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Comment by bingohbangoh | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody think these variants will ever stop?

I hate, __hate__ this constant fear of a lockdown. Hell, a good part of europe is in lockdown right now.

I get that the lockdown is being haphazardly enforce for those countries who've decided on it but I dislike these even being rules on the books. Leave me the hell alone! If we couldn't overcome it after a year of lockdowns, why is this gonna be the time it changes?

Particularly embarrassing is how Sweden and Florida have just survived without much restrictions.

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According to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard, as of now, Sweden has had 15,145 deaths; Norway has had 1,050 deaths; Denmark 2,863; Finland 1,309. With populations from Wikipedia (10,402,070 for Sweden; 5,402,171 for Norway; 5,850,189 for Denmark; 5,536,146 for Finland), this yields deaths per 1,000 people of:

Sweden 1.456 Norway 0.194 Denmark 0.489 Finland 0.236

Saying Sweden has "just survived" doesn't capture these numbers well, I think. If this is "embarrassing" for anyone, it's Sweden, but I wouldn't use the word embarrassing. It's tragic.

What are the _total deaths_? What is the total mortality rate?

You can view JHU's raw data sources at https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19. According to that, they are getting COVID death numbers for Sweden from the Swedish Public Health Agency via https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6.... I am not fluent in Swedish, but perhaps someone who is can tell you exactly how the Swedish Public Health Agency measures them. Likewise for the other countries cited.

Death per million inhabitants in these 4 countries: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

You can also compare with other neighbors and Europe: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Seems like a minuscule percentage.

Is that a pragmatic-enough reason to significantly deteriorate the economy and mental health of the enormous majority of people?

The GDP change in 2020 for Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland were -2.8%, -0.8%, -2.7% and -2.8%, respectively.

Sweden had no advantage over its neighbors on the economic outcome, and you'd need to cite real data in order to make an argument for mental health. Naïvely assuming a causal relationship with quarantine measures for both without considering positive effects of better health outcomes (and other factors) is fallacious.

So Sweden had proportionately 5 times more deaths for not locking down with a death / population ratio of 0.00145? I don't think it's ridiculous to consider not locking down with those stats.

Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it.

Are you going to tell those 12000 people: sorry, but you need to die for my exceptionally limited view of economy?

Yes.

How many people die in car accidents each year?

Will it increase exponentially if not cared about?

Yes, car deaths have decreased by multiple orders of magnitude in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

You can’t infer that from the graph. Yeah, they will go back to pre-pandemic levels, but they won’t increase exponentially from then on - which is not the case for COVID with no restrictions, which will only plateau at ridiculously high amount of infected (and dead).

> COVID with no restrictions, which will only plateau at ridiculously high amount of infected (and dead).

I'm curious what you think of Florida, which has had almost no restrictions for a majority of the pandemic and yet is actually doing better than some other states. Seems to disprove your assertion?

Airborne transmission being heavily climate-dependent? We can’t make everything into Florida (and that would be a much bigger problem than any virus in itself :D)

I'd imagine we'd have studies on this by now if that were actually the case though, right? It's been almost 2 years... so it seems like there's something else going on.

No, the fatality rate has. Unhappily, every safety advance seems to lead to an increase in crashes IIRC. Which sounds about like how we in the US approach COVID too.

Of course. Most deaths prevented by strong safety laws.

This kind of logic is, more or less, why Trump lost -- people (rightly so) don't like being told they have to sacrifice themselves for the economy

And that's why I'm unironically for banning cars in the long term. They're a terrible mode of transport, trains and bikes are all we need.

Hmmm, I take it you live in a city? You may not need anything other than a train or bike but other people have different needs.

So I actually live in a small town of 800 people somewhere in Europe. I can take the train if i need to get anywhere further than is comfortable by bike.

I understand that's not currently the case in a lot of the world, which is why I think cars need to be banned eventually, not right now.

That's fair, although instead of banning them I'd prefer to just have better alternatives that people naturally transition to. Cars are certainly not a very efficient mode of transport.

An order of magnitude less than the covid deaths in a year. And yet automobile engineering and usage are heavily regulated in order to improve safety and reduce fatalities.

In Sweden? ~300 [1], so about 40 years worth of traffic accidents.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/438009/number-of-road-de...

Why'd you leave out his mention of the impact on mental health?

No, I would tell: since you are at-risk, use the means provided to stay safe and take precautions to reduce the risk of getting infected.

What consequences do the lockdowns have on birth rates? In some western countries it has been shown that births have decreased by more than 10%. What are you going to tell those thousands of people who will remain childless because of these policies?

Strikes me how such a heartless comment comes from someone running a "community" business. Really sad.

Let's not get personal and connect his business and your expected social norms into some shaming activity.

I disagree with him but I wouldn't want to silence him. He needs to feel free to express his viewpoint and we should feel free to attack those views with other views and maybe throw in some facts to strength our case.

OP might have meant it as a personal attack and shaming, but it does point out a bias. The first benefit on the business's homepage is "Unlock the value of your community" and it's centered around jobs. Lockdowns (at least in the US) was tied with quite the wave of unemployment and continues to have lasting impact on that segment.

Of course, someone can also say everyone has bias what with it being a global pandemic, but it's still useful to be cognizant of said biases.

The problem with this line of argument - "if only the state didn't impose a lockdown, we could trade lives for life as it was before" - aside it from being kind of despicable, is that you can't get people to just continue previously normal activities once they know the danger. When Covid appeared in Seattle, the first US city, all the bars and restaurants downtown went out of the business before any restrictions went into place. Sweden had a lot of people working at home even with the supposed "no restrictions" policy. Indeed, see the list of policies that were, in fact, restrictive; https://sweden.se/life/society/sweden-and-corona-in-brief

There's no problem with people imposing their own restrictions on their movement and association. That's the whole point, and is what Swedish policy was predicated upon, that the people could largely be trusted with taking appropriate measures without the state imposed lockdowns.

There's no problem with people imposing their own restrictions on their movement and association.

Which implies you have some problem with the ordinary state lockdowns. These were certainly poorly executed and yet we can Sweden with nearly ten times the casualties-per-capita of an equivalent nation (Norway). Where my actual point about people taking their own measures is that life was sucky in Sweden as well as the rest of the world.

So what you effectively saying is: "I don't care if things were not that different in practice, for my principle of freedom, I'll 10K deaths without quality of life that different."

Edit:

"the people could largely be trusted with taking appropriate measures"

Trust is a pretty disingenuous term here. What's actually happened is that the people who took risks were the people who economically forced. Ironically, that include workers who took care of the elderly; poorly paid in Sweden and elsewhere, they then took their infections to the elderly concentrated in homes. Stopping this would have required more measures than any of the nations were will to do.

> Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it

The gorilla in the room that no one’s wants to acknowledge…we locked down to allow people who were likely to die within the next 3-5 years to maybe survive a couple of those years. The price of the lockdowns economically, physical health, mental health, and in education will be paid by folks who were probably never in much danger from this virus for decades.

I fully believe that historians will look back at this time and talk of the lopsided cost/benefit.

Harm the young to help the old... why are we doing this to ourselves?

The old are more reliable voters, while the youngest aren't even permitted to vote (even though they have more at stake, since they will have to live with the consequences longer.)

> Saying Sweden has "just survived"

Europe "just survived" the black plague (1/3rd of Europe died). Life on Earth "just survived" the Chicxulub impactor (the Dinosaurs and 90% of species on Earth died). People who say flippant things like this are unserious and frankly, dangerous.

COVID does not have a death rate of 33%.

You're missing the forest from the trees here; no one's suggesting that. Instead, we're saying that perhaps you shouldn't use Sweden as evidence supporting non-intervention when their deaths per capita was an order of magnitude higher than similar countries with more aggressive policies.

Potentially you're also missing the forest from the trees: it may be an order of magnitude higher, but in relation to the population size, the number of deaths is minuscule regardless.

Your argument seems to approach that any measures against covid that significantly impact daily life are bad utilitarian policy, since even the most extreme outcomes where healthcare capacity has collapsed leads to less than 1 percent of the total population dying.

Could you post a clarifying remark on what you consider the correct place to draw the line where more inconvenient quarantine measures are warranted?

It's pretty obvious that this is a very contentious subject. But it's also very obvious that a considerable democratic majority in most Western countries seems to agree on where the line should be drawn for their community, and that this line is much more conservative (on the side of public health getting priority over business as usual) than with most earlier pandemics. This is an interesting policy development.

Well then I have to ask: what hypothetical rate of death could exceed your definition of minuscule? How many per capita deaths do we need to reach before you will agree that societal intervention is warranted? A number would be appreciated.

The simple answer is public policy always lags the public therefor is always a bad idea to implement NPIs. Public policy should be concentrating on increasing hospital capacity, therapeutic/prophylactic distribution. Presumably never on "lockdowns" or travel bans or masks. People will lock themselves down if it's bad enough, and more importantly at finer granularity and with more equity.

Right, but I could make the same argument about influenza. We had an order of magnitude of deaths higher in 2019 compared to 2020 due to influenza. That fact alone isn't enough to justify lockdowns for influenza, so it shouldn't alone be enough to justify lockdowns for COVID.

Not saying it’s the reason, but Sweden has higher urbanization than its neighbors. The country also has more people who don’t speak the native language. Belgium has a similar population size but more deaths (27k).

Sweden does not have higher urbanization then Denmark (both at 88%). Also what has native language anything to do with the spread of the virus and its mortality rate? I fail to see a logical link between the two.

maybe some languages by their nature spread more virus into the air? i don't know..

> Not saying it’s the reason, but Sweden has higher urbanization than its neighbors.

The urbanization % for the four countries are: 82.9%, 87.9%, 85.5%, and 88.1%. Which one of those do you think is Sweden? Do you think it's at all plausible that such small differences could account for an order of magnitude more deaths?

> The country also has more people who don’t speak the native language

What are the numbers, and why would that be relevant?

The aggregated over-mortality rate for Sweden at this point puts it in the lower part among the EU, at place 21 of 31 compared countries IIRC. The covid-related death-count at 15000 has been more or less constant since May even while it's surging now in the other countries.

Besides, people keep comparing Sweden to Norway, Denmark and Finland, which is a bad comparison as the demographies are very different.

And yet you just decided to compare it to a host of EU countries whose demographics are radically different from Sweden.

Rather surprised you don't think Norway and Denmark are appropriate peers against which to compare Sweden. So please provide better suggestions for peers, rather than comparing it as you are, apparently, against Greece.

That's a bizarre statement. Sweden is almost directly comparable to Norway and Denmark at the very least. Finland too.

Sweden kept its freedom and paid the price. Considering that Sweden is not now experiencing another wave while the other countries are, it remains to be seen what the price is the other countries ultimately will pay.

Japan is fascinating for me. Do they just not test people? https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

I think "high degree of social cooperation," pretty big strength when confronting a socially transmitted threat.

“If we could not extinguish even the small fire, stop pouring buckets of water on it, let the whole thing burn down”

It is still an exponential curve that will overflow all the hospitals the moment you stop paying attention, causing hundred thousands of additional deaths indirectly due to overworked med staff.

Object permanence is a thing.

What I can't understand is the risk/benefit of firing thousands of unvaccinated medical staff across the US while we're in the middle of a pandemic and already experiencing hospital staff shortages.

Isn't that just exacerbating the problem? Were those unvaccinated medical workers really killing more people than they saved? I honestly don't know but it doesn't feel like we really did the calculus and are instead just shooting from the hip.

Especially because it takes a minimum of 4 years to train new ones...

If they are so stupid to not vaccinate themselves as a goddamn med worker, I doubt they were too useful in the first place, if not criminally dangerous.

Do you think the unvaccinated medical workers with natural immunity who were fired were criminally dangerous? I think denigrating nurses and doctors who have been working overtime to save lives for the last two years is pretty harsh and callous (vaccinated or otherwise).

These are the people we all called heros just a year ago. Again, are they really killing more people than they saved?

> Leave me the hell alone!

As long as that makes essential things such as grocery shopping more dangerous for others, such as myself, no.

Ok, then when does this end?

I'm all ears!

Maybe it doesn't? At least not until medical science catches up to allow the level of social/global interaction we had been taking for granted for decades.

In the history of our species, we have never been this connected on a global level before, we were potentially sitting on a timebomb just waiting for the appropriate viral trigger to bring it down.

Violence. It gives people a lot of perspective very quickly. Sooner or later, it's where we're going to end up.

As far as I know the current view is that it won’t end, but it will become a regular the same way the flu is. There may even be yearly shots combined with flu shots for all the new variants that may evolve.

I truly hate that guy, but “facts don’t care about your feelings”.

I don’t think OP is concerned with yearly shots or covid hanging around. It’s the lockdowns and other restrictions that people care about.

Bingo. It’s long since time to stop spending this much energy on this myopic fixation on Covid. There are billions of other things for each individual to worry about besides the spread of Covid. And that is a fact, which doesn’t care about the feelings of people pushing society to continue waging an impossible war on a respiratory virus.

Except that when these variants strike in waves they overwhelm hospitals that even the fittest among us still need from time to time. Perhaps permanently increased hospital capacity and a few million fewer people is a better trade off. Assuming there aren't other less visible costs.

The existence of Covid won’t end, but the pandemic has to. Living with overloaded hospitals forever, or doubling/tripling our health systems capacity to deal with it permanently don’t sound like very good ideas.

Endemic aerosolized variants could ultimately cull / mame everyone with a weakened immune response. The end game could be permanently higher overall mortality and reduced respiratory fitness in a significant part of the population.

If humans evolve to adapt then those adaptations may come at the cost of something else, given large enough time scales.

I agree with it's constant forever, just like flu. maybe we get a breakthrough treatment / vaccine for all virus' like that.

But we don't regular wear masks during winter nor enforce limited capacity or hours or quarantines. Personally of those options I'd be down for short term, financially assisted family quarantine and punishments for going to work sick.

It will be over if we go inside and plug into a matrix like world. That was the missing piece from the first lockdown. Mass VR simulating our world.

It doesn't end until you make it end. When I close my laptop, I am unaware there is even anything going on; I don't wear a mask, I am unvaccinated, and I am fortunate enough to live in a place where people largely behave in this same way. My life is 100% the same as it was 3 years ago.

If you're restricting your own behavior, stop. If you're being restricted by third parties, seriously consider moving or outright disobeying. This doesn't end until people (not politicians) make it end.

Unless you live in a 100% isolated, self sufficient community, your number will be called eventually. If that's the tradeoff you want to make then enjoy your life. But bragging about your life being the same as it was 3 years ago isn't the brag you think it is. Meanwhile, everyone else is living 90% of the life they were 3 years ago, but they'll continue that for a long and healthy life.

I don't think my number will be called. In the US, the hysteria is already fading even in the most liberal areas. In certain states like SC and FL, the people have pretty much decided that the pandemic is over. I really don't foresee this flipping back to lockdown in those areas. Self sufficiency is a virtue, one that I have been cultivating long before any of this happened; owning land and knowing how to use it makes a lot of the bullshit happening in the cities rather trivial. Working remotely takes care of the rest.

There's no reason for me to brag here. You can pretend I am an unhealthy, fat hick if it makes you feel better. For anyone else who is thinking of becoming a bit more self sufficient and is chafing under the yoke, I would recommend leaving the large cities foremost, and buying a house on some arable land. Read "The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency" for a primer on what is possible.

That's fair, if you're really that isolated then fair enough. Self sufficiency is great if you're able to achieve it, I commend you for that. My point is merely that the behaviours you describe (not wearing a mask, not being vaccinated) are counter to the self-sufficiency you're so fond of. Being that self sufficient sounds like something you wouldn't want to lose because you happened to catch COVID from your irregular contact with the rest of civilization.

You live in a place where people are largely unvaccinated? So, anti-scientific anti-citizens? What a 'shithole' country that you must live in, right?

I believe this has been more eloquently described as: “ignorance is bliss.”

Or more verbosely, "Mental health improves when you stop consuming propaganda"

It really is though. Early in the pandemic I was consuming the daily COVID stats, worrying myself over and over about it. Then one day I just decided to quit the news cold turkey. I immediately started feeling a lot better.

I also am thinking of moving again.. I'm not so worried about covid and I'm 100% willing to vaccinate but using masks forever is not something I'm ok with. I have some medical issues that make that really nasty and there is still no proper process or ID for this. I'm willing to accept more risk. I've lived in 4 countries so far so this is fine for me.

But the problem is that governments change. I'll move somewhere and a new government will get voted in that'll change the game again..

When society in your country or in every country strays too far from what you know is right, you can either become a revolutionary, or become self-sufficient, alone, or as a community. I don't have much advice for revolutions. For the other, all you can really do is move somewhere with like-minded people, rely as little as possible on the government, and try to live among your peers unmolested. This will be very hard if you like city life; the city is antithetical to self sufficiency for obvious reasons. But if you can accept a simpler life (and this does not mean lonely, boring, or anti-intellectual), I highly recommend it.

Do you have any evidence of a significant covid outbreak being traced to grocery shopping?

Yes just type covid breakout grocery store in google to see all the local breakouts in your area.

wow, i thought you were being sarcastic (I was laughing at your lmgtfy 'joke') , but they actually do list them. awesome!

https://corpo.metro.ca/en/covid-19-cases-ontario.html

I said shopping, not working there.

When you can prove in a court of law that person "x" infected person "y" at "Z" date/time - then you can say this with even a minimal level of confidence.

Don't want to get sick? Order groceries online and have them delivered to your door.

Are you saying that because it can’t be proven that you infected someone else, it is okay to put others at risk?

And that since we can’t hold individuals responsible, everyone else needs to alter their behavior?

That is, one infectious person wandering around a grocery store gets to force everyone else to shop online and is not doing anything wrong?

Those delivery people may be carriers. Better to grow and eat your own produce and avoid society at all costs.

> Does anybody think these variants will ever stop?

No but they tend to become less severe for the surviving population. Either because susceptible individuals don't make it or the immune system is learning and the virus runs out of good mutations. So far it seems that higher transmissibility was the driving factor. We still have a large percentage of the population waiting for their first infection. Next we will see more immune escape variants and then probably come the variants that diversify but they will probably run out of useful mutations and our trained immune systems are better at preventing severe infection. It could take some more years and some more severe waves (and some calm years in between) until we arrive there.

The new Joker we have are mRNA vaccines with which we might quickly sharpen our immune response before the main wave of a new variant arrives.

I don’t understand the recent celebrating of Florida’s COVID performance — in September, after vaccinations and treatment options were widely available, Florida was losing more than 300 people per day to COVID. They went from ~25th in the nation for COVID Deaths per capita to 8th worst since the pandemic started.

That “just surviving” came at a huge cost of lives.

After the vaccine was available it was mostly unvaccinated dying. It's called freedom.

With any vaccine, there are people who

1. Can't access the vaccine, 2. Can't take it for medical reasons 3. Who are scared/skeptical of getting it due to misinformation (often spread by those in power). Florida could have pushed for higher vaccination rates, but mainstreamed misinformation and skepticism instead

Florida has a higher proportion of elderly residents at higher risk. When you adjust for demographics the death rate in Florida is about average for the USA.

Citation?

> If we couldn't overcome it after a year of lockdowns, why is this gonna be the time it changes?

Lockdowns are not about overcoming it; they're about saving lives. I think it's fair to say that the lockdowns saved quite a lot of them. Looking at how the death charts correlate with lockdown impositions might support this viewpoint.

Lockdowns don’t make any progress. They put everything on pause. But as soon as you unpause, all of those saved lives are at the same risk they were at before. And you can’t pause forever. Each lockdown becomes less and less effective as people stop caring.

Except there's hope of finding a more effective treatment against this virus while we are on pause. So lives can be saved potentially.

We did. We have multiple vaccines and treatments. That was the end game. If those didn’t work, we have no choice but either live in some dystopian hellscape to save people from exactly one illness at the cost of literally all other issues… or we accept the risks and move on with our lives.

2 years of this is a non trivial amount of time.

We do have another choice, continuing to buy time to add to the arsenal of weapons we have against the virus. Things are only simple when you frame the issue simply; reality is complicated. You need only imagine yourself flickering out to see the value in doing what you can to keep someone from the same fate.

We are all alive in our heads just like you are in yours.

You are free to live that existence all you want but that is your own personal risk assessment. Vaccines were the end of the game for governments being able to dictate our own risk assessments. There is literally nothing else we can do besides vaccines and treatments.

To suggest it is totally cool to play this game 2 years into this requires an awful lot of privilege.

Just repeating that something is "the end game" doesn't make it so. That isn't how public health works.

There is no certain amount of privilege required to "play this game" for 2 years than 1 year, or 1 month. You're setting up arbitrary lines in the sand and pretending they're laws of nature or maybe government.

I understand 2 years is as long as you want to wait, but we're all doing things we don't want to be doing. Such is the cost of living in a society.

Until you enforce those rules with the military.

And then you end up with riots so the military end up killing people with guns to save them from covid.

You are wrong. The virus has a higher chance of mutating if left to spread. By slowing the rate of transmission we also slow down the rate of mutation. I bet we would be seeing far more dangerous variants at this point if all countries would have just kept business as usual and allowed it to spread unhindered.

In the mean time we have developed numerous vaccines and possible treatments, and have only seen a handful of dangerous mutations. The lockdowns certainly seem to be working as intended.

Don't the vaccines put evolutionary pressure on the virus to mutate in order to escape them? I'm thinking of the hospital superbugs which are resistant to antibiotics.

We are all going to have to live in the metaverse at the rate things are going.

> Does anybody think these variants will ever stop?

RNA viruses have high mutation rates and variants will never end in the same way that flu & common-cold variation continues. The more interesting question is how will our immune systems adapt and will vaccines continue to provide protection against severity of illness at the same time as they apply selective pressure that enhances viral transmissibility?

Of further interest is why Japanese and Taiwan infection and severity rates remain comparatively low and what - if any - role their openness to a certain anti-parasitic, protease inhibiting drug has played in their success.

Also of great interest is why aspiration isn't mandatory in the US to prevent the vaccine from entering the bloodstream (primarily the heart) rapidly and in large quantities.

Many unanswered questions.

> why Japanese and Taiwan infection and severity rates remain comparatively low

Just a stab in the dark, but generally high social conformity and particularly mask wearing.

>role their openness to a certain anti-parasitic, protease inhibiting drug has played in their success. It's their willingness to wear masks, follow social distancing guidelines, not the secret magic of ivermectin.

> nd what - if any - role their openness to a certain anti-parasitic, protease inhibiting drug has played in their success.

There's a trial study currently in progress in Japan to investigate this, but all the evidence we have points to ivermectin being of no benefit to Covid patients unless they have parasitic worms. See, for example: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...

It's not an unanswered question, in other words. Ivermectin doesn't help against Covid.

It's obesity.

We know that obesity is a large driver not just in severity, but transmission.

When you compare a world map of obesity rates to Covid death rates, you'll find a better match than any other single variable, far better-matching than income, masking, density, or any other single variable.

> why Japanese and Taiwan infection and severity rates remain comparatively low

Wearing face masks in public places.. indoors and outdoors. Social distancing is non existent considering how crowded places can be.

The same story applies to China, Hong Kong, Macau and S. Korea as well as some countries in SE Asia like Vietnam. Face mask wearing is culturally acceptable/normal in this part of the world so that's why people there started wearing them as soon as stuff started kicking off in Jan 2020 without their governments telling them.

People on HN are arguing over scientific papers on whether face masks are effective. You don't need scientific papers when these countries are proof that face mask wearing is effective.

Less people infected, lower chance of mutations. You will not hear about new SARS-COV-2 variants first being detected in these countries.

The world survived the 1918 flu without any vaccines and only sporadic and limited social distancing... but it killed 50 million people. That sucks, and we can do better.

Societies survive these things, usually; it's people who die.

Mutagenesis will continue as long as there are viruses making more viruses.

If I had to guess our future, COVID will become endemic but with less potency. We will manage it with vaccines and anti-virals.

Lockdowns and restrictions? Frankly, I don't think business will allow it, particularly given how hard it is to demonstrate their efficacy (we can't look at the parallel universe where restrictions weren't imposed by a nation).

> Does anybody think these variants will ever stop?

We have managed to clear out measles, so we should be able to stop COVID as well with high enough vaccination rates. Although this is not apples-to-apples comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine

Did we clear the flu? No, it is endemic. The same is what will happen with COVID.

> We have managed to clear out measles

No, we have not. In fact, there has been a rather significant resurgence in measles over the course of the last two years. One of the many side-effects of our reaction to Covid that is not properly accounted.

https://www.who.int/news/item/10-11-2021-global-progress-aga...

https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/11/1077482

https://www.outbreakobservatory.org/outbreakthursday-1/3/11/...

It is in great part due to idiot anti-vaxxers…

Stop. The articles explicitly tell you that the rate of people missing vaccines went up during global lockdowns. People missed their appointments and stopped vaccinating their children.

Which reaction to COVID are you crediting with the resurgence in measles exactly?

Read about the differences in mutation for maesles and corona viruses and you'll probably never make this comparison again.

We were close to clearing out measles in western countries until the anti-vax movement came along. These days, not so much.

What is the fraction of the population who is anti-vax with regard to measles? I don't know anyone. I do know many people who are reluctant/refusing to get the COVID vax.

Peak anti-vax for measles was like two decades ago, at least over here in the UK - we were at pretty much an all-time record high for MMR vaccinations of kids before Covid came along and disrupted all the vaccination programs. (I know the BBC ran a very misleading article making it sound like Facebook was causing a vaccination crisis and putting us at risk of a measles outbreak, but in reality the actual danger is from all the people who weren't vaccinated years ago due in part to their own bad reporting.)

Measles is a VERY different virus than COVID and even flu.

> The surface proteins that the measles virus uses to enter cells are ineffective if they suffer any mutation, meaning that any changes to the virus come at a major cost.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521133628.h...

Since the COVID shots doesn't prevent catching and transmitting the virus, at least the current shots aren't going to achieve herd immunity / get rid of COVID.

AstraZeneca vaccine's lead researcher and head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, Andrew Pollard, stated that the "idea of achieving herd immunity is mythical" and "not a possibility" because "vaccinated people can still be infected and transmit the virus". He also warned against making any vaccination policies and programs based on the idea of herd immunity because the virus may mutate to an even more transmissible variant among vaccinated populations.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/herd-immunity-is-mythical-wi...

Yet it seems that's the road we are taking. Some bro science: In 5-10 year heard immunity is what will happen.

Every year it will be a little less. Vaccines and other medicines will dampen the casualties. Partial lockdowns and restrictions will be kept in place so it doesn't get too much out of control.

Kids and teenager will grow up with corona being just one of the viruses they get among many others and build up, it not a full immunity at least a decent ability to handle it.

And slowly less and less it will control our society. But will definitely take a while.

Considering covid spreads through wildlife, unless you succeed in vaccinating every monkey in the jungle that’s never going to happen.

Deer seem to be big carriers also, 80% infected in one study

https://nypost.com/2021/11/02/deer-identified-as-widespread-...

Mutations happen during spread, so as long as we have huge swaths of unvaccinated people in every country around the world, the mutations will continue to happen. Luckily, variants of concern have slowed significantly as more and more people have gotten vaccinated (and practiced social distancing, masks, wash hands, etc), but there's still a long way to go before we can finally put this pandemic behind us.

Mutations are happening in vaccinated people. It's similiar to what happens when you spray a new poison on an insect group. Most die but the bugs with mutations live replicate and quickly spread making that poison useless.

South Africa, where this strain originated, has a vaccination rate of 25%.

Though I'm also curious why this only happens for this virus, and not any of the others we've destroyed with vaccination like smallpox, or reduced to nothingness like polio or measles. (short version: you don't know what you're talking about).

Mutations are happening in both populations. Specific mutation that make the vaccine ineffective are happening in vaccinated people.

This vaccine doesn't prevent covid the way the smallpox vaccine does. This is a new type of vaccine trying to reduce deaths. Calling the same is a marketing trick.

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