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A comment on Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show. Parent comment

Re:Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, tri... by wonderwonder on Monday November 16, 2020 @01:23PM (#25115132)
I live in a US state with essentially no lock down measures in place. Companies around me are going out of business by the dozen. These companies are not going out of business due to any government mandate they are going out of business because of economic uncertainty and people not spending as they dont want to go to places and potentially get sick. I used to spend ~$500 a month on eating out, I spend almost zero now as I dont want to take the risk. This has nothing to do with government choices and fully to do with mine. Now multiply this by tens of thousands of other people making the same choice and you will understand why an effective widely used vaccine is important for an economic recovery. Until the virus is under control I and many others will severely curtail our spending and there will be only a limited economic recovery.

In addition I dont go out as I have elderly relatives who I dont want to sicken, they dont expect it, its my choice. So blaming others for being selfish is really missing the point and is an illustration of not really understanding the current economic situation.

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Re:Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, tri... by kmonsen on Monday November 16, 2020 @06:10PM (#25118300)
Your point is perfectly true, but there is also one more thing to consider. It is possible for the health care system to get overworked like they did in NYC and North Italy. There are signs it could happens in other places in the US now like Wisconsin.

At that point everything else suddenly becomes critical, because there is no ICU left.

Also, at least in CA, doctors/hospitals/dentists etc are only doing what is critical right now to avoid the whole hospital going into lockdown. That has large consequences for health outcomes and for the economy of those practises.

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Re:Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, tri... by emn13 on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @05:43AM (#25122193)
To add some data to that: there is a correlation between disease spread and GDP reduction, and it's the one that consistent with your anecdote: The economic impact is greater where the disease is left unchecked :

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-health-economy, and then specificaly this scatterplot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirme...

(unfortunately, the graph doesn't include countries like china, vietnam, and many other asian countries, because that would make the trend even clearer.)

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