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At what number can we stop wearing masks, stop social distancing, start dining in, etc.? That's the number I care about. Because until somebody influential pick

by umvi 6y ago

At what number can we stop wearing masks, stop social distancing, start dining in, etc.? That's the number I care about. Because until somebody influential picks that number, we'll just keep masking and social distancing until the end of time.

randmeerkat 6y ago
According to this yahoo article about 65 - 70% of the population needs to be vaccinated until we can get back to normal. That said there still may be mutations or other complicating factors that could throw a wrench in things. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/around-65-75-of-the-population-needs-to-take-a-90-effective-coronavirus-vaccine-johns-hopkins-expert-says-185102526.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/around-65-75-of-the-populatio...
- repsilat 6y ago
  That number has been thrown around for here immunity. But I don't think it answers the GP's question because * Herd immunity numbers assume no ongoing vaccination -- they more or less say, "If life went back to normal, would the virus slow down or speed up?" * Age-related mortality and age-related vaccination rates are important. If we vaccinate all of the people who are at serious risk, the danger is mostly gone. There have obviously been deaths in populations not at serious risk, but not in proportion to the economic costs of locking down the economy. And as an aside, vaccine immunity is estimated to be about as good as post-infection immunity. And most estimates of the actual infection rate put them several times (some estimate 8-10x, but that's looking unlikely IMO) the measured case rate.
  - randmeerkat 6y ago
    Imho you’re underestimating the impact of the disease in general. Disease is much more than who lives or dies, there’s also people who “survive”. A number of asymptomatic covid patients have severe lung damage. Vaccinating “at risk” people who might die doesn’t account for all the people who might live permanently disabled lives as a result of a covid infection. https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/01/14/asymptomatic-covid-lung-damage/ https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/01/14/asymptomatic-covid-l...
    - DenisM 6y ago
      There are three X-rays in this article, and the covid one is completely bogus. Kind of stains the credibility of the article and the company the produced it.
    - packetlost 6y ago
      Considering the source for that is a single trauma surgeon on Twitter, I'm going to wait until there's something formally published on the matter. We have no information on the condition of the patient with "covid lung", or even a comparison between asymptomatic patients vs patients put on ventilators. Not saying you're wrong, but that article seems sensationalized and quite honestly lacking in relevant information.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        As an anecdote, my sister had Covid in March and had lung damage in October when she went for a checkup. Also, we're not going to get much research on this until after the pandemic is over, because of pandemic related lack of routine medical care.
    - irq11 6y ago
      The micrograph shown in that link was taken from this NEJM article, which clearly says that the patients in the study died from Covid: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432 Dying from Covid is not “asymptomatic Covid”. So your evidence for this phenomenon consists of a local news article where they’ve quoted the opinion of one person, mis-represented a figure from a journal article, and showed x-rays with no citations or context.
- cperciva 6y ago
  Immunized, not vaccinated. In particular, patients who have recovered from COVID-19 are (mostly) immune and count towards "herd immunity". (Obviously vaccination is by far the preferable of those two options!)
  - guscost 6y ago
    You’re not wrong, but the right people cannot profit or accumulate power via the spread of natural immunity, and not at all coincidentally it is unpopular to mention. “But the risk is far too great not to pay trillions and surrender our freedom,” retorts a frightened chorus of people.
    - EamonnMR 6y ago
      It's probably more along the lines of us not being able to correctly guess who has recovered from CoVID because most people are asymptomatic.
      - guscost 6y ago
        Not buying that for a second. This same industry ran PR to squash efforts at developing competing vaccines in human challenge trials[0]. I try to remind myself that most individual players don’t act with malice, but the system as a whole runs purely on profit-taking and corruption, and it has managed to do horrific damage. [0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/23/challenge-trials-live-coronavirus-speedy-covid-19-vaccine/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/23/challenge-trials-live-co...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - metamet 6y ago
      Research suggests that after infection with some coronaviruses, reinfection with the same virus — though usually mild and only happening in a fraction of people — is possible after a period of months or years. Further research is needed to determine the protective effect of antibodies to the virus in those who have been infected. Even if infection with the COVID-19 virus creates long-lasting immunity, a large number of people would have to become infected to reach the herd immunity threshold. Experts estimate that in the U.S., 70% of the population — more than 200 million people — would have to recover from COVID-19 to halt the epidemic. If many people become sick with COVID-19 at once, the health care system could quickly become overwhelmed. This amount of infection could also lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have chronic conditions. [1] Which would result in ~1.3M dead Americans. So no. The concept of defeating COVID by relying on a "natural herd immunity" is a bad idea on all fronts. [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/herd-immunity-and-coronavirus/art-20486808 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
- tzs 6y ago
  Do those kind of calculations assume that the people who are vaccinated are spread fairly uniformly throughout the population, or do they take into account that people who will not take the vaccine will have a tendency to clump so that we are likely to have some cities or counties with high vaccination rates and other cities or counties with low vaccination rates?
hindsightbias 6y ago
Perhaps never. Unless we authorize vaxrangers in helicopters to hunt and inoculate the 30% of anti-vaxxers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jeremiahhs 6y ago
Probably once the testing positivity rate is well below 1%, things may return to normal. I'll be curious what criteria are used.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- peytn 6y ago
  Doesn’t seem like that condition leads to termination. As things return to normal, fewer surveillance tests will be conducted by definition, so the test positivity rate will rise.
  - cperciva 6y ago
    In BC we've learned that we need to distinguish between the positivity rate for "testing due to symptoms or known exposure" and "testing for screening" (e.g. the film industry tests all their crew daily). The former positivity rate is much higher, but the latter may be more useful as a long-term trendline to follow.
    - peytn 6y ago
      I could get behind that. Hopefully we learn to make that distinction without enduring too much in the way of suffering.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Test positivity is a weird metric because of things like this. It's interesting week-over-week, but loses meaning over the long term as testing protocols, other behavior changes, and changes to the disease. This makes it a lousy metric for policy making.
    - T-hawk 6y ago
      There was a county in Louisiana that went back into a shutdown Thanksgiving week, when nothing at all had changed, except that a local university was on break and had stopped flooding the daily statistics with thousands of negative tests. Not to mention the perverse incentive: if you feel sick, you want to avoid getting tested and counted as a positive if you don't want your locality or employer to shut down. There is a theory that this accounts for much of Japan's perceived success - antibody studies show just as much prevalence as everywhere else, what happened was that all the mild cases never got tested.
TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
I think we could just stick with positivity rates and case numbers to figure that out, like we have been doing. Once the vaccines start working their magic, we’ll see it in those metrics. That way we don’t have to try and guess how infectious someone can still be after they have had the vaccine
- SamBam 6y ago
  Exactly. Fixating on the vaccination percentage is simply using a number that's two steps removed from what's actually important. It's like trying to decide if it's too rainy to go out by figuring out how many people are watering their yards right now, when you could just look out and see if it's raining.
  - evandijk70 6y ago
    Still we use weather forecast when we decide to make plans tomorrow. The best way to predict wether we can make plans (summer holidays, festivals, etc.) should involve some combination of the vaccination percentage and epidemological models.
    - SamBam 6y ago
      Seeing what the case positivity is this week is the best way to decide whether the vaccine has been effective enough to go out this week. Looking at the vaccine numbers for this week is a worse proxy. How does it help? Sure, you could use the projected vaccinations for next March to decide how likely it is that you'll be able to go and watch a broadway show in March, but, like the weather forecast, you'll need to know what the actual positivity is in March to make the final decisions.
- midasuni 6y ago
  No evidence that the vaccine stops spread, or even slows it down. It improves outcomes, so hospitals won’t be overloaded. Israel is over 40% on first dose and should have interesting reault sun the next month or two.
derekp7 6y ago
Hopefully the decisions will be data driven like they are now. When the number of new cases, positivity rates, and deaths in a given region fall below specific thresholds, the next phase of opening up happens in that region. Then those numbers start to increase, then restrictions start going back in place. The same as it has been since the start of this pandemic. With those that are the most vulnerable (front-line workers, elderly and health compromised), hopefully the death rate will start to fall as they are getting the vaccine first. That is what I'm looking forward to.
- jsight 6y ago
  Decisions like this are never fully data driven, as those "specific thresholds" will be different for different people.
duxup 6y ago
I'm hoping when we have the highest risk and care givers vaccinated and see the rates amongst them drop.
supertrope 6y ago
A lot of Americans have already stopped complying with public health recommendations. Or they never put on a mask to begin with. It's like a teacher who tells a class to line up so they can be dismissed but someone doesn't go along and drags out the whole process.
- peytn 6y ago
  One might reasonably believe that clearly defined exit criteria might boost compliance if chosen carefully with community input. I can see the other side of things. In my opinion we are doing a very poor job of meeting people’s needs.
  - supertrope 6y ago
    People were only in this together for a few weeks in March and April. I can somewhat understand as losing one's job is losing almost everything in America. Our leaders frittered away two months of advance warning, provided contradictory advice on masks, and botched creating a test. Compare the United States with Korea which had their first confirmed case on the same day.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      "Two weeks to slow the spread" while we build up hospital capacity has turned into nearly a year of not bothering with extra capacity. It doesn't surprise me people are fed up.
      - supertrope 6y ago
        It takes years to train a nurse and a decade to train a physician. An indication of max capacity is when hospitals halt elective procedures. There are currently 130K people laid out in hospitals. We have mercifully just trended down from a third peak. Would you rather we get Italy's fate of mass casualty stage rationing?
        6y ago
rmk 6y ago
When children are vaccinated. It's not clear if the vaccine confers sterilizing immunity, i.e., you are protected against the bug and also can't spread the disease, so most people who have children or are around children will ideally not take undue risks. I'm not sure if under-16 cohorts' trials are underway already. If they are, and if children are going to be vaccinated before their next school term starts, then society as a whole may consider dropping the current precautions.
- cthaeh 6y ago
  Children are almost immune from the virus. Everyone below 40 is also extremely extremely unlikely to die from the virus, just to a lesser extent.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    You might want to update. There were two studies out of Europe last week stating that children are just as likely to get the virus as adults.
    - SamBam 6y ago
      I think the poster above you was talking about the chances of death from the virus, not simply the chance of infection. I think it's pretty well established at this point that the case fatality index for children is vastly lower than for older adults, about 0.1% for people under age 29. [1] 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7518649/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7518649/
      - nradov 6y ago
        The actual best estimate of infection fatality rate for people under age 29 is way less than 0.1%. 0-19 years: 0.003% 20-49 years: 0.02% https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
mark2996 6y ago
Like 200 million
superkuh 6y ago
It's not clear yet if arm injected vaccines will provide mucosal immunity. They'll prevent serious disease but epithelial cells in the nose, mouth, and so on can still be infected and shed virus. It's the same for flu vaccines. There are nasal vaccines which do provide mucosal immunity like flumist but during heavy flu seasons only the old and young have access. So, even if you're the required 2 months post vaccinated you probably shouldn't stop wearing a mask or social distancing until 100% of the population around you has either also been vaccinated or been infected and recovered. When will the entire population be vaccinated or already infected? At current rates it may be a year or two.
- rmk 6y ago
  I have been downvoted elsewhere in this thread for saying that it's not clear whether the vaccine confers sterilizing immunity (or perhaps, for suggesting that restrictions will continue until children are vaccinated. Who knows!) Be careful what you say here, lest you get downvoted to oblivion!
- tim333 6y ago
  Hopefully we'll get some data on to what extent vaccinated people can still spread virus. I hope not too much. There's at least one nasal covid vaccine on the way https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/india-nasal-coronavirus-vaccine-soon-trials-begin-nagpur-1756780-2021-01-07 https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/india-n... Apparently it works very well in monkeys. "We have completed studies on monkeys. It demonstrates 100 per cent sterilising ability."
  - danenania 6y ago
    That seems very promising. Is there any reason to think we'd be different from monkeys in this regard?
    - tim333 6y ago
      I think the odds are we would not be but they still have to go through all the testing.
caseysoftware 6y ago
No one is quite sure but we're a LONG way from it.. and that's without addressing the fear/trauma that's been inflicted on otherwise healthy+exceptionally low risk people. From a month ago: Dr. Anthony Fauci now says as much as 90 percent of the population may need to get vaccinated or infected to achieve herd immunity against COVID-19 — admitting in a new interview that he has been intentionally raising the bar based, in part, on what he thinks the country is ready to hear. “We really don’t know what the real number is,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert told the New York Times. “I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.” Ref: https://nypost.com/2020/12/24/fauci-covid-herd-immunity-requires-90-to-be-infected-or-vaccinated/ https://nypost.com/2020/12/24/fauci-covid-herd-immunity-requ...
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  People are so impatient nowadays.
  - supertrope 6y ago
    I can't blame them. Rent is due on the first of the month even during a pandemic.
- worker767424 6y ago
  > on what he thinks the country is ready to hear He does have a track record of being dishonest about things. Part of the reason he drug his feet on masks was he was worried about shortages. It makes sense, but I really don't like the "I know what's best for you" paternalism.
  - supertrope 6y ago
    That's how you know he's a physician and not a politician. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/fauci-says-us-has-independent-spirit-but-now-is-the-time-to-do-what-youre-told.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/fauci-says-us-has-independen...
travisoneill1 6y ago
Should be 1 - 1/R0, right?
- sterlind 6y ago
  R0 (and vaccine efficacy) may change with variants though. It's a moving target and not a static threshold.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Yes, but R0 is likely going up with the UK strain.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
I believe we can add the vaccinated and the recovered, yes? About 25 million have recovered so far. That puts us at about 12% 'immune'.
- rsfern 6y ago
  As far as I understand those who were infected and recovered are still encouraged to get the vaccine. I’m not sure what that does to their priority in the vaccination queue though. I think the length of time recovery and vaccination confer are still not really nailed down
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    A medical professional I know had COVID in November and just got her second dose. Anecdotally, it doesn’t matter if you’ve had it or not for the purpose of the signup process.
- icedchai 6y ago
  I think it is much higher, if you consider all the asymptomatic cases not counted.
- Izkata 6y ago
  Don't forget cross-immunity from other viruses. Numbers I vaguely remember put it anywhere from 5% to 30% depending on the country.
- hirsin 6y ago
  Every medical professional I know /am related to has indicated that getting covid only grants 90 days immunity. Across state lines, they all have said that herd immunity visa infection is impossible as it requires everyone to be infected within a three month span.
  - pertymcpert 6y ago
    I'm calling bullshit on this. Source?
IgorPartola 6y ago
The number I have seen quotes form Dr Fauci is 70-85%. However I have seen no studies so far that show that either of the vaccines used in the US slow down the spread of COVID, just that they prevent severe cases. Also neither has been tested in children under 16 which is obviously a large population.
- wcchandler 6y ago
  .7 * 331m =~ 231m. If we average 1 million per day, we have 231 days to go, which is Aug 25th.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    That's single dose, so you gotta double it. And account for like 40% of the country that are not sure if the pandemic is real and/or if the vaccine is designed to have Bill Gates track them. And the fact that kids can't get it yet (and who knows when we will know), which would severely slow things down. Right now we are production-constrained, and somewhat distribution constrained since every state is handling it differently. But soon enough we will be constrained by people's unwillingness to get vaccinated, and then things will get really fucking annoying.
    - Animats 6y ago
      Nah. Just tell them they can't have it and they'll be screaming for it.
  - midasuni 6y ago
    1m a day seems low for the US. U.K. is current or around the 400k a day mark and that’s with 1/6 the population.
    - makomk 6y ago
      The UK has something like the 4th most Covid-19 vaccinations per capita of any country in the world, and the gap between it and other western countries is quite big from what I recall. (All the countries with more are much smaller, meaning that they could achieve that with a much smaller vaccination program and fewer doses than would be necessary to do the same in other countries.)
xivzgrev 6y ago
I don’t think it matters if 100% is vaccinated. What matters is new cases and deaths. As long as those are steady or going up we’re going to be masking and social distancing until the end of time. Once it goes down and stays down, that’s when gradual rule relaxation happens, and mass vaccination is the hoped-for silver bullet for it
- midasuni 6y ago
  the vaccine stops bad outcomes but doesn’t neccersarilly stop spread or cases. The metrics to follow are hospitilastions and deaths
AmericanChopper 6y ago
Most likely never. I can’t see any other way of interpreting this “new normal” idea that’s been so heavily promoted. Based solely on observations of the past, I would expect governments around the world to hold onto their newly established power, and continue to use it far into the future in whichever ways end up suiting them. After 9/11 the government decided that it needed to temporarily infringe upon everybody’s liberties while they sorted the problem out. 20 years later, that is literally just the “new normal” that we’ve been living with since then (some portions of the patriot act actually failed to be renewed last year, but that’s happened in the past and their expiry didn’t last long, so I’d be very surprised if this time was permanent). I would expect any decision to ease restrictions to be an entirely political one, and I would expect them to be reimplemented again in the future whatever ways end up suiting our current and future governments.
jsight 6y ago
That will depend heavily on what state you are in. Dining in is fully open in some states with only masks on entry/exit. Mask usage in some areas is vastly different than others. Its likely that a some places will heavily ease restrictions as soon as next month. Will that be too early? Depends.
eladgil 6y ago
It depends on who gets vaccinated. For example, Israel focused first on the 20% of the population (largely elderly) who drive 95% of deaths.
mbg721 6y ago
Whenever public resistance becomes inconvenient enough that the media are forced to change the narrative.
smileysteve 6y ago
< 5% positivity rate of a significant number of tests over 2 weeks should indicate containment of community spread.
Animats 6y ago
Probably when 80% of the population has either been vaccinated or survived the disease.
offtop5 6y ago
It's more like Mask Fatigue is already in full affect. In a high profile case Dave Ramsey had a holiday party and told employees to not wear masks . https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/caterers-finance-guru-dave-ramsey-s-holiday-party-told-not-n1251204 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/caterers-finance-guru-d...
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I am not an expert at all, but I guess it really depends on the effect that "precautions" have on transmissibility, and therefore... probably in at least a few months, not before - assuming the vaccines protect from the new variants.
diveanon 6y ago
What exactly is so difficult about wearing masks for Americans? I'm an expat living in Thailand, which has an exceptionally low number of cases due to consistent mask use and social precautions. Even if the vaccine reaches a level of saturation that is deemed safe, wearing a mask is a sane precaution that does not hurt you in any way and potentially saves lives of those unable to receive the vaccine.
- latch 6y ago
  I think you'll find people will hide behind the mask of "liberty", but in reality it's a mix of stupidity, laziness and selfishness.
- dragonsky 6y ago
  Individual freedom trumps community welfare. Who cares if my action causes problems for anybody else, yeah Freedom FREEDOM!!!! I'm the most important person in the world!!! ME ME ME ME ME My rights!!!! Freedom, oh and anything else is ism. swap in whatever ism is the flavour or the month, I have no idea what any of them mean, but they are all BAD!!! Sorry... couldn't help myself. There is something disgusting about how people cry freedom as an excuse to take actions that place everybody they encounter at risk.
eplanit 6y ago
By Springtime (in 45-60 days) we'll be at the one year mark, fatigued by masks, rules, shutdowns, and authoritarians, in general. The news will be tedious about how many are being vaccinated (it will be a lot) -- and, the weather will turn warmer. Then, many/most will say _fuck it_, I'm taking my life back. I'm visualizing that day, and will welcome it.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  I'm visualizing that day, and will welcome it Are you into apocalypses? There's the British quick-spreading strain, and there are the Brazilian and South African variants that the vaccine does not offer good protection against. I predict that COVID will be like Picardy Fever, not like the Spanish Flu - there will be outbreaks every few years here and there.
  - artificialLimbs 6y ago
    Gotta watch out for those 99% survival rate apocalypses. They'll getcha.
  - meddlepal 6y ago
    The apocalypse scenario is unlikely with the population having some resistance to the virus after vaccination even if new variants possibly render the vaccine less effective. We obviously do not have enough data yet to understand the vaccine's efficacy against these new strains but a lot of scientists are saying it will be "good enough" while we work on vaccines to handle the variants. If this thing can basically be treated no differently than the common cold once vaccinated by most people and in the outliers something a little worse there will be no popular support to continue draconian lock down measures. The goal is to stop the bleeding. The patient is on the floor right now and haemorrhaging liters blood. We want to stabilize the patient and let them get on with their life as quickly as possible. We cannot let perfect be the enemy of "Good Enough" here.
    - midasuni 6y ago
      Agreed. Hospital overflows is the main issue - and we know that things are far worse in winter than in summer. Come May things will be heading back to normal, and hospital collapse won’t be the concern it was this year come next October due to widespread vaccination. At least in the west, global logistics of vaccination seem to have collapsed. We need to, as a species, get on top of vaccine rollout for next time. It’s delayed at the moment because we didn’t make enough vials over summer FFS.
xienze 6y ago
> At what number can we stop wearing masks, stop social distancing, start dining in, etc.? Not long after we’re allowed to carry more than 3 ounces of liquid on an airplane, if I had to guess.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nradov 6y ago
Floridians have been dining in since September. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200927/florida-lifts-covid-19-restaurant-restrictions https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200927/florida-lifts-covid...
downandout 6y ago
Who's to say that we will ever reach that point? COVID-19 will be with us forever [1], which means that governments can forever point to it as a reason to push for increasingly oppressive restrictions. The economic meltdown resulting from these restrictions is pushing even the most capitalist countries much further onto the socialism spectrum than anyone could have imagined just a year ago. Some political parties view that as a positive outcome, regardless of how it was achieved. So as long as COVID can be used as a way to achieve long-standing political goals, there will be absolutely no political will to relax the restrictions, even as infection rates start to fall as a result of vaccinations. It will take serious pushback by the populace - people making it clear that incumbent politicians will lose their next elections unless restrictions are relaxed - to return to any sense of normalcy in a reasonable period of time. [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2021/01/covid-19-will-likely-be-with-us-forever-heres-how-well-live-with-it/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2021/01/covid-19-...
- farnsworth 6y ago
  I wish I lived in your reality. Where somebody has a Plan and everything is going as it is supposed to. Unfortunately that is not true. The virus is real.
  - downandout 6y ago
    I'm not sure how you could interpret that comment as saying the virus "isn't real". Of course it's real. I also don't think it was "planned," nor did I imply that. But it's certainly being exploited for political ends.
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      Exploited how?
      - downandout 6y ago
        My answer to that would garner yet more downvotes, which I am not interested in receiving. I already get auto-downvoted by several accounts on every comment I make. I assume you know the answer to the question you asked, and were just being argumentative, because the answer is quite obvious. But in case you really wanted to know, instead of answering directly, I'll point you to a few resources: 1) "For authoritarian-minded leaders, the coronavirus crisis is offering a convenient pretext to silence critics and consolidate power. Censorship in China and elsewhere has fed the pandemic, helping to turn a potentially containable threat into a global calamity. The health crisis will inevitably subside, but autocratic governments’ dangerous expansion of power may be one of the pandemic’s most enduring legacies." - https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/03/how-authoritarians-are-exploiting-covid-19-crisis-grab-power https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/03/how-authoritarians-are-e... 2) "The outbreak of Covid-19 and subsequent pandemic has led to an alarming uptick in authoritarian behavior by governments across the globe, who are using the crisis to silence critics, an open letter signed by more than 500 former world leaders and Nobel Laureates claims." - https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/europe/coronavirus-authoritarian-threat-open-letter-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/europe/coronavirus-authoritar... 3) "...as the crisis goes on, some leaders could order restrictive measures that make public health sense at the peak of the crisis and then extend them in the hope of quashing dissent once the disease declines....A harbinger of what is to come may have appeared in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban asked parliament on 21 March to indefinitely extend a state of emergency that prescribes five-year prison sentences for those disseminating false information or obstructing the state’s crisis response." - https://www.crisisgroup.org/global/sb4-covid-19-and-conflict-seven-trends-watch https://www.crisisgroup.org/global/sb4-covid-19-and-conflict...
not_a_moth 6y ago
We'll unlikely reach said number because over 50% of the population of the us is not interested in a vaccine because they do not view covid-19 as a disease much more risky than the flu. Facing this reality, the policy will probably be once everyone who wants it has had a chance to get it, things will or should move towards normal.
- acct776 6y ago
  Source?
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    I hear it everywhere as well, even from people that aren't antimaskers
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The number of people interested is up to 66% now (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/21/politics/cnn-poll-coronavirus-vaccine/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/21/poli...), and I think there’s good reason to expect it to keep rising as the rollout continues. It does seem likely there’ll be an awkward in between period where we don’t have quite enough takeup but the vaccinated people demand to go clubbing, but I don’t expect it’ll be too large.
  - remote_phone 6y ago
    The number of people in the US interested in getting vaccinated is very high, especially compared to Europe where it’s something like 20% in France.
    - satellite2 6y ago
      It's 59% of people interested in getting the vaccine in France. https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/59-des-francais-prets-recourir-un-eventuel-vaccin-contre-la-covid-19 https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/59-des-francais-prets-recourir-u...
balia 6y ago
Ya once I’m vaccinated, I’m done. The health officials have lied “for the greater good” for too long. CDC lied saying masks are not useful when they wanted to conserve I imagine they’ll lie again and say something like 70%. Screw the “vAcCiNe iSnT 100%”. Nothing is sure. But we gotta keep going w our lives
lsiebert 6y ago
When there's enough people vaccinated for herd immunity so there isn't community spread. Sadly it didn't have to be this bad. Compare the US to New Zealand.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  The US has cities with more people than New Zealand. Comparing it to Europe seems more fair because both have a mixture of policies between regions, more similar populations, neither is an island, and they're both economically developed.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  The US was hit about as hard as most comparable western countries in temperate northern climates. New Zealand is an extreme outlier, in another hemisphere and with a completely different climate, so the comparison isn’t really fair.
xyst 6y ago
Personally, I am probably going to keep wearing a mask in public for privacy reasons.
- burnthrow 6y ago
  Oh please, your behavior will depend on what's socially acceptable at the time and you know it.
FrojoS 6y ago
The people getting vaccinated right now are those that are, by far, most at risk. Every single extra vacation right now has a high chance of saving a life, which is much less true for the vaccinations that are administered when reaching the numbers that you care about. Also, I don’t know where you live, but I think in most places on earth you can legally have dinner with a small amount of friends, without some “influential” person giving you permission.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Nursie 6y ago
  Not the case UK, and from what I can tell much of Europe is not allowing that at present either. Here in the UK you may only meet other people for exercise purposes, outside. No visiting each other's homes. It's been this way in most parts of the country for months. Same in Ireland In France there is a curfew from 8pm-6am and restaurants cannot open. There have been rules preventing meeting others at home, can't tell if they're active right now. In Germany one person not of that household may visit another household, but only one. This is also true in Belgium. Some areas of Spain are not allowing meeting in others homes at all. So ... YMMV.
- LandR 6y ago
  > you can legally have dinner with a small amount of friend Not here you can't. We are not supposed to go outside for anything other than food / exercise and no meeting people from other houses. People have been fined for going out walks because they didn't go to the closest park to their house.
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  Not here in Israel. We're in our third lockdown and they keep extending it (it was supposed to be two weeks...I can't keep track of how many times its been extended). I was sitting in the park in a riverbank the other day, cops patrolled and asked people where they lived. Whoever you're with must live in the same household as you, and you may not be more than a km from home. I didn't see anyone get fined (although I believe they have the discretion to do so) but I saw some groups of friends be dispersed by the police.
DrBazza 6y ago
In a pragmatic, level headed world, we could stop wearing masks once everyone above the age of 50 or so is vaccinated, as the risk of death and hospitalization for under 50s is dramatically lower, to the point where death by anything else is significantly higher. In the shrill world of the media, point-scoring politicians, and people that believe we live in some kind of movie world where we can save everyone from everything, probably when everyone is vaccinated.
- oezi 6y ago
  Two points: - Long covid also affects younger people (1-2%), so we might not want stop wearing masks until the case numberes have fallen to less than 5 per 100.000 per week. - we might not want risking that the virus mutates, so we shouldn't use infections amoung the young to get back to normal. Also if your media perception is shrill world then you might want to change your perceptions/media channels.
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    > Long covid also affects younger people (1-2%), Do you have a link for that? > so we might not want stop wearing masks until the case numberes have fallen to less than 5 per 100.000 per week. - we might not want risking that the virus mutates, so we shouldn't use infections amoung the young to get back to normal. Which backs up my point about being pragmatic. 50% of the UK population are over 50 where COVID risks are dramatically higher. The likelihood of death or serious hospitalization for under 50s is much, much lower. 20-something men in the UK are much more likely to commit suicide, or die driving a car than dying from COVID, or having long-COVID (it's something like 100x more likely IIRC but I can't find a link right now). > Also if your media perception is shrill world then you might want to change your perceptions/media channels. I'm not sure what country you are in, but in the UK, at least, the closest to neutral reporting is the BBC, and only for its news bulletins. For everything else, Sky News, newspapers, and so on, the whole approach is just unrelentingly negative, and point scoring against the Government and its advisors.
mam2 6y ago
You can as early as now if you are all under 35 and not seeing at risk people. The risk of dying is 3x less the one of being hit by a cart. All the rest is pure fear-driven bullshit
luxuryballs 6y ago
The masks will stop as soon as people stop wearing the masks, I expect that may need to happen before politician’s “cover my ass” mandates are abandoned.
Kim_Bruning 6y ago
You'd still be looking at R for that I think. As number of immune people goes up, R goes down, and you can start reducing measures. (until R goes to near-0, at which point you're done) . At least, that's the theory.
deleted 6y ago
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woofie11 6y ago
Perhaps not for quite a while. The vaccine grants 95% protection with those measures in place. We have no idea how effective it is without those measures. If we're all going to dance parties, the vaccine might not be adequate. I think the question is the point at which we can send kids back to schools and reopen our businesses with precautions in place -- in other words, stem the pain and bleeding. It makes sense to keep masks on and 6-foot distance until the virus is gone, though. Vaccine+masking/distancing should be enough to get rid of it. It's not clear vaccine alone will do that. If not, we'll be on a dance for decades with new mutations, vaccines, and whatnot. We want this thing dead and gone for good. I don't think we're on a path to get there, though. People are fed up. If we can't get this under control, I suspect the new normal will be outbreaks for the rest of our lives. Perhaps the vaccine will be 95% without distancing. Or perhaps not.
- jdhn 6y ago
  >Vaccine+masking/distancing should be enough to get rid of it. It's not clear vaccine alone will do that. The public is treating the vaccine for like the vaccine for polio, which is that once you get it, you're good. If 80%+ of Americans get the vaccine and we still have to mask and social distance, you're going to see a lot of angry people.
  - jmcqk6 6y ago
    >If 80%+ of Americans get the vaccine and we still have to mask and social distance, you're going to see a lot of angry people. Then people need to do better. Getting angry at reality doesn't change it. If this is how things work out, throwing a fit only makes the situation even worse. Carl Sagan once pointed out the perils of basing a society on all this science and technology, when only a few people (relatively speaking) actually understand it. I didn't truly understand this warning until this pandemic.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    We've seen a lot of angry people. Prior to COVID19, I was quite frankly unaware of just how good Americans had become at denying reality. When COVID19 hit China in January, it was clear it was coming to the US. At the time, I thought the US government was preparing. Nope. Complete denial. When it hit in March, I thought schools would prepare. Nope. Complete denial. It's 2 weeks. 4 weeks. It'll be gone come the summer. And so on.... ... Anger against reality has led to over 400,000 deaths so far.

by umvi 6y ago

randmeerkat 6y ago

According to this yahoo article about 65 - 70% of the population needs to be vaccinated until we can get back to normal. That said there still may be mutations or other complicating factors that could throw a wrench in things. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/around-65-75-of-the-population-needs-to-take-a-90-effective-coronavirus-vaccine-johns-hopkins-expert-says-185102526.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/around-65-75-of-the-populatio...

repsilat 6y ago
That number has been thrown around for here immunity. But I don't think it answers the GP's question because * Herd immunity numbers assume no ongoing vaccination -- they more or less say, "If life went back to normal, would the virus slow down or speed up?" * Age-related mortality and age-related vaccination rates are important. If we vaccinate all of the people who are at serious risk, the danger is mostly gone. There have obviously been deaths in populations not at serious risk, but not in proportion to the economic costs of locking down the economy. And as an aside, vaccine immunity is estimated to be about as good as post-infection immunity. And most estimates of the actual infection rate put them several times (some estimate 8-10x, but that's looking unlikely IMO) the measured case rate.
- randmeerkat 6y ago
  Imho you’re underestimating the impact of the disease in general. Disease is much more than who lives or dies, there’s also people who “survive”. A number of asymptomatic covid patients have severe lung damage. Vaccinating “at risk” people who might die doesn’t account for all the people who might live permanently disabled lives as a result of a covid infection. https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/01/14/asymptomatic-covid-lung-damage/ https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/01/14/asymptomatic-covid-l...
  - DenisM 6y ago
    There are three X-rays in this article, and the covid one is completely bogus. Kind of stains the credibility of the article and the company the produced it.
  - packetlost 6y ago
    Considering the source for that is a single trauma surgeon on Twitter, I'm going to wait until there's something formally published on the matter. We have no information on the condition of the patient with "covid lung", or even a comparison between asymptomatic patients vs patients put on ventilators. Not saying you're wrong, but that article seems sensationalized and quite honestly lacking in relevant information.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      As an anecdote, my sister had Covid in March and had lung damage in October when she went for a checkup. Also, we're not going to get much research on this until after the pandemic is over, because of pandemic related lack of routine medical care.
  - irq11 6y ago
    The micrograph shown in that link was taken from this NEJM article, which clearly says that the patients in the study died from Covid: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432 Dying from Covid is not “asymptomatic Covid”. So your evidence for this phenomenon consists of a local news article where they’ve quoted the opinion of one person, mis-represented a figure from a journal article, and showed x-rays with no citations or context.
cperciva 6y ago
Immunized, not vaccinated. In particular, patients who have recovered from COVID-19 are (mostly) immune and count towards "herd immunity". (Obviously vaccination is by far the preferable of those two options!)
- guscost 6y ago
  You’re not wrong, but the right people cannot profit or accumulate power via the spread of natural immunity, and not at all coincidentally it is unpopular to mention. “But the risk is far too great not to pay trillions and surrender our freedom,” retorts a frightened chorus of people.
  - EamonnMR 6y ago
    It's probably more along the lines of us not being able to correctly guess who has recovered from CoVID because most people are asymptomatic.
    - guscost 6y ago
      Not buying that for a second. This same industry ran PR to squash efforts at developing competing vaccines in human challenge trials[0]. I try to remind myself that most individual players don’t act with malice, but the system as a whole runs purely on profit-taking and corruption, and it has managed to do horrific damage. [0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/23/challenge-trials-live-coronavirus-speedy-covid-19-vaccine/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/23/challenge-trials-live-co...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - metamet 6y ago
    Research suggests that after infection with some coronaviruses, reinfection with the same virus — though usually mild and only happening in a fraction of people — is possible after a period of months or years. Further research is needed to determine the protective effect of antibodies to the virus in those who have been infected. Even if infection with the COVID-19 virus creates long-lasting immunity, a large number of people would have to become infected to reach the herd immunity threshold. Experts estimate that in the U.S., 70% of the population — more than 200 million people — would have to recover from COVID-19 to halt the epidemic. If many people become sick with COVID-19 at once, the health care system could quickly become overwhelmed. This amount of infection could also lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have chronic conditions. [1] Which would result in ~1.3M dead Americans. So no. The concept of defeating COVID by relying on a "natural herd immunity" is a bad idea on all fronts. [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/herd-immunity-and-coronavirus/art-20486808 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
tzs 6y ago
Do those kind of calculations assume that the people who are vaccinated are spread fairly uniformly throughout the population, or do they take into account that people who will not take the vaccine will have a tendency to clump so that we are likely to have some cities or counties with high vaccination rates and other cities or counties with low vaccination rates?

hindsightbias 6y ago

Perhaps never. Unless we authorize vaxrangers in helicopters to hunt and inoculate the 30% of anti-vaxxers.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

jeremiahhs 6y ago

Probably once the testing positivity rate is well below 1%, things may return to normal. I'll be curious what criteria are used.

deleted 6y ago
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peytn 6y ago
Doesn’t seem like that condition leads to termination. As things return to normal, fewer surveillance tests will be conducted by definition, so the test positivity rate will rise.
- cperciva 6y ago
  In BC we've learned that we need to distinguish between the positivity rate for "testing due to symptoms or known exposure" and "testing for screening" (e.g. the film industry tests all their crew daily). The former positivity rate is much higher, but the latter may be more useful as a long-term trendline to follow.
  - peytn 6y ago
    I could get behind that. Hopefully we learn to make that distinction without enduring too much in the way of suffering.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Test positivity is a weird metric because of things like this. It's interesting week-over-week, but loses meaning over the long term as testing protocols, other behavior changes, and changes to the disease. This makes it a lousy metric for policy making.
  - T-hawk 6y ago
    There was a county in Louisiana that went back into a shutdown Thanksgiving week, when nothing at all had changed, except that a local university was on break and had stopped flooding the daily statistics with thousands of negative tests. Not to mention the perverse incentive: if you feel sick, you want to avoid getting tested and counted as a positive if you don't want your locality or employer to shut down. There is a theory that this accounts for much of Japan's perceived success - antibody studies show just as much prevalence as everywhere else, what happened was that all the mild cases never got tested.

TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago

I think we could just stick with positivity rates and case numbers to figure that out, like we have been doing. Once the vaccines start working their magic, we’ll see it in those metrics. That way we don’t have to try and guess how infectious someone can still be after they have had the vaccine

SamBam 6y ago
Exactly. Fixating on the vaccination percentage is simply using a number that's two steps removed from what's actually important. It's like trying to decide if it's too rainy to go out by figuring out how many people are watering their yards right now, when you could just look out and see if it's raining.
- evandijk70 6y ago
  Still we use weather forecast when we decide to make plans tomorrow. The best way to predict wether we can make plans (summer holidays, festivals, etc.) should involve some combination of the vaccination percentage and epidemological models.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    Seeing what the case positivity is this week is the best way to decide whether the vaccine has been effective enough to go out this week. Looking at the vaccine numbers for this week is a worse proxy. How does it help? Sure, you could use the projected vaccinations for next March to decide how likely it is that you'll be able to go and watch a broadway show in March, but, like the weather forecast, you'll need to know what the actual positivity is in March to make the final decisions.
midasuni 6y ago
No evidence that the vaccine stops spread, or even slows it down. It improves outcomes, so hospitals won’t be overloaded. Israel is over 40% on first dose and should have interesting reault sun the next month or two.

derekp7 6y ago

Hopefully the decisions will be data driven like they are now. When the number of new cases, positivity rates, and deaths in a given region fall below specific thresholds, the next phase of opening up happens in that region. Then those numbers start to increase, then restrictions start going back in place. The same as it has been since the start of this pandemic. With those that are the most vulnerable (front-line workers, elderly and health compromised), hopefully the death rate will start to fall as they are getting the vaccine first. That is what I'm looking forward to.

jsight 6y ago
Decisions like this are never fully data driven, as those "specific thresholds" will be different for different people.

duxup 6y ago

I'm hoping when we have the highest risk and care givers vaccinated and see the rates amongst them drop.

supertrope 6y ago

A lot of Americans have already stopped complying with public health recommendations. Or they never put on a mask to begin with. It's like a teacher who tells a class to line up so they can be dismissed but someone doesn't go along and drags out the whole process.

peytn 6y ago
One might reasonably believe that clearly defined exit criteria might boost compliance if chosen carefully with community input. I can see the other side of things. In my opinion we are doing a very poor job of meeting people’s needs.
- supertrope 6y ago
  People were only in this together for a few weeks in March and April. I can somewhat understand as losing one's job is losing almost everything in America. Our leaders frittered away two months of advance warning, provided contradictory advice on masks, and botched creating a test. Compare the United States with Korea which had their first confirmed case on the same day.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    "Two weeks to slow the spread" while we build up hospital capacity has turned into nearly a year of not bothering with extra capacity. It doesn't surprise me people are fed up.
    - supertrope 6y ago
      It takes years to train a nurse and a decade to train a physician. An indication of max capacity is when hospitals halt elective procedures. There are currently 130K people laid out in hospitals. We have mercifully just trended down from a third peak. Would you rather we get Italy's fate of mass casualty stage rationing?
      - 6y ago

rmk 6y ago

When children are vaccinated. It's not clear if the vaccine confers sterilizing immunity, i.e., you are protected against the bug and also can't spread the disease, so most people who have children or are around children will ideally not take undue risks. I'm not sure if under-16 cohorts' trials are underway already. If they are, and if children are going to be vaccinated before their next school term starts, then society as a whole may consider dropping the current precautions.

cthaeh 6y ago
Children are almost immune from the virus. Everyone below 40 is also extremely extremely unlikely to die from the virus, just to a lesser extent.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  You might want to update. There were two studies out of Europe last week stating that children are just as likely to get the virus as adults.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    I think the poster above you was talking about the chances of death from the virus, not simply the chance of infection. I think it's pretty well established at this point that the case fatality index for children is vastly lower than for older adults, about 0.1% for people under age 29. [1] 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7518649/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7518649/
    - nradov 6y ago
      The actual best estimate of infection fatality rate for people under age 29 is way less than 0.1%. 0-19 years: 0.003% 20-49 years: 0.02% https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

mark2996 6y ago

Like 200 million

superkuh 6y ago

It's not clear yet if arm injected vaccines will provide mucosal immunity. They'll prevent serious disease but epithelial cells in the nose, mouth, and so on can still be infected and shed virus. It's the same for flu vaccines. There are nasal vaccines which do provide mucosal immunity like flumist but during heavy flu seasons only the old and young have access. So, even if you're the required 2 months post vaccinated you probably shouldn't stop wearing a mask or social distancing until 100% of the population around you has either also been vaccinated or been infected and recovered. When will the entire population be vaccinated or already infected? At current rates it may be a year or two.

rmk 6y ago
I have been downvoted elsewhere in this thread for saying that it's not clear whether the vaccine confers sterilizing immunity (or perhaps, for suggesting that restrictions will continue until children are vaccinated. Who knows!) Be careful what you say here, lest you get downvoted to oblivion!
tim333 6y ago
Hopefully we'll get some data on to what extent vaccinated people can still spread virus. I hope not too much. There's at least one nasal covid vaccine on the way https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/india-nasal-coronavirus-vaccine-soon-trials-begin-nagpur-1756780-2021-01-07 https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/india-n... Apparently it works very well in monkeys. "We have completed studies on monkeys. It demonstrates 100 per cent sterilising ability."
- danenania 6y ago
  That seems very promising. Is there any reason to think we'd be different from monkeys in this regard?
  - tim333 6y ago
    I think the odds are we would not be but they still have to go through all the testing.

caseysoftware 6y ago

No one is quite sure but we're a LONG way from it.. and that's without addressing the fear/trauma that's been inflicted on otherwise healthy+exceptionally low risk people. From a month ago: Dr. Anthony Fauci now says as much as 90 percent of the population may need to get vaccinated or infected to achieve herd immunity against COVID-19 — admitting in a new interview that he has been intentionally raising the bar based, in part, on what he thinks the country is ready to hear. “We really don’t know what the real number is,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert told the New York Times. “I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.” Ref: https://nypost.com/2020/12/24/fauci-covid-herd-immunity-requires-90-to-be-infected-or-vaccinated/ https://nypost.com/2020/12/24/fauci-covid-herd-immunity-requ...

HenryKissinger 6y ago
People are so impatient nowadays.
- supertrope 6y ago
  I can't blame them. Rent is due on the first of the month even during a pandemic.
worker767424 6y ago
> on what he thinks the country is ready to hear He does have a track record of being dishonest about things. Part of the reason he drug his feet on masks was he was worried about shortages. It makes sense, but I really don't like the "I know what's best for you" paternalism.
- supertrope 6y ago
  That's how you know he's a physician and not a politician. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/fauci-says-us-has-independent-spirit-but-now-is-the-time-to-do-what-youre-told.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/fauci-says-us-has-independen...

travisoneill1 6y ago

Should be 1 - 1/R0, right?

sterlind 6y ago
R0 (and vaccine efficacy) may change with variants though. It's a moving target and not a static threshold.
dehrmann 6y ago
Yes, but R0 is likely going up with the UK strain.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

I believe we can add the vaccinated and the recovered, yes? About 25 million have recovered so far. That puts us at about 12% 'immune'.

rsfern 6y ago
As far as I understand those who were infected and recovered are still encouraged to get the vaccine. I’m not sure what that does to their priority in the vaccination queue though. I think the length of time recovery and vaccination confer are still not really nailed down
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  A medical professional I know had COVID in November and just got her second dose. Anecdotally, it doesn’t matter if you’ve had it or not for the purpose of the signup process.
icedchai 6y ago
I think it is much higher, if you consider all the asymptomatic cases not counted.
Izkata 6y ago
Don't forget cross-immunity from other viruses. Numbers I vaguely remember put it anywhere from 5% to 30% depending on the country.
hirsin 6y ago
Every medical professional I know /am related to has indicated that getting covid only grants 90 days immunity. Across state lines, they all have said that herd immunity visa infection is impossible as it requires everyone to be infected within a three month span.
- pertymcpert 6y ago
  I'm calling bullshit on this. Source?

IgorPartola 6y ago

The number I have seen quotes form Dr Fauci is 70-85%. However I have seen no studies so far that show that either of the vaccines used in the US slow down the spread of COVID, just that they prevent severe cases. Also neither has been tested in children under 16 which is obviously a large population.

wcchandler 6y ago
.7 * 331m =~ 231m. If we average 1 million per day, we have 231 days to go, which is Aug 25th.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  That's single dose, so you gotta double it. And account for like 40% of the country that are not sure if the pandemic is real and/or if the vaccine is designed to have Bill Gates track them. And the fact that kids can't get it yet (and who knows when we will know), which would severely slow things down. Right now we are production-constrained, and somewhat distribution constrained since every state is handling it differently. But soon enough we will be constrained by people's unwillingness to get vaccinated, and then things will get really fucking annoying.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Nah. Just tell them they can't have it and they'll be screaming for it.
- midasuni 6y ago
  1m a day seems low for the US. U.K. is current or around the 400k a day mark and that’s with 1/6 the population.
  - makomk 6y ago
    The UK has something like the 4th most Covid-19 vaccinations per capita of any country in the world, and the gap between it and other western countries is quite big from what I recall. (All the countries with more are much smaller, meaning that they could achieve that with a much smaller vaccination program and fewer doses than would be necessary to do the same in other countries.)

xivzgrev 6y ago

I don’t think it matters if 100% is vaccinated. What matters is new cases and deaths. As long as those are steady or going up we’re going to be masking and social distancing until the end of time. Once it goes down and stays down, that’s when gradual rule relaxation happens, and mass vaccination is the hoped-for silver bullet for it

midasuni 6y ago
the vaccine stops bad outcomes but doesn’t neccersarilly stop spread or cases. The metrics to follow are hospitilastions and deaths

AmericanChopper 6y ago

Most likely never. I can’t see any other way of interpreting this “new normal” idea that’s been so heavily promoted. Based solely on observations of the past, I would expect governments around the world to hold onto their newly established power, and continue to use it far into the future in whichever ways end up suiting them. After 9/11 the government decided that it needed to temporarily infringe upon everybody’s liberties while they sorted the problem out. 20 years later, that is literally just the “new normal” that we’ve been living with since then (some portions of the patriot act actually failed to be renewed last year, but that’s happened in the past and their expiry didn’t last long, so I’d be very surprised if this time was permanent). I would expect any decision to ease restrictions to be an entirely political one, and I would expect them to be reimplemented again in the future whatever ways end up suiting our current and future governments.

jsight 6y ago

That will depend heavily on what state you are in. Dining in is fully open in some states with only masks on entry/exit. Mask usage in some areas is vastly different than others. Its likely that a some places will heavily ease restrictions as soon as next month. Will that be too early? Depends.

eladgil 6y ago

It depends on who gets vaccinated. For example, Israel focused first on the 20% of the population (largely elderly) who drive 95% of deaths.

mbg721 6y ago

Whenever public resistance becomes inconvenient enough that the media are forced to change the narrative.

smileysteve 6y ago

< 5% positivity rate of a significant number of tests over 2 weeks should indicate containment of community spread.

Animats 6y ago

Probably when 80% of the population has either been vaccinated or survived the disease.

offtop5 6y ago

It's more like Mask Fatigue is already in full affect. In a high profile case Dave Ramsey had a holiday party and told employees to not wear masks . https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/caterers-finance-guru-dave-ramsey-s-holiday-party-told-not-n1251204 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/caterers-finance-guru-d...

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

I am not an expert at all, but I guess it really depends on the effect that "precautions" have on transmissibility, and therefore... probably in at least a few months, not before - assuming the vaccines protect from the new variants.

diveanon 6y ago

What exactly is so difficult about wearing masks for Americans? I'm an expat living in Thailand, which has an exceptionally low number of cases due to consistent mask use and social precautions. Even if the vaccine reaches a level of saturation that is deemed safe, wearing a mask is a sane precaution that does not hurt you in any way and potentially saves lives of those unable to receive the vaccine.

latch 6y ago
I think you'll find people will hide behind the mask of "liberty", but in reality it's a mix of stupidity, laziness and selfishness.
dragonsky 6y ago
Individual freedom trumps community welfare. Who cares if my action causes problems for anybody else, yeah Freedom FREEDOM!!!! I'm the most important person in the world!!! ME ME ME ME ME My rights!!!! Freedom, oh and anything else is ism. swap in whatever ism is the flavour or the month, I have no idea what any of them mean, but they are all BAD!!! Sorry... couldn't help myself. There is something disgusting about how people cry freedom as an excuse to take actions that place everybody they encounter at risk.

eplanit 6y ago

By Springtime (in 45-60 days) we'll be at the one year mark, fatigued by masks, rules, shutdowns, and authoritarians, in general. The news will be tedious about how many are being vaccinated (it will be a lot) -- and, the weather will turn warmer. Then, many/most will say _fuck it_, I'm taking my life back. I'm visualizing that day, and will welcome it.

HarryHirsch 6y ago
I'm visualizing that day, and will welcome it Are you into apocalypses? There's the British quick-spreading strain, and there are the Brazilian and South African variants that the vaccine does not offer good protection against. I predict that COVID will be like Picardy Fever, not like the Spanish Flu - there will be outbreaks every few years here and there.
- artificialLimbs 6y ago
  Gotta watch out for those 99% survival rate apocalypses. They'll getcha.
- meddlepal 6y ago
  The apocalypse scenario is unlikely with the population having some resistance to the virus after vaccination even if new variants possibly render the vaccine less effective. We obviously do not have enough data yet to understand the vaccine's efficacy against these new strains but a lot of scientists are saying it will be "good enough" while we work on vaccines to handle the variants. If this thing can basically be treated no differently than the common cold once vaccinated by most people and in the outliers something a little worse there will be no popular support to continue draconian lock down measures. The goal is to stop the bleeding. The patient is on the floor right now and haemorrhaging liters blood. We want to stabilize the patient and let them get on with their life as quickly as possible. We cannot let perfect be the enemy of "Good Enough" here.
  - midasuni 6y ago
    Agreed. Hospital overflows is the main issue - and we know that things are far worse in winter than in summer. Come May things will be heading back to normal, and hospital collapse won’t be the concern it was this year come next October due to widespread vaccination. At least in the west, global logistics of vaccination seem to have collapsed. We need to, as a species, get on top of vaccine rollout for next time. It’s delayed at the moment because we didn’t make enough vials over summer FFS.

xienze 6y ago

> At what number can we stop wearing masks, stop social distancing, start dining in, etc.? Not long after we’re allowed to carry more than 3 ounces of liquid on an airplane, if I had to guess.

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nradov 6y ago

Floridians have been dining in since September. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200927/florida-lifts-covid-19-restaurant-restrictions https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200927/florida-lifts-covid...

downandout 6y ago

Who's to say that we will ever reach that point? COVID-19 will be with us forever [1], which means that governments can forever point to it as a reason to push for increasingly oppressive restrictions. The economic meltdown resulting from these restrictions is pushing even the most capitalist countries much further onto the socialism spectrum than anyone could have imagined just a year ago. Some political parties view that as a positive outcome, regardless of how it was achieved. So as long as COVID can be used as a way to achieve long-standing political goals, there will be absolutely no political will to relax the restrictions, even as infection rates start to fall as a result of vaccinations. It will take serious pushback by the populace - people making it clear that incumbent politicians will lose their next elections unless restrictions are relaxed - to return to any sense of normalcy in a reasonable period of time. [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2021/01/covid-19-will-likely-be-with-us-forever-heres-how-well-live-with-it/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2021/01/covid-19-...

farnsworth 6y ago
I wish I lived in your reality. Where somebody has a Plan and everything is going as it is supposed to. Unfortunately that is not true. The virus is real.
- downandout 6y ago
  I'm not sure how you could interpret that comment as saying the virus "isn't real". Of course it's real. I also don't think it was "planned," nor did I imply that. But it's certainly being exploited for political ends.
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    Exploited how?
    - downandout 6y ago
      My answer to that would garner yet more downvotes, which I am not interested in receiving. I already get auto-downvoted by several accounts on every comment I make. I assume you know the answer to the question you asked, and were just being argumentative, because the answer is quite obvious. But in case you really wanted to know, instead of answering directly, I'll point you to a few resources: 1) "For authoritarian-minded leaders, the coronavirus crisis is offering a convenient pretext to silence critics and consolidate power. Censorship in China and elsewhere has fed the pandemic, helping to turn a potentially containable threat into a global calamity. The health crisis will inevitably subside, but autocratic governments’ dangerous expansion of power may be one of the pandemic’s most enduring legacies." - https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/03/how-authoritarians-are-exploiting-covid-19-crisis-grab-power https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/03/how-authoritarians-are-e... 2) "The outbreak of Covid-19 and subsequent pandemic has led to an alarming uptick in authoritarian behavior by governments across the globe, who are using the crisis to silence critics, an open letter signed by more than 500 former world leaders and Nobel Laureates claims." - https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/europe/coronavirus-authoritarian-threat-open-letter-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/europe/coronavirus-authoritar... 3) "...as the crisis goes on, some leaders could order restrictive measures that make public health sense at the peak of the crisis and then extend them in the hope of quashing dissent once the disease declines....A harbinger of what is to come may have appeared in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban asked parliament on 21 March to indefinitely extend a state of emergency that prescribes five-year prison sentences for those disseminating false information or obstructing the state’s crisis response." - https://www.crisisgroup.org/global/sb4-covid-19-and-conflict-seven-trends-watch https://www.crisisgroup.org/global/sb4-covid-19-and-conflict...

not_a_moth 6y ago

We'll unlikely reach said number because over 50% of the population of the us is not interested in a vaccine because they do not view covid-19 as a disease much more risky than the flu. Facing this reality, the policy will probably be once everyone who wants it has had a chance to get it, things will or should move towards normal.

acct776 6y ago
Source?
- hanniabu 6y ago
  I hear it everywhere as well, even from people that aren't antimaskers
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The number of people interested is up to 66% now (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/21/politics/cnn-poll-coronavirus-vaccine/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/21/poli...), and I think there’s good reason to expect it to keep rising as the rollout continues. It does seem likely there’ll be an awkward in between period where we don’t have quite enough takeup but the vaccinated people demand to go clubbing, but I don’t expect it’ll be too large.
- remote_phone 6y ago
  The number of people in the US interested in getting vaccinated is very high, especially compared to Europe where it’s something like 20% in France.
  - satellite2 6y ago
    It's 59% of people interested in getting the vaccine in France. https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/59-des-francais-prets-recourir-un-eventuel-vaccin-contre-la-covid-19 https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/59-des-francais-prets-recourir-u...

balia 6y ago

Ya once I’m vaccinated, I’m done. The health officials have lied “for the greater good” for too long. CDC lied saying masks are not useful when they wanted to conserve I imagine they’ll lie again and say something like 70%. Screw the “vAcCiNe iSnT 100%”. Nothing is sure. But we gotta keep going w our lives

lsiebert 6y ago

When there's enough people vaccinated for herd immunity so there isn't community spread. Sadly it didn't have to be this bad. Compare the US to New Zealand.

dehrmann 6y ago
The US has cities with more people than New Zealand. Comparing it to Europe seems more fair because both have a mixture of policies between regions, more similar populations, neither is an island, and they're both economically developed.
umanwizard 6y ago
The US was hit about as hard as most comparable western countries in temperate northern climates. New Zealand is an extreme outlier, in another hemisphere and with a completely different climate, so the comparison isn’t really fair.

xyst 6y ago

Personally, I am probably going to keep wearing a mask in public for privacy reasons.

burnthrow 6y ago
Oh please, your behavior will depend on what's socially acceptable at the time and you know it.

FrojoS 6y ago

The people getting vaccinated right now are those that are, by far, most at risk. Every single extra vacation right now has a high chance of saving a life, which is much less true for the vaccinations that are administered when reaching the numbers that you care about. Also, I don’t know where you live, but I think in most places on earth you can legally have dinner with a small amount of friends, without some “influential” person giving you permission.

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Nursie 6y ago
Not the case UK, and from what I can tell much of Europe is not allowing that at present either. Here in the UK you may only meet other people for exercise purposes, outside. No visiting each other's homes. It's been this way in most parts of the country for months. Same in Ireland In France there is a curfew from 8pm-6am and restaurants cannot open. There have been rules preventing meeting others at home, can't tell if they're active right now. In Germany one person not of that household may visit another household, but only one. This is also true in Belgium. Some areas of Spain are not allowing meeting in others homes at all. So ... YMMV.
LandR 6y ago
> you can legally have dinner with a small amount of friend Not here you can't. We are not supposed to go outside for anything other than food / exercise and no meeting people from other houses. People have been fined for going out walks because they didn't go to the closest park to their house.
names_are_hard 6y ago
Not here in Israel. We're in our third lockdown and they keep extending it (it was supposed to be two weeks...I can't keep track of how many times its been extended). I was sitting in the park in a riverbank the other day, cops patrolled and asked people where they lived. Whoever you're with must live in the same household as you, and you may not be more than a km from home. I didn't see anyone get fined (although I believe they have the discretion to do so) but I saw some groups of friends be dispersed by the police.

DrBazza 6y ago

In a pragmatic, level headed world, we could stop wearing masks once everyone above the age of 50 or so is vaccinated, as the risk of death and hospitalization for under 50s is dramatically lower, to the point where death by anything else is significantly higher. In the shrill world of the media, point-scoring politicians, and people that believe we live in some kind of movie world where we can save everyone from everything, probably when everyone is vaccinated.

oezi 6y ago
Two points: - Long covid also affects younger people (1-2%), so we might not want stop wearing masks until the case numberes have fallen to less than 5 per 100.000 per week. - we might not want risking that the virus mutates, so we shouldn't use infections amoung the young to get back to normal. Also if your media perception is shrill world then you might want to change your perceptions/media channels.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  > Long covid also affects younger people (1-2%), Do you have a link for that? > so we might not want stop wearing masks until the case numberes have fallen to less than 5 per 100.000 per week. - we might not want risking that the virus mutates, so we shouldn't use infections amoung the young to get back to normal. Which backs up my point about being pragmatic. 50% of the UK population are over 50 where COVID risks are dramatically higher. The likelihood of death or serious hospitalization for under 50s is much, much lower. 20-something men in the UK are much more likely to commit suicide, or die driving a car than dying from COVID, or having long-COVID (it's something like 100x more likely IIRC but I can't find a link right now). > Also if your media perception is shrill world then you might want to change your perceptions/media channels. I'm not sure what country you are in, but in the UK, at least, the closest to neutral reporting is the BBC, and only for its news bulletins. For everything else, Sky News, newspapers, and so on, the whole approach is just unrelentingly negative, and point scoring against the Government and its advisors.

mam2 6y ago

You can as early as now if you are all under 35 and not seeing at risk people. The risk of dying is 3x less the one of being hit by a cart. All the rest is pure fear-driven bullshit

luxuryballs 6y ago

The masks will stop as soon as people stop wearing the masks, I expect that may need to happen before politician’s “cover my ass” mandates are abandoned.

Kim_Bruning 6y ago

You'd still be looking at R for that I think. As number of immune people goes up, R goes down, and you can start reducing measures. (until R goes to near-0, at which point you're done) . At least, that's the theory.

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woofie11 6y ago

Perhaps not for quite a while. The vaccine grants 95% protection with those measures in place. We have no idea how effective it is without those measures. If we're all going to dance parties, the vaccine might not be adequate. I think the question is the point at which we can send kids back to schools and reopen our businesses with precautions in place -- in other words, stem the pain and bleeding. It makes sense to keep masks on and 6-foot distance until the virus is gone, though. Vaccine+masking/distancing should be enough to get rid of it. It's not clear vaccine alone will do that. If not, we'll be on a dance for decades with new mutations, vaccines, and whatnot. We want this thing dead and gone for good. I don't think we're on a path to get there, though. People are fed up. If we can't get this under control, I suspect the new normal will be outbreaks for the rest of our lives. Perhaps the vaccine will be 95% without distancing. Or perhaps not.

jdhn 6y ago
>Vaccine+masking/distancing should be enough to get rid of it. It's not clear vaccine alone will do that. The public is treating the vaccine for like the vaccine for polio, which is that once you get it, you're good. If 80%+ of Americans get the vaccine and we still have to mask and social distance, you're going to see a lot of angry people.
- jmcqk6 6y ago
  >If 80%+ of Americans get the vaccine and we still have to mask and social distance, you're going to see a lot of angry people. Then people need to do better. Getting angry at reality doesn't change it. If this is how things work out, throwing a fit only makes the situation even worse. Carl Sagan once pointed out the perils of basing a society on all this science and technology, when only a few people (relatively speaking) actually understand it. I didn't truly understand this warning until this pandemic.
- woofie11 6y ago
  We've seen a lot of angry people. Prior to COVID19, I was quite frankly unaware of just how good Americans had become at denying reality. When COVID19 hit China in January, it was clear it was coming to the US. At the time, I thought the US government was preparing. Nope. Complete denial. When it hit in March, I thought schools would prepare. Nope. Complete denial. It's 2 weeks. 4 weeks. It'll be gone come the summer. And so on.... ... Anger against reality has led to over 400,000 deaths so far.