That's the with-lockdowns rate, is it not? The without-lockdowns rate would be much higher.

Current Israeli death rates are with some social distancing measures, but nowhere near lockdown. They're having concerts and (vaccinated-people-only) indoor dining.

Wait until you hear about Florida and Texas.

Texas and Florida deaths per day are under 100

Note that deaths are a very lagging indicator. Here in Ireland we have a massive spike at Christmas, and some of the people infected then are still dying.

Florida schools have been open since August.

Yeah, it does appear that relative to other activities, schools are less risky. France appear to be having issues though, and apparently that's related to schools.

The UK numbers have stopped decreasing since they re-opened schools, but that could be due to the B.1.7 variant.

But with much higher infection and fatality rates, because that is not a good idea without mass vaccination.

dont forget that flu deaths are _after_ vaccinations, of which there are now billions annually.

Given that flu vaccine is needed annually, we don’t have nearly the coverage we are trying for with COVID. Hopefully, COVID vaccines (and natural immunity for those who recovered) hold for much longer than flu vaccines, so that we can actually get closer to true herd immunity.

I’m not optimistic we can rid ourselves of COVID completely, but pushing it to the fringes would be great.

The CDC estimates the flu vaccine prevents 6,500 deaths per year in the US. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/keyfacts.htm#effectiveness

Flu vaccines are less effective than what we're seeing with the covid vaccines as well as they're more of a guess as to what will become the biggest flu variant vs after the fact of the covid vaccines. Not really comparable.

By May, not really. Assuming by mid-May 50% of people are vaccinated and some more have had natural immunity the total immunity rate is likely to be around 70%, and much of the remainder is children and young teens. At that point you could do nothing and not worry much. Especially when the only excuse for being old or at risk and not being immune is your own anti-vax tendencies, not a realistic supply limitation.

There are entirely too many assumptions in that statement, especially with the complete lack of evidence cited. There is a lot of concern right now amongst scientists that our uneven rollouts could cause new variants to spread, and that this could turn into more of a yearly flu vaccine with a constant fight to stay in front of it.

The problem is that those 70% numbers assume even distribution, but that isn't turning out to be the case. Not only are different countries going at very different rates, but even inside of the US you can see a huge spread. This isn't just about where the vaccine is being delivered but we're it's being ignored. It's not hard to imagine that LA County might not ever get up to the 60% to 70% threshold needed for herd immunity due to a large community of antivaxxers who can support and spread new variants that spread further out.

This very article we're reading briefly mentions this, as pfizer is already working on boosters. Covid is not going to just disappear in the next six weeks.

I'm actually more optimistic than that.

I read an interesting article arguing that "the people who deserve the vaccine the least, should be the ones getting it first". As in, the kid who irresponsibly goes to Miami on spring break, should be the person getting the vaccine first- because vaccinating super spreaders would save more lives than vaccinating someone who stays home anyways. So arguably, the people who are most likely to transmit the disease should get vaccinated first.

The flip side of the coin is people who are most likely to catch the disease- probably already did. I can name a handful of people who I'm facebook friends with, who gave no shits about staying at home and caught covid already a few months ago.

So now, 1 year into the lockdown, the people who are most likely superspreaders- already got infected and are mostly immune. On the other hand, we're going to have 1/3 or 1/4 of the population still stay at home regardless of what the govt says.

So a significant percent of the population isn't contributing to spread anymore, even if they're not vaccinated.

Covid won't disappear but the risk of mass casualty events from the virus certainly will, and that should be enough to remove the pandemic restrictions. We've lived with endemic infectious disease for a long time, and we will continue to live with them for the rest of our lives.

Once every adult has had the chance to get vaccinated, there is no reasonable argument for lockdowns.

Sure there is, there could be new variants that the vaccines don't protect against. The criteria for the various levels of reopening were set at the beginning. Those are what should determine the reopening according to public health experts.

The vaccines have proven highly effective at protecting against COVID and its highly transmissible variants, and it's unlikely that we'll see a new variant arise that exhibits sufficient immune escape to result in severe infections in vaccinated people.

The criteria for the various levels of reopening at the beginning were due the need to protect vulnerable people who did not have the opportunity to magically protect themselves by getting vaccinated.

Surely you understand there are more considerations than just what public health experts say right? They are a part of the answer, not the whole.