The supermarkets would close and you would have a civil war after about 48hrs 
For the UK, the Zoe project has a lot of participants and delivers data which is believed to be reliable.
Pim5 wrote:
Well the unfortunate fact is that as of the end of December 2020 a grand total of 388 people under the age of 60 with no underlying conditions have died of CV19.
Source, please?
Other than that – you put the finger on one of the most difficult aspects of the vaccination campaign.
Regardless of the exact numbers, vaccinating the elderly and most vulnerable will massively reduce hospitalisation and fatalities. So in principle, once we bring these down by 90%, Covid-19 is no more deadly than a bad-is flu season so there is no good reason to keep restrictions.
Yet I have the suspicion that everyone in authority is now so scared that this won’t happen…
Cobalt wrote:
Regardless of the exact numbers, vaccinating the elderly and most vulnerable will massively reduce hospitalisation and fatalities. So in principle, once we bring these down by 90%, Covid-19 is no more deadly than a bad-is flu season so there is no good reason to keep restrictions.
Not quite.
in the long term, long Covid may well turn out to be a much larger challenge than what the death figures are. The dead are to be lamented and cause a lot of grief. Long Covid however will cause a long term need for medical care with associated costs and possible disability.
It appears from quite a few articles I’ve read that scientists are getting a lot more worried about that aspect of the whole saga.
Peter wrote:
The supermarkets would close and you would have a civil war after about 48hrs
It is quite obvious that food supply needs to be kept open, as well as core services. However, the zero covid goal may still be achieved if everything else gets shut down radically. That is primarily schools, but also other services which are still open now.
johnh wrote:
It’s not up to the UK, it’s up to the places that demand them
Things will be much more complicated than that. It’s not only IF you are vaccinated or not, but which vaccine brand and sub-brand, and when. South Africa has decided not to use AZ for instance, because it shows little effect on the SA mutation. If you are vaccinated with AZ, forget about going to SA. EASA has already decided that every pilot license will have to be linked up to a vaccine approved by EMA.
This isn’t really caused by Covid or vaccines, but by the urge to travel even though the pandemic is at full speed. One can only speculate if this situation will be permanent, like “security” at airports, or if it will eventually go away. My bet is that it will be permanent, and it will be an insane bureaucratic burden for everyone, that in itself will prevent travelling.
Going back a few posts, Aveling listed some common myths, including:
1) Covid is much less dangerous than the government say because fatality counts are hugely inflated by including everyone who tested positive regardless of what they died from.
Isn’t this one fairly easy to refute? The numbers just don’t work.
Taking the UK last month ago as an example, the ONS estimated that 2% of the population were infected with Covid.
Not all of them got tested, but even if they did, they could only test positive for about 12 days, so (28/12) x 2% is the maximum possible percentage of the population at any one time who could have tested positive for Covid in the previous 28 days. That’s just under 5%.
If the ‘28 day Covid deaths’ were really coincidental, i.e. they were the 5% of normal deaths who just happened to die ‘with a positive Covid test in the past 28 days’, then where are the other 95%?
Last month the daily ‘28 day’ Covid deaths were over 1,000. If this was, at most, 5% of ‘normal’ deaths, then the daily death rate from all causes would be at least 20,000. At this time of year, that’s about 18,000 ‘excess deaths’ daily.
Did almost 1% of the UK population die in January?
I think we would have noticed…
Slowly the way the future may look starts to unravel. And it’s not pleasant.
More and more indications come up that the vaccination won’t be the way out of restrictions or travel limitations, far from it. What I read now all over the place is that vaccinations will not stop people from being infected, nor will they stop people from transmitting the virus. From an epidemological point of view, they don’t do much at all.
All they do, which is important enough, is to stop people from getting terminally ill or to get severe cases. No idea how it impacts long covid (people without sympthoms who turn invalid after a couple of weeks) and it does not stop you from getting it.
Therefore vaccinations will not change anything other than the risk of hospitalisation and death will go down. In order however to keep infections down and possibly eradicate the virus mostly, lockdowns are still the only way to deal with it. Similarily, vaccinations will NOT end mask duty, quarantines and test requirements.
Basically, this is again a totally new ballpark which also explains why quite a few countries won’t actually implement vaccination passports or open up their borders for vaccinated people, as they still are dangerous.
For me the consequence is clear: We will not get rid of the measures for the forseeable future, all that will happen, which is a big step clearly, is that severe cases will reduce amongst those vaccined. For travel e.t.c. nothing will change or once the reality sinks in, travel may well be gone for good.
From an epidemological point of view, they don’t do much at all.
Fortunately, that is wrong.
which also explains why quite a few countries won’t actually implement vaccination passports
The main reason is that the PC / “civil liberties” groups will kick up a massive stink – because, to quote the “liberal” media, this creates an underprivileged underclass which, shock, horror, is having to pay a price for refusing to act responsibly and get vaccinated.
There is a reasonable reason which is that some people are contraindicated for the vaccine and thus cannot have it. For these, some other solution would need to be found so they can travel, but there are so very few of them that a GP letter will work fine.
The countries whose politicians and/or national media are slagging off the vaccine(s) are those who cannot get it (for reasons already well aired) until much later, so this is a useful kind of demand management.
One exception might be S. Africa but even their latest action (suspend use of the AZ vaccine) makes no obvious sense because even with the SA strain it probably does prevent nearly all severe cases. Maybe they haven’t got much of it so again it would be politically motivated demand management.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
More and more indications come up that the vaccination won’t be the way out of restrictions or travel limitations, far from it. What I read now all over the place is that vaccinations will not stop people from being infected, nor will they stop people from transmitting the virus. From an epidemological point of view, they don’t do much at all.All they do, which is important enough, is to stop people from getting terminally ill or to get severe cases. No idea how it impacts long covid (people without sympthoms who turn invalid after a couple of weeks) and it does not stop you from getting it.
Where on earth are you getting this stuff?
It is quite simply not true.
Restrictions will lift quite rapidly once infections, hospitalisations and deaths are down to manageable levels, and if it surges again then government action is more likely to focus on coping with it than preventing it. We simply cannot afford to continue like this, or we’ll be completely bankrupt. Zero-covid is only viable in places like New Zealand, and even then only with significant negative effects on the vital tourism industry.
Peter wrote:
The main reason is that the PC / “civil liberties” groups will kick up a massive stink – because, to quote the “liberal” media, this creates an underprivileged underclass which, shock, horror, is having to pay a price for refusing to act responsibly and get vaccinated.
As I understand it the main reason for vaccination passports being politically unworkable is the perceived unfairness of some people being vaccinated now and gaining their freedom, while others have to wait until the end of the year and are essentially in jail until then. I don’t think there’s any sympathy, public, political or otherwise, for unfairness that anti-vaxxers might suffer.
.bq What I read now all over the place is that vaccinations will not stop people from being infected, nor will they stop people from transmitting the virus.
Luckily actual infection data coming from Israel – probably the country most advanced both in vaccine distribution and population surveillance shows the exact opposite (not a lot of data on transmission yet).
