There is lots of competition for the top of the stupidity list.
NYC locking down all summer and then 'opening up' in September seemed top of the list to me. It's not that I thought they should have stayed locked down the entire time, its that they should have opened in the summer so they could lock down in the winter if they really needed it. But seriously though, locking down in the summer to only open up in flu season, really?
Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity. or the fact people still want to lock down despite how epically they have failed. Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic. They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America. To no fault of their own, they are hardest hit by the pandemic, and the US sharing a border with them the way it is meant no rosy outcome was in our future.
Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science.
Or what about the fact we are 2 years into this and we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals? if we had to lock down because of lack of hospital beds, well we better f'ing demand they have enough hospital beds, like real soon. This is why the lockdowns should have came at a price, you want to lock down then we need a metric that you are trying to achieve by the lockdown, we need timely updates on your progress to that metric, and we need an action plan such that this will never happen again (such as building more hosptials - hey, how about just opening the thousands we shut down in the last 5 years to make hospitals more profitable!). my views on that were called 'myopic'. so we gave them lockdowns without restrictions, and nothing was done. here we are in the same situation, odd.
As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
edit: just to be clear - I am not anti vax, I am vaccinated and I recommend to everyone to do the same. There is unrefutably evidence the vaccine prevents sever cases.
> Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity
New Zealand had 26 deaths in over a year of the pandemic. Not 26 per 100k population. Not 26 per day. Twenty six people full stop. Because in fact "We go hard and we go early" works.
Right now they are locked down (since last week) because they had one case in their community, but of course it isn't ever one case and they knew that, since that lockdown began there are now over 100 patients linked to that single infection. Under a lockdown the people who are surprised to discover that they're infected are (mostly) bored at home, not out infecting yet more people.
I think there's a fair chance they'll beat it again, and exit that lockdown as they did earlier ones. Because elimination strategy works.
"small", "remote", and "island" aren't significant direct contributions here.
"seal" does -- whether any group is collectively capable of taking chain-of-exposure and its management seriously.
Make your island arbitrarily small and remote but have even a single person who's boating/flying or any kind of unmanaged travel outside the bubble regularly and you'll see infection overrun the island.
Pick an arbitrarily large city within miles of another on a shared continent with an unmanaged pandemic. Have it populated with people who are unified in careful contact management and they'll keep outbreaks scarce and small.
It's far easier to have a successful seal on a remote island than the Czech Republic or Alabama. Land borders are both more secure and more porous than you'd think.
Nobody really needs to go to New Zealand unless they’re from there. London is an international hub for multiple industries. It’s much harder to prevent people from traveling there.
we never shut the airports (or the channel tunnel). If you arrived in the UK you were told to quarantine, but not made to.
Also our politicians are deeply incompetent and were the only ones in Europe (AFAIK) aiming for herd immunity right off the bat, until they eventually ran the numbers on death rates if the ICUs ran out of capacity and realised it was a terrible idea.
Right, so it's far more to do with institutions and policy than it is to do with how big an ocean you're in. NZ could have done the exact same thing - kept flights going, asked people politely to quarantine, etc.
Very true, but if you're a country with porous borders then it's going to be much harder to enforce. Border control is a prerequisite to enforcing transit quarantine, as well as having said rules in place, and border control is easier for an island.
Britain is so close to continental Europe that being an island is irrelevant. Also, it has a population of 66 million compared to NZ’s 5 on just as small an island.
1. New Zealand isn't "an island", there's two, one is slightly bigger and has less people.
2. Is your implication that the UK is so close to the mainland that the covid numbers are high due to people coming over in rafts? In that case the UK should have lower covid numbers because it has a much larger navy covering a the english channel, irish sea, and the north sea. Where as NZ has to cover the entire south pacific.
1. Sure, it's a figure of speech. And the number is way greater than two, if we're going to be nitpicky.
2. My point is that there's way more people entering, leaving, and going from A to B for whatever reason. Not trying to judge people, just stating a fact here.
It is far easier to lock down an island chain of 5 million people than it is to lock down a city of 8.5 million people.
But China knows how to do it, and they have much more density than the USA. You just need to be very authoritarian; e.g. marching people under guard to quarantine hotels from airplanes.
Right, I will second this, our law enforcement shut down the Florida Keys at what we call he 18 mile stretch. No one that is not a resident was allowed in. for a good deal of time it worked and to be honest, I am thankful that they did, as at that moment in time, we did not know what we where looking at.
Yeah, that's not happening in the U.S. Not without starting a civil war.
"Later the policy became even more aggressive, with officials going door to door for health checks, and forcing anyone ill into isolation. A disabled boy reportedly died after he was left without food, water or help when his his father and brother were quarantined."
I'd argue that a 'strict lockdown' is, in itself, rather draconian. Almost by definition, it requires heavy policing of an individual's life and almost total surveillance of their movements.
If by 'strict lockdown' you mean 'Ask people to limit their movements and preferably just stay at home' then maybe that's not quite so draconian.
Oh really? Is it possible to shut down the birthday parties and holiday gatherings my neighbors were having during the height of the winter peak without being draconian?
Being a remote island nation really doesn't make much difference in the era of Air travel. It has (had) very high immigration rates and a lot of tourists.
every single person traveling through an international airport is concentrated and processed in a way that people driving from alabama to florida are not. that makes an extraordinary difference.
Also, a country with a GDP the size of the U.S. state of Oklahoma mind you (New Zealand's G.D.P 204,671, Oklahoma's G.D.P. 206,058 (in USD million, 2019, according to the IMF) [1]
[1]
Comparison between U.S. states and sovereign states by GDP
It gives you a general idea, how significant or insignificant an economy is and also roughly how many other moving parts of the global economy it has complex gears in.
And thereby how many more fold damages can result from a catastrophic shutdown of the country, something a small geographically-on-the-periphery-of-the-world nation need not worry about, to the same degree.
NZ isn't North Korea. It's not a hermit jurisdiction relying on its own internal economy. It relies a lot on trade with the rest of the world - it gets a lot of money from exports and relies a lot on imports (everything here is depressingly expensive for that reason).
Hell I'm even able to connect to communicate you using internet (the exact same kind you get in Oklahoma).
You got it all in reverse. Large countries are much less affected by this as they are more self sufficient. Small countries have far more open economies and depend far more on import and export to work. They are too small to make everything themselves.
Except that's completely wrong. All the costs are borne by the citizens of NZ. Someone who can't go to work in NZ is just as affected as someone who can't go to work in the US. The difference is, and was, in the government's response in assisting those bearing those costs.
Wait until they actually open up. They are just delaying the inevitable. Then again there’s no reason to go indoors in crowds in NZ—not like they have an arts scene, or anything, really, besides the outdoors.
Yes. For small island countries like New Zealand it works "great." This was never an option for countries like the US, or even most of Europe. Much less so for countries like India.
But we'll see how it goes. If New Zealand and Australia persist in this notion that they're going to stay locked down until the virus goes away, particularly with its endemicity now inevitable, I think you will soon find vast swaths of those countries in open, violent revolt.
I live in NZ and can assure you from the front lines of the revolt that we don't think we're going to stay locked down until the virus goes away.
The game has always been to play it by ear. That's been a great call so far, we've lived normal lives for the last year while incredible scientific advances have delivered vaccines.
This is a long game, and we've done well in the first quarter. I hope the politicians continue making good calls as the game goes on.
Don't assume that because we locked down hard that that will always be the path forward. That's your straw man talking.
While not disagreeing with that, I think we can continue to eliminate. During level-4, the R value is clearly lower than 1.0 meaning the infection shrinks. And the infection is small since we locked down immediately when a community case was first found. Six weeks will probably do it... so long as we don't have (a) new cases coming in through the border, or (b) infected people flaunting the lockdown rules and spreading it faster than we can contain it. Indeed, if it blows out past a couple thousand or so, we will need to pivot.
> During level-4, the R value is clearly lower than 1.0 meaning the infection shrinks
Delta is a different beast.
Here in Australia, Victoria managed to get the Reff rate down to ~0.75 during their OG outbreak last year with a strict lockdown. Delta has an R0 that is multiples higher than the OG strain so the same lockdown would not get it below 1. You can look at Victoria's current outbreak for evidence of this.
Now that doesn't mean NZ can't beat it. A part from Auckland, the population density is very low and as long as compliance is high you might be able to just about get it back down again; especially if you manage to keep it out of large households and essential workers.
I just wouldn't base my expectations on what worked last year as Delta is quite a different game.
>You can look at Victoria's current outbreak for evidence of this.
Also worth noting that peoples' behaviour is very different this time round compared to a year ago. A lot more people are flouting the rules or at least coming up with creative ways to see their friends while technically not breaking the law. After 200+ days, everybody's just sick of it.
The framing of New Zealand's approach as "working great" is also very highly opinionated. My NZ colleagues are all starting to get sick of this approach, and even the ones that fully support it are realizing that having no international travel and a couple of 6 week nationwide lockdowns every year is not a viable long-term solution.
If you look at how far NZ has gotten in regards to overcoming the virus, it's clearly very far behind most of the world. It's done a good job so far of reducing the harm caused directly by infection, but in many ways it's just tried to lock itself into a time bubble in early 2020. The world is starting to move on, and NZ has put itself in a rather bad position of having to try and catch up. The longer it sticks with this approach, the harder it's going to be.
I agree, elimination still looks a good strategy, it's too early to give it up yet. If we can punch out the current outbreak (I'd put money on it, but not too much) and get back to zero then that will re-legitimise lockdown as a strategy for a bit longer.
We've got a few "open 'er up and let it rip" friends and I just don't get it. There are so many potential game changers when you are an island. If a reliable saliva-based test appeared that produced results in say 2 hours we could reduce MIQ and use waiting booths at the airport. Even if it was only 99% accurate we could pool groups of 20 into rooms together while waiting for results. So many possibilities if we continue to think critically instead of politically.
A quick word on test attributes and why we still don't have a more rapid test than PCR.
Tests for disease rely on two numbers:
1. "sensitivity" - the proportion of people with COVID who get a positive test
2. "specificity" - the proportion of people without COVID who get a negative test.
COVID, despite the media attention, is a rare disease compared to the number of people tested. Say we have 10,000 people tested for COVID at the airport. We have 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity. And we know 100 people have COVID (1% prevalence) in this group. Our test would find 99/100 of the positive cases. But it would also find an additional 99 false positives! It also misses one true positive case. Which would be disasterous for the quarantine measures in place in Australia and NZ. In short, even a gold standard rapid test is not enough, although at 99% specificity and sensitivity it would be somewhat useful.
This is a lot less intuitive than it looks. The companies pushing rapid antigen tests at the start of the pandemic would have know better, but they chose to lie to the public about this.
Our vaccination program is ramping up nicely, even with the lockdown they're posting record numbers. Should be done by the end of the year, and if we can get this outbreak under control we'll easily get there before the next one.
Definitely a concern for countries that have been able to lock down. Taiwan also had to rush to get people vaccinated when they had an outbreak recently.
> I don’t think anywhere in the US did anything that could reasonably be called a lockdown.
Agreed, yet people still clamor for more of the same ineffective nonsense while dousing their hands in sanitizer and erecting plexiglass barriers in front of everything. We do everything except what would make a difference: fixing indoor ventilation.
the problem is that even those halfhearted measures have proven to be economically disastrous for small to medium scale businesses and virtually everyone without a line to nearly limitless private equity. pairing the rollout of ineffective 'lockdowns' with woefully insufficient safety nets [that were even further stripped down and delayed by politicking] has effectively poisoned the public will towards any further interventions across large segments of the country. you would have been hard-pressed to even deliberately design a containment more guaranteed for failure.
It worked pretty well for Thailand, a country with 3k of land borders that people can and do walk across. Delta seems to have changed the calculus though
Edit: Don’t mean to sound nasty, but this type of reasoning gets repeated so often without much criticism.
It worked for China too, so don’t come with this “small countries” crap. The US is “small” relative to China. Okay… now we get the “easy in a dictatorship” response to which I offer Japan. A democracy, with relatively large and dense population, yet have had relative few cases… although I am sure an excuse can be invented for them too…
We're on a 4th wave, that's currently completely out of control. The hospitals are overwhelmed, and most Covid patients aren't being accepted by the hospitals.
One guy punching a horse and Queensland putting a hundred or so bored soldiers on the border to check permits of cars that drive past is not a state of open violent revolt.
I know people like to think that doing the per-capita calculation puts every country on an even footing for comparison. But it's kind of silly to straight compare countries with vastly different geographies and economies, regardless of population normalization.
>I think there's a fair chance they'll beat it again
If they are locked down, again, 16 months into this thing, they never beat anything.
> If they are locked down, again, 16 months into this thing, they never beat anything.
They eliminated this virus across Aotearoa. We didn't eliminate it everywhere else (actually almost anywhere else) and infected people continued to arrive at their border, eventually one of those infections (from Australia) leaked into their community about two weeks ago.
Unless your point is some purely nihilist position like "In the end nothing matters" (then why are you posting?) they beat this and now they're going to have to do it again.
But.. they didn't beat it. It's not endemic, it's not "one of the common colds", it's a locked down island, where noone can enter or exit freely anymore. This is like hiding in a cave, and saying that you've beat the bear outside.
I understand the advantages to a global village but we rarely talk about the downsides. Perhaps the global village is a failed experiment and needs to be reconfigured into bubbles. Perhaps we need to move back to a protectism of sort.
But why? People prefer the freedom to a minor risk. When lockdowns stop, people don't stay in their home bubble, but go out and meet with people. Why? Because they weren't at home because they were afraid of the corona, but because they were forced by their governments. Looking at the current happenings in europe, sooner or later a critical mass will be reached somewhere, and some (political) heads will fall.
In general yes, closing people up inside, in separate rooms, giving them only the needed amount of calories, forbidding every even mildly dangerous sport, and of course driving and cycling, would save many lives. But who wants to live in a world like that?
Not being able to leave your house, and not being able to leave your country, aren’t the same. The difference in degree is big enough to count as a difference in kind.
The point is that you can't just draw a line around obvious failure modes and say they're not part of the strategy. If you compare the median global response to "we beat the virus with a single lockdown!", that sounds like an obvious winner, but it's a much more equivocal story if you compare it to "we'll be doing snap lockdowns 1-2 times a year for the foreseeable future, and even then we may need to give up on elimination if one of the lockdowns doesn't work".
(As someone mentioned upthread, this shouldn't be seen as a slight against the people or leadership of New Zealand, who generally seem to understand that lockdowns weren't meant to be a one-and-done measure.)
> The US is suffering another 9/11 every few days.
Except no, it is not 9/11. People with a year or two of life expectancy dying is not the same as what happened with 9/11 & not the same as Vietnam. Millions of people die every year in the US, it's what happens to the old, the sick and eventually to us all.
Please stop saying that 1 or 2 years life expectancy does not matter. It matter a LOT for their families and for them it is almost the same as loosing someone with 20 years life expectancy.
They are a bunch of islands in the middle of nowhere with a population of a larger city - how is their situation applicable to any major nation in the world ?
Uhuh. Hawaii, an entire US state that is "a bunch of islands in the middle of nowhere" and yet somehow didn't eliminate the virus has far fewer people than New Zealand.
Hawaii is still allowing tourism from the USA, I assume NZ is not allowing similar tourism. They could have locked down harder (being an island and all) but didn't probably because their economy isn't as independent as NZ's is.
Cases have been skyrocketing in Hawaii over the last month, though, especially on the outlying islands. Before July, the highest daily case count the Big Island had ever had was ~30. Now the 7-day average is 125, or 60/100k.
Given the health care resources available anywhere but in Honolulu, things won't be pretty if it keeps climbing.
Western Australia is also a state and we've regularly locked down all travel from other Australian states when they have community outbreaks. We have a COVID death rate lower than New Zealand and, like NZ, have lived essentially normally throughout COVID despite the travel restrictions.
Currently you can only come here from NSW with express permission and then you have to quarantine at your own expense for 2 weeks. Quarantine requirements kick-in whenever there's a community outbreak in other states/territories and the restrictions ramp up as case numbers grow.
It is easy for Western Australia and Tasmania to isolate because the former has a vast desert between here and the east coast and the latter is an island without an international airport (probably one of the safer spots on Earth). There's no physical reason Hawaii and Alaska couldn't have done the same, but it's probably not politically or socially acceptable.
Atlantic Canada locked travel from out of region down almost completely ... as a result Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland have had the lowest rates (per capita) of COVID in North America:
No. There have been plenty of people traveling in and out of Hawaii all along. There were some quarantine/testing requirements at various times. But certainly not closed borders. I even looked of going there at one point but, when I looked, hotels were quite expensive.
I look at New Zealand and see close to the opposite. A near-complete failure. They've isolated themselves from the world for nearly 2 years, and have approximately zero things to show for it. They're not significantly vaccinated (25%, what happened??) and have no plan to be able to re-open up anytime soon.
It sounds harsh, but I don't see that they've done a lot other than waste 2 years of their life sitting on their hands.
It's not just that... NZ is an island, with few people going in and out daily. In europe, you have people living in one country and working in another, and driving across the border daily. You have trucks driving through 10 different countries, with drivers stopping, filling up the gas, eating and sleeping in many of them. You have large cities, where the border goes across the urban areas, and your nearest store is in another country.
I'm not saying that Wuhan's number is 100% accurate, feel free to inflate it by 10 times. But even with the censored social media in China, words do get across, and there's no evidence of any big outbreaks like in Wuhan or New York after April last year.
Virus cannot teleport from person to person, so why wouldn't NPIs like real lockdowns with full food delivery and mass testing (unlike mockdowns in some other countries) work?
If you don't believe the numbers, ask anyone you know who has relatives in China.
Lockdowns, or mass hospitalizations/deaths from Covid are a bit difficult to hide from the people living through it, if either of those two things are happening, everyone would hear about it through the grapevine.
I did exactly that (wife’s family lives in Beijing).
Various parts of Beijing and Nanjing have been under relative “lockdown” at various points in time in the last year. I’m pretty sure this has been reported in Western media too (and I’m sure that other parts of the country have too). I have no idea where this idea that “China has zero COVID lockdowns” came from. I suppose it may depend on your definition of lockdown.
I don't doubt that lockdowns are happening, which is why I listed the presence or absence of them as one of the two obvious things that can be observed by people living there.
I do have doubts that their actual case numbers are too far off from reported case numbers. (Because mass sickness and death, just like lockdowns, would also be obvious to observe.)
NZ has no cities. Auckland, the country's largest town, consists of 4 or 5 blocks of high density "city". Wellington another 2 or 3 blocks of high density "city". Outside of those few blocks the entire country is low-rise detached apartments, quickly giving way to semi-detached housing, which quickly gives way to endless suburbia. NZ has zero density.
New Zealand is not really a replicable model. It has a lot of unique properties like the combination of wealth, remoteness, culture, population density, etc. Not a lot that other countries can learn from it. Other countries could learn more from countries like Vietnam.
If you want to learn how to get a basketball in the hoop reliably, you’re better off asking a regular guy than a 7 footer who will say “well just put it in.”
As others have pointed out they're able to totally control their border and quarantine every single arrival.
But more importantly, how will it end for them? Australia and New Zealand are among the worst corona zealot nations. New Zealand just shut down everything over a single case and the PM told people to not even talk to each other anymore. How will they get out of this? If they looked at the facts they'd understand they will have to open up eventually, might as well do it now. Instead they're now trapped in eternal 'zero covid'.
Your comment is slightly out of date. The stated position of both the Australian PM and NSW state premier is that elimination is impossible, and vaccination/reopening is the goal.
I recognise you may not have the backstory on why this is the case.
Australia relied mainly on AstraZeneca and the UQ molecular clamping vaccine for its vaccine strategy, both of which could be manufactured locally. It signed other contracts for vaccines lackadaisically and with a late delivery time.
AstraZeneca is less effective than mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna, and causes a rare blood clotting condition that's fatal at a rate of 1 per millions. The UQ molecular clamping vaccine failed clinical trials despite being effective because it caused some patients to return a false positive result for HIV. This meant that domestic vaccine production in Australia was limited to one less effective vaccine that sometimes (very rarely) kills the people who get it, which the media have had a field day with.
The government now faces the problem of having millions of doses of a vaccine that few people want, few doses of the vaccines everyone wants, drug manufacturers who've already signed agreements with everyone else, a low rate of infection (due to lockdowns) that means they don't deserve emergency support, and a population that has no idea what's happening because the situation is complicated.
On top of this, the government has made some bad decisions with the roll-out itself. It doesn't allow the age groups most vulnerable to COVID-19 to receive the marginally safer and significantly more effective mRNA vaccines, on the basis that this age group has a clear benefit from receiving AstraZeneca and a lower risk of blood clotting, so there's significant vaccine hesitancy and less effective vaccine coverage among the very group who's most likely to die from the disease. It also didn't allow young people to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine for a long time, and even now requires them to give informed consent to a doctor or pharmacist before receiving it, so the roll-out requires finding qualified doctors and pharmacists as well as nurses, at a time when the medical system is already strained.
I live in slovenia, and we're giving vaccines away to other countries (literally), because people don't want to get vaccinated, and the vaccines are nearing the expiry date.
You can choose the vaccine, and can get vaccinated any day, even without signing up.
Yes, that's the obvious solution, and in fact we've bought Pfizer from Poland and cut various other deals. It's unfortunately not quick to do, although in my opinion the government failed to prioritise it as heavily as it should have.
Australia is a rich country, once this happened they could have paid whatever it takes to get enough Pfeizer/Moderna. The price almost don’t matter, it is so cost effective it’s insane.
If we could figure out the total cost of this pandemic I’m sure all the vaccines we will take over many years will be a fraction of 1% of the total cost and that is not including human suffering and death.
Yep. It costs somewhere on the order of $100 million to $1 billion a week to keep Sydney or Melbourne in lockdown. The costs thus far have vastly exceeded the estimated cost of ordering mRNA vaccine doses for every adult in the country ($780m[0]) or building federal quarantine facilities that don't leak cases (around $200m for a 500 bed facility[1]). It's an astounding leadership failure.
For elderly patients at least the risk of HIV infection is minimal so I don't understand why a false positive HIV test would cause a clinical trial to fail. Some cancer therapies also cause false positive HIV tests and that doesn't prevent them being used.
Because the federal government is full of incompetent conservative fuckwits that couldn't organise a root in a brothel and would struggle to win 5% of the vote without decades of the worst Murdoch propaganda behind them that makes Fox News look reasonable.
We have one of the worst governments in the entire democratic world. We just got insanely lucky that at the start of the pandemic they decided to lay off as much responsibility as possible to the state governments who have mostly been fantastic.
you misunderstand the zero covid strategy. The endgame is not zero covid forever. The endgame is zero-covid until we get as many people vaccinated as possible. This is the best result that can be achieved. less deaths, AND less economic disruption.
"They might as well do it now" is misguided. Would you prefer to release a virus into an unvaccinated or fully vaccinated population?
At this point, in the US any adult who wants to be vaccinated, is. But we still have to mask up due to Delta getting past the vaccines, and children not being vaccinated.
in Aus we don't have enough vaccines to give to the people that want them. bad luck on vaccine betting and incompetent government are the main reasons.
Why are they not vaccinated yet? Everyone here in Western Europe has had access by now if they wanted to get vaccinated. Could it be their "strategy" changes every week and isn't a strategy at all?
> "We ask people to stay two metres away from anyone you pass," she said. "Stay local. Do not congregate. Don't talk to your neighbours. Please, keep to your bubble."
To interpret that as anything other than physical distancing measures can only be deliberate obtuseness. You can talk to anyone you want, just pick up the phone.
One (1) positive case, entire nation placed on maximum level 4 lockdown where you can't leave your house except for a very short list of permitted reasons.
I'm quite well aware of what's happening in NZ, thank you, and the reason they locked down the whole nation is because that one case a) could not be immediately linked to another case, implying there were likely others out there, and b) had moved around quite a bit, meaning other cases were likely widely spread. As we now know both these turned out to be true.
Nevertheless, it is still a literally true statement that the entirety of NZ was locked down over one (1) case, because if they hadn't found that one case, they wouldn't have done that.
> some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated?
Do you have a link/links to where you read that vaccines don't do well at stopping the spread? Everything I've read is that vaccines, while not 100% effective at stopping the vaccinated person from infecting someone else, significantly lower the risk of spreading the virus[0]. That risk drops dramatically when both parties involved are vaccinated.
Yeah, GP has a couple of interesting ideas mixed in there (NY lockdown policy and building hospital capacity) but the rest are bog standard anti-mask, anti-vax talking points. Masks help, vaccines help -- it's all about pushing R below 1, and a measure doesn't have to be 100% effective (or anywhere near that) to push.
Lockdowns do flatten the curve, and while we might have built new hospitals in a parallel universe, in this one we really don't want to saturate the beds (again). I was pleasantly surprised by the "flatten the curve" narrative -- usually the telephone game ensures that this kind of nuance gets buried under simpler, incorrect versions like "if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over," but this time around I was pleased to see "flatten the curve" start strong and keep its legs.
CDC's initial mask take was wrong, but evidence changed their minds, and that's a good sign. GP, if you want to harp on this, tell me: if I were to dig through your post history would I find a bunch of poorly aged posts about a silent first wave?
> while we might have built new hospitals in a parallel universe, in this one we really don't want to saturate the beds (again).
Unfortunately, while hospitals can be built, you can't train enough medical professionals to staff the hospital in two years.
More generally, rather like nobody expects the Spanish inquisition, no health care system can cope with a global pandemic. We'd need to 10x health care capacity, most of which would sit unused for most of the time.
I am not anti vax, I am vaccinated and I recommend to everyone to do the same. However, relying on this vaccine as a long term solution is a very bad idea.
Also you are stating I am anti mask when I stated how I recommended mask usage. Do you not read or do you just force your expectations on people?
Sure, go ahead and dig through my history. not sure what you mean by 'a silent first wave'.
Accusing somebody of following a talking point seems needlessly provacative and ad-hominem, and not in the spirit of HN. Better to just give reasoned cited responses and leave it at that.
GP's statement contradicts the scientific literature - vaccination does reduce viral load of subsequent infection, and consequently reduces transmission [1].
However folks should be aware that immunity acquired through natural infection is robust and durable, and also has the same effect of reducing viral load and transmission [2].
It has been documented that people with asymptomatic infection will clear the virus quickly compared to those who are symptomatic [3]. Recent meta-analyses [4] and large population serological studies [5] have estimated the asymptomatic proportion lower bound to be at least ~33%, and the upper bound to be ~65% (even higher for young adults). Considering recent evidence that cases may be massively under-reported, the true asymptomatic proportion could be even higher than suggested [6].
Taken together, these results imply that a majority of the population has been already exposed to the virus, and either through natural infection or vaccination has acquired some degree of immunity that reduces the transmission of the virus.
Analogous to antibiotic resistance, vaccine resistance can evolve if vaccines are used indiscriminately [7][8][9][10]. So the benefits of compulsory mass vaccination may not outweigh the risks of such a policy, given the current state of affairs.
> so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated?
It is an important question with tremendously complex factors that go beyond the expertise of most lay people.
Covid-19 vaccination used to reduce viral load of subsequent infections. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work with the current Delta variant - both the CDC in the US and PHE in the UK have released studies finding that the viral load of vaccinated and unvaccinated people is basically the same. They're also not so effective at stopping people from catching the Delta variant, and when you combine that with its higher infectivity it's basically impossible to get herd immunity using them.
No this is extremely misleading, the misquote you are using applies only to breakthrough infections, but the vaccines themselves are highly effective at preventing infection and thus breakthrough infections are very rare in vaccinated individuals.
Should you happen to not mount a robust immune response despite being vaccinated then at that point you will have a viral load similar to an unvaccinated person, but the good news is even if this is the case you will still have much less severe disease outcomes than an unvaccinated person.
The vaccines are incredibly effective against all current variants.
>breakthrough infections are very rare in vaccinated individuals.
This is simply not true. In countries with accurate tracing like Singapore and Israel, it's apparent that the vaccinated aren't significantly less likely to get infected than the unvaccinated. Check figure 10 on https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/update-on-loc... ; the unvaccinated only make up around 10-20% of cases. They also only make up 10-20% of the population; if the unvaccinated were more likely to be infected, we'd expect them to constitute a larger proportion of infections.
There have been > 111k breakthrough infections in the US alone through the end of July. The CDC stopped tracking them unless they resulted in hospitalization or death, but we can still look at the data from the 35 states still tracking it.
It is fair to say that vaccination reduces the chance of infection. "Very rare", however, is not how I would characterize it.
They are effective. The vaccine stops delta between 70 and 90% of the time (depending on which vaccine and which study you look at). The "impossible to get herd immunity" scenario is within the error bars, but I wouldn't state that as a fact. On the contrary, it looks like NYC just reached it's Delta peak 2 or 3 days ago. This strongly implies herd immunity is still possible, but we need to wait and see if the trend holds.
Even in the case of the delta variant vaccinated people who get infected are more likely to have reduced symptoms (if they have any noticeable symptoms at all). That means a lot less coughing up huge plumes of virus over great distances. Nothing is perfect, but in the end the vaccines increase your odds of not being infected while decreasing your odds of spreading the virus. Herd immunity may not be reached but we can drastically reduce deaths and serious illness. That's already a win for vaccines.
> Or what about the fact we are 2 years into this and we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals?
If I understand correctly, there isn't a lack of literal beds/space; it's a lack of personnel. Basically hospitals are unable to staff themselves at the levels needed to accomodate being basically 100% full. This is compounded by the fact that hospitals are struggling to retain healthcare workers, who are burnt out, and the fact that healthcare isn't something that someone can easily switch to.
Unfortunately, there is absolutely a lack of beds. Someone I know was in emergency last week (totally unrelated to pandemic) and had to wait an entire day before actually being properly admitted to a ward because there were no beds available for them. So they layed in an emergency room "booth"[0] for close to 24 hours, until a bed became available. There are lots of news articles about the lack of beds/capacity all over the place [1][2][3]
[0] I don't know the right word for it, but a small room usually used for short-term (<few hours) evaluation of a patient before passing them along to the next phase, like admitting to a ward or sending them home or etc.
Yeah, people keep responding to this, so I'll reply.. Yeah, the beds are literally full, at least in the hospital I was in. People on beds in the hallways and stuff. It's not a staffing shortage or anything like that.
"beds" and capacity can be synonymous in casual medical conversation. If the staff had plenty of literal beds, but no staff for them, they might still tell you that they had no beds, because they are just saying they don't have the capacity.
This is down to a startling lack of imagination and flexibility on the part of healthcare providers and government healthcare regulators. They could train unemployed batistas to tend to COVID patients in a couple of weeks hugely reducing the pressure on the rest of the health system. You don't need to know all the shitloads required to be a doctor if all you're doing is tending to covid patients to try and somewhat reduce the dying.
My theory is that the vaccines are not stopping transmission, just reducing the effects -- enough that people don't even know they are carriers.
Then we re-opened everything and vaccinated (and others) stopped wearing masks. So in effect, coronavirus is spreading as if there were no masking or social distancing since those have ended. And by and large it is the unvaccinated who are paying the price.
I might be wrong, but at least my explanation is plausible.
Every tool in the quiver is about reducing Rt below 1. If it's above 1, cases double every few days. If it's far about 1, it's hardly any days, if it's just above 1, it's more days. But either way, the cases are still doubling at some rate, not just spreading but growing.
So every single tool in the quiver is about reducing Rt below 1. A lockdown will give you a few points. Vaccines will give you more. Masks give you more. Social distancing give you more. None of them get you all the way there. Some are more temporary than others, so have to be implemented at the right times.
So...
> they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated?
The do help limit spread. Going from "they don't stop spread entirely" to "why force people to get vaccinated?" is like saying "body armor doesn't prevent being killed, so soldiers shouldn't wear them". Plus, there's the aspect of it being contagious - vaccines make it less contagious overall. Vaccines reduce Rt.
> we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals?
The goal was never to permanently increase supply of hospitals, it was to reduce the demand for them, by putting measures into place to reduce Rt.
> anti-mask at the beginning
During that time, scientists thought that COVID was chiefly droplet-transmitted, so the emphasis was on distance, washing hands, hand sanitizer, etc. In an environment where people were already hoarding toilet paper, then if it had been true that droplets were the only source of transmission, masks were overkill, wouldn't do a lot to reduce Rt, and also had the risk of limiting supply to people who needed them. After it became clear that it was also aerosol-transmitted, the scientific recommendations changed, because then it was clear that masks would help reduce Rt.
As for Germany... Delta has a higher Rt than the Wuhan strain. Their lockdowns were effective.
Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science.
Hindsight is always 20/20, early on the virus was not believed to be airborne, only spread through relatively large droplets from coughing/sneezing which you'd likely only encounter in close contact with an actively ill person. Plus, Fauci had the responsibility to preserve masks for those that would be exposed directly to infected people - the medical workers and first responders.
The first lockdown in the USA was mid-march, and the mask guidance had already changed by the beginning of April as we understood more about how the disease spread.
Early guidance (and news coverage) also recommended sanitizing surfaces to prevent the spread of the disease, but surface contact was later found to be a less significant mode of transmission.
As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
People with serious diseases are being turned away from hospitals or asked to reschedule appointments/visits because hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID patients (and healthcare workers are being pushed to the limit). Vaccines are a public health decision, not a personal decision.
> Hindsight is always 20/20, early on the virus was not believed to be airborne, only spread through relatively large droplets from coughing/sneezing which you'd likely only encounter in close contact with an actively ill person.
This isn't about hindsight. Coronaviruses are not an unknown and airborne spread should have been assumed unless ruled out. And it was assumed by many: Taiwan immediately mobilized their military to ramp up mask production, even before the WHO admitted there was a problem.
> Plus, Fauci had the responsibility to preserve masks for those that would be exposed directly to infected people - the medical workers and first responders.
Then he and other leaders should have communicated that. Treating people like dumb idiots that you need to lie to to get what you want results in those people mistrusting your future recommendations, e.g. to get vaccinated.
Coronaviruses are not an unknown and airborne spread should have been assumed unless ruled out.
That's the hindsight I'm talking about. The WHO declared that it was not airborne at the beginning of the pandemic, as did the CDC, and it took a long time for them to change their guidance. Even independent aerosol researchers didn't release their findings until April, but that was after the CDC had already asked people to wear cloth masks.
Treating people like dumb idiots that you need to lie to to get what you want results in those people mistrusting your future recommendations, e.g. to get vaccinated.
You have more faith in people than I do -- the truth is that many of the public are dumb idiots and if you say "We want you to wear cloth masks to protect either other, but please dont use N95 masks, we need those for first responders", the first thing that will happen is that there will be a run on N95 masks, leaving none for first responders. Which happened anyway, my older sister ended up sewing homemade masks that my younger sister used in her job in healthcare because they had to ration N95's.
But supply chain issues for PPE is a whole different problem, and I'm not sure we've solved it.
But they burned huge amounts of their social trust capital in doing so, because they didn't just say "there are shortages, please stop hoarding masks", they outright lied about the efficacy of masks and perpetuated the lie for months. If people have no idea what to believe, it's because the government led a catastrophically inept response.
No. The CDC said AT THE TIME that they didn't recommend everyone wearing masks because hospitals were facing shortages. They have always been open about their reasoning and data. Quit repeating this terrible lie.
That is not quite true. The CDC listed several reasons not to wear masks. They definitely mention a shortage of masks and retaining supply for medical personnel, but at the same time they also said they were unnecessary and unhelpful for anyone not working directly around symptomatic sick people. Also, most people do not differentiate the CDC from the Surgeon General. This is a quote from the LA Times quoting Jerome Adams:
“Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” he wrote in a tweet that was later deleted. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Regarding the surgeon general quote, if you understand that he's referring to protective masks (such as N95s) and their capacity -- and it's pretty clear that he is -- the contents of his statement holds up very well, even now. PPE is extra crucial for those working around infected people. Most members of the general public are unlikely to use N95s in such a way they'd be significantly protective (after watching how most people wear any kind of mask including x95s, I don't know anyone could argue differently, and that's before you get into the kind of fit testing that people who count on these things professionally do and speak of as difficult).
What happened subsequently was a shift to cooperative masks whose benefit is primarily reducing transmission from the wearer.
These two things are both discussed under the header of "masks" but they are very different interventions. It's less that the position changed, it's more that what authorities were actually talking about changed.
You can fairly argue that this counts as a messaging failure and I'd agree, but a lot of people seem to be missing what the issue actually was (especially some who set this up as dishonesty or an attack on expertise).
Many N95s have valves that aren't permissable as COVID masks anyways. They are mostly designed to keep pollution out rather than your breath off of other people.
I for one, am glad that N95s haven't been mandated. I found them extremely irritating when I had to wear them because of high pollution in Beijing. The masks we wear instead, in comparison, are much more comfortable.
Here[1] is Dr. Fauci talking about how masks are mostly ineffective. Only at the end of the video, he agrees with the host that if everyone wears masks, it can lead to shortages for healthcare workers.
> I don't think 2 years is enough to just "build new hostipal", let alone staff them
It totally is enough time to build one. Staffing is more problematic, but if it was a state-run hospital you could've converted a lot of national guardsmen into nurses in the meanwhile. You don't need a lot of talent to handle most Covid cases, just people able to follow the protocol.
Maybe it depends on the area. I know California has famously strict building codes, so I'd be impressed to see a hospital made up to code in 2 years (unless the government threw the entire checkbook at it of course.)
It is, but you don't need ICU for most hospitalizations. My dad had a cytokine storm, and the doc looked at the health ministry Covid protocol that said "inject IL-6 inhibitor and keep the patient prone and on supplementary oxygen" and did exactly that. You don't need full-grown doctors to do that.
This is not a "standard" hospital, this is basically comparable to a warzone... so containers, drywall, and considering that most people there don't need a specialist, they can reuse doctors, that have nothing to do during the lockdowns (eg. in my slovenia, government-employed orthopedic doctors had someone else check them in daily, to get paid and get covid extra-pay, while never showing up for work and working in private practy all that time).
> Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect
There was never anything even remotely close to a total lockdown here. Too afraid that telling people not to got to work might hurt the economy.
What Germany got "right" was mostly things done long before the pandemic, e.g. investment in a large number of hospitable beds, as well as public health insurance and flexible sick days guaranteed by law so sick people can actually afford to stay at home.
> They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America.
LOL the US border is mostly ocean and the part that is through land is much more controlled than the "borders" in the EU.
> Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science.
Yeah, that was one of the biggest atrocities of the pandemic. Not only is it immorral to give false medical advice, this has also been responsible for more people (rightfully) mistrusting later recommendations. There should be leaders stepping down over this.
> As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
I agree, forcing people to get vaccinated (and that includes excessive restrictions to those not vaccinated) is not the way to go.
On the curve, hospital beds are basically flat compared to a covid spike. There is no rational amount of beds that is enough, because bed estimates are always a guess: wrong and wasteful because too many and then suddenly too few. And then you need doctors and nurses. And the disease spikes in one area and then another. Do you ship beds around?
Easier to take personal responsibility than depend on the government or whoever is meant to parachute in all the beds and doctors to save us from our own misunderstanding of exponential growth curves.
Personal responsibility is fundamental, that's what makes the collective measures work efficiently. But there are simply things that are near impossible to do personally. Are you going to build a personal ICU for your family just in case? Are you going to train as an ICU nurse, a respiratory disease specialist, and are you also building a personal protective equipment factory for yourself too? Of course not.
Though we need a bit of both. Depending on cheap just-in-time shit from China is great when you are dealing with a local flu outbreak in the local preschool, but not great in a pandemic. And the efficient solution is that everyone stocks up a few at home, and collectively we stock up a few billion in the country and then distribute it when and where needed instead of everyone trying to stock up thousands at home. (And so on for other aspects of protective measures.)
There currently isn't enough staffing to man the current hospitals forget about any newly created ones.
What I am upset about is why there was no plan to fast-track induction and graduation of nurses/paramedics/physicians with a minimum employment guarantee of 5 years by the govt so that folks are incentivised for a medical career.
> Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic.
There was never going to be an "easy" way to combat this pandemic, and experts have been quite clear about this from the beginning. A really successful strategy would have required a careful combination of several types of interventions, close monitoring of the situation as well as fast and effective adjustments to policies, and probably also a certain dose of luck.
Germany did a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong (though in certain instances, people might reasonably disagree about which is which), and Germany was also a bit lucky that we had many hospital beds and a social structure that is maybe a bit less conducive to infections (fewer inter-generational households). I think that Germany did well enough to avoid the worst effects of the pandemic (hospitals never got to the situation where they were fully overwhelmed, although it seemed close a few times) due to somehow people getting their shit together at the last minute every time, but I'm certain that a strategy with fewer deaths and less economic damage would have been possible.
The main problem that I see in Germany is that the government (or governments, if we include the regional ones) never had a real plan on what to do. Such a plan doesn't need to be inflexible, it can react to different situations and new scientific evidence, but it still should have been possible to establish some basic principles instead of stumbling through this pandemic almost blindly.
As an effect, we went into (more or less restrictive) lockdowns several times that prevented the worst, but a combination of other measures could have had a better impact: going into stricter, but shorter, lockdowns instead of months of weird "semi-lockdowns" with tons of exceptions (a lot of time was wasted especially last Summer), finding better solutions for schools and universities (such as better tools for remote teaching, and air filters), buying vaccines earlier, forcing employers to allow people to work from home (this was done eventually, but much too late — this was basically only because the industry lobbied hard enough, while at the same time, restaurants and museums had to close down completely), allowing certain lower-risk activities during the lockdown (such as outside terraces for restaurants), etc.
I'm not saying that all of these things would have worked, but we certainly could have tried more (or, in certain cases, earlier).
> better f'ing demand they have enough hospital beds
I am pretty sure people not getting sick in the first place is the priority, rather than making enough infrastructural medical capacity for something that is preventable. It's not like you can just magic up more doctors either.
> you want to lock down then we need a metric that you are trying to achieve by the lockdow
Well, this is obviously the vaccine
> Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic. They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America
Are you saying you advise lockdowns (especially in winter) and then saying lockdowns are ineffective?
ICU capacity should be the only metric for any mitigation measure.
Building greater capacity and staffing should be the focus.
The lack of capacity has been the justification for lockdowns since after summer 2020, and likely will be in some areas in the future. Its about periodic and seasonal things that occur while COVID is also taking up some bandwidth, not about whether it stops the spread at all. The messaging has been lackluster and hyperbolic and conflicting the whole time and will continue to be.
Sorry about your experience, its not worthwhile to stay frustrated on crowd reactions, this is a fast moving scenario and consensus will never be reached on the various overlapping chapters.
If you're going to pick one metric, if the exponential growth of the disease has any chance of overwhelming hospitals, then regional Rt > 1 should be the only metric for any mitigation measure.
If you're okay with Rt > 1 until hospitals are close to overwhelmed, then it means you were okay with allowing a doubling rate for a dangerous disease. It makes no sense. If you're destined to put mitigation measures in place eventually, why not just do them sooner and save a lot of suffering?
> If you're okay with Rt > 1 until hospitals are close to overwhelmed, then it means you were okay with allowing a doubling rate for a dangerous disease.... If you're destined to put mitigation measures in place eventually, why not just do them sooner and save a lot of suffering?
correct, it makes sense because now people have a choice about whether the prevalence of the disease will land them in the hospital. the mere prevalence is not the issue.
the subset of people that don't have a choice had the same issue before COVID existed, aka: the same distribution of immunocompromised people always existed.
this makes the calculus simply that it is back to business as usual, until ICU capacity is nearing full, that is. Since ICU capacity isn't only due to COVID cases, but due to all emergencies and injuries, then society as a whole needs to slow down to reduce the likelihood of emergency incidents, while also expanding ICU capacity to avoid future disruptions. The core of my supposition is that developed nations are not developed if emergency services are unavailable, and that governing system can prioritize reacting to that.
So no, you don't want business as usual until ICU capacity is near full. If you do that, you're basically destined to overwhelm ICU capacity.
If you increase ICU capacity, that solves nothing, because you're still satisfied with business as usual until ICU capacity is near full. No matter how big you make ICU capacity, Rt>1 means you will hit that capacity eventually. That's what exponential growth means.
The only answer is to move Rt<1, and you might as well do that sooner rather than later.
> No matter how big you make ICU capacity, Rt>1 means you will hit that capacity eventually.
I mean... for a little while until enough of the patients die. I mean that's whats happening.
ICU capacity due to COVID is filled overwhelmingly by unvaccinated people who had a choice in the matter for 9 months straight. If there wasn't a choice I would agree with you.
What is occurring now is completely tolerable to continue to allow to occur and is the consensus in all states, across the entire political spectrum.
Rt>1 means that there is a doubling rate of some number of days. Vaccines aren't 100% effective. The more cases, the more breakthrough cases. There are also children under 12. You can't say that all infected people had a choice in the matter, it simply isn't true.
A quick search shows ~20% of immigrants being deported testing positive (up to 25%). There are something like 200K immigrants currently encountered by border patrol per month. Naively that's 50K people coming to the US each month with covid who are poor (probably can't self quarantine), live in dense, multi generational households and exist outside of the law. Realistically, we'd expect that ICE (deportation) contributes to the spread. At any rate, I don't see how illegal immigration could be qualified other than a significant vector in the spread of covid.
We couldn't find a lot of places more far away from Mexico frontier in the entire US that NY. It was the first place seriously hit. It was hit for months while the Mexican border was showing... nothing. Do you have a logical explanation for that?
People being detained for months in really crowded places, as can be seen in all videos taken... they had covid when were deported? Well.. This is hardly a surprise to me.
We are talking about one vector over the last few months. The state of NY over a year ago is a non sequitur. Illegal immigration has probably increased close to 3x since then. Besides which, my understanding of the high mortality in NY is that it was mainly due to Cuomo emptying out hospitals of covid patients and sending them to nursing homes.
Maybe if their rate of infection were significantly lower than the local population, you could argue that we would be decreasing the percentage of the infected population which doesn't feel particularly compelling to me... but we'd really need to know how much each group contributes to the spread. My expectations is that illegal immigrants make larger contributions than average given their density in living arrangements, lack of access to health care, inability to take sick days, etc.
I think we are only in the business of arguing the counterfactual of what percentage of them get covid from interactions with law enforcement vs otherwise.
I'm not blaming the southern border, I am pointing out a fact that has implications on how we manage our expectations, and what actions to mitigate the corona virus that will work better than others given our situation. if you think facts should be suppressed then you hardly believe in science. its sad that russdpale thinks this comment should be removed by moderators. I also didn't state this is the only reason, nor that the solution should be stopping the border crossings.
In fact, I am arguing for increased capacity to handle the corona virus long term. short term measures like trying to lock down borders is going to have little meaning in the long run, and hurt a lot of people.
Hospital bed / ICU capacity is really just Hollywood accounting. They can prepare for surges and make more meds. There are federal and local incentives that get handed out to hospitals that are at or near capacity. So they’re always at or near capacity.
NYC locking down all summer and then 'opening up' in September seemed top of the list to me. It's not that I thought they should have stayed locked down the entire time, its that they should have opened in the summer so they could lock down in the winter if they really needed it. But seriously though, locking down in the summer to only open up in flu season, really?
Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity. or the fact people still want to lock down despite how epically they have failed. Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic. They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America. To no fault of their own, they are hardest hit by the pandemic, and the US sharing a border with them the way it is meant no rosy outcome was in our future.
Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science.
Or what about the fact we are 2 years into this and we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals? if we had to lock down because of lack of hospital beds, well we better f'ing demand they have enough hospital beds, like real soon. This is why the lockdowns should have came at a price, you want to lock down then we need a metric that you are trying to achieve by the lockdown, we need timely updates on your progress to that metric, and we need an action plan such that this will never happen again (such as building more hosptials - hey, how about just opening the thousands we shut down in the last 5 years to make hospitals more profitable!). my views on that were called 'myopic'. so we gave them lockdowns without restrictions, and nothing was done. here we are in the same situation, odd.
As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
edit: just to be clear - I am not anti vax, I am vaccinated and I recommend to everyone to do the same. There is unrefutably evidence the vaccine prevents sever cases.