4 ms·
Driving Rt below one will cause any species to go extinct. That’s just basic maths. If it’s not happening, then Rt is not below 1. As for the rest, you’re taki
by epgui 5y ago
Driving Rt below one will cause any species to go extinct. That’s just basic maths. If it’s not happening, then Rt is not below 1.
As for the rest, you’re taking ideas that have some truth to them, and probably misinterpreting what these things actually mean and taking them unreasonably far or to the extreme:
- Herd immunity is a thing, but I'm not sure how you imagine it in your head, or what you think that means.
- Vaccines do prevent infections, but not perfectly well. This (or the contrary) has been communicated to the public in very confusing ways.
- It is true that vaccinated people have a lower likelihood of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others. I'm not sure if you think that means it should be perfect, but biology is messy.
- refurb 5y agoYour response is some impressive hand waving. Yes, those things are infectious disease concepts and they were touted as to how COVID will be dealt with. Lots of talk of “once we get to 80% vaccination rate we’ll hit here immunity”. You don’t hear that any more huh? “If we drive R below 1 we can extinguish Covid”. Now it’s “Covid is endemic, it’s not going away”. “Once everyone is vaccinated, Covid goes away”, then “It really rare for the vaccinated to get Covid” to “holy shit, most new cases are in fully vaccinated”. You can honestly look at that narrative and NOT completely understand why people are not listening any more?
- epgui 5y agoMy response isn’t hand-wavy, it’s pretty categorical: the problem is that people can’t deal with uncertainty, and fill in too many blanks in their minds with over-simplistic assumptions. If you’re looking for a full picture of certainty about the future, that’s not exactly what science will give you.
- throwoutway 5y ago> the problem is that people can’t deal with uncertainty, and fill in too many blanks in their minds with over-simplistic assumptions. No, the problem is that this was communicated in imperfect ways to the public (as you said yourself), who then filled in the gaps themselves. Risk communication is complicated and the govt, the experts, and the media all failed the public here.
- epgui 5y agoI don't disagree that there were a lot of communication issues, but I think many people don't appreciate just how difficult public health communications is. It literally does not matter how right you are or well you communicate something: there will always be groups of people who misinterpret what you say, don't understand what you say, or weaponize what you say for political purposes.
- spurgu 5y agoR0 < 1 should be measured globally unless you're planning on isolating forever.
- epgui 5y agoBe careful because R0 and Rt refer to different things: R0 is a property of the pathogen under the assumption of “normal life” and measures how inherently infectious it is. Rt is a measure of the real-life infectivity of a pathogen at a specific point in time, under no assumption of “normal life”, and possibly within some arbitrary geographical bounds. The purpose of Rt is not to measure the inherent infectivity of a pathogen, but rather its infectivity in a specific environment and set of circumstances: it’s the high-level metric that informs you of the combined impact of public health measures, social behaviour changes, immunity, etc, on the pathogen’s infectivity. You can see Rt as being equal to R0 times some correction factor that accounts for everything else.
- spurgu 5y agoAh thanks for the explanation, I wasn't aware of the difference!