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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, that wouldn't really help long term, because the disease has spread through animal populations by now.

The only way to reliably stop this from being an ongoing pandemic is measures that reduce the R-value below 1 in a long-term manner, like mass vaccinations.

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The high rates of breakthroughs mean even very-highly-vaxxed populations have had case surges. Rt is going to oscillate around 1, forever.

Even if it’s around 1 forever, if the effects are mild as they are with vaccinated people, it’ll be manageable as flu is.

Since the weaker among us died with the first wave, it was already as manageable as the flu.

The mortality under 70 is pretty low.

Would we be happy to let 1% of the survivors die? Would 2% be acceptable?

As I already replied elsewhere in this thread, as of 12/02/2021 German CDC estimates 7-day R-value as 0.92. That is below 1.

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

The 7-day R-value with current vaccination rates and local restrictions, yes.

And, additionally, with overwhelmed laboratories that are underreporting the infections because they can no longer test all samples.

True. Thank you for acknowledging the point and adding further qualifications. Public discourse is rather disheartening. The options are either 100% vaccination or 0% vaccination, either strict house confinement or nightly clubbing, either masking while hiking in the woods or no masks ever. Life is a rich tradeoff of a myriad factors, somehow we reduced it to a handful of black/white binaries.

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