It just seems to me that we are talking minor percentage points of difference to vaccinated people for the sake of massive burdens and removal of liberty.
I think it is clear vaccination has made a huge difference. The argument is now bouncing around the residuals i.e. how many of the people whose immune systems are not working are still getting ill.
It also doesn’t seem to make sense to me to vaccinate those who have already had it and have antibodies.
Sure, but it’s not easy. You need a blood test:
)Peter,
I agree, the vaccination and speed of deployment, especially in the UK seems to have been a great success. I guess now that it’s generally been offered to everyone and the most vulnerable are treated we need to get back on with life.
I really don’t like the idea of forcing medical procedures on anyone who doesn’t want to undertake them.
If vaccinated people are terrified of unvaccinated it makes it seem as if they don’t feel the vaccine is that effective.
Peter wrote:
Sure, but it’s not easy. You need a blood test:
Or having a positive covid test and being alive. Presumably you would only have to take a blood test once? which involves less needles than double, or ongoing booster top ups.
Off_Field wrote:
If vaccinated people are terrified of unvaccinated it makes it seem as if they don’t feel the vaccine is that effective.
I think you are looking at it from the point of view of an individual, while the rules are being crafted from the point of view of society.
The rules aren’t there to stop a vaccinated individual in a restaurant getting sick, but rather to drag down the seriously ill numbers to a level where society, business and the economy can operate as if covid doesn’t exist anymore. So they are crafted to put restrictions on those who are unvaccinated rather than putting them on everyone.
The state appears to believe that if they put no restrictions on anyone, then the number in hospital will rise to a point where they will be forced to take action again. But it believes that the risk of vaccinated mixing with other vaccinated is low enough that the numbers in hospital won’t climb to unmanageable levels.
dublinpilot wrote:
I think you are looking at it from the point of view of an individual
Absolutely, I’m not really a “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz” sort of person.
Although I wasn’t comfortable with it, I did go along with the first lockdowns as we didn’t know how bad it was or wasn’t (10% mortality was being talked about early on) and would have preferred far stronger border controls than we got.
However, we seem to have gone from two weeks to flatten the curve to avoid the hospitals being overwhelmed.(reasonable) to a situation where the hospitals are nowhere near overwhelmed, we have vaccinated most of the population who wants it, and if the vaccines massively reduce hospitalisation then overwhelming them becomes less of an issue.
dublinpilot wrote:
The rules aren’t there to stop a vaccinated individual in a restaurant getting sick, but rather to drag down the seriously ill numbers to a level where society, business and the economy can operate as if covid doesn’t exist anymore. So they are crafted to put restrictions on those who are unvaccinated rather than putting them on everyone.
As with so many other factors in Europe, and as in aviation, EU Covid is seemingly ‘different’ 
Society, business and the economy does not seem to be collapsing hereabouts (It’s been pretty much life as usual here for quite a long time now, and nobody is much interested in going backwards).
The complex and differing rationalizations one reads for segregating society, vaccine passports etc are becoming increasingly complex, bizarre, desperate or take your pick but I think the reality is exactly as it appears: it’s a completely transparent and authoritarian attempt by government to coerce people, by removing their right to live normal lives as punishment for noncompliance.
Society and the economy does not seem to be collapsing hereabouts (It’s been pretty life as usual here for quite a long time now, and nobody is much interested in going backwards).
Gee thank god you point the American “exceptionalism” out, for a second there you’d almost have convinced everybody Europe is all hatches locked up going out once per week to buy food Wuhan style.
Actually I think that whatever lessons are learnt from this debacle, for the “next epidemic”, or for any evolution of the current CV19 one, is that doing what the US is doing is the only sensible way forward if you want to have any sort of modern economy left.
And yes it will mean people will die, who would have lived on average perhaps another year. That’s life. Life is not fair. And nature rocks the boat every so often. Wait for Yellowstone to go up, or the Lanzarote volcano to slide into the Atlantic. Both are due “about now”. Neither of these will be fair, especially as you won’t be able to flog your Tesla shares fast enough
Not suggesting the US has done it right by design; as the saying goes, they explore all the alternatives first but Europe takes no risks because it is afraid of getting it wrong.
Today I walked to a nice little countryside farm shop / cafe, for a soup and a toast. I reckoned that 2/3 of the customers would die if they caught this thing. And most were 25-50. What can the State do? The inevitable realisation must be that nothing can be done.
Silvaire wrote:
It’s been pretty much life as usual here for quite a long time now, and nobody is much interested in going backwards
That’s not unique, I went to the UK last week to do my BFR, and life in England was pretty much back to normal, except some people are choosing to wear a mask indoors when there’s lots of people around. Scotland wants a mask indoors (I went there the week before), but that’s not exactly a hardship.
It is a complete illusion to imagine life will be the same as before just if one wants it to go away. The way things are, it won’t and the reason is that human societies are incapable of the discipline needed to counter a plague like this one. That has been proven by Covid.
Any newer or more violent pandemic will simply be on a large scale worse than this one, mankind will not change their behaviour, this Covid has shown, unless they are literally put a gun at their head by those governments who took the clear decision to stop this thing, no matter what. Regrettably, even the countries which made this effort will eventually fold because due to undisciplined behaviour of the others.
Peter wrote:
Not suggesting the US has done it right by design; as the saying goes, they explore all the alternatives first but Europe takes no risks because it is afraid of getting it wrong.
Neither have “done it right”. The only ones who did were some of the Asian countries which locked down early and succeeded to keep this virus out for quite some time. Had the whole world reacted like them, as fast and as determined, we would be looking back at this pandemic now and pat our backs how well we dealt with it. Instead, we have an endless pandemic which will continue for the forseeable future. Damage of this is MUCH higher than a world wide lockdown for about 2 months would have been in 2020.
It is very sad to read things like “people will die, life’s not fair”. This, in my view, is a complete surrender to human vanity and lack of discipline which caused Covid 19 to become the global threat it has become. It is also very clear that the next pandemic, whatever it will be, will cause the same or much worse consequences because with the precedence of Covid, even less people will be willing to restrict their social life again, seeing that “it did not help last time”.
Well, in the end, Covid will prove a Darwinian kind of selection of the fittest and document the total failure of society to deal with it. Heaven help us if something like Ebola ever mutate to become transferrable by aerosol and acclimatize to our climates.
Peter wrote:
is that doing what the US is doing is the only sensible way forward if you want to have any sort of modern economy left.
Mhhhh – we don’t have 21 numbers yet, but if we look at 2020, I’m, not sure that your point about “doing it right” is so clear.
From 19 to 20 the unemployment rate in the EU only slightly increased from 6.9 to 7.1% while in the US unemployment exploded from 3.8 to 8.6%. It’s not so often that unemployment in the US is actually higher than in the EU. Even more drastically, the "youth unemployment (actually belo 24yr) in the US went up to more than 16% – rates we have seen in Spain during economic crisis…
After we know this years numbers, we will see if the US might have recovered more quickly – but the myth that the US did better for the economy is to a large extend the typical American marketing hype.
