What's the system you know about?
A doubling rate means it doubles within a period of time.
Let's arbitrarily pick 10 days as a doubling rate.
If, at a time when the doubling rate was 10 days, a particular mitigation measure had been taken, sufficient to knock R0 below 1, ten days earlier than it actually happened, then for the population in question, the situation is half as prevalent. Project that forward, everything that happens since that point flows from a situation that is half of what it actually was. It's a huge difference.
The situation isn't discrete, it's continuous. Getting hung up on 100% prevention is beside the point. Knocking it back by 50%, or even 20%, or 10%, is huge compared to the alternative.
People check the weather every day. I wish our nation had developed a very clear signal that everyone could check every day. Just check it in the morning to know whether it's advisable to wear a mask that day. Back in the post-Delta pre-Omicron days, I did a project of my own to develop something I could check every day. (https://tunesmith.github.io/covid-dashboard/) It's messy and hacky and some of its math is out of date and I haven't gotten around to updating it for omicron, but imagine something like that that is funded, tailored for everyone's county, and really easy to report and communicate. It would have helped, just to know whether today is a mask day or not.
Even in spite of those knockdowns it spread, and in spite of high vaccination rates it spread. It's not a solveable problem, citizens would not (did not) accept the terms necessary to be covid zero forever, so why delay it once everyone is vaccinated?
I was on team Covid Zero to begin with, but it was never meant to be a long term strategy. You can't exile a whole country while the rest of the world moves on and expect people to accept that.
We have the technology to lock things down at borders as hard as we'd need to, if Australia doesn't have that capability now they'd better start working on it. COVID-19 has (so far) only ranked as the fifth deadliest pandemic in human history, but it was the perfect opportunity for Australia to test and evaluate their ability to defend against deadly viral outbreaks which would rank much much higher. Experts agree that global pandemics will be increasingly more common in the future and that it's only a matter of time until we face something else like this or worse. We couldn't even make it through this pandemic before seeing another one starting!
Cleaners, hotel/airport/quarantine center staff, security, staff, screeners, etc. could have been in full HAZMAT etc. just as they'd absolutely have to be if the virus were much more deadly anyway. It would have been better to make sure they could do it right last year when the cost of failure would have been limited to locking down one city for a few weeks to contain the spread than to scramble to figure it all out when a single fuck up could wipe out a huge percentage of the country's population.
> You can't exile a whole country while the rest of the world moves on and expect people to accept that.
As long as people were still coming in and out of the country (albeit with a 7-14 day delay for those coming in) the nation wouldn't be "exiled" and it would have been the people of Australia who got to "move on", by living their lives without the virus, while the rest of the world was stuck in our ongoing cycle of wave after wave of infections, new variants, new/lifted/renewed restrictions, increases and decreases in hospitalizations, increasing numbers of deaths/disability, exhausted healthcare workers, economic uncertainty, etc. all while we try our hardest to just pretend that the virus around us doesn't exist.
I'd gladly trade the mess we have now for making entering the country a little more obnoxious by tacking on a short, enforced, unexciting, but all expense paid mini-vacation onto the itinerary of anyone coming in.
What do you think they did?
> I'd gladly trade the mess we have now for making entering the country a little more obnoxious by tacking on a short, enforced, unexciting, but all expense paid mini-vacation onto the itinerary of anyone coming in.
That isn't enough, that is what we did. Whilst that remains the case it makes that stance pointless to have. I agreed with you, I did all the right things, I advocated for lockdowns and was happy to see the 14 day quarantine periods. Guess what, expections are everywhere. It wasn't enough. It is absolutely not possible to lock down and still let people in and out. We are messy, shitty and selfish. Either borders stay closed or you accept cases will come in. The half measures are a waste of time.
Australia is a good example, because we had the 14 day quarantine period in an isolation hotel, and were technically closed borders to anyone but exceptional circumstances yet outbreaks kept happening. Melbourne was in full home isolation for months and months, while borders were closed to interstate and international, and that didn't stop the spread.
It really doesn't seem fair to call their efforts "somewhat half-assed" given that they did so much better than other countries, but they didn't go to the extent or take the care that they would have if the virus were more deadly.
The staff at hotels and airports weren't decked out like this (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Hazmat_D...) or this (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Army_tra...), proper ventilation wasn't considered and staff weren't even being tested properly leading to the virus spreading amongst staff, in hallways, between rooms, and as a result of the generally lax attitude (in deadly plague terms) the virus got out of those hotels and into the public not once or twice but over and over, tens of times!
I do agree that Australia did do a lot to try to stop the virus! The 14 day quarantine was a good idea (at the time), severely limiting the number of people coming in was good too (although I doubt that would have been sustainable for long) and there's no denying that people's shitty actions hurt their efforts, but I just can't believe they gave it everything they had. There were reports that they didn't even have a plan to work from initially, and were just kind of making it up as they went along. That's just tragic, but it means they also had the benefit of writing a plan with our current technology and understanding on the subject in mind from inception. You could have asked a random person on the street decades ago to come up with a plan on how to quarantine a family and prevent the spread of a deadly possibly airborne virus and and you'd get something that looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn0-nPOb_KM and while moves are fiction and not sound policy, they'd have had the "protected staff" and "ventilation" boxes checked at least.
It's clear that for all Australia did to stop the virus (and again, I'm not bashing their efforts here which were well above what others were doing) it was clearly not being taken as seriously as it would have if they were dealing with the next Black Death. I'd really like to think that if they had tried their best in this scenario to keep the virus out they'd have been more successful and that while some people will probably always act terribly selfish, that it is still possible in 2022 to let people in and out of an island nation while keeping out a highly deadly virus. I'd really like to think that because one day we might not have the choice to do otherwise. If Australia really can't manage it, what chance do the rest of the nations have?
I'm sure they've since used this experience to help shore up their defenses for the future, I'm sure it was eye opening for a lot of people, but not going all out in their containment efforts while they had the chance to stay ahead of covid was a lost opportunity. The good/bad news is that they're certain to get the chance again with a new virus sooner than they'd like and hopefully the stakes won't be that much higher.
When we think about international travel, I think it's the same discussion. I do believe you that it's technically possible to have that level of containment, but I'm skeptical that it's possible at the scale that humans want to move about. The scale of travel is easy to underestimate, even mid-pandemic when the world was closed.
Australia only has a population of around 25 million, and in 2019, 4 million people flew in or out of Australia every month. In 2019 we moved close to the equivalent of the entire country across the border TWICE. For all of 2020 and 2021 it was still above 100,000 people per month, while we were locked down and international travel was banned, that's a lot of movements to get perfectly right to prevent a breach. Trying to scale that up to levels people are happy with is going to be really tough to get right. ( https://www.bitre.gov.au/statistics/aviation/international )
I think you're right that if a disease we decide is deadly enough comes along that we'll have no choice but to reduce throughput entirely, but at the moment I think you can reduce part of this discussion to a tradeoff we're making, between throughput and level of containment.
Better testing, giving people options to isolate from their household, etc, all could have reduced the spread. I think they don't make as much sense after vaccines are widely available (but we haven't necessarily hit that point globally).
Figuring out how to do good public health messaging would also probably be worthwhile. Vaccine uptake in lots of places was pretty bad.
No, it's kicking the can down the road.
The virus is highly infectious, always was. There's no prevention, just delaying the inevitable, and possibly waiting for a variant that is more severe (to someone without any prior exposure), and not having any protection other than vaccines that are based on much earlier/different strains. I'm a little worried about this for my parents, for what it's worth.
The Omicron targeted vaccines likely provide a worthwhile improvement in protection against the recent variants. Hopefully the public health apparatus chooses to release them, rather than doing nothing.
As difficult as it was to live through, I'm supportive of what was done here in Melbourne to suppress the virus in 2020-21 when the variants were more severe and the vaccines weren't around. It's what enabled our fatality rate to be kept to one of the lowest in the world.
It doesn't make sense to keep doing it now, and doing so could make the problem worse. In a complex system these issues aren't without tradeoffs.
Luckily our health officials agree so we're all good.
(Btw saying “if you read my comment” is poor conduct here as I’m sure you know.)
you literally can as long as you keep on kicking and you keep road in front of you.
- I ask a parent commenter who has asserted that society should still be preventing transmission of a highly infectious virus if they know of a system that could actually achieve that;
- A few commenters invoke China's approach (whilst conceding it was excessively draconian), others insist that it's not about preventing transmission, just slowing it, conveniently avoiding confronting the fact that the original point was about prevention, and even if it wasn't, slowing spread still means infection is inevitable;
- Nobody suggests an approach that would have been effective or palatable;
- Many hours later, a new commenter slides in to point out that it really is literally possible to keep kicking a can down a road forever, as if this is either true in practice, consistent with the rhetorical point of that metaphor, or relevant to the point at hand.
I'll ask the central question again: can anyone describe a system that would have (a) been effective at preventing spread of the virus, and (b) resulted in a society that anyone wanted to continue living in, or that could even function at all?
More testing would have been worthwhile.
Supporting isolation from households would have been worthwhile.
Improving ventilation is probably worth the cost.
And on and on.
The question is: how can spread of this virus be completely prevented, so that nobody gets infected? This is clearly what the root commenter and the XKCD cartoon they shared are asserting should be happening.
Methods that just slow the inevitable are clearly sidestepping the point. And methods that make society into a dystopian nightmare may be technically argument-winning but not practical and thus make lame contributions to the discussion.
Testing, ventilation, supported isolation are fine; we’ve had and still have some of those measures in Australia, and I agree it’s helpful to slow spread and protect those most vulnerable for a while. I’ve been fine with that happening here. But that’s not the primary topic of this discussion.
Please stop with the ad-homs and side-stepping and address the point.
I'm in Melbourne, Australia, which locked down hard to suppress the virus in 2020, then for several more months attempting to suppress it again in 2021.
Since everyone had had the chance to be vaccinated by Nov last year, restrictions have been lifted and the virus has been allowed to spread, and almost everyone is much happier living with the virus than continuing to be locked down.
What is China going to do? Keep locking everyone down every few months forever?
For myself, having a young child at daycare means getting exposed to infections and being sick with something different almost every week, which is of course annoying but it's a part of life. I had covid for the second time last week (must have been BA.5 as it's dominant here), and it was no big deal; I felt a bit off for under 48 hours. It certainly felt like my body knew what to do with it having first encountered an earlier omicron variant in Feb.
How is shutting down all of society for weeks/months at a time preferable to that?
Starvation is not an exaggerated description of some of the Shanghai lockdown experiences:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/03/shanghai-food-shortages...
What are some examples of lapses of judgement to support the claim that he "let the outbreak get out of control "?
Shanghai health officials tried to control the outbreak with testing and neighbourhood-wide lockdowns; in hindsight they should have done the full lockdown earlier.
People screaming and begging for food and basic supplies may disagree
I see two distinct points at which it would have been possible:
1) The initial outbreak. I don't know if this was ever, in any practical sense, possible. (Honestly, I don't know, maybe it was).
2) vaccine availability, presuming worldwide that we all maintained strict lockdown until the vaccine was universally available and the vast majority of the population took it. This also does not appear to ever have been possible in any practical way, or at least I do not see any realist path for it to have occured.
Short of the two above possibilities, I see only a broad spectrum of approaches designed to spread the worst impacts over a period of time that didn't overhwealm health systems even more than some of them were, while protecting the most vulnerable as best as we can. People's tolerance for the different measures for doing this vary along multiple geographic & sociopolitical lines and so we have a patchwork of approaches, a lot of which provide only loose guidance while relying on individuals to make their own personal risk decisions.
This is may not be ideal from the perspective of personal risk decisions having an impact on others that decide differently, but again I am also not sure if a different outcome was ever, in a practical sense, possible.
At this point I think the main challenges for the world are to ramp up the infrastructure for cyclical vaccine updates & billions of doses to be available worldwide at each step. In terms of infrastructure, the needs are similar, though I would say exceed, those required for annual flue vaccine production and distribution. COVID still presents more serious risks with long term effects not yet understood, so my personal opinion is that cyclical vaccine infrastructure should target something higher than annual flu vaccine cycles.
Yes, Taiwan did it, as described in a JAMA article [1] published at the start of March 2020. In particular, follow the link to the supplement: "eTable: List of Actions Taken by Date and Category".
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
Using Taiwan to make this claim is incorrect-- or insufficient-- in at least two ways. Also keep in mind that I said for all practical purposes, which is very different than theoretically possible. But taking things one at a time:
1) Taiwan has failed to continue it's early accomplishments. It has now has had hundreds of thousands of cases. I'll preemptively address a to this that Taiwan's current cases are a separate topic from it's initial success. This is not an unreasonable point, though I myself do not think they can be separated. A discuss there however seems outside the scope of my response to you.
2) Taiwan was uniquely suited for it's early effective response to COVID. It had learned the lessons from prior scares such as 2003 and put excellent measures in place to to respond to future issues. It was only able to succeed early in the pandemic because of actions taken years earlier.
In the context of my comment it is unreasonable to deny my claim on the basis that, had the entire world 10+ years earlier acted differently that Taiwan's success could have been replicated. I clearly made "initial outbreak" the context of my comment while Taiwan's success was rooted in far far earlier actions. The actions listed in your linked article were only so rapidly possible due to that decade long preparation.
You might reasonably claim "had the rest of the world followed Taiwan's example 10+ years earlier..." But that would not be a contextual response to my comment. At the initial point of outbreak, especially with early cases in Italy traced back to 2019 & what we know of asymptomatic cases and spread rates, my claim stands: it may have, in any practical sense, been impossible at initial outbreak to have stopped things in their tracks. (I am open to further discussion that I may be wrong, but the example of Taiwan is not sufficient to demonstrate that)
The sociopolitical situation in some areas would quite literally have made it impossible as well. In the US for example even the patchwork response by states, often less extreme in restrictions than other areas of the world, prompted sporadic violence including a number of murders over simple mask requirements-- a strict policy in Taiwan that is credited with it's early success. IIRC there was at least one such murder in Germany as well.
Finally: I will concede that worldwide response was spotty and inconsistent and that a better job could have been done.
We all remember that the vaccines were described as being able to prevent infection and transmission, certainly by some politicians, perhaps less so by scientists. One of those very politicians is currently Covid positive after four (count them) shots of vaccine.
Doesn't mass vaccination, particularly with imperfect vaccines, increase the selection pressure on the virus to mutate?
With hindsight I wish there had been much more international focus on protecting and vaccinating those truly at risk. It seems fairly clear by now that fit and healthy under-50s really didn't gain much from vaccination, their risk from this particularly virus was already tiny. After a couple of months the vaccines didn't stop them catching and spreading the virus either, so they weren't even protecting the vulnerable indirectly.
Absolutely:
The variant that later became known as Delta was first identified in Oct 2020. The vaccines didn't start their heavy rollout until the beginning of 2021, and it took months before a decent percent of the population had been vaccinated.
Before that point there was little concern about variants, as the virus didn't seem to be mutating very much in ways that would heavily change its infectivity dynamics. But after that? That's when Delta started easily out-competing prior variants, with the "delta waves" occurring in mid/late 2021. And since then we keep getting more and more named "variants of concern" that are expected to escape immunity.
First, Alpha was from Dec 2020-Jan 2021 in the UK and was already substantially more infectious than the Wuhan wild type or D614G variant, though it did not escape immunity.
Second, as far as we know neither Delta nor Omicron (nor all the other Greek letters that were outcompeted by them) developed in vaccinated people, and both of them are anyway incredibly more infectious even in unvaccinated people.
I don't know about BA.4/5 but, at least for the three main lineages of concern that drove waves after mass vaccination, selective pressure was not a cause of either the birth or the spreading of the variant.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00215-2
"Omicron forms a stronger grip on ACE2 than do previously seen variants3. It is also better at evading the virus-blocking ‘neutralizing’ antibodies4 produced by people who have been vaccinated, or who have been infected with earlier variants [..] At some point [..] something happened to help Omicron explode, maybe because the progress of other variants — such as Delta — was gradually impeded by the immunity built up from vaccination and previous infection, whereas Omicron was able to evade this barrier."
Evading vaccination could very well be why it was so fast to spread in mostly-vaccinated populations in Europe and North America, which happened "faster than any previous versions" as the (very interesting!) article you linked says at the very beginning, but the variant was more fit anyway.
Selection pressure exists, but they will exist whether or not the immune pressure comes from vaccination or infection, so it's preferable to protect first.
The virus changed, thanks to Omicron not even the WHO agrees with that claim.
"Vaccine-induced immunity following a primary vaccine series is modest against infection due to Omicron in the months after vaccination, and wanes significantly over time. Vaccine-induced immunity against Omicron-related mild symptomatic disease, asymptomatic infection, and viral shedding is also modest and short-lived even following a booster dose."
https://www.who.int/news/item/01-06-2022-interim-statement-o...
“ Currently available data from emergency-use listed COVID-19 vaccines show that vaccines provide higher levels of protection than SARS-CoV-2 infection against severe disease outcomes, with modest waning in the 6 months following completion of primary vaccine series. Further, they continue to protect against severe disease, hospitalizations and death due to Omicron, albeit to a lesser degree compared with other VOC.”
[Now that we have them] the vaccines are indeed effective at protecting against severe outcomes. Even before the vaccines, and against this particular virus, being young and healthy is and always was also exceptionally effective:
"People of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an example, around 1 in 70,000 died from Covid over the 9 peak weeks of the epidemic. Since over 80% of these had pre-existing medical conditions, we estimate that a healthy women in this age-group had less than a 1 in 350,000 risk of dying from Covid, around 1/4 of the normal risk of an accidental death over this period"[0]
(from May 2020): "Coronavirus risk for young is 'staggeringly low', says UK's top statistician [..] “If we look at under 25s, there're 17 million of them in the country where we have 26 deaths recorded,” he said, suggesting a similar risk would be seen in “a couple of days” in general accidents and sudden deaths. However, he said the risk for the over 90s was 10,000 times as high, with more than one per cent of over 90s having died from Covid-19."[1]
[0] https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris... [1] https://archive.ph/WYas8 ( https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/10/coronavirus-risk... )
In the former case, policy changes to reduce likelihood of people flying with covid (temp checks, affidavits, allowing removal of obviously ill passengers), and to increase ventilation and filtration on planes, and perhaps to even bring back masks or at the very least encourage or incentivize them in times of high transmission.
I don't know that we can do much about the latter case other than better public health education and perhaps PSAs.
But in 99.999% of cases, non-airtight masks do not work at all. Not even a little bit.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The journals are unreliable on this and many other topics. Objective data suggests that mandatory masking has no effect on transmission.
1. It's ironic how much you denounce the value of journals and extol the value of "objective data", yet you have not attached any "objective data" (in any meaningful sense) with your original comment, and have dodged follow up requests for sources.
2. You're moving the goalposts from masks "do not work at all" to "mandatory masking has no effect".
Anything less than an airtight full aerosol filtration respirator will not stop aerosols infected with SARS-CoV-2 from leaving and being inhaled by people. Fact. The latest CDC data suggests that "medical masks are better than cloth masks" but never attempt to identify a difference between a cloth mask and nothing.
This article outlines a paywalled paper suggesting masks don't work at all. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/data-do-...
The incidence of infection between areas that are fully mask-mandated can't be proven to differ significantly from areas that had no mask mandate due to many other factors https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-....
I don't trust the establishment because they were wrong about everything. Fauci lied about masks, then lied about lying about masks, then lied about HCQ, then about IVM and other treatments. The NIH has provided 0 guidance on treating COVID other than vaccines. They did eventually do a study on HCQ to "disprove" it's effectiveness but started the dose at 1200mg/day! Nearly lethal. This of course started on patients that were too far advanced in disease and also had co-morbidities. It was a sham and borderline homicidal. All to protect the emergency use authorization for vaccines and Remdesivir.
A course of HCQ: $10. A course of Remdesivir: $3000. Which is a more fiscally responsible opportunity for a for-profit industry that controls the NIH and FDA?
The NIH staffers including Fauci (and of course the expert who is not an expert: Bill Gates) stand to make a lot of money on vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer.
Fauci also lied about the NIh funding gain of function research in the Wuhan lab under oath to Congress. https://www.outkick.com/nih-admits-fauci-lied-about-gain-of-...
Historically the entire medical industrial complex and APA lied about the "chemical imbalance" theory for depression for decades while making billions of dollars selling SSRIs and misleading the population for profit: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
It is my opinion that these establishment organizations have 0 credibility anymore and I would never trust anything put forth by them at face value.
2. If masks don't prevent transmission, and mandates are intended to prevent transmission then mandates don't work. Aristotelian logic.
Even if we suppose this is true, it does not support the claim that "in 99.999% of cases, non-airtight masks do not work at all. Not even a little bit". At best it supports the claim that "non-airtight masks" are not 100% effective, which is an entirely different claim.
>The latest CDC data suggests that "medical masks are better than cloth masks" but never attempt to identify a difference between a cloth mask and nothing.
Okay, but this feels like you're moving the goalposts again. In your original comment you were talking about "non-airtight masks" in general, not cloth masks in particular. Also, even if we grant that cloth masks are the same as wearing nothing, the fact that medical masks are better than cloth masks/nothing still contradicts your original claim that "non-airtight masks" (ie. including surgical masks) "do not work at all" in "99.999% of cases".
>This article outlines a paywalled paper suggesting masks don't work at all. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/data-do-...
The paper actually isn't paywalled. You have to log in to download pdf, but you can view the paper using the web viewer without any login: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25776/chapter/1
I skimmed the paper and I disagree with the characterization that it "suggest[s] masks don't work at all". The conclusion seems to be "there's no evidence that masks works in practice (ie. because no such studies were conducted, not because studies were conducted and turned up negative), but evidence does seem to suggest that they works at capturing virus particles". The relevant parts from the conclusion:
"There are no studies of individuals wearing homemade fabric masks in the course of their typical activities. Therefore, we have only limited, indirect evidence regarding the effectiveness of such masks for protecting others, when made and worn by the general public on a regular basis. That evidence comes primarily from laboratory studies testing the effectiveness of different materials at capturing particles of different sizes.
The evidence from these laboratory filtration studies suggests that such fabric masks may reduce the transmission of larger respiratory droplets. There is little evidence regarding the transmission of small aerosolized particulates of the size potentially exhaled by asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals with COVID-19. The extent of any protection will depend on how the masks are made and used. It will also depend on how mask use affects users’ other precautionary behaviors, including their use of better masks, when those become widely available. Those behavioral effects may undermine or enhance homemade fabric masks’ overall effect on public health. The current level of benefit, if any, is not possible to assess."
>The incidence of infection between areas that are fully mask-mandated can't be proven to differ significantly from areas that had no mask mandate due to many other factors https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-....
Again, moving the goalposts. This is talking about the effectiveness of mask mandates, your original claim was "in 99.999% of cases, non-airtight masks do not work at all. Not even a little bit.".
>2. If masks don't prevent transmission, and mandates are intended to prevent transmission then mandates don't work. Aristotelian logic.
Right, but "do masks work" and "do mask mandates work" are two separate questions. I suspect your intention might be to argue for the latter, but by overplaying your hand (ie. making the bold and unfounded claim that non-N95 masks don't work at all) you ended up getting dimissed/downvoted.
> The Lancet knowingly lied about HCQ. Therefore I don't trust them.
>I don't trust the establishment because they were wrong about everything. Fauci lied about masks, then lied about lying about masks, then lied about HCQ, then about IVM and other treatments. The NIH has provided 0 guidance on treating COVID other than vaccines. They did eventually do a study on HCQ to "disprove" it's effectiveness but started the dose at 1200mg/day! Nearly lethal. This of course started on patients that were too far advanced in disease and also had co-morbidities. It was a sham and borderline homicidal. All to protect the emergency use authorization for vaccines and Remdesivir.
>A course of HCQ: $10. A course of Remdesivir: $3000. Which is a more fiscally responsible opportunity for a for-profit industry that controls the NIH and FDA?
>The NIH staffers including Fauci (and of course the expert who is not an expert: Bill Gates) stand to make a lot of money on vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer.
This is getting derailed from the original discussion of masks, so I'm explicitly going to not respond to it.
WFH as standard (unless the job requires presence)
Illegal for employees to attend work while sick, with fines etc for employers, much like fire regs. Perhaps this can be a strict liability offence.
Capacity limits on public spaces according to ventilation standard - no ventilation, no public.
Testing everywhere for all the things.
...
You lost a week's pay because you couldn't work because you were ill. Not because some politician was mean and didn't pay you or tell your boss to pay you.
But the vaccine failed, it doesn't prevent infection, it doesn't prevent transmission, and it only lasts for a few months.
It does protect against serious illness though.
But because it doesn't prevent reinfection new variants have plenty of hosts. Natural immunity is better in this regard since it lasts longer.
Best option: Get vaccinated, then get infected while you still have immunity - you get all the benefits with much lower risk of serious disease.
That what I do, I try to be in large gatherings at least every 3 months, then I keep getting new immunity without getting seriously sick.
No vaccine is 100% effective.
The vaccines were sufficiently effective to let Israel skip the alpha wave altogether with ~70% of the population covered. At the lowest point in June 2021 they were down to less than 20 new cases per day. Then the delta variant came out of the bush (from India which had much less coverage at the time, the more infections, the higher the mutation risk). It's R0 was higher than alpha's and the epidemic kicked back up.
Had there been an initial, aggressive push to vaccinate globally we might have been done with the virus by the summer of 2021.
It should also be noted that COVID has cumulative effects. The all around risk of complications is about twice as high for the second infection (I don't think there's data for more than two, so we don't know if the trend is additive, multiplicative, a combination thereof, or if it peaks there). Among other things, it culls the naive lymphocyte population weakening your immunity to bugs you haven't met yet.
So a couple months after the vaccine push they would have been back where they started, even without Delta.
> Had there been an initial, aggressive push to vaccinate globally we might have been done with the virus by the summer of 2021.
That's simply not true. You can never vaccinate everyone, so 3 to 6 months after this massive vaccination campaign everyone would start to get sick with the Alpha variant again.
Not to mention even someone vaccinated still has some degree of infection, allowing new variants to develop.
This is our first interaction, not sure why you think I keep thinking something I never thought.
There might have been a need for boosters, it would have been possible to contain the epidemic had we not let covid mutate into more faster, more contagious and evasive variants. And the variants were much more likely to spring up as we let the epidemic go rampant.
Are you not posting a message demonstrating your current thinking? And your current message is showing the same thought process. You need to adjust your knowledge of the situation.
Giving the entire planet a booster every 3 months is not a viable strategy.
> it would have been possible to contain the epidemic
No, it would not.
> had we not let covid
We didn't "let covid" do anything. This is not a disease we are currently able to control.
Vaccines don't work stop the spread of the virus (they only stop serious disease), masks don't work, lockdowns don't work.
The only failure here is we let fear control us. Once the first vaccine was available the fear should have been over.
But even today hospitals are refusing non vaccinated visitors even if they have immunity due to getting stick. There is no scientific basis for this, it's just fear.
And it's stupid as well - the vaccine only works for a few months, but if you got vaccinated 2 years ago you are permitted entry, but you recovered from illness 1 month ago you are not. This is not science, this is dogma.
They did stop the spread of the historic and alpha variant in Israel, with a 55-60% rate of vaccination (I mistakenly thought it was 70%, it was even lower). Before the onset of the delta wave, the virus was about to go extinct there.
You can check the graphs. May 11 2021, there were 4.66 new cases per million inhabitants. By June 9 it was down to 1.5. Compare with the surrounding countries, where the alpha wave lasted much longer, and was still lingering when the delta variant came around.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
June 9 coincides with the point where the delta share crossed the 50% threshold.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
But the global vaccine rollout was criminally slow.
I don't know how hospitals devise their COVID policy in the US... In France you need a "Sanitary pass" to access healthcare facilities. You must either provide a negative test taken in the last 24 hours, or a proof of some level of immunity (either up to date vaccination, or a COVID recovery certificate from less than 4 months).
The Alpha wave occurred in Jan 2021, did happen in Israel, and at the time they only had ~10% fully vaccinated (~25% partially).
Despite what we want and how we wish the world would be, the reality is that if you are constantly exposed to covid you are unlikely to ever be symptotically ill. Since we can’t prevent that from happening everywhere in the world, might as well plan for it. It also puts evolutionary pressure on the disease to be less severe, since if you feel sick you stay home, but if you don’t you go out and spread it.
Because the scientific evidence indicates it is still highly effective at reducing hospitalization and especially death.
This isn't a binary fail / no fail condition.
It is not that vacccines failed: the government failed.
If they advertise them as “you will not get sick” they are 100% success.
But they advertised it as “we need to have mandate so that everybody will get immune forever”. This is where things failed adding ammunition to crazies and conspiracy theories.
They failed in their primary goal: Creating lasting immunity to this disease. They succeeded in a secondary goal: Reducing severity of infection.
The trouble with failing in the primary goal is that COVID is here forever.
But now, the vaccine effectiveness is actually negative in several places! I have even seen what seemingly look like nonsense such as vaccinated but unboosted people having much lower infection rates than both boosted and unvaccinated people. It is something that has been puzzling me for a while and that study may be final piece I needed.
What I have seen so far:
- The vaccine was very effective against Alpha, not as effective against Delta but still very good.
- The vaccine has some effectiveness against Omicron, but it wanes quickly. After about 6 months, it doesn't do much, but not nothing, especially against severe cases. I've seen around 20% effectiveness against infection, I suspect even less against BA.4/5
- Almost everyone has some immunity now, natural or vaccine induced.
So, what I think happened is that many people got their booster just before the first Omicron wave, giving them significant protection. Far from perfect, but enough to see it clearly in the stats. Most of those who didn't receive boosters or were unvaccinated caught it (with or without symptoms). Later, in the following waves (BA.2,4,5) and even in the end of the first wave, those who had their boosters found their protection diminished, while the unvaccinated were protected by their first wave Omicron infection, which, according to the article, seems to be highly effective.
I would rather avoid deliberately getting sick though... If you really want to attend these large gatherings because that's what you enjoy, fine, but doing that just to get covid is a terrible reason. There is no guarantee it will all go according you your plan. If that pandemic has taught us anything, it is than not much happened according to plans. I would rather wait for an Omicron optimized vaccine that may not do everything as planned, but at least went through trials.
The only reason I can imagine where getting deliberately infected is worth it is if you plan to be in a situation where you really can't afford to get covid. And if that's the case, getting an extra dose of the current mRNA vaccines at the right moment will offer you some limited time protection.
And finally, I think that vaccine mandates should go. Because almost everyone has some immunity, and these old vaccines offer very limited protection, it won't do much besides pissing some people off. I am still very pro-vaccine, but I don't see the need for mandates anymore.
Yes, I did. And no, it didn't.
It is exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned negative effectiveness. And while the study definitely shows waning immunity, the apparent "lower immunity compared to someone unvaccinated" after 8 months is just an artefact resulting from the fact that you are unlikely to get covid twice in a row (i.e. natural immunity).
The Lancet study actually shows an overall vaccine effectiveness of 84% and naturally concludes by recommending booster doses. The 84% figure is may also be an artefact and doesn't account for Omicron, buy I could say that from the study, the vaccine is 84% effective over 9 months, which would be as misleading as the "immunity is lower after 8 months" quote.
The vaccine would only work for a few months - even for Omicron, never mind future variants.
Unless you plan to get a booster every 4 months vaccines are not a viable strategy.
And sure enough current vaccines are not a viable strategy, but it tells you nothing about covid vaccines as a whole. Researchers are not standing still, new vaccines are being researched, and even if we can only make short lived vaccines, it doesn't mean that vaccines are not a viable strategy. Flu vaccines are a viable strategy, they save many lives despite a rather low effectiveness and requiring yearly injections.