[WalterGR]

> let's be honest: they haven't been anywhere near the panacea hoped for, and a lot of the pseudo-promises made around a return to normalcy haven't been kept.

Isn't the latter caused in part by the former?

> Instead, the goal posts keep changing.

Have the goal posts moved or did the vaccines not make it to the goal line? You can't have it both ways.

[LurkingPenguin]

The vaccines appear to be providing very good protection against hospitalization and death. This was the original goal -- to keep people from getting super sick and dying. Then the focus shifted to preventing infection entirely. However once it became clear that the vaccines didn't provide sterilizing immunity, a lot of places remained focused on cases.

If you plot cases versus deaths in countries like the US and UK, it's clear that the vaccines are doing what we needed them to do most and as more and more people have some level of immunity (either through vaccines or prior infection) the virus is looking less and less menacing.

It's true that COVID continues to strain hospital systems, primarily because of unvaccinated patients and vaccinated patients who are high-risk to begin with (due to age, immunocompromisation and comorbidities), but getting out of the "overwhelmed hospitals" situation is going to be really, really difficult. Resource and staffing shortages didn't just begin when COVID started. According to Becker's Hospital Review, "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."[1]

Between the large populations of vaccinated individuals and those with natural immunity, it's getting harder and harder to justify maintaining restrictions indefinitely on the basis that SARS-CoV-2 naive individuals in certain populations (namely the elderly, overweight/obese and diabetic) and high-risk vaccinated individuals are filling ICUs that were already routinely at 80-90% capacity before the pandemic.

At some point, learning to live with the virus also involves accepting that we can't shut all of society down when ICUs fill up.

[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc...

[forgingahead]

I think the parent you're replying to and you are in agreement - the vaccines have turned out not to be magic exit to this, regardless of vaccination rate, so returning to normalcy isn't possible yet without overwhelming healthcare systems. So it's either start-stop for the near future again, or the ugly alternative where the systems get overwhelmed.

No good answers unfortunately, either way people suffer.