I think we’ll all agree that federal leadership was absent last year; that governors were on their own to make massively impactful decisions; and that each state decided differently.
Actually, we still don’t have national leadership on the pandemic. Biden seems to defer to the CDC, but as we’ve discussed, that agency has lost it’s gold star credibility rating. And how could the Biden administration change what happened last year anyway? Plus now the covid epidemic in the US at least seems to be a progressively diminishing threat.
One thing we shouldn’t forget is that it wasn’t just restaurants that got wacked. They were the most visible and extensive, maybe, but many other business sectors were affected.
I haven’t followed what all 50 governors have done since last year February, but I’ve followed and lived through everything that’s happened in CA. Memories can be short, as you yourself have pointed out, but last year was a morass, month by month. It’s hard to remember/reconstruct the exact sequence of events, but it was a mess.
I think the Biden administration is doing OK. Vaccinations are going smoothly and they’re adjusting strategies as necessary, e.g. reallocating doses among states. They got more relief passed, including the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. They’re not ignoring science in favor of putting politics, pseudoscience, or conspiracy theories.
I think it is readily apparent that vaccinated people should not be wearing masks and restaurants should be fully open. The CDC was just stating the obvious.
The CDC statement that fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks is solid science. If you’re vaccinated, you’re not a significant risk to the unvaccinated. Arguments for vaccinated people to continue to wear masks are not based on science but on the presumed untrustworthiness of the unvaccinated.
Whether it’s sound public health policy for restaurants to be fully open depends on the level of community spread and the percentage of people who are unvaccinated. If R is higher than 1, it’s irresponsible to loosen any restrictions.
I’m not really sure what your point is b/c the CDC guidelines are not simply about restaurants and what is “obvious” may or may not be reflected in prevailing laws, may only be applicable to certain settings and not at all in others, and may have no bearing on what vendors/businesses are contractually obligated to follow.
::shrug::
Statistical analysis is def not my area of expertise (and I think there are posters here who do work in this area), but this article explains why giving R as much significance as you’re suggesting might not be a good idea. Not sure if there’s been any further updates since then. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02009-w
The nature paper is quite good (and widely circulated) as it nicely describes the problems with measuring (or better estimating) R. It has relatively little meaning for virologists as it is used an estimation but not a directly measured value.
I have doubts we will ever reach 80% in the US of fully vaccination. And as a consequence will see something like what happens currently in Vietnam also in the US in the future
Nobody knows what percentage would result in herd immunity, but if you’re fully vaccinated, you’re currently safe.
Vietnam’s increase in cases nay have more to do with only 0.1% of the population being vaccinated than with a new variant, though obviously the health minister might want to emphasize the latter.
Level of vaccination plays an important role but it is also clear that the efficacy of the vaccines against new strains is slowly going down (95 → 88% doesn’t sound like much but it is actually a significant drop for a vaccine just half year administered) and the virus will continue to mutate rapidly
I’m still skimming this, but a key part of the article says
What we know about coronavirus so far suggests that, if we were really to go back to a pre-pandemic lifestyle, we would need at least 70% of the population to be immune to keep the rate of infection down (“achieve herd immunity”) without restrictions on activities. But this level depends on many factors, including the infectiousness of the virus (variants can evolve that are more infectious) and how people interact with each other.
At least one state has reached 70% of the population having rec’d a single dose. Many are far below that. I’m not sure if vaccinations rates have plateaued, but, given how quickly this virus seems to mutate, even in the US, we might be playing “catch up,” rather than getting “ahead” of it in the US (let alone in other countries where the vaccination rate is far, far lower).
So far, the vaccines have proven effective against the variants. That could change, but mutations that make the virus more transmissible don’t make vaccinated people more likely to have symptoms, become seriously ill, or die. And natural selection would seem to favor variants that are more likely to be asymptomatic.
So far with diminishing efficacy and natural selection will drive it to lessen the efficiency of the vaccines.
The current data shows the opposite with the “Indian” variant for example being more transmissible and leading to less vaccine efficacy (which translates to higher hospitalization, deaths etc. 95 → 88%)
No - the virus doesn’t care from a selection process if the host is symptomatic or asymptomatic but where it can produce the highest viral load without killing (but weakening) the host (and data so far is mixed if this happens in symptomatic or asymptomatic hosts$
The novel coronavirus will be around and mutate forever. We need to get our heads around that fact and learn to live with it. If we bit our nails every time the 150 variants of the primary influenza virus mutated, we’d have no fingernails. This past year the number of deaths from covid-19 was more than ten times that in a very bad flu year (in the US), but that won’t go on forever.
An 88% vaccine efficacy against any disease is still remarkably high. Annual boosters, as with influenza shots, will become pretty standard, IMO, and a point will come where the number of deaths per year will be similar to influenza (30 - 60 thousand in the US). How much public, media, and government attention is paid to those deaths? I think the same will eventually be the case with covid-19 and its mutations.
Virologists have to guess at which influenza mutations are likely to be most problematic in a given year, and so the flu vaccines are only 50% effective. Combine that with the fact that only about 50% of the population even bothers to get the annual shot, and you have 75% of the population vulnerable. Each year. A parallel may well be likely in the future with covid.
We may not get to true “herd immunity” against covid-19, but a certain level of community resistance may develop naturally over time. Some have said that the very low rates of covid infections in places with very low vaccination rates (e.g., Japan, Vietnam), where almost everyone thereby remains susceptible to covid-19, can be attributed to an innate resistance deriving from prior exposure to related viruses.
I won’t repeat all the wrong points you bring up again and again which clearly show that you haven’t understood yet the key difference between influenza and covid virus, it’s effects in humans, how vaccines work, how herd immunity works etc.
Thanks for asking. Well, I’ve read the same thing in a number of places. It’s speculative, which is why I said “some have said”. But if you Google for something like “Asian resistance to covid-19” you’ll come up with a number of articles that contain this explanation, as posited by quite a few scientists. Anyway, for starters, here’s a quote from a January 8, 2021 article in worldcrunch.com.
According to the researcher, East Asia populations have therefore naturally developed a form of resistance to SARS-CoV-2. This is because they have already been exposed, over the course of their lives, to a multitude of other less ferocious cousins of the coronavirus. “It’s not just MERS or SARS, but many other viruses of a similar type which are circulating,” he says. “This explains why the death toll is so low in East Asia.”