alioth wrote:
I’m fully expecting to have to take an annual COVID vaccine (just like I do with flu) till the day I snuff it. I don’t see this going away in my lifetime.
Probably, but there may be another outcome – ironically, if the vaccines do not prevent circulation, they will become unnecessary as the disease will act as the vaccine. Everyone will be infected on a regular basis and have enough immunity to prevent severe disease, and babies / children will get infected in their first few years when the disease is mild, or if they are at risk will be vaccinated.
For all we know, the common cold virus is as deadly as Covid-19 if encountered by a >50 year old individual that had absolutely no exposure to it ever before, but since ‘everyone’ gets a cold multiple times in their lives from a young age, the cold is always mild.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Overwhelming of the health systems within a month or so and thereafter total collapse of society due to Millions of deaths per week rather than years, people dying in the streets e.t.c.
On one hand, wish you would turn down the rhetoric / hyperbole (sick people stay at home and die in their beds, and don’t collapse in the streets as people with pneumonia find it difficult to leave their beds, let a lone their home).
On the other hand, once the health system collapses and the case fatality rate goes from around 1% (with treatment, pretty well established now) to around 10% (without treatment, wild guess), people will become a LOT more cautious. And if some economically critical people refuse to leave their homes, there may well be severe shortages which then spiral out of control… so just letting it rip is not really an option.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
If we have a 30% quota of anti vaxxers who refuse taking their share of responsibility in this crisis, we will continue to have thousands of new infections every day for the forseeable future
As long as the anti-vaxxers are the young and less susceptible, that is no problem. We are not trying to prevent infection, we are trying to prevent severe disease. And for those who ARE at risk and still refuse the vaccine – well, as long as there are not too many of those, their problem; society can tolerate them and treating them in the same way that we treat a lot of people with preventable diseases.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
IMHO, there is no other way to eventually reduce the amount of sick people than to totally suspend ALL air travel
What percentage of infections in Switzerland in April were caused by air travel?
Cobalt wrote:
(sick people stay at home and die in their beds, and don’t collapse in the streets as people with pneumonia find it difficult to leave their beds, let a lone their home).
Well, happened in NY during their first wave.
Cobalt wrote:
What percentage of infections in Switzerland in April were caused by air travel?
In the 2nd wave a LOT of cases came out of people travelling “home” to wherever their roots lie. Balkans, Turkey, Spain e.t.c. during last Summer. As most land routes were shut at the time or impaired (multi border crossings with different quarantine regimes) we can safely assume that most of them came and went by air.
Clearly the Brazilian and South African Variants made it here via Air Travel, which other way do you see they could get to Europe? And how would the thing have travelled so fast all over the world without Air Travel from/to China?
Shutting down air travel isn’t going to help if you have a rogue / criminal regime like the CCP who denied the existence of Covd-19 for far too long. If they had acknowledged the problem right away, there would have been no pandemic. Shutting air travel down now is like closing the proverbial barn door after the horse has bolted.
Where I partly agree with you are Brazil and South Africa. Brazil especially should be quarantined 100%, but again – it is run by a criminal regime, similar situation to the CCP.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Well, happened in NY during their first wave.
How many people “died in the streets”? I mean outside the sensationalist press coverage.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
In the 2nd wave a LOT of cases came out of people travelling “home” to wherever their roots lie. Balkans, Turkey, Spain e.t.c. during last Summer. As most land routes were shut at the time or impaired (multi border crossings with different quarantine regimes) we can safely assume that most of them came and went by air.
What proportion of cases does constitute “a LOT”?
Your assertions do not fit the facts. Actually, Turkey needed protection from the highly infectious Swiss from October until March, if you sent out everyone to Turkey during that period they would have done better…
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Clearly the Brazilian and South African Variants made it here via Air Travel, which other way do you see they could get to Europe?
You do have an argument there – but the Kent variant only needed a tunnel, and the hundreds of not-so-prominent-variants make it through the population anyway. IMO this only delays the inevitable.
Quite explicitly, delaying the inevitable was the game from the beginning: use (damaging and freedom-constraining) restrictions to hold the virus at bay until the vaccine cavalry arrives.
172driver wrote:
Shutting down air travel isn’t going to help if you have a rogue / criminal regime like the CCP who denied the existence of Covd-19 for far too long.
We (as most western countries) currently have more challenges with the British and the South African Virus than with the original one. Shutting down any kind of travel would have help tremendously if the goal is to avoid infections and deaths – and compared to road traffic air travel is easier to shut down and has less consequences if you do so.
Germany has been quite strict with many measures (although we never had a real lockdown) esp. with closing borders and restricting travel. The success of this policy so far has been that the fatality numbers are only half of what other countries had to suffer from.
One can always argue if about 80.000 saved lives are worth the (mostly economic) downsides. But it is hard to negate the fact that the German policies actually saved these lives e.g. compared to California.
Cobalt wrote:
What proportion of cases does constitute “a LOT”?
According to what we were told at the time the 2nd wave was started almost exclusively by this travel and by the fact that those countries allegedly fluked their numbers in order not to kill summer tourism and their “own” population being able to flock “home” as they (and we) do every year. I believe it: We also are half of that origin and we did travel twice to Bulgaria, even though “reason” said not to and it was a horrid experience. If they are not kept from travelling by the law and by enforcement, asking for reason and for self restriction does not work at all. The pull “home” is way too strong for many, quite a few even chose to travel illegally. Shows the dark side of immigration for economical reasons. Things in that regard were much safer in the times when people were not allowed to just go and live in other countries and I am starting to think for many reasons, it was better for many of them to stay in their own world rather than just work somewhere else but have their heart at home.
Turkey should have closed their borders but also they needed tourism and they would not deny their ethnic diaspora entry to the country which they deem home. Same problem.
But yes, that is pretty much what is going on: Countries outside Europe need to be protected from undisciplined Europeans. Europe will for a long time stay the pariah in this pandemic and will most probably (or rather should) be shunned for travel for some years to come.
172driver wrote:
Shutting air travel down now is like closing the proverbial barn door after the horse has bolted.Where I partly agree with you are Brazil and South Africa. Brazil especially should be quarantined 100%, but again – it is run by a criminal regime, similar situation to the CCP.
The CCP are hugely responsible but once they got going, they had it under control bloody quick. 2-3 months max and the virus is gone. Criminal or not, for the purpose of fighting a pandemic, regimes like this and people used to discipline and harsh consequences for disobediance are at a very clear advantage.
Apart, Look at Asia today. They almost stamped it out, almost all of them and not by far are all those who did dictatorships. NZ and Australia aren’t and it was tough there too but they got it done.
Shops and bars etc are finally re-opening here, after ~ 4 months of a really horrid lockdown which has driven a lot of people crazy. The reason for it was to avoid a 3rd lockdown here (which the mainland is unfortunately getting now) and they are vaccinating people as fast as they can to achieve that, and clearly they will unless a new strain emerges.
Asia is different in many ways… routine wearing of masks in many places undoubtedly helps a lot.
Peter wrote:
The reason for it was to avoid a 3rd lockdown here (which the mainland is unfortunately getting now) and they are vaccinating people as fast as they can to achieve that, and clearly they will unless a new strain emerges.
That is a mistake and they will pay for it with higher numbers.
Maybe it is time to reckognize that bars and restaurants are a thing of the past, as is the live entertainment industry. I guess shops can be kept safe if people wear masks…
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Maybe it is time to reckognize that bars and restaurants are a thing of the past, as is the live entertainment industry. I guess shops can be kept safe if people wear masks…
Yuval Noah Harrari describes this thinking in his book Sapiens in a fantastically coherent way. It is called the ‘’our boys did not die for nothing’’ syndrome. In a similar way people die at the front (WW1 and WW2, gulf War, Religious terrorism etc) for an imaginary story, the altar of sacrifice is filled with the carcasses of our youth, business and any sense of freedom to the delusion the world is ending because of COVID19.
The higher the suffering from the sacrifices we make, the stronger the need to clinch to the imaginary story that the end is near. All of our sacrifices would have been for nothing, so we double (or triple) down. Tourism is dead, millions of small business owners have lost everything and thousands of restaurants and bars will never open their doors again.
Admitting it was all ’’useless’’ and admitting these measures were without grounds and were founded in lies and half truths is something that is simply unacceptable to the mind. These consequences are not the ’’fault’’ of the virus, they are the direct consequences of the respective governments (as are the closures over the past 15 years of hospitals and the reduction in staff to man those hospitals, for which we all pay with our freedoms now).
Politically there was the need for draconian measures and sacrificial gestures in the form of freedom restrictive measures but I remain baffled by the fact arguably smarter than average people (they allow us to fly planes for ***sake ;-)) would support wave 3 of butchery (and I’m not talking about the virus but about the destructive measures).
@ mooney I understand you might be scared and may have been personally touched by the virus directly. But we need to put things into perspective. Like you, I depend on the Swiss health system, own business there and have part of my income from Switzerland. I pay taxes, vote and enjoy the country.
So far less than 10K people have died in Switzerland, the health system was never in any trouble and people weren’t ‘’dying in the streets’’ as you have previously claimed. This is on a 6Mio population, with ski resorts remaining open, most shops (GVA intelligently decided to go their own way for much of the ’’crisis’’) remaining open and no real lockdown.
