Graham wrote:
Where on earth are you getting this stuff?
Wall Street Journal was one article I saw and local press here has picked up on this quite a bit.
I understand it so that while people won’t get as sick as they do now, the virus will still be able to spread and probably even spread more than now without measures. So if the goal should be to eradicate it, vaccines may do the opposite as people get careless yet again.
Also as todays vaccines won’t be able to treat future mutations, we will need to revaccinate every couple of months to keep up. Judging by today, where it will take more than a year to vaccinate the world, we will have this again and again, obviously in between will have outbreaks of new mutations and waves after waves.
So IMHO, this is the wrong direction. The only way to win over this is to eradicate it and that means keeping measures or even going into more massive lockdowns and to stop all international travel indefinitly, possibly forever. Then in limited areas we might get virus-free. Otherwise not.
I understand it so that while people won’t get as sick as they do now, the virus will still be able to spread and probably even spread more than now without measures.
Yes, as the influenza virus and literally dozens of viruses circulate in the general population.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
The only way to win over this is to eradicate it and that means keeping measures or even going into more massive lockdowns and to stop all international travel indefinitly, possibly forever. Then in limited areas we might get virus-free.
A bit of a heavy price to pay for being ‘virus-free in limited areas’. And then these limited areas will be re-infected, because just one needs to slip through. While I don’t say it can’t be done, I don’t think a single disease has been eliminated that way once it was out of the bag.
I also don’t understand your obsession with international travel. In fact, internal travel is far more risky because more people do it, more frequently, and it is harder to check them. Same about everyone obsessing about mass events. Sure, not a good idea, but on average a person goes to the pub twice a week and to such an event twice a year (or thereabouts) so banning pub visits makes much more sense than banning football matches.
Cobalt wrote:
I also don’t understand your obsession with international travel. In fact, internal travel is far more risky because more people do it, more frequently, and it is harder to check them.
You have to give me a bit of leeway in the sense that “internal” travel in Switzerland is quite limited. So international travel literally begins 10 minutes from my front door at the border to Germany 
But you have got a valid point, clearly. I guess there are two major aspects.
As you rightly say short range travel, from going to work in public transport to crossing internal borders are risky. That is why some countries blocked this or shut down selected regions or communities. That of course is what should have happened, but alas, did not.
Personally I expect that the vaccinations will relax the health care problems within Europe and probably North America sometime this year. However, this won’t happen world wide, I guess this will take considerably longer if it ever happens. And that is where is international travel or better intercontinental travel come in. So far, we’ve had 3 major mutations which appear to have serious implications: UK, South African and Brazil. Likewise, I hope Oz and NZ won’t be stupid enough to gamble away their success in eliminating the plague by opening up too soon.
The UK variant had a classic distribution scheme: It came to Europe via Ski tourism and common trade routes. Had the border been shut for non essential travel, this would not have happened to the extent it did.
South Africa and Brazil are both intercontinental travel. We know that these mutations are very dangerous and we know that vaccination manufacturers are thinking of adapting their vaccines which tells me that they only work limited against them at this point. Yet, we still allow travel to and from those places, which WILL distribute those mutations everywhere. The question is why do we do that.
Fact is that international/intercontinental travel has spread the thing in the first place. Had we cut off travel to China the moment the first indications of a severe problem had appeared, quite possibly we could have contained it there. But why repeat the same mistakes?
The only way to contain biohazards and plagues like this would be to shut the world wide population into their homes for 2 months and then, when no more cases are there, (not 1 or two, NO cases) reopen very very carefully locally first and then, maybe over the period of 2-3 years, gradually more and more, while immediately shutting down any region where the bug resurfaces. Sanitized countries or regions would return to normal first, then national and finally international level. This can of course take up to 3-5 years until everything is open, but that is the price to pay. If that means shutting down non-essential passenger travel (which means 95% of it) then so be it.
Then we’d have a chance to eradicate the bastard. The way things are now, I doubt it will get eradicated but it will basically guarantee that it gets distributed all over in new mutations again and again and we shall play catch up for ever.
South Africa and Brazil are both intercontinental travel.
They are not. “UK”, “Brazil” and “SA” variants have appeared and will appear even in the absence of travel in immuno-suppressed or immuno-deficient patients. See e.g. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2031364
vaccination manufacturers are thinking of adapting their vaccines which tells me that they only work limited against them at this point
Not true. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01270-4
Cobalt wrote:
I also don’t understand your obsession with international travel. In fact, internal travel is far more risky because more people do it, more frequently, and it is harder to check them.
Generally speaking, conservatives prefer closed borders while liberals prefer open borders. Of course such basic political views affect how we view the pandemic.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
So IMHO, this is the wrong direction. The only way to win over this is to eradicate it and that means keeping measures or even going into more massive lockdowns and to stop all international travel indefinitly, possibly forever. Then in limited areas we might get virus-free. Otherwise not.
What I can’t understand, is that some people seem to be ready to live in the world like that to avoid a 1% risk of dying (probably even less than 1%). Is there a point in the life prolongation completely sacrificing its quality?
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Wall Street Journal was one article I saw and local press here has picked up on this quite a bit.I understand it so that while people won’t get as sick as they do now, the virus will still be able to spread and probably even spread more than now without measures. So if the goal should be to eradicate it, vaccines may do the opposite as people get careless yet again.
You’re adding your own conclusions to what they write – they don’t say that.
Of course it will continue to circulate. It’s incredibly infectious and not very deadly so it spreads well, and large amounts of the world will not have good vaccine takeup either though choice of because they can’t get any. Current vaccines work well on most of the variants we see, one or two variants not so well. In this case it’s not technically difficult to create a vaccine for a new variant.
Valentin wrote:
What I can’t understand, is that some people seem to be ready to live in the world like that to avoid a 1% risk of dying (probably even less than 1%). Is there a point in the life prolongation completely sacrificing its quality?
Indeed – it’s crazy. What’s needed at the moment is education to help people understand that the risk spread across a population is not uniform. If the mortality rate is 1% (or whatever it is, in the subset of the population that you occupy) the vital fact is that nearly all of that risk lies with a very small fraction of that population – those that are very unhealthy, obese, elderly, whatever. As an otherwise-healthy individual your personal risk of dying from Covid-19 is very difficult to calculate, but it certainly far less than 1% or the other numbers that get bandied about.
Valentin wrote:
probably even less than 1%
The problem is that the risk is much larger than 1% after a certain age, and then just continue to increase with age. IMO the vaccines will make the risk negligible after a while, and for a while. But, when looking at how easy entire populations are lead by fear, and how gladly entire populations fall back to symbols (thinking about masks), I cannot see this is over anytime soon.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Had we cut off travel to China the moment the first indications of a severe problem had appeared, quite possibly we could have contained it there.
That would have meant the CCP owning up to the virus immediately – which they did not.
They are still trying to put a cynical spin on it, now claiming the doctor who first reported the virus and got jailed for his efforts was a hero! The big problem, IMHO, is not the virus – it’s the horrendous spread of lies and politically motivated misinformation.
Exactly when should they have owned up to the virus, compared to when they actually did? And how does that delay compare to the delay in taking action after they “owned up”?
