No herd immunity for you
We can’t have herd immunity because people are too stupid.
Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.
Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.
Like car crashes and flu and diabetes, I suppose.
The sad joke is, the more modest goal will be another reason for people to decide not to get vaccinated, which will make the modest goal harder to reach.
The endpoint has changed, but the most pressing challenge remains the same: persuading as many people as possible to get the shot.
So it’s too bad that so many “influencers” are shouting on social media that it’s all a deep state plot, or even Nazism.
“Kapos” ffs.
They probably aren’t at all aware of the history of public health requirements. Like, at all. Vaccinations have been mandated since the 1850s, for $#!7’s sake. This isn’t new, and yet people act like it is. Not only is it not new, it’s not even close to governmental overreach. Rather, it is precisely the role of government to promote the general welfare.
This is so depressing.
So now keeping people from getting sick and dying = tyranny.
Got it. Sounds a lot like trans ideology. Strange equations, tortured logic, and proclamations without evidence.
SICK PEOPLE ARE HEALTHY. SICK PEOPLE ARE HEALTHY. SICK PEOPLE ARE HEALTHY.
I’m surprised and alarmed how many people don’t comprehend that any pandemic is going to require intrusion on our civil liberties. I remember learning what a quarantine is as a child and thinking how unfair it sounded, that all the people within a region or a village would be trapped there during an outbreak. But quarantines work; they’ve worked since biblical times. When there’s an outbreak, the collective immediately overrides the individual. That’s just how it is.
COVID is deadly, but the problem is that it’s not quite deadly enough that the gravity of the situation is immediately palpable to everyone (particularly those disinclined to trust the government, and otherwise healthy young people who don’t pay attention to the news). When the SARS outbreak happened here in 2003, it was serious as fuck, and we’re extremely lucky that it was contained before it could become a global pandemic. I fear that the next outbreak will be more like SARS than COVID, and the consequences of noncooperation will be much much deadlier.
Shakespeare had to deal with several quarantines in his career; so he utilized it to write King Lear. Isaac Newton was sent home from college because of a quarantine. He used the time to discover his theory of gravity.
I’m not saying everyone can be a Shakespeare or a Newton (very few can), but instead of belly aching about it, they could suck it up and use the time wisely. Today is my first day back at work after more than a year. I haven’t been to theatre, or movies, or restaurants, or much of anywhere. I dealt with it. I wrote…I was very prolific. Of course, not everyone is a writer, either, but there are a lot of ways people can deal with it. I don’t feel sorry for these people, I feel sorry for the people whose lives did change. Now unemployed, at risk of losing everything they’ve worked for, or maybe lost loved ones to the disease. Staying home, wearing a mask, and getting vaccinated seem so minor in comparison.
My parents sometimes talked about the quarantines that occurred when they were growing up (1940s & 1950s). From the way they talked about them, I got the impression that they were just one of the things people did, like a standard procedure, to deal with the diseases. Similar to how you would follow the rules of the road when driving.
According to my Mom, it was not unheard of for a household to voluntarily quarantine if someone in it caught measles. If they needed something from the store (eg food, toilet paper), it was delivered. The delivery boy would place the items on the porch and go back to the delivery vehicle. Then someone from the household would take them inside.
Did America ever have mass screening for TB?
In Oz, Xray vans travelled cities, suburbs, towns and it was compulsory to attend for an Xray. Notices were distributed in advance via mail, and failure to attend without good reason, was punishable by a fine.
TB eliminated from the community, now only ever seen in immigrants from still infected countries.
Yep, civil liberties – have an Xray or die.
Hmm, good question. I think so but I’m not sure. Polio on the other hand I know triggered a lot of shutdowns of parks and swimming pools and the like.
My brother in law has a very serious needle phobia. I’m not talking a bit leery of getting a jab, I’m talking fainting, crying, screaming, needing five people to hold down his 10-stone-piss-wet-through body to keep him still if he’s approached by anything sharper than a mango.
He went for his first vaccination last week.
He’s not particularly at risk from COVID and isn’t especially frightened of it. He’s young, fit, healthy, works mostly from home at the moment… He was vaccinated for the benefit of other people, even though it terrified him.
According to my sister in law, it was very difficult for him indeed. It took a long time, he fainted twice and couldn’t stop himself fighting off the nurse. She eventually managed to calm him enough to get the injection, but I think it was fairly horrible for all concerned. The nurse wrote to his GP recommending a course of CBT and some medication that would take down a bison to take before his second dose. She wrote that it was the worst case of needle phobia that she – a veteran nurse in her fifties working at a vaccination centre – had ever seen.
But he still went and still fully intends to go for the next dose. So what the fuck is wrong with these idiots?
The last time I saw the same level of smug, self-certain delusion that leads to someone making a remark like that “kapo” remark, the speakers had all bought new running shoes and were preparing to “graduate to the next level of evolution” up on comet Hale-Bopp.
‘Like car crashes and flu and diabetes, I suppose.’
More like mass shootings really.
Hale-Bopp. Wasn’t that a time.
Like herding cats.
For a long time humanity survived diseases by dispersement, and variations in both behavior and genetics. Nothing conscious about it. Variation meant odds are some would survive and humanity would once again muddle through.
In this case, guided by science, the best thing for everyone to get vaccinated quickly. It would be a more perfect solution. It isn’t surprising that our tendencies, inculcated by thousands of years, would lean toward the merely adequate, not so perfect, solution.
Good news: humanity will survive. Bad news: COVID-19, and whatever it mutates unto, will be with us for the long haul.