To be clear, I meant "elimination of the outbreak" in the sense of an endemic virus that produces a steady case rate. Clearly no, no one expected this disease to be eradicated.

Well, you and I didn't. I know quite a few people who've been talking since June about how they're comfortable doing suchandsuch "as soon as Covid is gone", and I'm not sure what they could mean by that other than eradication. It would seem to me that by an endemic standard, the Covid outbreak was gone from the US between May and July and has only just recently made a resurgence.

That seems nitpicky. There are lots of non-eradicated endemic diseases (ebola, malaria...) that are objectively much scarier than covid. But we don't freak out about them because they are well-controlled and rare. A covid mitigation regime that keeps its R0 under 1 and its outbreaks local and non-spreading would be very much the goal here.

> It would seem to me that by an endemic standard, the Covid outbreak was gone from the US between May and July and has only just recently made a resurgence.

Pffft. Yeah, not even close. At its lowest, the covid death rate was 5x higher than average deaths from influenza over the past decade.

At what specific death rate would you be comfortable saying "okay cool" and treating Covid the same way as other diseases?

I don't mean for this to be a trick question. 5x the flu is within my comfort zone, but 2x or 1x or even 0.5x could all be reasonable answers. The answer that's not reasonable, but is by far the most common answer I've gotten, is that no Covid deaths are acceptable and we should never stop taking extreme measures to suppress them.

Gah. Influenza kills more people in the US than any other infectious disease, and frankly it isn't even close. You aren't making any sense here. I cited that number, clearly, as an UPPER bound beyond which we couldn't possibly view an outbreak as acceptable.

I don't view a statement that puts 100k deaths/year as within your "comfort zone" as a serious attempt to engage, sorry.

I dunno. I'm not gonna browbeat you with more arguments for my risk tolerance if you're not interested in them, but I think you're avoiding looking reality in the face here; there's a lot of people an order of magnitude more risk tolerant than me who wanted to open crowded bars in February or earlier. A policy that expects restrictions will remain in place as Covid deaths fall, but can't offer any explanation for why they should remain in place or when they'll no longer be needed, seems doomed to the same kind of mass defection we saw in mid-2020.

People aren't necessarily risk tolerant they largely are utterly incapable of grasping relative magnitude of risk and largely believe that gains in freedom will accrue to them and costs will accrue to other people.

Yeah, but a politician can’t say that…so the experts close to the politicians tend to follow the political narrative instead. The ugly result is a lack of trust in the experts, the science, and the politicians when there are setbacks to that political narrative.

Yeah. This has been my impression, too. I’m not aware of anyone who thought vaccines were a path to total elimination. But then, my only news source is HN and some science YouTube channels.

The vaccines are/were a path out of a pandemic.

That's something to strive for, but extremely different from "elimination"