Then I expect you will be surprised. As far as health policy is concerned, the status of single individuals won't matter. You count as a point on a scoreboard. You were in the first half of the line, took your shot. Congratulations, you scored, now stand over there, and wait for everyone else in line to finish the game. You don't get to get bored, immediately declare victory and demand the start of a new game because you finished your shooting task for Team Human. Team COVID and the rest of Team Human is still on the floor, and you and everyone else will have to wait. Strapped businesses aren't going to spend labor costs to sort who is safe and who isn't. It will either be vaccination requirements to enter, or masks in high density locations. IMO, Disney is going to bet on enough people willing to mask up a little longer, than telling the vaccination hesitant to stay home and not spend money with them.
I think we will have to reach two thresholds for the removal of all restrictions. Vaccination uptake will be one of the check boxes. Virus prevalence will be another one. I think we are going to have to get through next winter and see if we have a resurgence. I don't think we'll reach the vaccination uptake levels until Fall, and so it will just be easier to keep the extremely cheap restriction of masks through the end of the year. Distancing will go away sooner because of economics.
Vaccination uptake is going to come down to trust in the medical community, and trust in government. I think it would be stupid to tell the hesitant that, "Because you have experienced a medical or a government situation to generate high levels of mistrust (especially minority populations)," we are going to make you mistrust us even more by blaming you for your hesitation and leaving you to your fate. I know why humans on message boards will blame the people who are hesitant, but I don't think it will become policy.
It’s not a matter of being bored, it’s a matter of no longer posing a danger to others. Masks are cheap, but useless if the person wearing them doesn’t have COVID and is 95% certain not to become infected or give it to others. I’m perfectly amenable to vaccine requirements in order to enter.
I suspect you will be surprised at how quickly masks and other restrictions are dropped after a highly effective vaccine becomes widely available.
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle here. Meaning, I don't think many businesses are going to make vaccine specific exceptions and manage those interactions differently than the manage all interactions. That requires extra overhead which isn't worth it while the number of people with the vaccine is low. Businesses that are harder impacts are likely to do the extra overhead while ones that are not will not bother. So, while a cruise ship is a good candidate for vaccinated specific rules, a grocery store is not. Joe's coffee shop down the street isn't likely to implement the extra overhead and continue to require one standard for everyone.
However, once the vaccine is available in quantity, I think the uptick will be very quick. Beyond the general anti-vaccine group, I think most reluctance is tied to viewing it's release as a political task not a scientific evaluated one. The more it's shown to not have political tricks releasing, the more people will want to take it. We're already seeing this attitude change. By the time it's generally approved, not just EUA, and available in quantity the perception should have fully changed.
Once widespread uptick is possible and occurring, I think we'll see rapid decreases in cases and transmission. Maybe not in a single month, but certainly faster than 6 months or a year. Over those few months as transmission decreases, we'll see changes. This assumes it doesn't take a year to get availability in quantity. If availability takes that long, early recipients are going to have to deal with mitigation items longer than they would like.
Last I heard from Fauci was the end of next year at the earliest if all goes well with vaccine approval and distribution. He did an interview within the last week
Dammit. I "rescheduled" not cancelled our trip twice already. Just because it's a year later, it's not cancelled. Not looking forward to doing it again. If we could get those few months to start sooner, that would be nice.
I think you may be overestimating the number of people who spread it with no idea they were a risk to spread it. Here is an example (I've actually heard a few similar stories):
My brother is an assistant coach for a youth baseball team. In the third inning of a game two weeks ago, they were informed that a kid who was playing in the game just got a positive test result and needed to leave. His mom had symptoms a few days earlier and tested positive. The kid got tested due to the close contact with his mom even though he was asymptomatic. However, he continued his normal life until he received a positive test result. He should have quarantined just from the close contact with a positive (and symptomatic) case. I think there are at least hundreds of thousands of stories like this.
I've read a bunch of stories like this. They're sad every time. In this one, at least the kid got tested and he was only exposing people for a few days. I've read some where the contact didn't get tested because they had no symptoms. Then, 5 or 6 days later they develop symptoms, get a test, resulting in a positive a few days later. They've been exposing people for a solid week by then.
@DisneyCane is absolutely correct, this kid should have quarantined. The guidelines actually say he should have quarantined for longer than the original infected person, the test was optional, with either result should have quarantined, and only needed a test if symptoms showed up.
People also wildly overestimate the number of people who actually have it, but I see that more from the few people who post often here than out in real life. I wish our news media were more about informing and less about sensationalizing. This virus is bad enough without all the hyperbole and fear-mongering.
I've tried to do the math a couple of times in this thread to estimate the percentage of potential spreaders out of the population at any given time. I just get hammered for minimizing the situation and admonished that "you don't know if you are in the tiny percentage of the population that is asymptomatic and contagious."
I've been thinking this through more, and I think the problem is being thought of wrong, leading to the wrong math. My thought is this is more like the Birthday Paradox math, and hence not linear. If a bunch of people interact, the question isn't "what's the probability that I get COVID", it's "what's the probability that COVID is transmitted between two people". Since any transmission increases spread and means we have to keep dealing with the question of transmission again and again. For those unfamiliar, if you ask 23 random people for their birth month and day, there's an over 50% chance two of them will match. At 50:50, it's a pretty good bar bet, if there are more than 23 random people to ask. It's also very different than if you ask 23 people if their birthday is the same as your own, which is way worse odds.
Nope. A highly effective vaccine available to all who want it is the goal. Once that point is reached it is unreasonable to ask the population to take steps to reduce spread which will be 90% or more among people who voluntarily didn't get vaccinated.
The original goal of all the measures was simply to "flatten the curve" not have a sustained reduction in the number of cases.
To me, it’s COVID hospitalizations and deaths. Once those are controlled (however we get there), remove all restrictions, put everything back to normal.
Restrictions should be lifted once hospitalization and death rates have dropped to an "acceptable level". A vaccine should get us there, but if it doesn't restrictions may have to continue.
No, a vaccine is not the goal, the vaccine is just a tool. If hospitals are getting overwhelmed with people who are sick with a virus, then it makes sense to put precautions in place to prevent that from happening. Having a vaccine available doesn't magically make it ok for hospitals to be overwhelmed.
A vaccine isn't the goal, it's a tool to get to the goal.
Reducing hospitalizations is a goal to protect the healthcare system, but it's not a direct COVID goal, more of a side effect.
Reducing deaths from COVID is a goal, but really it's more of a side effect goal too.
Reducing COVID infections and it's ability to spread is the goal.
By reducing infections and spread, we reduce hospitalizations, reduce deaths, reduce long term impacts, reduce short term impacts. That's the goal.
- We could do it through rapid testing and contact tracing. Requires lots of resources and only works when community spread is low, need to get to low first.
- We could reduce community spread to lower by restricting interactions and taking steps to make interactions less likely to be infectious. This requires active measures by people and is disruptive.
- We cold do through complete and total lockdowns, stop all interactions completely. This is super disruptive and not practical.
Using a vaccine to reduce spread which will reduce who is infected is the easiest for an individual, since it requires no effort beyond getting the vaccine. Since the vaccine directly reduces spread regardless of the interaction, it's easier to implement than reducing interactions. Since the vaccine reduces who becomes infected, it reduces the need for contact tracing and testing.
Yes, he has downplayed it in statements. However, the White House Coronavirus Task Force was formed on 1/29/20, with Fauci the great on it from Day 1. The President followed the recommendations of the task force, especially in the beginning and supported the shutdown (aka "15 days to slow the spread" and then "47 days to slow the spread.")
Doing better depends upon the definition of better. If you believe that getting the States on board with a nationwide mask mandate is "doing better" then somebody else could have done better. If you define better as strong arming for stricter and longer term restrictions then somebody else could have done better. Since doing the latter would have necessarily led to a worse economy (at least in the short term) I don't believe that Hillary Clinton would have done it. Do you really think she would have won reelection if the economy was even worse than it is now, people would have been restricted for months on end and she could only point to a hypothetical number of lives saved?
The only thing that would have led to a drastically different situation now would have been to lock down the country in early February, before there were any known cases in the US and not reopen until high quality tests were developed and deployed in high quantity. Then, maybe a test and contact trace strategy would have worked to keep it under control after the reopening. Not a single politician would have supported such an action given the information available at the time, even knowing that it was contagious and deadly. Fauci certainly knew at least as much, if not more than President Trump in January and he was also downplaying it back then.
That doesn't mean that somebody else in office would have led to a dramatically different situation now. Short of implementing very strict and very long lockdowns, I don't think any world leader can really do anything to significantly change the course of the pandemic until there is wide availability of a vaccine.
The entire task force did poorly. There's an entire world of things that could have been done and were not done by the president or the task force. No matter who was on it, the task force as group did a horrible job.
Someone more interested in dealing with COVID in general instead of just the messaging would have done better.
A lock down is NOT the only thing that would have made a difference.
Of the top of my head:
- Central leadership on solutions and guidance for local implementation.
- Ramp of of contact tracing.
- Funding and ramp up of rapid testing.
- Federal funding for locally implemented actions.
- Central ramp up of PPE production and procurement.
- Consistent messaging of how to reduce spread.
- Support for the actions that would reduce spread
- Leadership, even without enforcement, of the public actions that would reduce spread.
Please stop saying "only thing that would have led to a drastically different situation now would have been to lock down the country", this is simply not true.
Edit: That is a giant wall of text, but wow this thread adds posts fast.
abc7.com
