What do you mean? In the absence of vaccines or any reason to believe that a vastly more effective treatment would arrive, masks and lockdowns “flatten the curve” in the sense that they primarily defer disease, not prevent it. (Major exception: if lockdowns actually eradicated COVID, it would be all over. A few countries pulled this off, but this is only a long term solution if it worked everywhere.)
Vaccines, however, assuming they work as well as the measles vaccine, prevent deaths outright. Vaccinate 5% of the population and you will reduce the eventual number of severe disease cases and deaths (and long COVID?) by something around 5%. (Maybe more like 2.5% if efficacy is on the low end.). Vaccinate 95% of the population and COVID will resemble measles: a few localized outbreaks will still occur, but most people will never be exposed, let alone get sick.
I just wanted to note that COVID cannot be eradicated unless we also eradicate it from all animal populations that can carry it, such as cats, dogs, ferrets, fruit bats, gorillas, hamsters, minks, sea otters, pumas, snow leopards, tigers, and tree shrews [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemi...
What I’m saying is different though. I’m arguing that even if COVID had a 0 death rate but the same hospitalization rate and severity, we’d still be vaccinating everyone. Because we decided to protect our health care system.
It's not like there is no effective treatment in case you are infected. After all, we did quite a few clinical trials in the past year, and it's kind of surprising the answer is "let's just do mass vaccinations and nothing else"
That's like saying seatbelts are an alternative to traffic laws.
Many states and health institutions behave as this was the case.
I have three problems with this statement:
(a) I always thought COVID anti-measures including vaccinations are not about death rates but mainly about the "flattening the curve" and protecting our health systems from collapsing, which would result in many more deaths.
(b) Deaths vs. "inflicted": How is this a good comparison? The consequence of death is clear, what does inflicted mean here?
(c) Deaths vs. "inflicted": Are those who barely survived or who have long COVID not inflicted? What's the ratio then?
Last but not least: It is always easy to say this is bad without giving an alternative solution. What's the alternative to vaccinations? Having COVID spread without controlling it? Or having masks and contact reductions forever?