LFHNflightstudent wrote:
And even there it is only workable if you stay isolated forever…
Or until your population is vaccinated.
Malibuflyer wrote:
The perception, however, in Germany is that we are in the middle of a Monster Wave while as you report in California it feels like pandemic is over.
I guess trends and new infection rates might have something to do with it, along with the effect of lockdowns on normal life etc.
dublinpilot wrote:
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
And even there it is only workable if you stay isolated forever…
Or until your population is vaccinated.
The problem is you have X% who refuse a vaccine and Y% who are contra-indicated. Then U18s. That’s still a good chunk of people for it to spread around and mutate into new variants.
The interesting thing (and I don’t suppose we can predict it at all) is where R will end up for a hypothetical country which is as fully vaccinated as it’s possible to be and sees extensive international travel in/out without quarantining or testing (or anything else that is long-term unsustainable)….. does that allow the virus to keep a foothold?
I suspect the virus will always have a foothold: it’s now here to stay and we just have to live with it like the flu and other viruses. We’ll still be needing vaccinations in 25+ years time, it won’t be eliminated.
@Silvaire beat me to it. L.A. County (pop. around 10 Mio) currently has 5-6 new daily cases per 100.000 inhabitants. Source NYT.
Germany has 139 new cases per 100.00, source Der Spiegel
Of course the above figures bring us back to the discussion about metrics. AFAICT testing has declined sharply here, as the big test centers have been converted to vaccination centers. And herein lies the real progress – the by now universal access to vaccination. As I stated earlier, it is now possible to get same-day appointments (two of my friends did just that in the past days) and the access will expand to all age groups 16+ next week. Restaurants and cinemas are open, bars also with restrictions. Of course there is an uptick in cases as people start to let their guard down, but this will soon be blunted by the vaccination rate, currently around 3 Mio/day across the US with some days topping 4 mio/day. I don’t have the daily figures for L.A., but the county dashboard shows 4mio doses total, data here.
Graham wrote:
The problem is you have X% who refuse a vaccine and Y% who are contra-indicated. Then U18s. That’s still a good chunk of people for it to spread around and mutate into new variants.
That’s true, but I don’t think any country is planning on keeping it out forever. They simply plan to keep it out until everyone who wants to be protected has been protected. If you are offered a vaccine and you choose not to take it, then you are on your own!
By the way, it looks like U18’s will be vaccinated before the year is out too.
I simply do not understand why it takes so long.
What is the bottleneck that prevents the capacity from increasing, say, five-fold? It certainly isn’t distribution and the actual vaccination. What is it we did not do a year ago that constrains the capacity?
It’s the production process.
Certainly for the AZ vaccine, making it is not like making widgets. It’s a biological process, more akin to brewing beer or growing crops. Some batches have a good yield, others less so.
Last week I planted twelve tomato seeds (four each of three different varieties) because I plan for six plants (two of each) in the greenhouse when we get to summer. As of this evening, seven have germinated and maybe one or two more will. For the ones that do not, I haven’t done anything wrong. Sometimes they just don’t.
I think a year ago nobody thought it was still going to be running a year later.
A year ago I spoke to a top level hospital guy and he said it will be carnage in April and will be all over by May, like all the other respiratory epidemics which kill a few tens of k in the UK each winter. I spoke to him again recently and he said it was “carnage” just now (and worse).
For me it is not especially surprising with a new virus for which there is almost no immunity in the population at all. I cant imagine why anyone thought it would just fizzle out (and I know that might seem easy to say with hindsight, but I really do think this was a reasonable prediction).
Like every virus that is highly contageous it will fizzle along probably for as long as there are sufficient people in the population that havent been vaccinated. More worrying is the risk it will throw up the odd variant that may challenge existing vaccines. Such is the constant battle between our technology and evolution.
