If one reads the actual studies about "long COVID" (and not sensationalistic media reports that leave all the nuances out), they often emphasize that severity of post-COVID symptoms correlates quite neatly with severity of illness. Because younger people rarely have severe illness, that means the risk of long-term symptoms is very low for them. Not zero, of course, but low as with many other common illnesses for which major societal restrictions are not imposed.
People might be tempted to jump in with "But my friend who got COVID...!", but please don't, this is irresponsible in a scientific context. All those people before COVID who claimed to have chronic Lyme disease, doctors tell us, likely didn't, and long-COVID self-reporting and anecdotes is the same thing.
While anecdotal, I do know of at one person that has lost their sense of smell and taste for now over 5 months. Even worse, any smell she can actually notice (often the faintest of smells ) is disgusting to her. Independently of what the smell actually is. That person is young and to my knowledge not in a risk group at all. In the UK, she struggles to even get someone to take it more serious than just prescribing antidepressants. I would not be surprised if many of the minority of people with long-lasting effects are unknown to the system, because either they do not search for help, or because the health system does not take them seriously.
So again, one sample is not a study, but I just want to point out that overgeneralising in either direction does not help.
She has a prolonged non-life-threatening condition with no known treatment. There's no tests to run or nothing more to diagnose, that's apparently done already. There's no drugs or procedures prescribed because, as far as I know, there are no drugs or procedures known to be effective for that. And that (looking seriously at her issue and giving a serious answer "do nothing") is a reasonable end state for diagnosis - it sucks, it's less common nowadays than it used to be, but it still happens.
That's it, the next step is acceptance, not continuing to seek soomeone to "take it more serious" - and if acceptance isn't working and is causing distress that's causing further problems, then indeed the next step is psychological help or pharmaceutical help for the psychological issues. Perhaps a few years later (not sooner) there will be treatment for that issue, so when (if!) that happens, then it would be a different discussion, but until that IMHO it's dangerous to encourage people to keep looking, as it can only lead to various snake-oil charlatans who'll make false promises. If the system would deny her some test or treatment that's likely to help, then it would be justified to seek attention and have someone take the complaint seriously and do the thing that needs to be done, but it doesn't seem to be the case here.
I'm sorry as this does sound like a dismissal, but if there are suggestions about what the system should do differently in this case, I'd be glad to hear, perhaps there can be a better way to go about this, but I'm all out of ideas.
It's an issue of perception and condescending attitudes by medical professionals that is the real problem. If I were a medical professional, I would at the very least acknowledge the problems as genuine physical symptoms and do my best to re-assure the patient that it's being researched by the scientific community so a treatment might be possible in the future.
Yes, it's completely inappropriate to say 'just take these weird, possibly life-long systems and deal with it'.
'The answer' is obviously to adjust our policies given the fact that 'a lot of people are having symptoms off-the-record'. Meaning possibly aggressive push for vaccines among youth, and factoring this into 'opening up schedules' etc..
The parent post and my response was about "the system" not taking her seriously, about the people where the damage was already done - are there any policy adjustments that would be useful for people like that? For people who now do have these weird, persistent, possibly life-long conditions, is there any better option than "dealing with it"? Denial helps noone, and can be quite harmful.
There've been reports that people suffering from long-COVID have seen improvements after getting the vaccine.
What additional actions should be taken by the medical system or the political system at this point for a (supposed) disease that has no known treatment or even any understood cause?
The daily had an episode[1] about a food critic who lost her sense of smell after a COVID infection and the effort she went to in order to get it back. Her descriptions of what it was like to eat her favourite food without being able to taste made me want to wear two masks.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/podcasts/the-daily/corona...
I also had really bad Parkinson’s-like shaking a few times, but luckily that’s gone away. Post viral issues do happen with other diseases and I’m personally glad COVID’s symptoms of it are so unique. From personal experience doctors have a hard time acknowledging fatigue. This should lead to more research on the matter.
The estimates I see are over 10% across age groups do not fully recover.
This: 'All those people before COVID who claimed to have chronic Lyme disease, doctors tell us, likely didn't, and long-COVID self-reporting and anecdotes is the same thing. '
Is a little bit of a wild claim ('they're all lying!') and unsubstantiated.
Comparison between Finland and Sweden: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbf...
That some cases go without symptoms is besides the point.
Kids are almost as likely to get COVID as any other group [1], they are just a lot less likely to die.
The epidemiological data on that has been consistent for some months now.
The study you presented was a short time-frame at the very start of the pandemic.
COVID is a wildly infectious disease, so the notion that 'kids don't die from it it so it's ok' is really bad logic: everyone who has symptoms, spreads, and causes other people to get it which creates the pandemic.
Also - you have provided no evidence for your wild claim that all the 'long-covid people were lying about their lyme disease'.
[1] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...
(0-19 year-olds are the 2cnd highest cohort. Granted it's a bigger cohort, that said, they are getting infected at very meaningful rates i.e. they are spreaders)
Isn’t it odd that there was no spike in the virus after the protests and riots in the US? Millions of people were out in the streets packed together.
The data was 5 months, starting in January, long before COVID started.
The comparable time-frame was short and it's only a very rough comparison - 'everything' about policies in nations, rates of infection (time of onset) would have been different.
Since then, we have much more data, and we know unambiguously that children get and spread COVID.
That 'people at protests' were or were not super-spreading is besides the point unless you're trying to suggest that 'COVID does not spread' at all? Those events took place outdoors during the summer among healthy people. Since September, with colder weather and more indoor activity (and the start of school), the growth of COVID has been quite spectacular.
550 000 Americans have died from COVID. It's affected everyone.
But all of this is moot: COVID is dangerous not because of individual effects, but because of how rapidly it spreads.
The thing that makes COVID a pandemic is the easy by which it gets into the population.
Because one group is much less likely to die is not hugely important if they serve as vectors for the disease which kills others.
From an epidemiological perspective, kids spread it almost like adults, and therefore 'are a cause' almost like adults. It's great they don't die, but that's only 1/2 of the story.
We have to make sure to keep children from getting infected, just as we do adults.
In short: children should be vaccinated, we may do them last but we can't ignore the population and assume 'it will be fine because they won't die'.
If you take a look at the BLM riots in the US, a lot of people were wearing masks. It's a contrast to several Trump events, where a lot of supporters famously got infected. That's not to mention the huge spike and spreading after spring break 2020..
I get the sense that you're trolling tbh.
Edit: Let us assume you're not.
"[Trump rallies gauged to] have led to more than 30,000 additional cases and at least 700 additional deaths."
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-10-31/super-sprea...
"We demonstrate that cities which had [BLM] protests saw an increase in social distancing behavior for the overall population relative to cities that did not,” reads the report called, “Black lives matter protests, social distancing and COVID-19.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/report-blm-protests-have-n...
The CDC states that schools are not particularly bad, and the worst scenario are small, informal gatherings cf. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-19-spreads-easily-expert...
These 3 articles suggest that it comes down to behavior. So if we assume that the Swedish studies are correct, they would reflect how schools deal with protocols. I think it's fair to assume a different result e.g. outside Sweden or Scandinavia.
It's also premature to say whether this still applies wrt the new variants from Brazil, GB and South Africa.
And no I just think lockdowns have done far more harm than good. This paper is a meta-analysis of 54 prior studies that involved a total of 77,758 subjects reporting secondary transmissions in households. Conclusion: Asymptomatic people are not a factor for spreading Covid: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33315116/
FYI that study has been cited a few times by the CDC even.
So yeah all this masking and social distancing has really not been needed. If you have symptoms then stay home should have been the guidance.
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/critics-slam-letter-...
It is not true that kids don't get covid. It is not true that kids don't spread covid.
Also you didn’t read the report: “Closing of schools had no measurable effect on the number of cases of covid- 19 among children”. They are not major vectors of transmission for COVID.
As far as this odd celebration of a clearly failed national policy, just remember:
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
The fact that Sweden guessed right on schools and wrong on everyone else really should be guiding you to the opposite intuition here.
including better adherence in school environments to other mitigation strategies like mask wearing and distancing; schools are better organized and MUCH more rule-compliant than society at large!
which for Sweden is clearly not true, they didn’t even wear masks in school. And I never said kids don’t get COVID I said schools aren’t major drivers of transmission. Feel free to continue misreading what I wrote though.
"...hospitalisation rate of 0-9 year olds are 181 out of 17004 confirmed cases and 10-19 yo 180 out of 36065 confirmed. 23% of those had an underlying disease."
Edit: The intensive care numbers are 11 and 15 for the two groups with 4 and 3 with an underlying disease.
Aside from antibodies, (citation needed).
I caught COVID recently, and my symptoms were incredibly mild. I like to think that keeping my immune system healthy and exposed to all of the stuff it would normally see played a role in that.
Hospitalization by definition is considered severe.
"research suggests that people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are at their most contagious in the 24 to 48 hours before they experience symptoms." [1]
[1] https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/10/exposed-to-...
The World Bank estimates 150 million will be pushed into extreme poverty due to COVID-related lockdowns:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/c...
Education has also been severely disrupted:
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/children-cannot-afford...
Your suggestion that you can safely just quarantine and not be a risk to others is flat out wrong because you are at your most contagious 24-48 hours before you have symptoms.
Also you may not have immunity after you sheltered and recovered.
I'll agree with you that the response was pretty terrible though.
The links I provided give some indication of the poverty and educational disruption this causes, but unfortunately it's hard for people to admit that mass-quarantines were and continue to be wrong, because this issue has been politicized.
Maybe you're right, and quarantine after contraction of illness was not a fully effective method of transmission control, but just the elderly isolating, instead of every one, was, and is a much more proportionate and sensible way to deal with a pandemic that only the elderly are highly vulnerable to.
This seems to be a big part of your reasoning but I don't think this is true. Yes, risk does skew there. But there are large numbers of non-elderly people who have been severely affected.
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/nihr-publishes-second-themed-rev...
> For those admitted to hospital, between 50-89% had at least one enduring symptom after two months. Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one month later and at least 10% three months later;
> Long Covid appears to be more prevalent in women and in young people (including children) than might have been expected from acute Covid19 mortality;
That's not "very low" and you shouldn't insert your own conclusions on unnamed resources.
> Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one month later and at least 10% three months later;
Still, not "very low"...
People who haven't been hospitalized aren't likely to end up in these statistics, regardless of whether they have long-term problems or not. It's harder to study them.
*Even flu can cause scary effects like temporary paralysis in children
It might not be directly life-threatening (I would like to be able to smell smoke again, though), but blowing off peoples' reports of issues that severely reduce their quality of life is toxic.
That's too big of a % in my personal sphere to not consider any chance of "very low"
Edit: perhaps read his comment again.
His conclusion is not definitive, it's his opinion based on some not linked sources:
> that means the risk of long-term symptoms is very low for them.
NHS mentions the following on long covid after actual research : https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/nihr-publishes-second-themed-rev...
> For those admitted to hospital, between 50-89% had at least one enduring symptom after two months. Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one.
By all common sense. That is not a "very low" risk for long covid.
Anecdotes are not useless, though they can be misleading. There are always exceptions to rules/trends.
OP didn't try to refrain people from providing opposing views or evidence that actually contradict his statements, he just asked to avoid that common fallacy.
If you want something on long covid, here it is from NHS ( UK):
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/nihr-publishes-second-themed-rev...
> For those admitted to hospital, between 50-89% had at least one enduring symptom after two months. Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one month later and at least 10% three months later;
> Long Covid appears to be more prevalent in women and in young people (including children) than might have been expected from acute Covid19 mortality;
That's not "very low"
> Data from one study shows that of more than 3,000 adults ages 18 to 34 who contracted COVID-19 and became sick enough to require hospital care, 21% ended up in intensive care, 10% were placed on a breathing machine and 2.7% died.
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/nihr-publishes-second-themed-rev... ( NHS about long Covid )
> For those admitted to hospital, between 50-89% had at least one enduring symptom after two months. Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one month later and at least 10% three months later;
With any common sense. That is definitely not a "very low" risk.
And it's obvious the actual research I added doesn't suggests it either.
The rate of infection is highest among 'younger people' and though their rates of hospitalization are lower, there's still quite a few people.
And that they may have had 'other complications' like 'obesity' or 'asthma' is almost besides the point.
10% of those admissions is going to be, overall, a potentially serious health issue, affecting quite a lot of people.
We have yet to determine what all of that amounts to and how severe it will be, but it can't be dismissed.
Additionally, young people without chronic diseases excludes some young people. Your original comment didn't exclude them and made the wrong association.
Chances of dying because of a thunder strike or in an airplane accident is very low.
Having long term covid issues as a young person is not.
In a number of countries, health ministers are complaining that the broad public is no longer observing restrictions, and the ruling party may even feel pressure to roll back restrictions because internal polling finds they could cost it reelection. If a voting public is unconcerned enough with those uncontroversially at-risk groups that have not yet been vaccinated, you cannot expect much sympathy for those relatively few examples of less at-risk demographics who end up with long-term symptoms, even if their risk is somewhat higher than a “thunder strike or an airplane accident”.
"Very low" minimizes the risk people associate with it and it's not appropriate for things that:
- needs more research
- current research doesn't support it's usage
In the context of assessing personal risk factors of readers in the midst of a global pandemic. I think it's kinda irresponsible.
Yes. It's been one of the dumbest narratives of the last year that "herd immunity" is a single, fixed constant determined solely by vaccination rate. It isn't. The threshold itself is going to differ by subpopulation, and is affected by population mixing, mobility, climate, age distribution, current disease prevalence, natural infection rate and lots of other factors. For example, it's quite possible that large pockets of rural areas will achieve "herd immunity" long before, say, London, simply because there are fewer people interacting on a daily basis.
Even then, it's not like you hit the threshold, and infections just drop off dramatically. It's a shift as you get closer to the "threshold" (whatever that actually is), with infections gradually falling toward (but likely never reaching) zero.
This toy model version of herd immunity is appealing to the Thomas Pueyos of the world, but not at all representative of what happens in messy reality.
Engineers have a poor sense of the level of slop in biology and medicine. I can tell you with near 100% confidence how PCR works, but if I set out to run PCR in the real world (which is actually one of the most repeatable things in biology, btw), it's just going to fail some of the time, even if I've done the same exact reaction many times before. The biological world is noisy.
Remember the old physics joke about "assume a frictionless spherical horse"? This is a "spherical horse" of the pandemic. It's one of those things that armchair biologists take way too literally, because it's in a textbook. Obviously, first-year mechanics isn't wrong...it's just not all there is.
Working age population (205M): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
Total population (328M): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTOTUSA647NWDB
Under 15 (~60M): https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/101-child-popul...
* 33% of the US population has had at least one dose (19% are fully vaccinated).
* 42% (25%) of the population over 18.
* 76% (57%) of the population over 65 (who are, not incidentally, by far the most likely to experience mortality):
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations
These numbers are rapidly increasing, and on top of the ~100-120M that have been infected in the US already (current CDC estimates are that actual cases are around 4x the number reported [1]). And of course, as I said, it's not as if "herd immunity" is a single number that is the same everywhere in the US.
Nobody claimed that we're there yet, but given all current data, pessimism is unwarranted.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/geog...
> > So can we have "herd" immunity when the majority of the able-bodied working-age population and school kids are not protected yet?
> Yes.
The thinking was that some people within a community are interacting with many more people than others and that they would be more likely to have antibodies.
It looks like in November/December the rate among grades 7-11 was almost 3x the rate of those ages 35-39.
https://twitter.com/c_drosten/status/1347544994941431808?s=2...
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Also, most schools were closed from the beginning of January to March.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/world/europe/uk-lockdown.... https://www.bbc.com/news/education-51643556
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/08/covid-uk-coron...
The data I shared is calculated from random population surveillance testing, and is the gold standard on measure of true spread.
The data you linked to is reported cases. Children often have very mild or asymptomatic cases so they are not tested nearly as much and thus many more cases are undetected in children compared to other age groups.
That's rubbish. My kids are stuff swabs up their nose twice a week - and they are lateral flow tests, so we sit there waiting to see whether the double line appears.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rapid-lateral-flow-testing-for-h...
It may well be they're telling the truth about their school, but that still makes a blanket claim, like the one made above, misinformation when it's presented with no qualification to indicate it's based purely on an anecdote (I'll note the comment has since been edited to water down the original claim)
Also, the false negative rate isn't a big problem IMO. The PCR 'false negative' rate is far far higher because we are only doing a few hundred thousand a day, so 90% of people are getting missed entirely. I'd rather a 50% false negative rate than a 89% false negative rate from PCR.
There is also the problem that PCR takes at least a day to turn around as well - which will result in more spread.
I'm not saying we should get rid of PCR testing and just do LFD but doing both is probably the best option.
I agree with this part. My guess is that Israel is getting herd immunity at a lower overall immunization rate than expected because behavior is different too. There's still some amount of residual social distancing, social isolating, and so on. Plus whatever number of people didn't get a shot, but have some immunity from a previous (perhaps non-symptomatic) COVID infection.
That number will be higher with no restrictions at all, due to more activity overall.
For me herd immunity is only a way to persuade politicians to remove all restrictions so that we can resume our lives.
And Corona vaccine passes do not have any place in this last scenario.
We think it is simply because when she was pregnant a year or two ago she took some drugs that moderated her immune response. She hasn't taken the drugs since. Apparently it is just a matter of people's health records being searched in a pretty basic way - if you are flagged up as having been prescribed drug X/Y/Z etc (apparently regardless of when) then you are treated as having an underlying condition and get the call.
So the British government built a vaccination strategy around preventing death, hospitalisation and illness. It was estimated that if the vaccines had been available during the first wave and we had just vaccinated the priority groups we would have saved 90% of the lives lost to Covid.
Those over 20 are due to get their first dose by the end of July.
One important reason that school kids aren't being vaccinated is that the vaccines haven't been approved yet because trials in that age group are still ongoing.
Sort of. The vaccine also wasn't tested on 80+ but they were first in line.
What do you mean by due?
Ministers have said this will happen but there has not been much else backing this up AFAIK. There was a vaccine roll-out plan from Jan which merely mentioned all adults by Autumn. I haven't heard of an official, detailed plan regarding the healthy under-50s.
I’m looking for details. Is it going to be wide open? Or in age brackets? Etc. An actual rollout plan by the organisations delivering it
That article is very light on detail for the under 50s, which is exactly my point. It sources the covid delivery plan which hasn’t been updated since Jan.
It doesn’t mean nobody will get Covid and as you point out the immunity isn’t evenly distributed - so you could certainly have outbreaks in sub-populations.
But the overall trend should be downward.
I believe in my borough that 60-70% figure is actually closer to 70-80% by now. Unfortunately Greater Manchester is really a very large system, and a lot of other boroughs have not been as efficient.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precaut...
1) they have herd immunity, or
2) the lockdown wasn't really doing anything anyway
Or both, of course. But the theory that accords best with prior knowledge, is that because they have gotten above 70% resistant (either through vaccination or the virus itself), they have herd immunity because that's what we expected.
The real news would be if they did NOT have herd immunity by now, as that would imply that vaccination is for some reason not working. But, good news, it appears to be working.
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion based on the data at http://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
Total cases have continued to decrease, with the most recent 7-day average showing a 30% decline, and latest figures showing 39 cases per 100,000 people per week. That's hardly "running rampant".
> people without health conditions under 50 have not yet had anything at all
This is not quite correct. There are a lot of people under 50 who've had the jab for other reasons. Frontline health and social care workers were among the first to get the vaccine.
But my impression is this decision has been too hard to defend, since it would necessarily mean more deaths in risk groups while the vaccination campaign is ongoing. And the difference in time to herd immunity is relatively small if vaccine access is good, only a quarter or two.
You may be right about their motivation, but it does not follow that it would necessarily increase deaths in high-risk groups. To become infected you must first be both susceptible and exposed.
I think there was a clear argument for reserving vaccine doses for high-risk groups when those populations were totally naive to the virus. At this point, though, the marginal returns on the population susceptible-exposed product (i.e. infections) are so low, focusing on targeting the most likely community spreaders--regardless of age or individual risk profile--might have an even greater impact on mortality in high-risk groups.
Vaccinating yourself lowers your susceptibility to infection. Vaccinating others lowers your probability of exposure to the virus. It's not super clear exactly where the best trade-off lies, but I think at this point we need to focus on reducing incidence in the entire community.
But we'll be safe from scenarios like overwhelmed burial logistics in population centers so there won't be much pressure for action. Which personally I find a bit unfortunate, because with vaccinating going forward an additional month more of countermeasures has a well-defined benefit whereas earlier in the pandemic the benefit was a bit murky because countermeasures might have been just a delay of eventually inevitable infections. Cost/benefit is much better now, but cost of inaction is ceasing to be sensational failure, it's getting subtle now.
Lucky I think are countries like Portugal that have tackled a massive wave just before vaccination ramp-up, I believe that they can just watch as the infection rates recovering from hard suppression slowly creep up before vaccination eventually takes their sting, with little risk of another wave hitting unbearable levels.
First jab
Israel has 56% of people fully vaccinated, Chile 22%, US 19%
UK is just 8%
> but everyone is apparently cool with that because "kids don't get sick from it"
The government and media don't give a stuff about anyone under the age of 50, certainly not under 40.
I find this blend of comments disheartening and disappointing, mainly because they appear to come from a place of willful ignorance.
Please try not to forget that the reason all covid-19 vaccination programmes have been rolled out progressively from the older to younger segments of the population is due to the fact that:
a) vaccines are in short supply, thus mass vaccination programs demand a rational approach to maximize it's effectiveness in lowering covid-19 deaths,
b) all covid-19 vaccination programmes prioritize vaccinating at-risk groups within their population,
c) covid-19 is patently known to have a considerably high fatality rate on older segments of the population, while on younger segments of the population it's negligible.
Let's not feign ignorance here. Covid-19 kills old people in spades while young people just brush it off. If you care about loved ones and aren't happy with he idea of seeing your elders die from covid-19 then it's obvious why said elders are moved to the front of the queue to get vaccinated.
This should be so obvious that should require no explanation. Then again basic steps to safeguard the health and well-being of others, such as the ridiculous anti-mask militancy, is sadly a thing. So it's clear that many among us simply care nothing about any issue that does not involve them directly and are so self-centered that interpret basic care for others as an affront to their personal privileges.
It really isn't, and reeks of egocentric entitlement. It should be obvious that at-risk groups are a priority. Complaining that the people that likely die from covid are being prioritized over a group that has a negligible risk for no reason other than wanting to jump the line is something that's both baffling and dumbfounding.
But they didn't. Instead they do things like closing sure start centres and increasing pensions way more than wages while taxing people 69% marginal rates for a typical middle class job.
The real question is: is our goal to minimize deaths, or to do what's fair? For the most part, we've chosen to heed the advice of our public health experts and minimize deaths.
But is it really fair that we vaccinate all the old people first, just so they can leave their home and get back to their weekly bingo nights, instead of the younger person working at a grocery store to make sure everyone has food on the table? From an ethics perspective, I don't think the answer is so clear-cut, and I think it's reasonable for people to gripe about it.
Your post is unnecessarily hostile, ignorant, and insensitive. I knew someone who died of the disease. He was half my age and I’m too young to be eligible for the vaccine. Not all young people “brush it off.”
1. When the vaccine roll-out was started, there was no proof that it prevented infection - only that it prevented death and serious illness and hospitalisation.
2. In the UK it is estimated that having the vaccine in the first wave and vaccinating the priority groups woudl have saved over 90% of deaths that occurred.
It's pretty obvious
If you think the answers are “obvious”, you’re either ignoring relevant questions or you are filling in answers with your own assumptions.
They need that system anyway for babies too young to be vaccinated, people with health issues making the vaccine inadvisable, etc.
edit: just look at the numbers
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-people-fully-vaccin...
>"kids don't get sick from it"
..isn't strictly true. A quick look at the local (Danish) health department says that the hospitalisation rate of 0-9 year olds are 181 out of 17004 confirmed cases and 10-19 yo 180 out of 36065 confirmed. 23% of those had an underlying disease.
Hospitalisation is defined as someone who have been hospitalised for at least 12 hours with something covid related inside 14 days from a positive test result.
So while only something like 1% needs to go to hospital compared to 27% of the 70-79 age group they do get sick and so get long-term damage too.
My favorite one is India's tradition of grouping by hundred thousand.
Interestingly, Canada uses both characters as decimal separators, but English always uses a period, and French always uses a comma. That's probably also why Canada also uses a space as a thousands separator, not a comma like the US.
See the Examples of Use section of that Wikipedia page for a more extensive list.
So yeah. The end goal is to eradicate the disease and to vaccinate everybody, but because of production and logistical problems that's not possible, so they focus on the in between goals of lowering death rate and hospitalizations, and that's been very effective so far.
Now arguably this exposed e.g. the UK to using a vaccine with unfortunate rare side effects (I was vaccinated with AZ myself), but on the other hand this has shielded us from a third wave of infections and probably saved tens of thousands of lives.
I have what I think is interesting anecdotal data regarding restaurant works. 1st I live in Miami Beach where it’s essentially been spring break for over a month.
Ocean drive has been blocked off since pretty early on in the shutdown with the city giving the restaurants pretty large swaths of the street for outdoor seating. These have restaurants have pretty much been at full capacity since the election if not a little before.
Even though they have been operating what would be full capacity meaning fully staffed, I noticed in the last week many of them now have hiring signs that all read “for all positions”. In my mind this can only mean these fully staffed and operational restaurants must have had larger outbreak amount staff recently. While I don’t know if it’s true, I’m left thinking that mass outbreaks is exactly what happened, meaning once a give restaurant staff is infected the restaurants are simply replacing them with new staff which will subject these new batches of employees to a mass outbreak and some point. It it turns out to be true, it’s essentially the people forced into these temporary jobs where they will inevitably get corona just to be discarded and rinse/repeat all because people need income they will willingly subject themselves to that kind of environment...it really feels like im watching a dystopia of the haves and have nots, and while it’s always been the case to a degree, the scale and stakes are deeply disturbing.
I was a server and worked “in the industry” so I’m familiar with the high turnover of restaurants, but restaurants on Ocean drive are a little different in that respect.
It’s one thing for a restaurant on Ocean Drive to to be looking to fill a position or two...usually they won’t need to advertise. It’s very unusual and another thing entirely for multiple restaurants on Ocean Drive to have signs posted outside advertising they are hiring for every single position (servers, busers, hosts, bartenders, cooks).
If kids don't get sick, then they don't get sick. What's foolish or difficult to understand about this? BTW when someone says "kids don't get sick from it" they don't talk in absolute terms. Kids also can get cancer, yet we are not screening their prostate yearly like we do with old men.
Wanting to harm children's future, education, development and mental health because out of your own fear is rather distasteful.
You can't get to 0
And I mean everyone in the world unless we a) close the borders completely for absolutely everything, or b) implement covid passports.
There's no data about prevalence of long-term symptoms after an infection yet, regardless of whether people show immediate symptoms.
There's also no data about the prevalence of long-term symptoms of the covid vaccines, since it's literally impossible to test the 2-5 year effects of something that's only existed for one year, so by your logic should non-at-risk populations avoid taking that?
It's a complicated situation, and there's likely no perfect answer. However, it's definitely not as black-and-white as "if they don't get sick, they don't get sick", and such reductionist statements don't help make an informed decision.
In the UK 60% of the adult population have had the jab now, but people without health conditions under 50 have not yet had anything at all - not even their first dose. Those under 18 are not even scheduled to get it.
So can we have "herd" immunity when the majority of the able-bodied working-age population and school kids are not protected yet? From what I've seen in media and data (http://coronavirus.data.gov.uk), the virus is running rampant in teenagers now, but everyone is apparently cool with that because "kids don't get sick from it" (ignoring any long-covid repercussions, which seems foolish to me)
Its all well and good making sure at 100% of 75+ year olds are protected, but they're not exactly representative of the people out and about mixing with strangers in shops/workplaces/bars/public transport/gyms/cafes etc