8 ms·

Isn't this exactly what we would expect? It's more or less similar to what probably happened with the flu in 1920. New flu variants were still popping up, but

Isn't this exactly what we would expect? It's more or less similar to what probably happened with the flu in 1920. New flu variants were still popping up, but they weren't like the 1918-1919 type, and the mortality rate was much lower. Plus, I recall being told before the vaccines showed up that they would be better at reducing mortality than at eliminating getting sick at all. Now, if you thought you were going to just stay in hiding and neither get vaccinated nor get sick, and just wait it out, well that's not going to work (and was never a good strategy). Covid-19 is the new flu, it will always be in circulation, but just get vaccinated and get on with life.

Justsignedup 5y ago
Ironically in NZ they have nether vaccine nor any remaining covid. Because they solved it as a community. Instead we created a global persistent pandemic. Cool.
- umanwizard 5y ago
  Unlike New Zealand, most countries don’t think indefinite draconian restrictions on travel and ever-present risk of being locked down with little notice are an acceptable price to pay for a small increase in life expectancy. I share that viewpoint, and am very happy not to live in New Zealand.
  - datameta 5y ago
    Except there would be no need for an ever present risk of lockdown if every single country simply locked down for 3-4 weeks a year and a half ago. But no, muh freedomᵀᴹ and the economy!! are far more important considerations that certainly didn't turn out to actually be incredibly short-sighted. I'm lucky to live in a place with >70% vaccination rate. So this no longer comes from a place of grievance toward personal inconvenience. I'm shaking my damn head at the collective lack of wisdom that was exhibited in countries' responses, including my own. ̶E̶d̶i̶t̶:̶ ̶P̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶,̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶l̶ ̶f̶r̶e̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶v̶o̶t̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶p̶o̶n̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶o̶p̶i̶n̶i̶o̶n̶.̶
    - umanwizard 5y ago
      > if every country simply locked down for 3-4 weeks This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world. > But no, muh freedom, and but the economy! Your mocking tone is out of place. I do in fact think freedom and the economy are both important. Don’t you?
      - jasonlaramburu 5y ago
        >This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world. China and the countries of Oceania did just this and have largely suppressed COVID without MRNA vaccines. China has a massive, porous land border. They've protected themselves from inbound infection by quarantining all visitors on arrival.
        umanwizard 5y ago
        > every single country
        jasonlaramburu 5y ago
        The pandemic is estimated to have cost the world >$16 trillion already. Now politicians are telling us we will have to live with it forever. For that price, we literally could have paid every human on earth $2,000 to shelter in place for 4 weeks.
      - datameta 5y ago
        Yes, my freedom over the course of almost 1.5 years was adversely affected because we couldn't handle a month without it. And yes, the economy was adversely affected because most small businesses were shuttered for half a year and swaths of them went out of business since we could not bear closing everything down for a sixth of that time period. Edit: Please explain to me how swallowing real estate, employee, and supply chain expenses for 30 days would have been more difficult or less preferable to the splintered schedule of mandated closings over a far longer time period.
  - aunty_helen 5y ago
    Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose. Also, as a vaccinated New Zealander who after spending 5 months at home is now traveling again, I can assure you people there are happy and mostly oblivious to what has gone on overseas. The travel restrictions whilst draconian, aren’t absolute and are being eased when needed. The travel bubble with Australia being a good example of this.
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      Sounds worse than many places, ie Switzerland which is completely landlocked with diverse neighbors and open borders. Very few travel restrictions, mostly in spring 2020, just do your part and do the right choices in ie hygiene and travel destinations.
      - aunty_helen 5y ago
        Switzerland has had just under 11,000 people die, NZ 26 (twenty-six). Not to mention, NZ had complete lockdown for all of two months. The rest of the time peoples daily lives were unchanged. No masks (generally), concerts with 10,000+ people no problem. Summer holidays etc etc.
        SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        New Zealand was exceptionally successful, and other areas which tried that strategy weren't so lucky. Some parts of Australia were shut down for something like 9 of the past 18 months. (Sydney is under lockdown orders today!) And I think it's hard to find fault with the strength of lockdowns in France, Spain, or Italy - their lockdowns just didn't fully eliminate transition, so we put them in the "weak lockdown" bucket, even though as a matter of government policy they were doing the same thing.
    - umanwizard 5y ago
      > Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose. How so? The first result I could find[1] estimates that life expectancy decreased by 1.18 years in the US due to the pandemic, which doesn't strike me as extreme. 1: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118
- Renaud 5y ago
  They solved it as long as they can live without contact with anyone else. As much as it shows what could be done with drastic measures, NZ is an island with small population, in the middle of nowhere so it can easily lock its borders compared to say, pretty much any European country. They certainly handled it better, but I'm not sure that they will actually be ready to live in a COVID world any time toon without a strong and thorough vaccination rollout like everybody else. Wanting to keep zero case as all cost is going to be increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain: how long will the population accept that they can't travel? Can an economy partially dependent on tourism afford not to be open? Wouldn't NZ be penalized at some point if business people/athletes/students/engineers/scientists can't fly to or from it? Even if all western countries had been exemplary -ignoring that it would probably be impossible anyway- as long as we don't ensure that even poorer countries are able to stamp out the virus, there will always remain sources of variants that will continue to spread across the world. Look at Australia. Small population, big country, huge barriers to entrance (even for residents), extreme quarantine measures, and yet, you only need a single infected person to start spreading again.[1] As long as the population won't reach the minimum vaccination level required, they will continue to be barred from travelling and get lockdowns. Looks like the only hope we have is to accept it's there and ensure that the impact remains manageable through vaccination and targetted health control measures. [1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/world/sydney-lockdown-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/world/sydney-lockdown-cov...
  - aunty_helen 5y ago
    Just to be clear, Australians are barred from leaving the country whilst NZers are free to come and go, provided when they return they do a 14 day quarantine at their own expense. Getting a spot in the quarantine hotels is difficult but possible on a 3 month time frame. As for the tourism thing, I’ve heard that it’s actually a net positive for the country(~1.5%). Whilst we have no foreign tourists, we’re also not heading overseas spending money.
    - Arnt 5y ago
      Are children free to play team sports? The lack of that really hurt here.
- refurb 5y ago
  Well NZ can enjoy their isolation and constant threat of outbreak while the rest of the world goes back to normal.
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
  Idiot soyboy cuckdowncel detected.
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  NZ's strategy only makes sense with eventual vaccines. There is no chance that this disease would ever not become endemic. The world is too large, and too many countries don't have the advantages NZ does (comparitavely wealthy, isolated, low population density). They deserve props for keeping their population healthy until this point, but the idea that it can continue indefinitely, or that it was ever feasible for a large proportion of the world to replicate it is pure fantasy.
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    NZ's strategy (and all lockdown strategies) never made any sense and it was obvious from the get-go. Very early into the pandemic, we learned three crucial facts: 1) Covid is non-transmissible outside. 2) Vitamin D is a potent inhibitor of respiratory illness in general and covid in particular. 3) Obesity is the greatest risk-factor associated with covid. With these taken into account (and all are very well-supported by many of those peer-reviewed studies everyone seems to need in order to take any action), the best course of action is to encourage everyone to go outside, hang out with friends, don't wear masks outside (because this discourages going outside), exercise, and soak up lots of sun. The next "big wave" of covid in the northern hemisphere is going to come in the winter, just as all "seasonal illnesses" do. In fact, there's at least one study out lately that indicate that there's nothing seasonal about illnesses, but that vitamin D deficiency, brought on by staying inside during the cold months lowers group immunity and causes increased illness.
    - mmastrac 5y ago
      1) might not be true with Delta. There are cases of "passing" transmission of <30s contact. Too soon to tell, but what we learned early in the pandemic pre-delta may not apply now. 2) is still up in the air with studies going both ways (but get your vitamin D still, it has multiple benefits outside of this) 3) is somewhat true, but there are other big comorbidities as well (Diabetes, Downs Syndrome, etc), it's just that it's one that's highly visible in Western society and hypertension is very common in obese people.
      - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gregwebs 5y ago
yep, it may be that these new variants are not attempting any kind of immune escape against vaccines. They might just replicate faster or may be more transmissive and we are seeing the inevitable outcome of a non-sterilizing vaccine: you still get an infection, it just usually isn't a bad one.
lamontcg 5y ago
Yes, escape from circulating neutralizing antibodies (so the virus is able to infect you and replicate) is one thing. Escape from CD4+ T-cells is another thing (the dreaded "reset to 2019" fear). And the 1918 H1N1 influenza circulated as the only form of seasonal influenza until 1957 (when it was displaced by H2N2 which later became H2N3). From 1957 to 2009 H1N1 mutated in swine. After 50 years of mutating in probably billions of pigs the H1 envelope protein jumped back to humans in 2009. Since old people had pretty universally been exposed to pre-1957 H1N1 they had cross reactive partial immunity from T-cells that still recognized the H1 envelope protein and that pandemic fizzled. If you can't escape CD4+ T-cells after 50 years of mutating in pigs, I don't think that this coronavirus is going to be able to escape them in a year or two. Also at some point to achieve escape from neutralizing antibodies this virus is likely going to have to start making "choices" which make it less virulent. A decline in vaccine efficacy against delta could also indicate that the enhanced transmissibility of delta comes through partial vaccine/immune escape and not through ratcheting up R0/Rt (which would be more consistent with reports that it isn't more lethal / doesn't have higher viral loads, since those switches are all likely to move together).

Justsignedup 5y ago

Ironically in NZ they have nether vaccine nor any remaining covid. Because they solved it as a community. Instead we created a global persistent pandemic. Cool.

umanwizard 5y ago
Unlike New Zealand, most countries don’t think indefinite draconian restrictions on travel and ever-present risk of being locked down with little notice are an acceptable price to pay for a small increase in life expectancy. I share that viewpoint, and am very happy not to live in New Zealand.
- datameta 5y ago
  Except there would be no need for an ever present risk of lockdown if every single country simply locked down for 3-4 weeks a year and a half ago. But no, muh freedomᵀᴹ and the economy!! are far more important considerations that certainly didn't turn out to actually be incredibly short-sighted. I'm lucky to live in a place with >70% vaccination rate. So this no longer comes from a place of grievance toward personal inconvenience. I'm shaking my damn head at the collective lack of wisdom that was exhibited in countries' responses, including my own. ̶E̶d̶i̶t̶:̶ ̶P̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶,̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶l̶ ̶f̶r̶e̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶v̶o̶t̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶p̶o̶n̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶o̶p̶i̶n̶i̶o̶n̶.̶
  - umanwizard 5y ago
    > if every country simply locked down for 3-4 weeks This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world. > But no, muh freedom, and but the economy! Your mocking tone is out of place. I do in fact think freedom and the economy are both important. Don’t you?
    - jasonlaramburu 5y ago
      >This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world. China and the countries of Oceania did just this and have largely suppressed COVID without MRNA vaccines. China has a massive, porous land border. They've protected themselves from inbound infection by quarantining all visitors on arrival.
      - umanwizard 5y ago
        > every single country
        jasonlaramburu 5y ago
        The pandemic is estimated to have cost the world >$16 trillion already. Now politicians are telling us we will have to live with it forever. For that price, we literally could have paid every human on earth $2,000 to shelter in place for 4 weeks.
    - datameta 5y ago
      Yes, my freedom over the course of almost 1.5 years was adversely affected because we couldn't handle a month without it. And yes, the economy was adversely affected because most small businesses were shuttered for half a year and swaths of them went out of business since we could not bear closing everything down for a sixth of that time period. Edit: Please explain to me how swallowing real estate, employee, and supply chain expenses for 30 days would have been more difficult or less preferable to the splintered schedule of mandated closings over a far longer time period.
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose. Also, as a vaccinated New Zealander who after spending 5 months at home is now traveling again, I can assure you people there are happy and mostly oblivious to what has gone on overseas. The travel restrictions whilst draconian, aren’t absolute and are being eased when needed. The travel bubble with Australia being a good example of this.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    Sounds worse than many places, ie Switzerland which is completely landlocked with diverse neighbors and open borders. Very few travel restrictions, mostly in spring 2020, just do your part and do the right choices in ie hygiene and travel destinations.
    - aunty_helen 5y ago
      Switzerland has had just under 11,000 people die, NZ 26 (twenty-six). Not to mention, NZ had complete lockdown for all of two months. The rest of the time peoples daily lives were unchanged. No masks (generally), concerts with 10,000+ people no problem. Summer holidays etc etc.
      - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        New Zealand was exceptionally successful, and other areas which tried that strategy weren't so lucky. Some parts of Australia were shut down for something like 9 of the past 18 months. (Sydney is under lockdown orders today!) And I think it's hard to find fault with the strength of lockdowns in France, Spain, or Italy - their lockdowns just didn't fully eliminate transition, so we put them in the "weak lockdown" bucket, even though as a matter of government policy they were doing the same thing.
  - umanwizard 5y ago
    > Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose. How so? The first result I could find[1] estimates that life expectancy decreased by 1.18 years in the US due to the pandemic, which doesn't strike me as extreme. 1: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118
Renaud 5y ago
They solved it as long as they can live without contact with anyone else. As much as it shows what could be done with drastic measures, NZ is an island with small population, in the middle of nowhere so it can easily lock its borders compared to say, pretty much any European country. They certainly handled it better, but I'm not sure that they will actually be ready to live in a COVID world any time toon without a strong and thorough vaccination rollout like everybody else. Wanting to keep zero case as all cost is going to be increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain: how long will the population accept that they can't travel? Can an economy partially dependent on tourism afford not to be open? Wouldn't NZ be penalized at some point if business people/athletes/students/engineers/scientists can't fly to or from it? Even if all western countries had been exemplary -ignoring that it would probably be impossible anyway- as long as we don't ensure that even poorer countries are able to stamp out the virus, there will always remain sources of variants that will continue to spread across the world. Look at Australia. Small population, big country, huge barriers to entrance (even for residents), extreme quarantine measures, and yet, you only need a single infected person to start spreading again.[1] As long as the population won't reach the minimum vaccination level required, they will continue to be barred from travelling and get lockdowns. Looks like the only hope we have is to accept it's there and ensure that the impact remains manageable through vaccination and targetted health control measures. [1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/world/sydney-lockdown-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/world/sydney-lockdown-cov...
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  Just to be clear, Australians are barred from leaving the country whilst NZers are free to come and go, provided when they return they do a 14 day quarantine at their own expense. Getting a spot in the quarantine hotels is difficult but possible on a 3 month time frame. As for the tourism thing, I’ve heard that it’s actually a net positive for the country(~1.5%). Whilst we have no foreign tourists, we’re also not heading overseas spending money.
  - Arnt 5y ago
    Are children free to play team sports? The lack of that really hurt here.
refurb 5y ago
Well NZ can enjoy their isolation and constant threat of outbreak while the rest of the world goes back to normal.
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Idiot soyboy cuckdowncel detected.
bart_spoon 5y ago
NZ's strategy only makes sense with eventual vaccines. There is no chance that this disease would ever not become endemic. The world is too large, and too many countries don't have the advantages NZ does (comparitavely wealthy, isolated, low population density). They deserve props for keeping their population healthy until this point, but the idea that it can continue indefinitely, or that it was ever feasible for a large proportion of the world to replicate it is pure fantasy.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  NZ's strategy (and all lockdown strategies) never made any sense and it was obvious from the get-go. Very early into the pandemic, we learned three crucial facts: 1) Covid is non-transmissible outside. 2) Vitamin D is a potent inhibitor of respiratory illness in general and covid in particular. 3) Obesity is the greatest risk-factor associated with covid. With these taken into account (and all are very well-supported by many of those peer-reviewed studies everyone seems to need in order to take any action), the best course of action is to encourage everyone to go outside, hang out with friends, don't wear masks outside (because this discourages going outside), exercise, and soak up lots of sun. The next "big wave" of covid in the northern hemisphere is going to come in the winter, just as all "seasonal illnesses" do. In fact, there's at least one study out lately that indicate that there's nothing seasonal about illnesses, but that vitamin D deficiency, brought on by staying inside during the cold months lowers group immunity and causes increased illness.
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    1) might not be true with Delta. There are cases of "passing" transmission of <30s contact. Too soon to tell, but what we learned early in the pandemic pre-delta may not apply now. 2) is still up in the air with studies going both ways (but get your vitamin D still, it has multiple benefits outside of this) 3) is somewhat true, but there are other big comorbidities as well (Diabetes, Downs Syndrome, etc), it's just that it's one that's highly visible in Western society and hypertension is very common in obese people.
    - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gregwebs 5y ago

yep, it may be that these new variants are not attempting any kind of immune escape against vaccines. They might just replicate faster or may be more transmissive and we are seeing the inevitable outcome of a non-sterilizing vaccine: you still get an infection, it just usually isn't a bad one.

lamontcg 5y ago

Yes, escape from circulating neutralizing antibodies (so the virus is able to infect you and replicate) is one thing. Escape from CD4+ T-cells is another thing (the dreaded "reset to 2019" fear). And the 1918 H1N1 influenza circulated as the only form of seasonal influenza until 1957 (when it was displaced by H2N2 which later became H2N3). From 1957 to 2009 H1N1 mutated in swine. After 50 years of mutating in probably billions of pigs the H1 envelope protein jumped back to humans in 2009. Since old people had pretty universally been exposed to pre-1957 H1N1 they had cross reactive partial immunity from T-cells that still recognized the H1 envelope protein and that pandemic fizzled. If you can't escape CD4+ T-cells after 50 years of mutating in pigs, I don't think that this coronavirus is going to be able to escape them in a year or two. Also at some point to achieve escape from neutralizing antibodies this virus is likely going to have to start making "choices" which make it less virulent. A decline in vaccine efficacy against delta could also indicate that the enhanced transmissibility of delta comes through partial vaccine/immune escape and not through ratcheting up R0/Rt (which would be more consistent with reports that it isn't more lethal / doesn't have higher viral loads, since those switches are all likely to move together).