Don’t even get me started with him and his emergency powers. I am beyond livid that he has been making these decisions unilaterally. I can understand a 30-60 day grant of emergency powers last spring, but by last summer this should have been a covid response panel with various doctors, economists, business owners, etc. The fact that he has kept these powers is so improper. Same goes for governors across the nation. A team needed to be making this decision and the data they were using needed to be transparent and the reasoning behind each needed to be clear and explained. This would have taken away some of the highly charged political views and entrenchment we have seen on each side and may have helped our vaccine progress.
The restaurants with bars being open for months and the bar only places having to stay closed was just beyond dumb and cost business owners their business is a really good example.
With that said CDC has said for months and months that you need to be within 6 feet for 15 minutes to be at risk. I had no concerns outside or waking by people outside unless we were tight for more than 5 minutes.
You turned out to be right that this was not a big concern outside. It’s not that it couldn’t happen, just that it’s very unlikely to (and the 6 feet guideline has gotten a lot of criticism, particularly for indoors). I understand if other people wanted to reduce their risk further.
I wonder if the situation in India will make any difference on people’s attitudes. People there appear to have let their guard down too soon, and now their hospitals are getting overwhelmed and there’s tremendous suffering. That definitely could have happened here without many of the restrictions that were kept in place over the last year and a half. It’s amazing to me that Covid still spread like it did given how much the restrictions zeroed the normal flu season. It’s the worst combination: highly transmissible, more severe symptoms than most common diseases, but not deadly enough to mobilize everyone in our current culture and with a delay in the onset of symptoms (including asymptomatic spreaders). If this had killed people like Ebola, then I doubt it ever becomes a global pandemic.
The majority of the India cases appear to be coming from rural areas and they have run into a shortage of vaccines. I have a feeling the people we need to go get vaccines aren’t the people watching cases in India, but I hope you are right.
One of the interesting things is watching impact to health care systems. I am not familiar with India, but I wonder how their capacity is vs. population. A bartender at my favorite Irish Pub is from Ireland and I said I couldn’t believe their pubs were still closed and he said well we have less 300 ICU beds - in the entire country. For comparison - we have 2500 in NC alone. For all the hell our system gets, much rightfully so - capacity isn’t an issue. https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/en/data-insights/intensive-care-beds-capacity
We’ve been duped. As a lot of us thought, herd immunity was never attainable and this essentially becomes the flu.
Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.
That has been my expectation since early in the process. I would say I am surprised anyone is surprised, but I’m not.
The pfizer pill is interesting. Not really sure how that one works yet. But perhaps it’ll be even less of a hassle than a booster shot, which really is not that big of a deal itself.
One of the earliest comments was to this exact same point and a discussion of whether this virus was going to evolve into an annual frustration (best case) much like several of the coronaviruses we live with now, or keep mutating into something worse, and killing millions more in the process. Somewhere in one of these threads is the post I made early on about how doctors / scientists think that other coronavirus strains are the remnant of the major outbreaks that killed millions in the late 1800s and of course the big one 100 years ago.
Vaccination and herd immunity should help us avoid the horrors of what is happening in India right now. The pyres of bodies every night because they cannot deal with all the dead. If you haven’t seen the photos… Maybe don’t. It’s heartbreaking.
I had a feeling about the yearly shots - but for a more cynical reason. There is no money in curing anything that doesn’t actually kill in huge numbers. Just need it to be lethal enough the masses pay for the boosters.
These statements about herd immunity are unnecessarily confusing in my opinion. While it may be unlikely we’ll reach herd immunity nationwide as defined as completely preventing any community spread for the foreseeable future, in part due to global outbreaks and in part due to vaccine refusal here, the mass vaccination is still likely to have a major dampening effect on any future spread. In those communities where vaccination has occurred at higher rates, it is very likely that community spread could be precluded due to approaching herd immunity, at least until varieties appear that elude the vaccines at higher rates than we are seeing now.
Remember those articles being pushed by the herd immunity advocates toward the beginning of this? They were misinterpreted, particularly in terms of overly optimistic ideas of limiting spread to seniors while exposing young people and the amount of suffering involved in a case of massive spread, but not entirely wrong about the dampening effect of approaching herd immunity without actually reaching it. No doubt it would have been better to stamp it out earlier and in more places.
We are nothing like India. Not to be rude, but the lack of slums, a working sanitation system, potable water supply and a viable healthcare infrastructure will help us avoid being like India. Not vaccinations and herd immunity.
Just as a note, Texas and Florida were 1-2 in population growth from July 2019 to July 2020.
Michigan, California, Illinois and NY were the bottom 4 with all at a net loss in population
Cannot live in fear. Need to get back to normal. If you have the vaccine, then I do not understand continuing to wear the mask, but I am not a health professional. I know it is to protect others, but if they are not going to get the vaccine then that is their decision which I respect. I should not be penalized for someone else not taking the vaccine.
