12 ms·

Measles surging as Covid-19 curbs disrupt vaccinations

184 points by nostromo 6y ago

Barrin92 6y ago
probably the most underrated danger of the pandemic, the degree to which it crowds out and diminishes successes in fighting countless of other diseases and systemic issues. Food security, health and safety of probably hundreds of millions in the developing world is threatened and year long progress seems to be undone because everyone has to deal with covid 24/7. Damage is probably immeasurable.
- rwcarlsen 6y ago
  Well - it's damage the world "chose" - via lockdowns, fear and hysteria, etc. When I talk about covid with people, I often notice difficulty to distinguish between covid the virus and covid the event (and associated things the world is doing to deal with it). Some seem to insist on attributing fallout like this to being caused by the _virus_ and as something that was never in our control. That is false. Covid doesn't make measles spread. Covid doesn't force people to not get vaccinated for measles. The culture and mitigation society chose to develop around covid caused these things.
  - verall 6y ago
    The "world" didn't "choose", because different parts of the world responded to the pandemic radically differently. Places that locked down immediately, like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and New Zealand, have mostly prevented spread within their borders, and are not experiencing the same fallout as other nations. Other parts of the world did partial lockdowns, or mask recommendations, or nothing at all. With both my state and nation leading the charge in new cases per day, I am personally experiencing how that is going...
    - nostromo 6y ago
      > Places that locked down immediately, like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and New Zealand, have mostly prevented spread within their borders, and are not experiencing the same fallout as other nations. This isn't fully true. Look at Australia, which all but declared victory against Covid many months ago, but has continued to need rolling lockdowns as the virus spreads as soon as the lockdowns end. Lock downs just aren't a long-term solution, all they can do is "flatten the curve."
      - acqq 6y ago
        The case of Australia doesn't disprove the fact that there are countries that managed to have even better response, with even less negative effects to their people. It illustrates how every environment has its unique challenges, but doesn't disprove that better responses (observable mostly in Asian countries) are possible.
      - soperj 6y ago
        Australia didn't lock down immediately.
        nostromo 6y ago
        It wouldn't have mattered because they were Covid-free in June, only to implement a full lock-down (complete with military check-points) only two months later.
        dhfb5 6y ago
        One state (Victoria) implemented a full lockdown, because they botched their international returned traveller quarantine. Life in the rest of Australia has been fairly normal, apart from interstate travel restrictions.
      - dhfb5 6y ago
        Australia doesn’t have rolling lockdowns “as the virus spreads”. It does have a law-abiding population, geographic isolation and luck. In most states, life is almost normal, and has been for months. In New South Wales, for political reasons, they aren’t going all-out against Covid, but even there, they’ve managed to control the virus through effective contact tracing. Victoria, which became the worst affected state because of the second wave (from foreign arrivals), seems to have recovered well after a stringent lockdown, and is on track for full reopening. Ultimately, Eurasia is probably too interconnected, and the US is too individualistic to make a dent in Covid, but Australia is not a good example of failed lockdowns, since lockdowns actually worked extremely well there.
    - umvi 6y ago
      > The "world" didn't "choose", because different parts of the world responded to the pandemic radically differently. To play devil's advocate though, there is a certain degree of "peer pressure" that countries can put against other countries to "encourage" a different response. Travel bans and negative press alone are enough to pressure countries reliant on tourism to respond differently than they normally would have. Also the examples you listed are mostly island nations, USA and EU have basically open uncontrolled borders between members of the union so it's very hard to control migratory spreading.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Taiwan "locked down immediately" but the Taipei metro was never below 2/3rds usual ridership. Right. It's not your garden variety lock down. While the US government authorities were telling people "Masks don't work" and armies of conformists were busy shaming mask wearers for not thinking about 'our frontline workers' and nonsense like that, Taiwan just built sufficient capacity to make a mask for each person every 3 days. "Don't hoard your masks. Give them away to our precious medical personnel". Total fucking bullshit. There are lots of people who went around telling people that masks don't work unless they're N95, that N95 don't work unless you're trained, that N95 don't work if you reuse. All total bullshit. Don't try to rewrite history. I was there.
      - zamfi 6y ago
        I share your frustration, but no one in this chain above rewrote history. Everyone agrees that the US response to covid was abjectly terrible. The response should have been to suddenly and dramatically develop a capacity for producing masks. It’s true that in the early days we weren’t sure if it was transmission through air or contaminated surfaces that was more problematic, but we can already wash our hands. We can’t stop breathing. Instead, the US president spent months attacking anyone who said covid is a problem, the CDC screwed up testing, and health authorities backpedaled on masks while giving conspiracy theory-level justifications. I was there too. The really sad part is that now we know how to get this under control (and a few countries that really tried everything, like those listed by GP, got it right at the outset), but the politics have become so fraught that I doubt we’ll this under control in the US before it’s spread to everyone.
        renewiltord 6y ago
        The part I object to is this idea that the right response is a total lock-down where we stay Wuhan-style in our houses like Li Bai waiting until only the house remains. If that was not intended by anyone in the comment chain, then consider my comment rescinded.
        worker767424 6y ago
        > backpedaled on masks I don't trust Fauci because of this. https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-because-doctors-shortages-from-the-start-2020-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus... Same goes for Trump and telling Bob Woodward something completely different from what he told the public.
- cm2187 6y ago
  The net effect of covid is going to hard to calculate. We may save a flu season, car crashes are way down, I don’t think crime is down in the US. Given the demographics of covid deaths, it’s not clear that covid deaths will be much of a net positive beyond a year, but vaccination campaigns stalled, cancer screening stopped, no dental care, elective procedures postponed, obesity booming up, mental health issues, and the secondary effect of a serious economic crisis on health too.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Car crashes aren't way down. In the first half of the year driving was down 17% but deaths per mile driven went up by 15%, so total deaths per capita was only slightly down. The pandemic has left us with only the more desperate people doing a lot of driving, and those are low-earning, highly stressed, chronically fatigued people in older cars. ETA: Speaking about the USA specifically.
    - ouid 6y ago
      I think this is the wrong hypothesis about why cars are more dangerous right now. I am a much worse driver right now than I was a year ago because it has been a year since I have driven consistently. It's like riding a bike, in that you get worse at it if it's been a while since you've done it.
      - Cerium 6y ago
        I agree that it is part of it. I know that the first time I got back in my car after the first month of staying at home I felt like I didn't know how to drive.
    - throwaway987978 6y ago
      Or perhaps the most reckless drivers are going to be the ones still driving normally because they're not going to listen to the government.
  - worker767424 6y ago
    I still maintain May BLM protests were part outrage, part cabin fever, part not having a job, the latter two being caused by covid.
narrator 6y ago
In good news, the CDC reports a 91% drop in flu infections this year[1]. Since people are sheltering in place and not going to school, there will probably be a lot less measles transmission too. One way to not get measles besides getting the vaccine is for kids to not leave the house and not have friends over, which is the norm in 2020. The 200,000 number of measles deaths referenced in the article was from 2019, before the pandemic. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937a6.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937a6.htm
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago
  That's not the issue here. The issue is - COVID, too, shall pass, people will come out in the open again, and meanwhile the measles vaccination rates have dropped a lot, thanks to irrational beliefs made popular by "influencers".
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  Maybe its the norm in US, but in Europe kids are very much going to school even if overall the society in given state is close to standstill. Not claiming every single state is like that here over the pond (situation evolves), but most are. Even in most infectious region per 100k citizen in last 14 days - canton Geneva in Switzerland, schools are running open, so are kindergartens. Doesn't make much sense, I know. But on the other side at least for us we are not skipping nay vaccinations, nor for us (mainly flu) nor for out 11 month old kiddo.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    Some amount of in-person-schooling-as-necessary-function makes a lot of sense. We know that kids under 10 are very unlikely to transmit Covid, and younger kids are also the least able to thrive in a remote learning environment. My SO is currently teaching second grade (7-8 year olds) remote, and I get nightmares just imagining trying to keep 7-year-old me staring at a teacher on a computer screen (that was a difficult enough task in person). If you can orchestrate your staff in such a way that they're in limited contact with one another (maybe specials suffer) you can probably teach younger kids safely.
rhacker 6y ago
How the hell are people going to even catch measles right now? I would expect that the social distancing measures are going to do more than the vaccines ever would.
- nostromo 6y ago
  Measles is much, much more contagious than Covid-19.
- isoprophlex 6y ago
  Without any social distancing, other measures etc, covid has a basic reproduction number of 2-ish... measles has R0 of 15.
  - ouid 6y ago
    Initially, deaths had a doubling time of 3 days, and the infectious period for covid is weeks. I haven't seen a reasonable calculation of R_0 that was less than 3.5.
    - isoprophlex 6y ago
      Yeah it's difficult to estimate, very dependent on what environment you study. Nevertheless, measles is clearly different from covid, IIRC because it survives so much better outside it's hosts. About R0 values, here's some data from that cruise ship, early on in the pandemic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220300916 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122... • The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia has caused 355 confirmed cases on the Diamond Princess cruise ship as of February 16, 2020. • We estimated that the Maximum-Likelihood (ML) value of reproductive number (R0) was 2.28 for COVID-19 outbreak at the early stage on the ship
      - ouid 6y ago
        The diamond princess is a truly terrible place to try to get an estimate for R_0. A cruise ship outbreak is likely to be A) many times more infectious, and B) the countermeasures applied are likely to be many times more intense. For instance, the R_0 of covid on the cruise ship was estimated to be around 15 in a paper published less than 2 weeks later. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ Ultimately, a cruise ship is a bad place to look for estimates on R_0 in more broadly applicable contexts, and trying to calculate R_0 so early, when the number of people actually infected is not well known, is a task doomed to failure. Furthermore, I trust big studies with large confidence intervals done by national laboratories https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article, more than I trust studies done by people whose methods section is "we plugged it into R".
deleted 6y ago
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gojomo 6y ago
There are only-partially-understood immune processes that go by the names 'trained immunity' or 'bystander immunity' - where encountering one infectious agent (including just an immunogenic vaccine) can "rev up" the immune system to be more ready for other infections – even those of very-different types. For example, there are preliminary indications that flu vaccines, Tuberculosis vaccines ("BCG"), & Measles-Mumps-Reubella vaccine ("MMR") may each decrease Covid-19 infection rates or severity-of-cases. Given that, letting usual immunization practices decay under Covid-19 disruptions is double-destructive. If anything, other vaccination schedules should accelerate, even towards a point of over-vaccination.
- everybodyknows 6y ago
  Evidence of Covid-19 protection by "trained immunity" after MMR booster vaccination: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-vaccine-covid-deadly-mexico-city.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-vaccine-covid-deadly-... Evidence of Covid-19 protection retained from much earlier original MMR vaccination: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23250680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23250680
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Guthur 6y ago
At the beginning it was said that we do not fully understand consequence of community lock down, i think this will just be one of many long tail effects. Will be interesting to see if it was really a good idea in the long run.
- CardenB 6y ago
  It seems likely that it was a good idea to try, but ultimately was not done well enough to have significant benefits.
  - Guthur 6y ago
    When the error margin on the fatality rate was so wide at the beginning it maybe had some value because the worst case was so bad. But now that we have a wealth of data on who the vulnerable are and what's the actual impact the pendulum has shifted, the mounting potential downsides are growing as they were always understood to be and in some places more lock downs are the equivalent to holding back the ocean with a bucket with a hole in it.
tomohawk 6y ago
To get an idea of how infectious measles is, spectators were infected by an athlete at the special olympics who were sitting 30.5 meters away. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7876616/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7876616/ People are so freaked out about covid that they're getting tunnel vision. There are more risks out there than just covid, and focusing only on the one risk to the exclusion of all else is likely to lead to other problems. If you or your child do not have the 2 doses of MMR vaccine, get on that pronto. Many pharmacies can also perform the vaccination. A single dose is 93% effective, while 2 doses are 97% effective.

184 points by nostromo 6y ago

probably the most underrated danger of the pandemic, the degree to which it crowds out and diminishes successes in fighting countless of other diseases and systemic issues. Food security, health and safety of probably hundreds of millions in the developing world is threatened and year long progress seems to be undone because everyone has to deal with covid 24/7. Damage is probably immeasurable.

rwcarlsen 6y ago
Well - it's damage the world "chose" - via lockdowns, fear and hysteria, etc. When I talk about covid with people, I often notice difficulty to distinguish between covid the virus and covid the event (and associated things the world is doing to deal with it). Some seem to insist on attributing fallout like this to being caused by the _virus_ and as something that was never in our control. That is false. Covid doesn't make measles spread. Covid doesn't force people to not get vaccinated for measles. The culture and mitigation society chose to develop around covid caused these things.
- verall 6y ago
  The "world" didn't "choose", because different parts of the world responded to the pandemic radically differently. Places that locked down immediately, like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and New Zealand, have mostly prevented spread within their borders, and are not experiencing the same fallout as other nations. Other parts of the world did partial lockdowns, or mask recommendations, or nothing at all. With both my state and nation leading the charge in new cases per day, I am personally experiencing how that is going...
  - nostromo 6y ago
    > Places that locked down immediately, like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and New Zealand, have mostly prevented spread within their borders, and are not experiencing the same fallout as other nations. This isn't fully true. Look at Australia, which all but declared victory against Covid many months ago, but has continued to need rolling lockdowns as the virus spreads as soon as the lockdowns end. Lock downs just aren't a long-term solution, all they can do is "flatten the curve."
    - acqq 6y ago
      The case of Australia doesn't disprove the fact that there are countries that managed to have even better response, with even less negative effects to their people. It illustrates how every environment has its unique challenges, but doesn't disprove that better responses (observable mostly in Asian countries) are possible.
    - soperj 6y ago
      Australia didn't lock down immediately.
      - nostromo 6y ago
        It wouldn't have mattered because they were Covid-free in June, only to implement a full lock-down (complete with military check-points) only two months later.
        dhfb5 6y ago
        One state (Victoria) implemented a full lockdown, because they botched their international returned traveller quarantine. Life in the rest of Australia has been fairly normal, apart from interstate travel restrictions.
    - dhfb5 6y ago
      Australia doesn’t have rolling lockdowns “as the virus spreads”. It does have a law-abiding population, geographic isolation and luck. In most states, life is almost normal, and has been for months. In New South Wales, for political reasons, they aren’t going all-out against Covid, but even there, they’ve managed to control the virus through effective contact tracing. Victoria, which became the worst affected state because of the second wave (from foreign arrivals), seems to have recovered well after a stringent lockdown, and is on track for full reopening. Ultimately, Eurasia is probably too interconnected, and the US is too individualistic to make a dent in Covid, but Australia is not a good example of failed lockdowns, since lockdowns actually worked extremely well there.
  - umvi 6y ago
    > The "world" didn't "choose", because different parts of the world responded to the pandemic radically differently. To play devil's advocate though, there is a certain degree of "peer pressure" that countries can put against other countries to "encourage" a different response. Travel bans and negative press alone are enough to pressure countries reliant on tourism to respond differently than they normally would have. Also the examples you listed are mostly island nations, USA and EU have basically open uncontrolled borders between members of the union so it's very hard to control migratory spreading.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Taiwan "locked down immediately" but the Taipei metro was never below 2/3rds usual ridership. Right. It's not your garden variety lock down. While the US government authorities were telling people "Masks don't work" and armies of conformists were busy shaming mask wearers for not thinking about 'our frontline workers' and nonsense like that, Taiwan just built sufficient capacity to make a mask for each person every 3 days. "Don't hoard your masks. Give them away to our precious medical personnel". Total fucking bullshit. There are lots of people who went around telling people that masks don't work unless they're N95, that N95 don't work unless you're trained, that N95 don't work if you reuse. All total bullshit. Don't try to rewrite history. I was there.
    - zamfi 6y ago
      I share your frustration, but no one in this chain above rewrote history. Everyone agrees that the US response to covid was abjectly terrible. The response should have been to suddenly and dramatically develop a capacity for producing masks. It’s true that in the early days we weren’t sure if it was transmission through air or contaminated surfaces that was more problematic, but we can already wash our hands. We can’t stop breathing. Instead, the US president spent months attacking anyone who said covid is a problem, the CDC screwed up testing, and health authorities backpedaled on masks while giving conspiracy theory-level justifications. I was there too. The really sad part is that now we know how to get this under control (and a few countries that really tried everything, like those listed by GP, got it right at the outset), but the politics have become so fraught that I doubt we’ll this under control in the US before it’s spread to everyone.
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        The part I object to is this idea that the right response is a total lock-down where we stay Wuhan-style in our houses like Li Bai waiting until only the house remains. If that was not intended by anyone in the comment chain, then consider my comment rescinded.
      - worker767424 6y ago
        > backpedaled on masks I don't trust Fauci because of this. https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-because-doctors-shortages-from-the-start-2020-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus... Same goes for Trump and telling Bob Woodward something completely different from what he told the public.
cm2187 6y ago
The net effect of covid is going to hard to calculate. We may save a flu season, car crashes are way down, I don’t think crime is down in the US. Given the demographics of covid deaths, it’s not clear that covid deaths will be much of a net positive beyond a year, but vaccination campaigns stalled, cancer screening stopped, no dental care, elective procedures postponed, obesity booming up, mental health issues, and the secondary effect of a serious economic crisis on health too.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Car crashes aren't way down. In the first half of the year driving was down 17% but deaths per mile driven went up by 15%, so total deaths per capita was only slightly down. The pandemic has left us with only the more desperate people doing a lot of driving, and those are low-earning, highly stressed, chronically fatigued people in older cars. ETA: Speaking about the USA specifically.
  - ouid 6y ago
    I think this is the wrong hypothesis about why cars are more dangerous right now. I am a much worse driver right now than I was a year ago because it has been a year since I have driven consistently. It's like riding a bike, in that you get worse at it if it's been a while since you've done it.
    - Cerium 6y ago
      I agree that it is part of it. I know that the first time I got back in my car after the first month of staying at home I felt like I didn't know how to drive.
  - throwaway987978 6y ago
    Or perhaps the most reckless drivers are going to be the ones still driving normally because they're not going to listen to the government.
- worker767424 6y ago
  I still maintain May BLM protests were part outrage, part cabin fever, part not having a job, the latter two being caused by covid.

narrator 6y ago

In good news, the CDC reports a 91% drop in flu infections this year[1]. Since people are sheltering in place and not going to school, there will probably be a lot less measles transmission too. One way to not get measles besides getting the vaccine is for kids to not leave the house and not have friends over, which is the norm in 2020. The 200,000 number of measles deaths referenced in the article was from 2019, before the pandemic. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937a6.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937a6.htm

Florin_Andrei 6y ago
That's not the issue here. The issue is - COVID, too, shall pass, people will come out in the open again, and meanwhile the measles vaccination rates have dropped a lot, thanks to irrational beliefs made popular by "influencers".
saiya-jin 6y ago
Maybe its the norm in US, but in Europe kids are very much going to school even if overall the society in given state is close to standstill. Not claiming every single state is like that here over the pond (situation evolves), but most are. Even in most infectious region per 100k citizen in last 14 days - canton Geneva in Switzerland, schools are running open, so are kindergartens. Doesn't make much sense, I know. But on the other side at least for us we are not skipping nay vaccinations, nor for us (mainly flu) nor for out 11 month old kiddo.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  Some amount of in-person-schooling-as-necessary-function makes a lot of sense. We know that kids under 10 are very unlikely to transmit Covid, and younger kids are also the least able to thrive in a remote learning environment. My SO is currently teaching second grade (7-8 year olds) remote, and I get nightmares just imagining trying to keep 7-year-old me staring at a teacher on a computer screen (that was a difficult enough task in person). If you can orchestrate your staff in such a way that they're in limited contact with one another (maybe specials suffer) you can probably teach younger kids safely.

rhacker 6y ago

How the hell are people going to even catch measles right now? I would expect that the social distancing measures are going to do more than the vaccines ever would.

nostromo 6y ago
Measles is much, much more contagious than Covid-19.
isoprophlex 6y ago
Without any social distancing, other measures etc, covid has a basic reproduction number of 2-ish... measles has R0 of 15.
- ouid 6y ago
  Initially, deaths had a doubling time of 3 days, and the infectious period for covid is weeks. I haven't seen a reasonable calculation of R_0 that was less than 3.5.
  - isoprophlex 6y ago
    Yeah it's difficult to estimate, very dependent on what environment you study. Nevertheless, measles is clearly different from covid, IIRC because it survives so much better outside it's hosts. About R0 values, here's some data from that cruise ship, early on in the pandemic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220300916 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122... • The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia has caused 355 confirmed cases on the Diamond Princess cruise ship as of February 16, 2020. • We estimated that the Maximum-Likelihood (ML) value of reproductive number (R0) was 2.28 for COVID-19 outbreak at the early stage on the ship
    - ouid 6y ago
      The diamond princess is a truly terrible place to try to get an estimate for R_0. A cruise ship outbreak is likely to be A) many times more infectious, and B) the countermeasures applied are likely to be many times more intense. For instance, the R_0 of covid on the cruise ship was estimated to be around 15 in a paper published less than 2 weeks later. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ Ultimately, a cruise ship is a bad place to look for estimates on R_0 in more broadly applicable contexts, and trying to calculate R_0 so early, when the number of people actually infected is not well known, is a task doomed to failure. Furthermore, I trust big studies with large confidence intervals done by national laboratories https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article, more than I trust studies done by people whose methods section is "we plugged it into R".

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gojomo 6y ago

There are only-partially-understood immune processes that go by the names 'trained immunity' or 'bystander immunity' - where encountering one infectious agent (including just an immunogenic vaccine) can "rev up" the immune system to be more ready for other infections – even those of very-different types. For example, there are preliminary indications that flu vaccines, Tuberculosis vaccines ("BCG"), & Measles-Mumps-Reubella vaccine ("MMR") may each decrease Covid-19 infection rates or severity-of-cases. Given that, letting usual immunization practices decay under Covid-19 disruptions is double-destructive. If anything, other vaccination schedules should accelerate, even towards a point of over-vaccination.

everybodyknows 6y ago
Evidence of Covid-19 protection by "trained immunity" after MMR booster vaccination: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-vaccine-covid-deadly-mexico-city.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-vaccine-covid-deadly-... Evidence of Covid-19 protection retained from much earlier original MMR vaccination: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23250680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23250680

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Guthur 6y ago

At the beginning it was said that we do not fully understand consequence of community lock down, i think this will just be one of many long tail effects. Will be interesting to see if it was really a good idea in the long run.

CardenB 6y ago
It seems likely that it was a good idea to try, but ultimately was not done well enough to have significant benefits.
- Guthur 6y ago
  When the error margin on the fatality rate was so wide at the beginning it maybe had some value because the worst case was so bad. But now that we have a wealth of data on who the vulnerable are and what's the actual impact the pendulum has shifted, the mounting potential downsides are growing as they were always understood to be and in some places more lock downs are the equivalent to holding back the ocean with a bucket with a hole in it.

tomohawk 6y ago

To get an idea of how infectious measles is, spectators were infected by an athlete at the special olympics who were sitting 30.5 meters away. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7876616/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7876616/ People are so freaked out about covid that they're getting tunnel vision. There are more risks out there than just covid, and focusing only on the one risk to the exclusion of all else is likely to lead to other problems. If you or your child do not have the 2 doses of MMR vaccine, get on that pronto. Many pharmacies can also perform the vaccination. A single dose is 93% effective, while 2 doses are 97% effective.