There are small steps toward normal life, but most activities are still out of bounds.
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CDC to release guide for life after vaccination—with normalcy still far off
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California, Florida, Texas ... 3 of the most populous states in the USA. Each with very different COVID responses.
Yet so far, all with similar per capita case/death rates.
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I will likely not be thought well of for saying this, but I don't believe that vaccinated people should worry even the slightest bit about what non-vaccinated people think. If I am vaccinated and want to have 100 other vaccinated people to my house (which could only comfortably hold 15 or 20) then I do not see why that would be restricted.
Secondly, I realize that the vaccinations are not 100% effective, but I, like many others who have followed the best practices recommended by the experts, fully intend to one day no longer wear a mask or worry about this. The vaccination is the first step to hitting that point. And if I and other vaccinated people choose to congregate in any number that is simply no one's business outside of those in the group.
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I'm unvaccinated so you don't care what I think. But I suspect (a) you'll be allowed to and (b) the US will continue to lead the world in dying from COVID. And that those two things won't be unrelated.
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I am unvaccinated as well at the moment. But I honestly do not care what you think whether I am vaccinated or not. But when I am vaccinated I will attend social events with as many vaccinated people as I see fit. Not some number that I am told. And at some unforeseen point in the future when the only people who have not been vaccinated in my country are those who chose not to be, then I will cease doing anything unique at all and will go back to pre-COVID life with the possible exception of getting booster shots of the vaccine just like I get the flu shot every year.
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I'm sure the virus will be cowed by your badassness. And the fire marshal as well.
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I am not badass in any way. But at some point society will have to move on after we have done our best to overcome this. I personally am fine if my tax dollars pay for every person in my country and people in other countries to be vaccinated. But those who choose not to be vaccinated will sadly be on their own. I am 48 years old, pretty healthy, and in fairly good shape. If I get vaccinated but manage to get the virus anyway and have symptoms I am likely to be okay. I would certainly take precautions if I was around someone who out and out asked me to because it made them more comfortable, but I believe that will be the exception and not the rule.
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Again how is conspiracy nonsense, they did not just lie (or worse not know) about masks, they have been months behind on the science constantly during COVID. It is taking OpEds to embarrass them to look at the evidence, not just masks but aerosols.
This is not at all what you said in your post. You made excuses for the CDC now you are trying to blame Orange man bad. Its not just CDC mismanagement, WHO has been just as incompetent during COVID with stupid counterproductive messaging, behind on the science. Really no one outside of South Korea should be taking a victory lap in the developed world. Getting back to the CDC they have a change in leadership and it still appears the same problems are occurring that they still treat the public like we are stupid children.
We are not being asked to stay this way a little while longer; it's for the foreseeable future and into 2022 the language being used despite the evidence really suggesting this June or July. Every time there is good news we apparently need a Cochrane study yet every bit of bad news that failed to make it past pre-publication in Vulture Journal is acted upon.
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It is as transmissible and widespread as the common cold. Eradication is 100% impractical on any budget that would ever be considered for a nanosecond.
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Your OP: you're going to follow guidance but you're confused why.
I replied with the reason why: so that we can get out of the crisis sooner.
You decided you should have a party with 100 people in a space that can safely fit 20.
At some point, yes, society will move on from the crisis. Once the crisis is over. Moving on from the crisis while it's still ongoing doesn't make any kind of sense.
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To me, it shows that partial lockdown of varying degrees - with essentially free movement of populations in between - simply don't work. Look at countries like Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia that took Covid 19 seriously. Per capita case/death rates totally different from our own!
In our own country, seems whenever numbers improve from 'devastating' to 'merely very serious' -- one state or another announces partial let up's... or one county or another within a state announces partial let up's... these, coupled with free movement of population, seem to pretty much guarantee upcoming surges again... condemning our entire nation to operate perpetually behind the curve!
With little patience and essentially no discipline, seems only vaccines and eventual 'herd mentality' can save us. Half a million people didn't need to die, but did. And there will be more. We have no Plan B!
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I am truly ambivalent about this.
Don't lie: We can all imagine the sheer panic of 325 million Americans fighting tooth and nail for N95 masks that would make our toilet paper shortages look like child's play!
Lie: China did a FANTASTIC job containing / near eradicating Covid 19 -- and yet, it can't get past the world's finger pointing them for lying those critical first 6 days!
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In fairness, I read the news and it's clear a significant proportion of this country is currently bat-shit crazy. You can draw your own conclusions about why, but I do believe covid-19 is contributing.
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Why do you think we'd be able to eradicate Covid but we've been unsuccessful at eradicating countless other diseases, like e.g. yellow fever? Especially when "we" (the US, first world countries, whatever) have limited control over what everybody else in the world does?
In 10 years, before traveling to an "exotic" foreign country, you'll have to check to see whether or not you need a Covid-19 booster shot just like you check to see what other shots you might need. I don't see how this could possibly be avoided.
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Nothing about this has to be 100% effective. When most people are vaccinated, Rt will drop way below 1 and the virus will fizzle out regardless.
You're arguing this from the point of view that vaccinated people hanging out with each other will cause as much of a problem re: disease transmission as non-vaccinated people. Which there is no evidence to support, and there's a lot of reason to believe otherwise.
So far tens of millions of people have been fully vaccinated worldwide and I don't think there's been a reported case of a vaccinated person transmitting the disease to a non-vaccinated person.
Maybe let's not just assume that this is a problem until there's some reason to actually believe that it's a problem?
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Deaths per million
Australia 35
South Korea 32
New Zealand 5
Fiji 2
Taiwan 0.4
I’ve had citizenship or residency in every one of those countries bar South Korea.
South Korea has done well. But it isn’t the best performing developed country by a long shot.
Australia is lead by sock puppets who would use a respirator for colon cleansing. So I’m not sure how it did so well. It’s probably that the States managed everything instead of the Federal happy clappers. So South Korea’s performance is a meh. Sure it isn’t a screwup like Sweden or a complete train wreck like UK. But it isn’t the best performing developed country by a long shot.
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Optics, for one. Is is a very small easy and inexpensive gesture of kindness towards one's fellow human...
Basic Statistics for another: Vaccinated person has a slight risk of infection... And wearing a mask makes one much less likely to transmit and a little less likely to receive... This probability multiplied by the other probability equals a much lower probability of transmission...
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Now is not the time to lift restrictions. We have new variants spreading which if mutating further might be unaffected by the vaccine. In addition now more and more people get the vaccine nature will select for virus variants which might be immune for the vaccine. Normally these would not get noticed (especially if they are not more contagious) however they can quickly become dominant after the vaccine eliminates the other more susceptible variants. Now if people take no precautions anymore this resistant variant can easily spread further and we be back at where we started.
We are at a point in which we can finally make progress against the virus or we can let our guard down and give the virus a chance to make a comeback.
We are at a point in which we can finally make progress against the virus or we can let our guard down and give the virus a chance to make a comeback.
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It's almost as if the vaccine doesn't really do anything. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the CDC can all go to Hell, I'm going to Texas.
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The key concept: keeping R<1 means the epidemic will eventually end. It’s binary whether it ends or not. But it’s not binary how many people get sick during that “eventually”. The lower R is, the faster the epidemic ends and the fewer people get sick.
Your response has been to assume that vaccination is 100% effective at preventing transmission and require proof that it’s not perfect before believing otherwise. That’s just wishful thinking.
All of this is moot though because it’s clear that Pollyannas far worse than you run the show, given how states are ending NPI measures even before people have been vaccinated — indeed, doing so while case counts are higher than the July peak, and flat or rising. We’re doing the same, just from a lower level of infection, in Quebec.
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The CDC guidance seems to be that the vaccine is useless so we need to continue masks, social distancing, etc forever.
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Wow, opening up months before herd immunity, sorry I mean "herd mentality". Talk about putting the cart before the horse.
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No, just until herd immunity. Then travel restrictions from outside the country are just about it. Too much vaccine hesitancy could put that at risk though.
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You expect rapture this summer, or is the next quarter the limit of how much time you can conceive?
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You might have a point if we weren't about to enter the 2nd year of "2 weeks to flatten the curve".
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Having gotten it myself and having a pretty good idea of the consequences six months out if I wasn't near one of the single-digit infusion sites not being inundated with a horror show of cases with funeral homes matching beside the hospitals with a primary care physician wondering why I waited five days after I was symptomatic to get tested because I underestimated just how bad it was...
Generally by the time you're sick and the time it's too late for you to be saved both tend to come and go before you have any warning or rationality to recognize it. So please, go to Texas and stay away from the 5 million Biden voters there. We'll be eagerly skimming the obituaries for you here the next 3 months.
The heavier you are, the more screwed you are. The older you are, the more screwed you are. The lighter you are, the more crippled you will be.
And of course Texas is utterly merciless with its emergency medical costs, so have fun with bankruptcy, because again you very likely won't recognize you needed medical care as a patient until well past the point it's obvious you did. I can tell you this bluntly with experience that you can't reason your way through it and the luck crapshoot means you are statistically more likely to die or have months or years-long chronic complications with exhaustion, brainfog and memory than have it be a bad memory after one infusion. Assuming you can even get the infusion without paying through the nose even with insurance.
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Right. The odds are so low that the risk of providing this guidance is likely outweighed by the net benefit to get as many people to sign up for the shots as possible. This could be an incentive for people who are on the fence. The thought being that someone who's not sure about getting the vaccine will hear all the things they can do if they've been vaccinated and perhaps consider getting it with the thought that they may be able to return to some form of normalcy sooner. At the end of the day, we need as many people to get the vaccine as possible, and if they won't do it for altruistic reasons, then we should at least try to persuade them by highlighting the selfish reasons for them to do it. Much like our early suspicions for how fomites weren't really much of a risk, I think as the evidence rolls in on real-world vaccine efficacy, I'll continue to stack up on the side of sterilizing immunity until it's a mountain that can no longer be ignored.
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When you get to the point where you're wishing for the death of your political opponents, it might be time to recognize that your obsession with politics is an unhealthy one.
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You’re mad that politicians lied to you about how hard it would be, so you want to move somewhere the politicians lie even more brazenly about how hard it’s going to be?
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But the current day Nazis are even bigger wimps than regular people now, so it would work out just fine, maybe even better.
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I expect politicians to lie, my concern is the CDC and the rest of the medical establishment lying.
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By definition, by the time most of us CAN get vaccinated, most of the US WILL be vaccinated. The CDC needs to make that clear. This is for now, not for then.
It's hilariously optimistic to think Americans will listen to the CDC after most of us are vaccinated. They're already being ignored by large swaths of the country. They need to maintain future credibility by being a little realistic.
It's hilariously optimistic to think Americans will listen to the CDC after most of us are vaccinated. They're already being ignored by large swaths of the country. They need to maintain future credibility by being a little realistic.
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I'd say that Australia was really lucky by geography. It's incredibly huge but mostly empty and dry and hot and they still took shutdowns seriously there, with checkpoints, etc in major cities.
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Look at our Nov-Jan peak. That's what we were able to delay, up until the point where people just gave up. That's what could have started much closer to the beginning, when we knew far less about how to test and treat, if we had failed to flatten the curve. And that's what could have just kept going until the vaccines were ready.
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The vast majority of people (aged under 65) that get infected with COVID have very mild disease, requiring no treatment.
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For that matter, so do the vast majority over 65. Now, you literally have people discussing the need to implement COVID like restrictions every flu season, and if you disagree, you're anti-science, or worse, a Republican, or even worse, a Trump supporter.
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Wearing a mask has always been about protecting other people as well as yourself. That doesn't change after you get vaccinated. As for the science, it's currently unclear how much a given vaccine does to prevent you from spreading the virus (though it seems like it does a lot, does it do enough to protect people? How about immunocompromised people?). Until we know how much a vaccine protects unvaccinated people from infection by unmasked vaccinated people, the responsible and moral thing for vaccinated people to do is to continue to wear a mask.
There's another argument to make here -- people are being vaccinated in tiers that roughly correspond to risk, and there seems to be broad social acceptance that this is the moral choice. Those of us who are not in the priority groups for vaccination are accepting some additional personal risk because we want to protect people who have a higher chance of dying if they get the bug. The least they can do is continue to wear a mask till the rest of us get shots. We live in a society and everybody should act like it.
I don't think I'm going to win the popular opinion on this one, because people really want to stop wearing masks. I don't really get it, to be honest. I haven't been sick in a year and I like that. I'm going to keep wearing a mask when I'm around lots of people in close spaces even after I get a shot. I don't care about "friction with conservative relatives" or other people who can't read good. I'm not going to hang out with them anyway.
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*looks at plummeting infection, hospitalization, and death rates*
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