Besides, the virus is not standing still. It is responding to selective pressure by becoming ever more transmissible. The more we try to control the virus by social distancing, the more the virus responds by becoming easier to transmit. We cannot control this pandemic long term via social distancing, even with perfect compliance.
That is a mischaracterization. I mean, it's true, but only in a specious sense that all organisms respond to changes in their environment (including vaccination techniques!). It's absolutely not an argument that pandemic mitigation strategies are universally doomed to failure!
> We cannot control this pandemic long term via social distancing
Again, this is wrong. And in fact it worked to control covid (not perfectly, but well, well under what you'd expect from the early exponential curves in places like Milan and New York) for almost a year before vaccines showed up.
You're making another common mistake here, and imagining that all arguments are about absolutes. In your mind, mask wearing either Works Perfectly or Must Be Abandoned.
In the real world, you wear masks when the pandemic is at a high infection rate and growing, (like now) because marginal improvements are important ("every little bit helps"), and not as much when it's low and shrinking (as it was in June, when I even went to a few restaurants unmasked!).
Would the delta variant have arisen were it not for social distancing? Perhaps, that's unknowable. But we certainly created a lot of selective pressure for it to exist.
That's not to say that social distancing was bad or wrong. It was our only choice at the time. But in a future where social distancing is much less effective and where compliance by vaccinated people will be low, the utility of these interventions is becoming ever smaller. You can of course do whatever you want individually according to your conscience.
Where do we go from here? The world needs to increase vaccine production to billions per month, and decrease response times to new variants so that if there is a new vaccine-resistant variant we can vaccinate the world again quickly.
In fact objectively India's net response to Delta, both in width of infection wave and peak outbreak rate, has been better that the US's, despite near zero net vaccination.
And why is the US so bad at this? Largely because of PEOPLE LIKE YOU who insist on crazy pseudoscience theories like "Masks don't work" or "treat it with dewormer" or (sigh) "Pandemic controls are already doomed to failure" instead of just doing the right thing. Stop it. Stop trying to be smarter than everyone. Just get in line and do the right thing.
The science is settled. Virtually everyone is going to get Delta either sooner or later. There's nothing that can be done to change that fact. All we can do is slow the spread from a few weeks of wildfire to a few months of wildfire.
Good grief, stop. Stop using jargon you don't understand. Stop making medical pronouncements that are clearly wrong. STOP. That statement, if true, would mean that the entire population would be trapped in a cycle of reinfection after reinfection, coming faster and faster, forever. It is clearly not true. No disease works like that. You are using words you don't understand to describe a subject you don't understand but have strong feelings about.
> The science is settled.
Then maybe you could cite some?
It's not about protecting those that are unvaccinated by choice. It's also about protecting those that cannot get vaccines for whatever reason and also to stop breakthrough infections.
Also the majority of UK residents at least are still wearing masks[1] so I think at least that's some evidence that people do share this compassion.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/20/uk-still-weari...
No, we aren't. Obesity is an epidemic. Nearly all of those people made a decision to make themselves more likely to contract covid, more likely to exhibit symptoms longer (thus spread it), and more likely to occupy critical healthcare infrastructure - as well as more likely to die from covid.
There has been almost 0 acknowledgement of this as well as 0 promises to fix this issue. If you're still obese (or not calling for mandatory weight loss) and upset others aren't getting a vaccine you're not fairly applying "every little bit helps".
You're picking and choosing which issues we should bear "collective responsibility" for. It's some kind of irony we're passing out krispy kremes when you get your vaccination.
Pandemics aren't about personal choice. Period. Pandemics aren't about personal choice. People who do all the right things still suffer. So... how about we try to minimize that instead of making excuses and placing blame?
Post-vaccine, we are not all in this together.
The desire to see this pandemic solely in terms of an individual moral play (on all sides of the debate!) is really strong on this website, and I think it's very unhelpful.
We're all in this together. I got my shots. All my family members of age are vaccinated. All our friends and regular acquaintances are vaccinated.
I still wear my mask where I have to be near people in public, because every little bit helps. My risk is not zero, and if I get sick so might someone else who isn't as protected. I still avoid restaurants. I still work at home. I still limit travel.
We can stop this when the pandemic is controlled. Until then, it remains all of our collective responsibility. And I for one am willing to bear that.