The US has been pretty transparent on that, that the goal is not to prevent it from coming here (that's impossible), but to slow its spread here to give scientists more time to evaluate its impact.
Point of saying "it's impossible to prevent" is that it's not possible to reduce the first term to 0.
There are other things in life to worry about than slowing the spread of exactly one illness... is it worth continuing to put those on the backburner?
When does this end?
Otherwise it may never end. With widespread circulation, and selection pressure to evade immunity from vaccines and prior infection, escape variants may become the norm. Each new escape variant will require lockdowns, travel restrictions, and new vaccination.
Pretending it is not happening is not an option either, when basic medical services are not available due to overwhelmed healthcare systems.
The only way for covid to "end" is to accept that it's endemic and change our mentality towards living with it.
Truthfully even if everybody on earth caught it simultaneously tomorrow, only a few percent would die, and society would not fundamentally change.
It may sound heartless, but that's the truth. 1-2% of US population dies every year as a baseline as it is.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that more than 114 million Americans had been infected with Covid-19 through March 2021. Factoring in new infections in unvaccinated people, we can conservatively expect more than 15 million cases of long Covid resulting from this pandemic. And though data are still emerging, the average age of patients with long Covid is about 40, which means that the majority are in their prime working years. Given these demographics, long Covid is likely to cast a long shadow on our health care system and economic recovery."
"COVID-19 Associated with Long-Term Cognitive Dysfunction, Acceleration of Alzheimer’s Symptoms" https://www.alz.org/aaic/releases_2021/covid-19-cognitive-im...
COVID-19 is having harmful medical effects beyond killing people. These long term effects may be the true reason behind at least part of the Great Resignation. If so this is already having large economic effects and unless it turns out than many people recover, worker shortages and supply chain snarls may last a very long time. And the cost of all those people going onto disability will be enormous, both in terms of the disability payments and the number of health care workers needed to help them all.
You can't just tally up the deaths and say that is acceptable, there are other big factors to take into account. In addition to the fallout from long covid many of those fatalities will have held jobs, controlled assets, volunteered time, babysat for relatives, and more. If eventually everyone gets covid, then eventually 10% to 30% of _everyone_ will have long covid. That would be a really big deal.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
Many viruses can cause postviral fatigue syndrome. We've known that for decades and there's nothing special about SARS-CoV-2 in that regard.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3063394/
The vast majority of deaths were elderly. While those deaths were tragic, few of them held jobs.
Then maybe those hospitals should have increased capacity over the last 2 years? Expecting all of what you said because hospitals don’t have capacity is, well… morally and ethically wrong.
> Each new escape variant will require lockdowns, travel restrictions, and new vaccination.
Expecting society to keep doing this forever is madness. It ain’t happening. There is more to life than a myopic fixation on exactly one illness to the detriment of literally everything else. That is a fact that some people seem to be unable to digest.
This ends when enough people get tired of this and stop complying. The experts who keep telling us to be afraid will never say it is safe.
When 'exactly one illness' is sufficient to overwhelm health care systems, then yes the focus will be on that.
Part of the reason health care systems are being overwhelmed is through loss of staff due to burnout - not least because of people like yourself who refuse to engage with the reality of this disease.
This ends when we have properly dealt with Covid - or I guess we can hope it just goes away by itself!
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
The best evidence indicates that there was another coronavirus pandemic caused by HCoV-OC43 in 1889. It killed a bunch of people worldwide. Now the virus is still endemic and most of us get infected as youths which protects us later in life.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
There is no requirement for lockdowns or travel restrictions. Those are politician overreactions which cause more harm than benefit. It's time to accept the risk and move on.
I think this is a fair question many people are asking. I also think a simple answer does not exist.
It's interesting. This is the first pandemic of what I might describe as the most connected version of humanity in the history of our species. I mean this in every possible sense, not just electronic communications (for example, travel is massively easier and faster than, say, one hundred years ago).
This means this is new to us (the world). In the prior pandemic people died by the tens of millions and that was that. This time we have a fairly reasonable ability to slow it down and fight it. Yet, I don't think anyone truly understands how far this goes and where the end of the "event" might be. I happen to be travelling outside the US at the moment and, at least where I am (Mexico) they seem to be taking it far more seriously than in Los Angeles. For example, I have yet to see people complaining about mask usage as some form of reduction-of-freedom issue.
but isn't that almost immediately the case? Let's say you have only 50 people in the States who have the new variant before you notice it, with an r naught of 2-6 that most of these strains seem to have after a few days you're probably already way beyond the few falsely negatively tested people who come in by plane. (the US still requires tests right?)