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?
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.
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.
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.
Very few French are dying of it (like, 300/day), which I'd call a massive success story. Containing COVID is of course out of the question at this point, and I never argued otherwise. However, the risk of life and limb to people who did get vaccinated is nevertheless increased by the presence of those who did not, because the unvaccinated get sick and eat up hospital resources that would then be denied to people who need medical attention for unrelated reasons. Moreover, they increase the risk of spreading COVID to people who cannot get the vaccine (e.g. babies, folks with weak immune systems). So, it really is in everyone's interest to get everyone vaccinated -- everyone's risk of dying a preventable death decreases.
What's the cost of this? Why, it's the very same as the cost of getting most everyone vaccinated for literally anything else we get vaccinated for! No one has a conniption about vaccine regimens for measles, mumps, polio, etc., because the programs for implementing them at scale have been so successful that hardly anyone gets hospitalized or dies from them anymore. Want to attend public school? Get vaccinated. Want to join the military? Get vaccinated. Want to live in a college dorm? Get vaccinated.
The marginal cost of adding one more required vaccine on top of the ones almost everyone regularly gets (and almost no one complains about) in order to participate in normal society is negligeable.
So no, it's not a case of "everyone gets corona" vs "everyone gets corona and we have a miserable digital dystopia", as you put it. It's a choice of "everyone gets corona and a lot of other people needlessly die for want of medical care" vs "everyone gets corona and/or the vaccine, you have to fill one more checkbox on your vaccine card (which already has a dozen or so), and comparatively fewer people die for want of medical care." Life will get back to normal either way; at this point it's really a question of dealing with the selfish, paranoid, delusional, despicable people who would rather see the mass death of their fellow countrymen over having to fill one more checkbox on their vaccine card.
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.
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.
I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, but moving on is an entirely separate issue. We can move on as soon as people stop panicking and decide to accept the risks. In fact that's already happening in some states.
Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that another coronavirus HCoV-OC43 caused another worldwide pandemic starting in 1889. It killed a lot of people. There were no vaccines or effective treatments. The same virus is still endemic today; the only reason it doesn't kill many people today is that most of us get infected as youths and the resulting immunity protects us later in life. People moved on.
Circumstantial evidence - no direct evidence for HCoV-OC43. In fact it is simply conjecture.
It would be instructive to compare the virulence factors encoded in SARS-CoV-2 vs the common cold coronas.
People can move on when Covid stops making people seriously ill and compromising our healthcare systems. That is not yet, indeed the way we are going it may be never. Even if Omicron turns out to be 'mild', the next variant may not be.
I think there's a possibility that omicron may mark the end of this pandemic. Anybody who refuses to get vaccinated will very likely get omicron within the next few weeks. So your immune system will either develop antibodies as a result of being vaccinated, or as a result of being infected. Well, there is the third option of dying from covid, but the current evidence seems to indicate that the risk of hospitalization or death from omicron is lower than from covid-19 or delta.
To be sure, the descendants of the novel coronavirus that appeared in Wuhan in 2019 will float around the human population indefinitely. Omicron isn't the end of covid, but it could be the end of widespread hospitalizations and deaths. At least until the next crisis comes along.
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.
> 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.
Anecdote: I had to go to the ER in 2017 in San Francisco and my experience was exactly like this back then too. It was a ~4 hour wait in the ER waiting room, then another several hours on a bed in a bright loud busy hallway, then some tests, back to the hallway for a few hours, and then emergency inpatient surgery.
Unfortunately that can vary from hospital to hospital, it also depends on how you're triaged.
If you go to SF General, yes, you're in hell. Its an extremely poorly run city hospital that is where most GSW victims go, its busy. If you go to UCSF or CPMC, you'll get world class care.
Seatbelts and drink driving rules don’t totally eliminate car crashes, but they do reduce their frequency and consequences. Likewise vaccines and masks for COVID.
Indeed, if we had 100% vaccine uptake, or 100% sobriety, then all COVID incidents would be vaccinated just as all car crashes would have sober drivers.
“Learning to live with COVID” ought to imply “learning to live with masks and vaccines”, not “lose your sense of smell and be ill for an extra week each year”.
With Seat Belts & Driving rules we still have 45,000 Driving related deaths a year in the US. We don't ban automobiles because that number isn't 0.
Seatbelts and vaccine's are high impact & low-cost. The same cannot be said about every possible driving or covid restriction. Closing schools has a real cost, sending kid's home from school for a week every time they have a fever has a real cost, requiring kids to wear masks for 8 hours a day has a real cost.
We had 38,680 motor vehicle deaths in 2020. We haven't had 45,000 since 1989; 54,000 in 1972. The rate has been steadily decreasing (with a few ups and downs along the way) for about the last 50 years(1), even though miles driven has been steadily increasing(2). This is because we, as a society, as a government, decided to study the problem and implement changes to improve the situation.
Comment I was responding to is complaining about vaccines being “dammed if you do dammed if you don’t”, so you’re shifting the goalposts a bit here by adding the extra restrictions for e.g. closing schools.
> sending kid's home from school for a week every time they have a fever has a real cost,
Hmm. This is what happened to me as a child in the U.K. in the 90s, but perhaps the increasing frequency of both parents working makes this harder now.
Closing schools, sure, that’s got social etc. costs.
> requiring kids to wear masks for 8 hours a day has a real cost.
I don’t see how this is true. Care to elaborate?
Also, your school days are 8 hours? Mine were 09:00-15:30, plus travel time.
>> requiring kids to wear masks for 8 hours a day has a real cost.
> I don’t see how this is true. Care to elaborate?
Kids are developing and need to learn facial non-verbal social cues. It also directly impacts learning, it's harder to understand the teacher, or for the teacher to understand the child. Do you think wearing a mask makes it easier to learn English as a second language? How about dealing with a speech impairment? And overall masking and other policies also just generally makes school less enjoyable more anxiety driven, which also leads to learning loss. They have a real-cost and just as important it is incredibly low-impact when you have other options like vaccination available.
> Also, your school days are 8 hours? Mine were 09:00-15:30, plus travel time.
The base school day sure, but the commute and morning/afternoon activities means masking up for even longer.
Face masks and vaccines will be the new seatbelts and DUI laws at the rate we're going. I predict that certain activities like flying on an airline, going to public school, or working at a job with close quarters will one day require proof of vaccination and/or masking up to participate. Omicron won't be the last variant, and there is no guarantee that a future variant won't come along that is just as virulent but far more deadly.
> I predict that certain activities [...] will one day require proof of vaccination and/or masking up to participate
I think those policies will slowly go-away in the North East & West Coast as the public and media comes to term with how ineffective they are. 96% of the population of my county (including those not eligible) has had it least 1 covid vaccine dose. At some point you just stop benefiting from continued restrictions.
> Omicron won't be the last variant, and there is no guarantee that a future variant won't come along that is just as virulent but far more deadly.
And the next terrorist attack could be even more deadly - stay subscribed for our upcoming report on why you should be more afraid.
Around here the restrictions only happen when the waves happen. I’m not the person you’re replying to here so I have a slightly different expectation: these will come and go regularly until the combination of vaccine and virally induced immunity is sufficient to stop the spread.
> And the next terrorist attack could be even more deadly
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
You obviously can't expect people to continue wearing masks indefinitely. That would be ridiculous.