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Personally I think the path is countries which have a high vaccination level need to stop implementing restrictions whilst making mitigations such as increasing

by altacc 5y ago

Personally I think the path is countries which have a high vaccination level need to stop implementing restrictions whilst making mitigations such as increasing healthcare capacity (which they should have done 18 months ago but many didn't), paying for rapid testing, enabling PTO for people who think they are sick, sensible mask mandates, etc... These countries need to lead the way to accepting we've waited for vaccines & prophylactics so that we have tools to use to combat this but there is now a heightened risk that we have to live with and make reasonable mitigations against.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bufferoverflow 5y ago
None of what you described is a path to normalcy. We've been doing it for over a year. Look at Australia, they have concentration camps. Vaccines don't really stop the spread of the virus, neither do they stop you from getting infected, they just reduce the symptoms and the odds of death. Which is still great, but it's not stopping the virus. We need next level meds, real vaccines.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  > Vaccines don't really stop the spread of the virus Technically correct, they don't stop the spread, but they significantly reduce it. It's kinda logical, isn't it? The virus must win over your antibodies to replicate. Currently breakthrough infections happen 1-2% of the time in the vaccinated, so even if there are 10x as many asymptomatic, unreported cases, the protective effect is still huge. This is really important to keep R < 1, which effectively means "stopping the virus". Eventually. In addition, the 90% reduced chance of hospitalisation is of great help to the healthcare system.
rocqua 5y ago
Making mitigations is difficult. Increasing healthcare capacity is not a short term project. Especially with staffing because the training pipeline is quite long. Besides, restrictions have an exponential effect (by reducing the R value) whilst mitigations only have a linear effect. That makes it hard to replace one with the other. Instead I think earlier, less stringent, restrictions to start damping the wave early, combined with as much mitigation as possible are probably the right solution. Every wave, its a new game of 'flatten the curve'. And really that is what we need.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  An entire new hospital was built near me since this all started. It has fewer beds than the one it replaced (granted, the planning was done pre-pandemic).

by altacc 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bufferoverflow 5y ago

None of what you described is a path to normalcy. We've been doing it for over a year. Look at Australia, they have concentration camps. Vaccines don't really stop the spread of the virus, neither do they stop you from getting infected, they just reduce the symptoms and the odds of death. Which is still great, but it's not stopping the virus. We need next level meds, real vaccines.

ricardobeat 5y ago
> Vaccines don't really stop the spread of the virus Technically correct, they don't stop the spread, but they significantly reduce it. It's kinda logical, isn't it? The virus must win over your antibodies to replicate. Currently breakthrough infections happen 1-2% of the time in the vaccinated, so even if there are 10x as many asymptomatic, unreported cases, the protective effect is still huge. This is really important to keep R < 1, which effectively means "stopping the virus". Eventually. In addition, the 90% reduced chance of hospitalisation is of great help to the healthcare system.

rocqua 5y ago

Making mitigations is difficult. Increasing healthcare capacity is not a short term project. Especially with staffing because the training pipeline is quite long. Besides, restrictions have an exponential effect (by reducing the R value) whilst mitigations only have a linear effect. That makes it hard to replace one with the other. Instead I think earlier, less stringent, restrictions to start damping the wave early, combined with as much mitigation as possible are probably the right solution. Every wave, its a new game of 'flatten the curve'. And really that is what we need.

throwawayboise 5y ago
An entire new hospital was built near me since this all started. It has fewer beds than the one it replaced (granted, the planning was done pre-pandemic).