, you (and everyone else) will face personal consequences (including risk of death) from COVID19's impact on health care systems.
This disease is not about you, or me, or individuals in general. It's about a threat to our public health systems because of large numbers (and the numbers don't have to be that large) of people catching COVID19, getting sick and overloading hospitals. It has nothing really to do with risk of death or long term consequences, although the friends and relatives of the hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, and the thousands of people with long covid might also want a word with you.
This has been the #1 (if not the only) concern from the beginning. It baffles me how little focus is being put into it.
Why not pour a ton of resources into hospital capacity, equipment, training staff (quick courses with guaranteed well-paid work), finding solutions that require less staff..? Being to scale up this operation seems imperative for when something like this happens in the future. I.e. spin up new Covid ICU:s when/where needed. We seem to be highly inelastic/incapable in this regard.
It's really disconcerting to think all those amazing life-saving but time-critical techniques and technologies that we have developed in the 20th century don't mean a thing if you're screaming in agony in the back of an ambulance after a car accident while the ambulance is stuck in a protest 200 feet from the ER entrance.