1) Vaccination means fewer people die, and so we have more choices than we did before.
Not only will fewer people die but those who get it do in most cases not need hospitalisation. Seeing that hospitalisation and ICU rates are still the two factors dictating lockdown policies in most places, that is a very significant observation.
What is brutally clear by now however is that vaccination is NOT the final solution to this problem, it is but a intermediate remedy. Now that it becomes more and more clear that spreading is not sufficiently reduced within vaccinated folks, a lot of easing of measures for those vaccinated appear in a very different light. The Austrian lockdown is a clear indication, that vaccination alone will not prevent those things from happening, as long as there are still too many unvaccinated around who have in fact thaken the whole system hostage.
2) We have to find a better way of living with this virus, we can’t just lockdown forever.
Looking at Austria, where a ganeral lockdown now has been imposed again on everyone, any way of better dealing with it eludes me.
Austria is walking a very dangerous path now however, by threatening to impose vaccinations. It is almost 100% clear that what ever law they will pass to make vaccination compulsory will be challenged in court and I am almost certain that in the end it will banned by the courts. The signal this sends will be fatal to the whole effort.
My own prediction now is that lockowns will become cyclic, they wlll come every fall and winter and be eased in spring. So we will see lockdowns over winter and relatively open summers for the forseeable future. The way things are going, with each wave outdoing the previous in viciousness and case numbers, it is hard to imagine where the whole thing is going, the only think clear is that it won´t end. Ever.
And it becomes clearer than ever that there is no herd immunity. Those who have passed the illness can get it again after some time.
Your prediction that it will be a distant memory in 60 years is not reassuring in the lleast. It merely confirms what i have been saying all along:Covid will rule our lifes for the remainder of all our lifetimes. In 60 years my daughter, may she live that long, will be retired. We all will be history by then. So basically we may admit that Covid has indeed destroyed life as we knew it and it will not come back in any relevant future.
@skydiller and @Archer181 may well spit at those terrified. I have been terrified from day one of this, as many posters here can easily remember and read up on what I´ve been saying and gotten flack for. Well, unfortunately, most of what I feared has come to pass but in much worse extent. And about having fun, what travesty is it to have “fun” in the worst exisential crisis mankind has seen since WW2. It is exactly the obsession with having fun which has brought us here. Martial law in February 2020 and even now could possibly do something about it, only there is one snag:Martial law does not exist in most constitutions, it is an imagination in government critics and sceptics paranoid imagination. Even though the Austrian lock down may come close. But it is a vain effort even there. as the moment it is relaxed, whatever has been gained will be lost within 3 weeks.
I am with @Mailbuflyer with this one. Those of us who have lost people or who have had loved ones affected naturally think differently. I am taking over work now from unvaccinated folks who are now all sick and who impose their tyranny onto us. Frankly, I´d rather not say it aloud what I think it is they deserve but I do hope they get a lesson they will NEVER forget.
critical
question one:
could the austrian health system (hospitals/icu) could take/withstand the fourth wave (after lockdown) ?
scientific data indicates it would be very, very close.
forced (local) procedures of triages at icus are quite probable.
(nobody talks about the very exhausted and (by politics) deeply frustrated women and men who do this work every day and night).
question two:
would a higher percentage of vaccination (like 80-85%) of adults would have prevented this threat to the healthsystem?
as evident scientific data in austria indicates, the answer is YES.
question three:
could this higher percentage of vaccination could have been accomplished in austria ?
the answer is YES. by end of june 2021 enough of the approved and accepted vaccines were available and could have been administered.
question four:
was there enough political effort, clear messaging, to get people vaccinated by positiv motivation and reasonable argument/media work during the time available
in summer ?
the answer is NO.
question five:
would a mandatory vaccination starting 01 02 2021 solve the problems of the fourth wave?
the answer is NO.
question six:
are the considerable threats to our democracy adressed accurately in public and political discourses?
the answer is NO
question seven:
is the most immanent threat by the corona virus (highest replication rates/highest mutation/variant likelihood ever recorded in human history) adressed
and discussed proberly.
the answer is NO.
cpt_om_sky wrote:
was there enough political effort, clear messaging, to get people vaccinated by positiv motivation and reasonable argument/media work during the time available
in summer ?
the answer is NO.
What else did you want to do? It was said, over and over again, GO get the goddam vaccintion. Everywhere. People ignored it, some out of “religion” some because they are lazy. Those latter ones are in the process of being vaccinated now, the rest will most probably try a revolution.
Apart: Quite a few of my Austrian friends have been able to get the booster shot by now, by just walking into the nearest vaccination center. By the looks of it, Switzerland has once again proven incapable of providing this service, anyone below 65 is now told it will be January before we can get the booster. This is totally unacceptable. This way also our country will be thrown into lockdown. I still hope that after the referendum they will pull out the stops.
While I understand and support the motives for the total lockdown, I fear that the fact that vaccinated people are now locked down in the same way as unvaccinated do a quite harsh problem, as it a) frustrates those who have been cooperating so far and b) “proves” to the anti vaxxers that “vaccines are no good anyway”.
cpt_om_sky wrote:
question five:
would a mandatory vaccination starting 01 02 2021 solve the problems of the fourth wave?
the answer is NO.
It won’t solve the 4th wave which is a reality now. Also it is critical to announce something which will most probably be nullified by the courts. If at all, it should have come right now.
cpt_om_sky wrote:
question six:
are the considerable threats to our democracy adressed accurately in public and political discourses?
the answer is NO
So far, I don’t see too many threats to the democratic process directly, as almost all the regulation concerning Covid are passed through the democratic channels. The threat is rather on level of society, which has allowed a vocal minority to take the rest hostage.
Austria in general has done much better politically and from an infrastructure point of view than most other countries, after initally failing to act. Chancellor Kurz has never been afraid to call hard shots. Aparently this has changed, otherwise measures would most probably been taken much earlier.
anybody done any flying lately? ;-) this thread is still going ;-)
Dear LFHNflightstudent -yes I went flying yesterday and going again today – but it’s a Covid thread remember 
I would like to thank everybody in this thread for the fantastic debate. Sometimes I have posted some slightly provocative things to get a response but people come back respectfully. This is nothing like you get anywhere else where debate is seen as dangerous as it might lower the vax rate.
I think Mooney Driver is right, he has experienced some awful fallout whereas I know about 30 people who have had Covid both at the start and recently and in all cases it has been like a cold/flu. This must impact on the way we both think.
There is an article in the Spectator magazine which sums up exactly how I feel – here is a small section where they are specifically talking about the ONS data of the 100,000 of each category. I think Nature magazine is where I saw those graphs I mentioned in previous theads:-
As for the comparative contagiousness of each group, the data is mixed. A study published in Nature early last month confirmed PHE’s finding that the Covid-positive vaxxed and unvaxxed carry nearly identical viral loads; hence they should be similarly infectious. But viral load turns out to drop more quickly in the vaccinated, making them infectious for a shorter period. The study shows that ‘people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a Covid-19 vaccine than if they haven’t’.
That’s the good news. Now for Nature’s bad news: ‘But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot… Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time.’ Three months after vaccination, your chances of passing on the Delta variant are ‘on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus’.
Mercifully, the vaccines’ protection from hospitalisation and death is slumping slowly and remains considerable. Stress on healthcare systems and excess deaths are the only reasons Covid is a concern of government.
All this information is in the public domain. Yet due to doublethink, idiocy, mulishness, duplicity, derangement or all of the above, policy-makers are refusing to act on its implications. The absurd theatre of vaccine passports in continental Europe is worse than pointless.
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
anybody done any flying lately? ;-) this thread is still going ;-)
I have been flying every week, except in bad weather 
This weekend my wife and I are painting a room in our new house. Corona is something that every vaccinated person gets sooner or later it seems. That’s my subjective view on the situation
Hospitals here are full. This is not due to corona, but rather a build up of patients from health care that didn’t die within the last couple of years, and are now filling up the beds.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
What is brutally clear by now however is that vaccination is NOT the final solution to this problem, it is but a intermediate remedy.
So what is the final solution?
So what is the final solution?
Maybe ask Japan: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/
Or Uttar Pradesh: https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/lucknow-news/covid19-active-cases-in-uttar-pradesh-cross-100-mark-again-101637260330542.html
Or sub-Saharan Africa with the exception of South Africa.
Rwy20 wrote:
Maybe ask Japan
I’m asking Mooney_Driver (or anyone else who wants to answer).
What exactly does “mandatory vaccination” mean in Austria?
Mandatory means different things to different people, but I’m wondering what it means in this context?
For example does it simply mean that you’ll need to be vaccinated to go to work, shops, use public transport etc?
or does it mean that you’ll lose rights, such as your employer will have the right to dismiss you if aren’t vaccinated without any rights to redundancy/unfair dismissal rules
or are you jail (can’t imagine they’d have the capacity for that)
or does it mean that the police will arrive at your front door drag you to a vaccination clinic where some big hairy men with tattoos, guns a buzz cut will hold you down while a nurse shoves a needle in your arm? (Given Austrian history, I can’t imagine that happening)
All I could find is that you’ll have to pay a fine if you don’t get vaccinated, but no idea of that’s €100 fine or €10K?
Some US states tried inducements to get vaccinated (cash/gift cards for those getting vaccinated). Anyone know if that had a useful effect?
