5075 new cases this week (2227 in New York City).
In New York Cuomo killed many of these people early on.
Anecdotally, I understand it can be pretty nasty - not "like a winter cold", more like bad 'flu (the anecdote relates to an antivaxx family).
From where I sit, anecdotally, vaccines have been highly effective. The messaging around them is weak. The choice and recentness of vaccines and boosters is having a big impact on severity of infection, and there's a world of difference between an asymptomatic never-tested-positive exposure and a 3-day flu. The CDC has a problem in their marketing department that has generated so much confusion.
- Masking is highly effective and just a bit inconvenient.
- Lockdowns are extremely effective just very expensive.
- Vaccines are very effective even against transmission.
- Nobody is aiming for 0 Covid anymore (except some Australians and China I guess), but getting through the winter wave without too many fellow citizens dead should be something we spend some effort on.
Covid isn't tearing societies apart if everybody just has a bit of compassion and does the right thing (get vaxxed, masks, reduce in-person meetings).
Australia has more new daily cases per capita than US right now, according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
This is about closing schools. Should we keep schools closed for 5 year? How long? For vaccinated folks omicron is very manageable.
Nobody is arguing about the next 5 years, it is the first winter after we started a very successful vaccination campaign. Without Omicron, Covid would already be mostly over.
Also total school closures could be prevented if we adopt more nuanced methods (such as alternating days of attendance, air filtration, etc.)
None of those appear to be true for Omicron, and we’re only sorta/kinda true for Delta. Vaccinated people are getting and spreading it at rates that are really quite shocking, and even pro-mask drs and scientists are admitting that cloth masks don’t seem to do much now…
Mask are absolutely working. Even cloth masks. But of course when we are talking masking nowadays we mean N95 for everyone which provides roughly a 25x reduce risk of contracting covid if both source and target are wearing it.
No, it's really not. It's made no difference in the overall spread. It's also a LOT more than "just a bit inconvenient". It prevents normal face to face human interaction in public.
> Lockdowns are extremely effective just very expensive.
Well the "extremely expensive" part is somewhat right, though it would be more accurate to call them "extremely damaging to society". However, they also are ineffective at at preventing an easily transmittable virus that is spread across ever corner of the globe. At most you just give up one day of your life at the beginning, when they are the most valuable, and trade it for an extra day at the end.
It's a harmful juggling of freedom NOBODY should be forced to be subjected to.
> Vaccines are very effective even against transmission.
Not these ones.
> Nobody is aiming for 0 Covid anymore (except some Australians and China I guess), but getting through the winter wave without too many fellow citizens dead should be something we spend some effort on.
Well all the measures being pushed only make sense in the context of "zero covid". It's time for people to wake up and reject the attacks on freedom that make no sense in the reality of a commonly occurred but rarely deadly coronavirus we will encounter for the rest of our lives.
Of course masking works. Why wouldn't it? It had a tremendous impact of making a virus that has a R0 of more than 3 spread rather slowly.
We don't have to argue about lockdowns anymore because we won't be getting another one. There are more nuanced tools available now. But of course lockdowns have worked to delay spread. It is just basic physics that you can't get infected if you don't spend time with somebody infected.
Last, your rejection of any measures does not make any sense. We are in the first winter after a tremendously successful vaccination campaign (over 10x risk reduction for those vaccinated). It is appropriate to keep some measures with high impact on spread and low impact on freedom (such as masks!) to slow the current wave to help the healthcare system.
China is still trying it but I expect that to fail in a few weeks. Australia has given up on it.
The real question is why Japan is yet again not having a breakout.
- More time to vaccinate.
- Better treatment in hospitals which aren't under stress
- More time to develop pharmaceutical treatments against severe cases.
(I am not advocating for a lockdown. There are much more nuanced options.)
Just wait for it. New case numbers have been multiplied by 10 in less than a week to reach over 8000 new cases yesterday.