Idk. I know this was a popular refrain early on to blame folks refusing vaccines for ruining everything but it doesn’t seem relevant (blame them for crowding hospitals if you want though).
Getting world wide vaccination rates at a level that stayed ahead of mutations and died out with herd immunity seems like it was a pipe dream in retrospect. Delta originated in India. Omicron originated in South Africa from someone who was vaccinated and took a really long time to clear the virus. The way past this may be what is happening now. That a dominant strain develops that is highly transmissible but that isn’t that severe.
Do we cancel games because of a flu outbreak, no, this is no different, people get the flu sometimes even though vaccinated, same with Covid virus, just reduces chances of getting really sick, this nonsense has to stop!!!
The flu has been studied since… I don’t know but I’d bet it’s near a century now. You can get some pills at CVS for the flu or you can take a vaccine that’s been around for a very long time. Virologists (who are true experts) have studied the flu and its behavior from every angle. I could go on.
Covid is brand new. Still lots of unknowns. Hence the public health people (who are also experts) issuing extra caution.
If we had a vaccine that was 95% effective we could roll out against Omicron to 85% of the world tomorrow, sure we’d probably be in great shape to stamp things out for now and may even have a decent shot to prevent mutations. But after seeing how things played out it’s clear that was always going to be impossible. Leaning on preventing mutations as the stick for the 30 million or whatever unvaccinated Americans (which seemed to be the subtext of the post I responded to) misses the forest through the trees and ignores actual experience in favor of looking for scapegoats.
I was hopeful that vaccination would be effective until somehow not getting vaccinated became emblematic of one’s devotion to one’s political viewpoint. I think without that happening, Delta doesn’t wreck the country and omicron would have been a footnote.
I’d like to hear ehog’s thoughts on this. I’ve been thinking the same thing as TJ. If this Omicron pushes Delta out, and assuming we withstand this initial massive outbreak, could this particular variant put us on the path to a better place?
That includes lots of “ifs”… Does Delta really disappear or will it come back? Is Omicron really not as severe, as I’ve heard from S Africa? Will we be able to vaccinate enough of the world to prevent or at least mitigate new variants?
I’m not really following what point you are making here. Yeah ppl do foolish things in the name of cultural/political/etc affiliation but the way you are trying to use it seems like a non-sequitur and not really fact based. Denmark has an extremely high vaccination rate and got a lot of people boosted right before Omicron hit. Omicron still went through Denmark like wildfire. However, it looks like it may be peaking there and hospitalizations haven’t been that bad. The vaxx rate may be a part of the latter, though South Africa did well with Omicron with a low vaxx rate.
I’m not sure what classification you are using to say a variant is or is not a footnote in a particular place (deaths?) but that’s a different point than mutations and it’s yet to be seen how we fare in that respect in any event.
TQC - it’s my hope as well that omicron is much milder and brings more immunity to the herd than damage. The jury is still out on this. As highly transmissible as it clearly is, it doesn’t have to have a high mortality/morbidity rate to have a substantial mortality/morbidity count.
TJ - I just think if the US got properly vaccinated, we wouldn’t have the terrible Delta variant still active and destroying while omicron moved in. It muddies things significantly and makes it harder to relax about omicron because you don’t know if you are dealing with Delta or omicron at the point where it’s most important in dealing with the public health aspects. And the hospitals across the country are weary and stressed, to say the least. https://twitter.com/DrTomFrieden/status/1475099998773731334?t=2HJJruIHfX6aUGbDGwIJlg&s=19
Here’s an interesting article that explains virus mutations from National Geographic. It was published early in 2021, but I think it gives a good overview on how these organisms function.
There were 93,000 people at Jerry World last night to watch the Cowboys. Thank goodness we tested the 50 players on the Cowboys and the Redskins. We wouldn’t want last night’s game to be a spreading event.
So a medical degree makes one infallible? Not all doctors agree on the policies advocated by the ‘experts’. So how do we go about determining the ‘real experts’ without a healthy debate?
