5 ms·

"eliminating or eradicating the virus in the U.S." I sincerely didn't imagine anyone still thought this was feasible. Is this really still an aspiration that

"eliminating or eradicating the virus in the U.S." I sincerely didn't imagine anyone still thought this was feasible. Is this really still an aspiration that can be offered with a straight face? I want to point and laugh, but this is NPR so I know that's not allowed...

encryptluks2 5y ago
But people not getting vaccines are the reason we're here!!! /s Seriously, can't we just accept reality and get back to normal. Those that want the vaccine should get it and those that don't shouldn't. I think the harm being caused by the ridiculous mandates at this point have done equal harm.
- hef19898 5y ago
  I would agree if it wasn't for all those people that cannot get vaccinated. Young children, people with auto-immune diseases, transplant patients, certain kinds of cancer... I just guess taking one for the team went out of fashion a while ago.
  - ulfw 5y ago
    Erm why do you think those can NOT get vaccinated? Quite the opposite. They need more boosters as the vaccines don't generate enough immune response.
  - tpm 5y ago
    Or those who can get the vaccine but it won't help them much. But, as you say, homo homini lupus.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Studies have shown that deaths from COVID among children are incredibly rare, and more kids die from the flu than from COVID. People with auto-immune diseases, transplant patients and certain kinds of cancer have always been more susceptible to illness. Never have we mandated flu vaccines before, and those people would be equally as susceptible. However, I think you should be asking yourself.. if an mRNA vaccine presents auto-immune response, who is to say that isn't harming those being forced to be vaccinated? There is little to be understood about many auto-immune diseases, just look at fibromyalgia, which has often been labeled as a psychological condition and not a physical one. Many doctors still don't believe it is real, and if you use it for a disability claim it is difficult to prove. If what you're saying is to be considered, then it must also be considered that the vaccine could have subtle side effects that may not be immediately known and later exhibit themselves as incredibly hard to diagnose and nearly impossible to detect illnesses.
- dessant 5y ago
  > Seriously, can't we just accept reality and get back to normal. Those that want the vaccine should get it and those that don't shouldn't. No, we can't, because in most places in the world people who have nothing to do with COVID can't get into hospitals or be seen by doctors, when there is an infection wave, which at the moment is fueled by the unvaccinated. Deers won't take up hospital beds, but the unvaccinated will continue to strain health care systems.
  - gspr 5y ago
    I personally know one person who's more than a year late for a hospital procedure (for a non-life threatening condition obviously) due to covid. Their life is partly on hold. And I personally had to worry every single time my mom went for chemotherapy this summer – what if something went wrong and the hospital didn't react properly due to short-staffing from dealing w covid patients? The antivaxxers can go to hell. They're doing real tangible harm. The vaccine does real, tangible good. There is nothing more to the story. Get the fucking vaccine.
    - incrudible 5y ago
      The vaccines also do real, tangible harm. Even if the chances are quite low, so are the chances of severe COVID for young and healthy individuals, especially children. If this was not an almost unspeakable truth, if it had not become politicized, if there was not this massive propaganda campaign to blame the unvaccinated for the failure of many aspects of the health care system, if there was any reason left to trust the regulatory bodies, then maybe, just maybe, some of the people who now refuse the vaccine against better judgement would not be clogging up hospital beds. Get off your high horse.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      It has been around 18 months now. If the hospitals haven't started to adjust to the higher patient counts then that isn't the fault of the antivaxers. Certainly it is wise to get vaccinated, but blame where blame is due - the people responsible for any problems right now are the hospital planners.
- mach1ne 5y ago
  Honestly, there could be a malicious actor deliberately creating division among the populace. As with so many other topics, vaccination and COVID has been politicised to fanaticism. Then again, the more probable explanation is that what we're seeing is the result of social media changing the dynamics of the society.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  > Seriously, can't we just accept reality and get back to normal. Some countries have, some haven't been able to yet. I'm not going to start ideological arguments just want to bring you a new perspective. The main criteria is your healthcare capacity. In the Netherlands facemasks are only mandatory in public transit at this point. But you need a vaccine or test certificate to go to a restaurant/bar. The number of infections went up with everybody going back to the offices, but the hospitalizations and deaths are still on the low numbers. In Germany you have regions like Saxony with extremely low numbers of vaccinated people, infection numbers also went up, but the hospitalizations are equally high, and the healthcare system is now strained with beds being repurposed for covid wards and surgeries cancelled. My point is that _if_ we have unlimited healthcare resources and capacity then yes, theoretically, everything could go back to normal. But irrespective of where you sit ideologically our resources are finite, so our decisions have consequences.
  - Clampower 5y ago
    This is partially untrue. Numbers are back up in the Netherlands, hospitals intensive care units are largely at capacity, and facemasks were reintroduced in public spaces such as all shops, doctors offices, etc last week.
    - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
      Indeed, fair correction on the masks being brought back. But the intensive care units in the Netherlands are only at capacity in Brabant. Everywhere else things are still ok and are likely to receive transfers from Brabant to balance resources.
    - tromp 5y ago
      There is a facemask mandate in public spaces, but enforcement is often lacking. I'd say 5-10% of shoppers don't wear masks. And no shop seems to refuse them. In my local mall, I've seen the mall manager walking around unmasked.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    In the US, even before the pandemic, ICUs were typically run at very close to capacity. From Becker's Hospital Review[1]: > For most level 1 trauma centers and tertiary care facilities, operating intensive care units at 80 percent to 90 percent capacity is standard — even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In bad flu years, ERs are commonly overwhelmed[2] even though we obviously have vaccines that provide so-so protection: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/ https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie... I suspect that the situation in Europe is much the same. Even if the vaccines continue to provide good protection against hospitalization, that doesn't mean that breakthrough infections won't have any impact on the healthcare system. As an anecdote, I just learned that a friend, who is a super fit collegiate athlete, just had a breakthrough infection and almost went to the ER because her symptoms were quite bad. She decided against it and the symptoms subsided within a couple of days, but if you hear about and read enough reports about breakthrough infections, it's pretty clear that it's not rare for "mild" cases to be pretty rough -- rough enough to have some people thinking about a visit to the hospital. SARS-CoV-2 is well on its way to being endemic (it basically already is) so if we're being honest about getting back to normal, it's time for public health decision makers to be more realistic about the impact the virus will have on the healthcare system. Practically speaking, that means being prepared for high utilization and expanding capacity. [1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthcare-leaders-talk-icu-capacity-5-sound-bites.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc... [2] https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/ https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
- gspr 5y ago
  No. The ones that don't want the vaccine (and don't have a real medical reason not to) have to take the goddamn vaccine. Their beliefs are objectively wrong, and if they want to live in society, they have to do their part. Bodily autonomy is very important to me, but it does not mean that you are allowed to cause real harm to others' bodies. The antivaxxers have nothing. They're ridiculous morons who try to undermine society. Meet fire with fire, marginalize these idiots if they refuse to get their shit together.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    What do you say to people who eagerly took the initial 2-dose vaccine series but aren't interested in perpetual boosters every 6 months? Are they antivaxxers? Do they need to be marginalized? The neutralizing antibodies generated after vaccination wane very quickly and the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission. There are even breakthrough cases happening in people who are just 2-3 months out from their second dose. I flew halfway around the world to get vaccinated and when I was in the US earlier this year, observed that the people who were most confident and even cavalier about forgoing preventative measures like mask wearing and social distancing were people who were fully vaccinated. If vaccinated people who harbor objectively wrong beliefs about what the vaccines actually do engage in behavior that causes "real harm to other's bodies", do they need fire and brimstone too?
    - gspr 5y ago
      > What do you say to people who eagerly took the initial 2-dose vaccine series but aren't interested in perpetual boosters every 6 months? Are they antivaxxers? Do they need to be marginalized? I don't know. It's difficult. So let's focus on the easy one: the idiots who won't get their first dose. > The neutralizing antibodies generated after vaccination wane very quickly and the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission. There are even breakthrough cases happening in people who are just 2-3 months out from their second dose. Of course there are breakthrough cases. The vaccines aren't 100% effective. That's not the point.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  > But people not getting vaccines are the reason we're here!!! /s > Seriously, can't we just accept reality and get back to normal. Those that want the vaccine should get it and those that don't shouldn't. I think the harm being caused by the ridiculous mandates at this point have done equal harm. People seem to forget all those folks who can't get their surgeries, early cancer screening, undiagnosed chest pain etc. Those are deaths and suffering that won't ever appear in official covid mortality stats but they are out there, everywhere. During Spring 2021 in India outbreak alone, officially there was 500k deaths, but heightened mortality for that period was more like 5 millions (that covers undetected covid and everything else). A more general rant - it pains me to no end see how covid crisis brutally highlighted the fact that large part of population is utterly irrational, emotional, believes all kinds of lies very easily and is, is selfish, arrogant, self-centered, and for the lack of better word, plain dumb. You can't win with dumb. We saw it earlier with elections, we saw it on football stadiums etc. but this is worse. And I don't see a way out.
jmopp 5y ago
There's a difference between elimination and eradication. Elimination means getting cases close to 0 as possible, and then - any outbreaks that do occur, tracking them and stamping them out before they can spread. A good analogy is that of TB in most of Europe. When I moved from South Africa to the Netherlands, I had to have a chest X-ray every 6 months for 2 years to make sure I'm not infectious with TB. The disease has not been eradicated, but there are measures in place to make sure people don't die of consumption like it's the 1800s. We can do the same with covid, there is just a supreme lack of will to do so.
- topspin 5y ago
  "We can do the same with covid" Do you have any evidence for this claim? It shouldn't need to be pointed out that COVID is vastly more contagious than TB. What sort of tracing system do you imagine implementing to achieve containment? You'd probably need a video record of every waking moment of every soul, subject to instantaneous remote analysis by authorities. And now the deer as well...
  - GaryTang 5y ago
    At this point, as conspiratorially as it sounds, I think this is exactly what the powers that be intend.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    > What sort of tracing system do you imagine implementing to achieve containment? Ask Taiwan? They had 39 cases in the past week, only two of which were local, and the latest of those was six days ago. https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Bulletin/List/MmgtpeidAR5Ooai4-fgHzQ https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Bulletin/List/MmgtpeidAR5Ooai4-fgHzQ Of course they've never had more than 554 cases in a day, so it was a bit easier to get down from the peak. In most other countries people don't seem to have the patience to keep up countermeasures for long enough to achieve local elimination.
    - topspin 5y ago
      > Ask Taiwan? I don't need to. I'm well aware of how Taiwan achieves this; near absolute control of travel to and from the island, implemented early and with no meaningful political opposition. That window closed for the US by Jan. 2019 while certain parties were still screaming "Xenophobe!" at modest and insufficient travel restrictions. The question at hand is how NPR -- or anyone else for that matter -- imagines this happening in the US. Large numbers of people literally sneak into this country on foot every day and impeding them (for any reason at all, never mind COVID) is a monumental political issue, as just one example of what separates the US from Taiwan.
pvaldes 5y ago
An to remove the virus just in a country would be useless. Specially in a country that receives millions of international tourists. It would return again and again. At this point is either vaccines or more people killed and more money to the sink. And as in the Ebola case we really didn't have a good picture of what is happening with pets until late. Cats can pick it and ferrets most probably.

encryptluks2 5y ago

But people not getting vaccines are the reason we're here!!! /s Seriously, can't we just accept reality and get back to normal. Those that want the vaccine should get it and those that don't shouldn't. I think the harm being caused by the ridiculous mandates at this point have done equal harm.

hef19898 5y ago
I would agree if it wasn't for all those people that cannot get vaccinated. Young children, people with auto-immune diseases, transplant patients, certain kinds of cancer... I just guess taking one for the team went out of fashion a while ago.
- ulfw 5y ago
  Erm why do you think those can NOT get vaccinated? Quite the opposite. They need more boosters as the vaccines don't generate enough immune response.
- tpm 5y ago
  Or those who can get the vaccine but it won't help them much. But, as you say, homo homini lupus.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Studies have shown that deaths from COVID among children are incredibly rare, and more kids die from the flu than from COVID. People with auto-immune diseases, transplant patients and certain kinds of cancer have always been more susceptible to illness. Never have we mandated flu vaccines before, and those people would be equally as susceptible. However, I think you should be asking yourself.. if an mRNA vaccine presents auto-immune response, who is to say that isn't harming those being forced to be vaccinated? There is little to be understood about many auto-immune diseases, just look at fibromyalgia, which has often been labeled as a psychological condition and not a physical one. Many doctors still don't believe it is real, and if you use it for a disability claim it is difficult to prove. If what you're saying is to be considered, then it must also be considered that the vaccine could have subtle side effects that may not be immediately known and later exhibit themselves as incredibly hard to diagnose and nearly impossible to detect illnesses.
dessant 5y ago
> Seriously, can't we just accept reality and get back to normal. Those that want the vaccine should get it and those that don't shouldn't. No, we can't, because in most places in the world people who have nothing to do with COVID can't get into hospitals or be seen by doctors, when there is an infection wave, which at the moment is fueled by the unvaccinated. Deers won't take up hospital beds, but the unvaccinated will continue to strain health care systems.
- gspr 5y ago
  I personally know one person who's more than a year late for a hospital procedure (for a non-life threatening condition obviously) due to covid. Their life is partly on hold. And I personally had to worry every single time my mom went for chemotherapy this summer – what if something went wrong and the hospital didn't react properly due to short-staffing from dealing w covid patients? The antivaxxers can go to hell. They're doing real tangible harm. The vaccine does real, tangible good. There is nothing more to the story. Get the fucking vaccine.
  - incrudible 5y ago
    The vaccines also do real, tangible harm. Even if the chances are quite low, so are the chances of severe COVID for young and healthy individuals, especially children. If this was not an almost unspeakable truth, if it had not become politicized, if there was not this massive propaganda campaign to blame the unvaccinated for the failure of many aspects of the health care system, if there was any reason left to trust the regulatory bodies, then maybe, just maybe, some of the people who now refuse the vaccine against better judgement would not be clogging up hospital beds. Get off your high horse.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    It has been around 18 months now. If the hospitals haven't started to adjust to the higher patient counts then that isn't the fault of the antivaxers. Certainly it is wise to get vaccinated, but blame where blame is due - the people responsible for any problems right now are the hospital planners.
mach1ne 5y ago
Honestly, there could be a malicious actor deliberately creating division among the populace. As with so many other topics, vaccination and COVID has been politicised to fanaticism. Then again, the more probable explanation is that what we're seeing is the result of social media changing the dynamics of the society.
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
> Seriously, can't we just accept reality and get back to normal. Some countries have, some haven't been able to yet. I'm not going to start ideological arguments just want to bring you a new perspective. The main criteria is your healthcare capacity. In the Netherlands facemasks are only mandatory in public transit at this point. But you need a vaccine or test certificate to go to a restaurant/bar. The number of infections went up with everybody going back to the offices, but the hospitalizations and deaths are still on the low numbers. In Germany you have regions like Saxony with extremely low numbers of vaccinated people, infection numbers also went up, but the hospitalizations are equally high, and the healthcare system is now strained with beds being repurposed for covid wards and surgeries cancelled. My point is that _if_ we have unlimited healthcare resources and capacity then yes, theoretically, everything could go back to normal. But irrespective of where you sit ideologically our resources are finite, so our decisions have consequences.
- Clampower 5y ago
  This is partially untrue. Numbers are back up in the Netherlands, hospitals intensive care units are largely at capacity, and facemasks were reintroduced in public spaces such as all shops, doctors offices, etc last week.
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    Indeed, fair correction on the masks being brought back. But the intensive care units in the Netherlands are only at capacity in Brabant. Everywhere else things are still ok and are likely to receive transfers from Brabant to balance resources.
  - tromp 5y ago
    There is a facemask mandate in public spaces, but enforcement is often lacking. I'd say 5-10% of shoppers don't wear masks. And no shop seems to refuse them. In my local mall, I've seen the mall manager walking around unmasked.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  In the US, even before the pandemic, ICUs were typically run at very close to capacity. From Becker's Hospital Review[1]: > For most level 1 trauma centers and tertiary care facilities, operating intensive care units at 80 percent to 90 percent capacity is standard — even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In bad flu years, ERs are commonly overwhelmed[2] even though we obviously have vaccines that provide so-so protection: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/ https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie... I suspect that the situation in Europe is much the same. Even if the vaccines continue to provide good protection against hospitalization, that doesn't mean that breakthrough infections won't have any impact on the healthcare system. As an anecdote, I just learned that a friend, who is a super fit collegiate athlete, just had a breakthrough infection and almost went to the ER because her symptoms were quite bad. She decided against it and the symptoms subsided within a couple of days, but if you hear about and read enough reports about breakthrough infections, it's pretty clear that it's not rare for "mild" cases to be pretty rough -- rough enough to have some people thinking about a visit to the hospital. SARS-CoV-2 is well on its way to being endemic (it basically already is) so if we're being honest about getting back to normal, it's time for public health decision makers to be more realistic about the impact the virus will have on the healthcare system. Practically speaking, that means being prepared for high utilization and expanding capacity. [1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthcare-leaders-talk-icu-capacity-5-sound-bites.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc... [2] https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/ https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
gspr 5y ago
No. The ones that don't want the vaccine (and don't have a real medical reason not to) have to take the goddamn vaccine. Their beliefs are objectively wrong, and if they want to live in society, they have to do their part. Bodily autonomy is very important to me, but it does not mean that you are allowed to cause real harm to others' bodies. The antivaxxers have nothing. They're ridiculous morons who try to undermine society. Meet fire with fire, marginalize these idiots if they refuse to get their shit together.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  What do you say to people who eagerly took the initial 2-dose vaccine series but aren't interested in perpetual boosters every 6 months? Are they antivaxxers? Do they need to be marginalized? The neutralizing antibodies generated after vaccination wane very quickly and the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission. There are even breakthrough cases happening in people who are just 2-3 months out from their second dose. I flew halfway around the world to get vaccinated and when I was in the US earlier this year, observed that the people who were most confident and even cavalier about forgoing preventative measures like mask wearing and social distancing were people who were fully vaccinated. If vaccinated people who harbor objectively wrong beliefs about what the vaccines actually do engage in behavior that causes "real harm to other's bodies", do they need fire and brimstone too?
  - gspr 5y ago
    > What do you say to people who eagerly took the initial 2-dose vaccine series but aren't interested in perpetual boosters every 6 months? Are they antivaxxers? Do they need to be marginalized? I don't know. It's difficult. So let's focus on the easy one: the idiots who won't get their first dose. > The neutralizing antibodies generated after vaccination wane very quickly and the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission. There are even breakthrough cases happening in people who are just 2-3 months out from their second dose. Of course there are breakthrough cases. The vaccines aren't 100% effective. That's not the point.
saiya-jin 5y ago
> But people not getting vaccines are the reason we're here!!! /s > Seriously, can't we just accept reality and get back to normal. Those that want the vaccine should get it and those that don't shouldn't. I think the harm being caused by the ridiculous mandates at this point have done equal harm. People seem to forget all those folks who can't get their surgeries, early cancer screening, undiagnosed chest pain etc. Those are deaths and suffering that won't ever appear in official covid mortality stats but they are out there, everywhere. During Spring 2021 in India outbreak alone, officially there was 500k deaths, but heightened mortality for that period was more like 5 millions (that covers undetected covid and everything else). A more general rant - it pains me to no end see how covid crisis brutally highlighted the fact that large part of population is utterly irrational, emotional, believes all kinds of lies very easily and is, is selfish, arrogant, self-centered, and for the lack of better word, plain dumb. You can't win with dumb. We saw it earlier with elections, we saw it on football stadiums etc. but this is worse. And I don't see a way out.

jmopp 5y ago

There's a difference between elimination and eradication. Elimination means getting cases close to 0 as possible, and then - any outbreaks that do occur, tracking them and stamping them out before they can spread. A good analogy is that of TB in most of Europe. When I moved from South Africa to the Netherlands, I had to have a chest X-ray every 6 months for 2 years to make sure I'm not infectious with TB. The disease has not been eradicated, but there are measures in place to make sure people don't die of consumption like it's the 1800s. We can do the same with covid, there is just a supreme lack of will to do so.

topspin 5y ago
"We can do the same with covid" Do you have any evidence for this claim? It shouldn't need to be pointed out that COVID is vastly more contagious than TB. What sort of tracing system do you imagine implementing to achieve containment? You'd probably need a video record of every waking moment of every soul, subject to instantaneous remote analysis by authorities. And now the deer as well...
- GaryTang 5y ago
  At this point, as conspiratorially as it sounds, I think this is exactly what the powers that be intend.
- yorwba 5y ago
  > What sort of tracing system do you imagine implementing to achieve containment? Ask Taiwan? They had 39 cases in the past week, only two of which were local, and the latest of those was six days ago. https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Bulletin/List/MmgtpeidAR5Ooai4-fgHzQ https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Bulletin/List/MmgtpeidAR5Ooai4-fgHzQ Of course they've never had more than 554 cases in a day, so it was a bit easier to get down from the peak. In most other countries people don't seem to have the patience to keep up countermeasures for long enough to achieve local elimination.
  - topspin 5y ago
    > Ask Taiwan? I don't need to. I'm well aware of how Taiwan achieves this; near absolute control of travel to and from the island, implemented early and with no meaningful political opposition. That window closed for the US by Jan. 2019 while certain parties were still screaming "Xenophobe!" at modest and insufficient travel restrictions. The question at hand is how NPR -- or anyone else for that matter -- imagines this happening in the US. Large numbers of people literally sneak into this country on foot every day and impeding them (for any reason at all, never mind COVID) is a monumental political issue, as just one example of what separates the US from Taiwan.

pvaldes 5y ago

An to remove the virus just in a country would be useless. Specially in a country that receives millions of international tourists. It would return again and again. At this point is either vaccines or more people killed and more money to the sink. And as in the Ebola case we really didn't have a good picture of what is happening with pets until late. Cats can pick it and ferrets most probably.