8 ms·

> I predicted that vaccines plus immunity from those who had been infected would end the pandemic by mid-year 2021. Me too. I'm still wondering why, in most fi

by umvi 5y ago

> I predicted that vaccines plus immunity from those who had been infected would end the pandemic by mid-year 2021. Me too. I'm still wondering why, in most first world countries with free vaccines, we are still having authoritarian crackdowns and culture wars. Does the media just love perpetuating a state of constant crisis? If widespread vaccine availability didn't trigger a return to normalcy, I don't know what will. Seems like we will be doing pandemic measures for years to come at this rate since scaling healthcare in any way is off the table for some reason.

Karunamon 5y ago
>Does the media just love perpetuating a state of constant crisis? Constant catastrophosizing drives engagement, it's that simple. This is the reason you'll never hear 'stay calm' messages that are not tempered by a 'but'. Anger and fear are powerful emotions, and the media will hammer those buttons as hard as they can (unless given a powerful incentive not to), the effects on society be damned.
- paul7986 5y ago
  Exactly and that's why for me personally all media is biased trash driven by money/power/greed directly or indirectly to be ignored. For covid news I get it directly from my medical friends working in hospitals or this time around all the people (two handfuls) I know and they know dealing with Covid. Personally worst I've experienced first and second hand since it started but each person who isn't OLD recovers quickly vaxed or not.
jude- 5y ago
The problem is that a certain slice of the population adamantly refuses to wear a mask or get a vaccine, thereby prolonging the pandemic.
- xeromal 5y ago
  But Omicron is infecting vaccinated at a very high rate. At this point, damned if you do or damned if you don't. We need to start moving on at this point.
  - awsthro00945 5y ago
    This is a false equivalency. Being vaccinated or not is the difference between requiring days/weeks in the hospital or only spending 1-2 days with a mild headache. It's "mildly inconvenienced if you do, damned if you don't". I was at the hospital yesterday (for something unrelated to covid) and there are 0 rooms available. The hallways are still packed with unvaccinated people with covid laying in every open space they can find. Nurses and doctors are still worked past their breaking point. We cannot move on until the thick-skulled members of society realize that their unwillingness to get vaccinated is the number one thing stopping us from moving on.
    - xeromal 5y ago
      It ain't happening though so we need to move on with it. There are too many stubborn people in the United States and probably elsewhere. There are people who would rather die than take the vaccine for whatever ridiculous reason so why are we sitting around waiting for them.
      - awsthro00945 5y ago
        I'll say it again: we cannot move on with it until people are vaccinated. It's not a choice. It's not something where we just say "eh well it looks like it won't get better so let's move on". It physically cannot happen.
        xeromal 5y ago
        So let's assume these people never get vaccinated. We wait forever?
        awsthro00945 5y ago
        You're still not understanding. We are not "waiting". Waiting implies that we are making some type of conscious choice to put things on hold. But there is no choice. We cannot simply choose to stop waiting. We cannot move on until people are vaccinated. We are blocked, not waiting.
- nradov 5y ago
  While I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, the virus will be around forever. Any talk of "prolonging" is absurd. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 You obviously can't expect people to continue wearing masks indefinitely. That would be ridiculous.
  - jude- 5y ago
    I can expect that if a sufficiently high body count or death rate is reached (now or in a future variant), certain high-risk activities will require proof of recent vaccination to participate in. See also: seatbelts, child-specific seats, etc. Why should I, a responsible member of the public, be forced to put up with other people's needlessly risky behavior when it directly affects me and mine?
    - throwaway55421 5y ago
      You're not, you can hide inside forever. In the real world we accept risk vs reward. My neighbours having a kitchen knife in their house presents a nonzero risk to me, and that's a-ok and I don't wander about wearing a stab vest.
      - jude- 5y ago
        Or, we can do what we've done in the past to address this very situation by giving everyone the following choice: get the vaccine, or forfeit some privileges. It's not hard, and it's not without lots of precedent, so it should not be controversial.
        throwaway55421 5y ago
        Well, you can. France are doing it. They are having 200k daily cases. So it's not really "or", it's just "and". You can either have everyone gets corona, or you can have everyone gets corona plus a miserable digital dystopia, loads of restrictions on everyday life etc. Either way, unless you manage zero covid which is almost universally considered to be impossible at this point in most of the world, your options are still "hide inside forever" or "get corona". Which brings us right back full circle to risk vs reward.
azakai 5y ago
COVID is far less dangerous than in 2020, but it is still a problem - it's not just a "media thing". COVID is still powerful enough to fill our hospitals past their ability to cope, and also we have enough uncertainty about long COVID that it's better to minimize infections. So we are not yet back to normalcy. Why is COVID still that dangerous? Not enough people are vaccinated, and not enough use masks (especially not good masks like N95s), and new variants are making things difficult. It is plausible that during 2022 we do return to something close to normal. But it depends on those three factors.
- daveevad 5y ago
  > Not enough people are vaccinated Is it not the case that we essentially need to vaccinate everyone in the whole world within a small time period, like 4 weeks, to prevent mutation and vaccine escape?
  - azakai 5y ago
    That would let us eradicate it entirely. It's worth trying. But we can still get mostly back to normal without that. If we get enough immunity that the worst COVID causes is a small bump in hospitalization and deaths once or twice a year then we could live with that and just wear masks during those weeks perhaps. We are much, much closer to that goal today than we were a year ago.
    - nradov 5y ago
      It's not possible to eradicate the virus. The vaccines are pretty good at preventing deaths, but they don't reliably prevent infection or transmission. There are also multiple animal reservoirs and those can't be vaccinated at all. The only human viruses we have managed to eradicate are smallpox and (almost) polio. The vaccines for those are generally much more effective, and there are no animal reservoirs.
      - azakai 5y ago
        You're probably right. We'd need a new type of vaccine that is more effective for that to be realistic. There is still hope for that though.
downrightmike 5y ago
Nope, still going to kill a bunch of people and that will curb any real growth. Here's what will happen: April/may cases will be much lower, end of may people will party into June. June/July there will be a uptick until august just before school starts. September cases will climb, get slightly lower in October, then spike the second week of November and then continue until April/may. This is an infectious disease functioning in/on a human system and we well know how this works out. Everything I described above is the schedule for the Spanish flu, and coincidentally, covid. Because that is how humans work and do things. We have not progressed enough in the last 100 years to change this due to the luddite/zealot problems we have.
jpeloquin 5y ago
I also thought widespread vaccination would end the pandemic in the US by mid-2021. I guess vaccination rates have to be very high, maybe > 90%, for that to work? Personally I've redefined my goal for dealing with the pandemic as merely, "I will not give Covid to anyone else," which still seems doable by spacing out social events and testing in between. Although I also find the media's tendency towards sensationalism to be annoying, the media industry and its audience are so fractured now I'm not sure they're the cause of anything. It feels like no one is in control and they (and us) are merely along for the ride. That is, I feel that, due to decentralized mass communication and targeted media delivery, social phenomena is tending towards emergent rather than directed behavior.
- imnotreallynew 5y ago
  Malta is about at 90%, yet the government is introducing more mandates to the chagrin of residents[0]. There’s been maybe ~three deaths in the entire country over the past couple of weeks; COVID hasn’t even been in the top 5 causes of death for a long time. Yet, you’ll now risk being fined €100 if you’re outside walking by yourself without a mask (of course smoking in restaurants and going to nightclubs is allowed, because that makes freaking sense). Malta was even touting quite a bit about being the first European country to reach herd immunity..back in May. In my opinion, anyone who believes continued restrictions have been about anything other than political theatre and positioning are utterly delusional. 0: https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/this-latest-masks-mandate-risks-backfiring.920869 https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/this-latest-masks-man...
  - jpeloquin 5y ago
    So 90% does remove Covid as an ongoing concern? That's encouraging. If you live in Malta, my condolences on dealing with restrictions that, on face value, are overly fearful and internally inconsistent.
    - solresol 5y ago
      Unfortunately not -- look at what is happening in NSW (Australia). >90% vaccination rate, and essentially exponential growth in cases and hospitalisation. The only things that changed were: omicron instead of delta, and the dropping of restrictions with a new premier.
phillipcarter 5y ago
My personal view, which is US-based, is that our government is filled with second-rate people from top to bottom. They have continually failed to communicate clearly about the virus, testing, masking, and vaccines throughout the past two years. They are still not providing good masks. They still talk about "washing your hands". They are not building better ventilation systems. They are not providing good rapid test kits. They are not passing laws that address our countless medical system inefficiencies. And so on, and so on. Anything they are doing feels imperceptible from doing nothing. I think the sad reality is that we're going to have a lot more needless deaths in 2022. People with disabilities that are impacted by COVID will need to keep locking themselves up indefinitely - no government agency will help them, and their communities will ignore their problems. Vaccines will still not be taken by ~1/3 of the population. Is it even worth trying anymore with them? I guess yes, however frustrating, but only because it makes everyone else safer to do so. I do not see how 2022 is terribly different from 2021.
- nradov 5y ago
  Most disabilities in general don't increase the fatality rate for COVID-19. Besides advanced age, the real risk factors are chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and hypovitaminosis D. Those conditions aren't usually classified as disabilities. Governments and communities can help to an extent by facilitating healthier choices but ultimately the patients have to commit to permanent lifestyle changes if they want to reduce their risks.
  - phillipcarter 5y ago
    > Most disabilities in general don't increase the fatality rate for COVID-19. That is correct. And most cases of COVID don't result in death or even severe illnesses. But the point isn't that we should just be happy with the majority we have. I work directly with someone whose disability requires them to take immunosuppressants, and so now the pandemic has forced them to either (a) isolate from the rest of the world, (b) risk their body destroying itself, or (c) risk a more severe infection from COVID than someone else like them might have. > Governments and communities can help to an extent by facilitating healthier choices but ultimately the patients have to commit to permanent lifestyle changes if they want to reduce their risks. The point isn't that the governments and communities directly help those who suffer disabilities that make COVID far more dangerous. They point is that things in the US are far, far worse than they need to be, and there are very real things that the government could do starting right now to make it better, but it isn't.
MrPatan 5y ago
> Does the media just love perpetuating a state of constant crisis? Yes, of course. More clicks for little effort. Many other interests are also aligned. No need for a conspiracy, it's just that if you ask a pharma company or a hospital "how's the pandemic going? the right answer will mean more resources and/or prestige for you!" you can already guess the answer.

by umvi 5y ago

Karunamon 5y ago

>Does the media just love perpetuating a state of constant crisis? Constant catastrophosizing drives engagement, it's that simple. This is the reason you'll never hear 'stay calm' messages that are not tempered by a 'but'. Anger and fear are powerful emotions, and the media will hammer those buttons as hard as they can (unless given a powerful incentive not to), the effects on society be damned.

paul7986 5y ago
Exactly and that's why for me personally all media is biased trash driven by money/power/greed directly or indirectly to be ignored. For covid news I get it directly from my medical friends working in hospitals or this time around all the people (two handfuls) I know and they know dealing with Covid. Personally worst I've experienced first and second hand since it started but each person who isn't OLD recovers quickly vaxed or not.

jude- 5y ago

The problem is that a certain slice of the population adamantly refuses to wear a mask or get a vaccine, thereby prolonging the pandemic.

xeromal 5y ago
But Omicron is infecting vaccinated at a very high rate. At this point, damned if you do or damned if you don't. We need to start moving on at this point.
- awsthro00945 5y ago
  This is a false equivalency. Being vaccinated or not is the difference between requiring days/weeks in the hospital or only spending 1-2 days with a mild headache. It's "mildly inconvenienced if you do, damned if you don't". I was at the hospital yesterday (for something unrelated to covid) and there are 0 rooms available. The hallways are still packed with unvaccinated people with covid laying in every open space they can find. Nurses and doctors are still worked past their breaking point. We cannot move on until the thick-skulled members of society realize that their unwillingness to get vaccinated is the number one thing stopping us from moving on.
  - xeromal 5y ago
    It ain't happening though so we need to move on with it. There are too many stubborn people in the United States and probably elsewhere. There are people who would rather die than take the vaccine for whatever ridiculous reason so why are we sitting around waiting for them.
    - awsthro00945 5y ago
      I'll say it again: we cannot move on with it until people are vaccinated. It's not a choice. It's not something where we just say "eh well it looks like it won't get better so let's move on". It physically cannot happen.
      - xeromal 5y ago
        So let's assume these people never get vaccinated. We wait forever?
        awsthro00945 5y ago
        You're still not understanding. We are not "waiting". Waiting implies that we are making some type of conscious choice to put things on hold. But there is no choice. We cannot simply choose to stop waiting. We cannot move on until people are vaccinated. We are blocked, not waiting.
nradov 5y ago
While I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, the virus will be around forever. Any talk of "prolonging" is absurd. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 You obviously can't expect people to continue wearing masks indefinitely. That would be ridiculous.
- jude- 5y ago
  I can expect that if a sufficiently high body count or death rate is reached (now or in a future variant), certain high-risk activities will require proof of recent vaccination to participate in. See also: seatbelts, child-specific seats, etc. Why should I, a responsible member of the public, be forced to put up with other people's needlessly risky behavior when it directly affects me and mine?
  - throwaway55421 5y ago
    You're not, you can hide inside forever. In the real world we accept risk vs reward. My neighbours having a kitchen knife in their house presents a nonzero risk to me, and that's a-ok and I don't wander about wearing a stab vest.
    - jude- 5y ago
      Or, we can do what we've done in the past to address this very situation by giving everyone the following choice: get the vaccine, or forfeit some privileges. It's not hard, and it's not without lots of precedent, so it should not be controversial.
      - throwaway55421 5y ago
        Well, you can. France are doing it. They are having 200k daily cases. So it's not really "or", it's just "and". You can either have everyone gets corona, or you can have everyone gets corona plus a miserable digital dystopia, loads of restrictions on everyday life etc. Either way, unless you manage zero covid which is almost universally considered to be impossible at this point in most of the world, your options are still "hide inside forever" or "get corona". Which brings us right back full circle to risk vs reward.

azakai 5y ago

COVID is far less dangerous than in 2020, but it is still a problem - it's not just a "media thing". COVID is still powerful enough to fill our hospitals past their ability to cope, and also we have enough uncertainty about long COVID that it's better to minimize infections. So we are not yet back to normalcy. Why is COVID still that dangerous? Not enough people are vaccinated, and not enough use masks (especially not good masks like N95s), and new variants are making things difficult. It is plausible that during 2022 we do return to something close to normal. But it depends on those three factors.

daveevad 5y ago
> Not enough people are vaccinated Is it not the case that we essentially need to vaccinate everyone in the whole world within a small time period, like 4 weeks, to prevent mutation and vaccine escape?
- azakai 5y ago
  That would let us eradicate it entirely. It's worth trying. But we can still get mostly back to normal without that. If we get enough immunity that the worst COVID causes is a small bump in hospitalization and deaths once or twice a year then we could live with that and just wear masks during those weeks perhaps. We are much, much closer to that goal today than we were a year ago.
  - nradov 5y ago
    It's not possible to eradicate the virus. The vaccines are pretty good at preventing deaths, but they don't reliably prevent infection or transmission. There are also multiple animal reservoirs and those can't be vaccinated at all. The only human viruses we have managed to eradicate are smallpox and (almost) polio. The vaccines for those are generally much more effective, and there are no animal reservoirs.
    - azakai 5y ago
      You're probably right. We'd need a new type of vaccine that is more effective for that to be realistic. There is still hope for that though.

downrightmike 5y ago

Nope, still going to kill a bunch of people and that will curb any real growth. Here's what will happen: April/may cases will be much lower, end of may people will party into June. June/July there will be a uptick until august just before school starts. September cases will climb, get slightly lower in October, then spike the second week of November and then continue until April/may. This is an infectious disease functioning in/on a human system and we well know how this works out. Everything I described above is the schedule for the Spanish flu, and coincidentally, covid. Because that is how humans work and do things. We have not progressed enough in the last 100 years to change this due to the luddite/zealot problems we have.

jpeloquin 5y ago

I also thought widespread vaccination would end the pandemic in the US by mid-2021. I guess vaccination rates have to be very high, maybe > 90%, for that to work? Personally I've redefined my goal for dealing with the pandemic as merely, "I will not give Covid to anyone else," which still seems doable by spacing out social events and testing in between. Although I also find the media's tendency towards sensationalism to be annoying, the media industry and its audience are so fractured now I'm not sure they're the cause of anything. It feels like no one is in control and they (and us) are merely along for the ride. That is, I feel that, due to decentralized mass communication and targeted media delivery, social phenomena is tending towards emergent rather than directed behavior.

imnotreallynew 5y ago
Malta is about at 90%, yet the government is introducing more mandates to the chagrin of residents[0]. There’s been maybe ~three deaths in the entire country over the past couple of weeks; COVID hasn’t even been in the top 5 causes of death for a long time. Yet, you’ll now risk being fined €100 if you’re outside walking by yourself without a mask (of course smoking in restaurants and going to nightclubs is allowed, because that makes freaking sense). Malta was even touting quite a bit about being the first European country to reach herd immunity..back in May. In my opinion, anyone who believes continued restrictions have been about anything other than political theatre and positioning are utterly delusional. 0: https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/this-latest-masks-mandate-risks-backfiring.920869 https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/this-latest-masks-man...
- jpeloquin 5y ago
  So 90% does remove Covid as an ongoing concern? That's encouraging. If you live in Malta, my condolences on dealing with restrictions that, on face value, are overly fearful and internally inconsistent.
  - solresol 5y ago
    Unfortunately not -- look at what is happening in NSW (Australia). >90% vaccination rate, and essentially exponential growth in cases and hospitalisation. The only things that changed were: omicron instead of delta, and the dropping of restrictions with a new premier.

phillipcarter 5y ago

My personal view, which is US-based, is that our government is filled with second-rate people from top to bottom. They have continually failed to communicate clearly about the virus, testing, masking, and vaccines throughout the past two years. They are still not providing good masks. They still talk about "washing your hands". They are not building better ventilation systems. They are not providing good rapid test kits. They are not passing laws that address our countless medical system inefficiencies. And so on, and so on. Anything they are doing feels imperceptible from doing nothing. I think the sad reality is that we're going to have a lot more needless deaths in 2022. People with disabilities that are impacted by COVID will need to keep locking themselves up indefinitely - no government agency will help them, and their communities will ignore their problems. Vaccines will still not be taken by ~1/3 of the population. Is it even worth trying anymore with them? I guess yes, however frustrating, but only because it makes everyone else safer to do so. I do not see how 2022 is terribly different from 2021.

nradov 5y ago
Most disabilities in general don't increase the fatality rate for COVID-19. Besides advanced age, the real risk factors are chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and hypovitaminosis D. Those conditions aren't usually classified as disabilities. Governments and communities can help to an extent by facilitating healthier choices but ultimately the patients have to commit to permanent lifestyle changes if they want to reduce their risks.
- phillipcarter 5y ago
  > Most disabilities in general don't increase the fatality rate for COVID-19. That is correct. And most cases of COVID don't result in death or even severe illnesses. But the point isn't that we should just be happy with the majority we have. I work directly with someone whose disability requires them to take immunosuppressants, and so now the pandemic has forced them to either (a) isolate from the rest of the world, (b) risk their body destroying itself, or (c) risk a more severe infection from COVID than someone else like them might have. > Governments and communities can help to an extent by facilitating healthier choices but ultimately the patients have to commit to permanent lifestyle changes if they want to reduce their risks. The point isn't that the governments and communities directly help those who suffer disabilities that make COVID far more dangerous. They point is that things in the US are far, far worse than they need to be, and there are very real things that the government could do starting right now to make it better, but it isn't.

MrPatan 5y ago

> Does the media just love perpetuating a state of constant crisis? Yes, of course. More clicks for little effort. Many other interests are also aligned. No need for a conspiracy, it's just that if you ask a pharma company or a hospital "how's the pandemic going? the right answer will mean more resources and/or prestige for you!" you can already guess the answer.