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Re:The Coronavirus Is Here Forever by zarzavat on Monday August 23, 2021 @06:38PM (#28282931)
Pandemic controls are already doomed to failure in the case of COVID. If you look at countries where they have had very strict and successful pandemic controls, such as Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand, they are finding it impossible to contain the delta variant. It has several attributes that make control difficult.

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.

Re:The Coronavirus Is Here Forever by ajross on Monday August 23, 2021 @06:57PM (#28283112)
No. No, no, none of that is correct. Stop saying things that are untrue simply because they feel like they should confirm your priors. Delta outbreaks in many places have peaked and subsided well short of saturation. Look at India, where it was first detected. They peaked in May and are now at about 9% of peak infection rate.

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.

Re:The Coronavirus Is Here Forever by dcolkitt on Monday August 23, 2021 @11:27PM (#28284780)
There's no way to get the R0 of Delta below 1.0. Period. Even the strictest lockdown regiments have had transmission far above 1.0. The only reason Delta ever subsides (like in India) is when it burns through enough of the population to lose fresh targets.

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.

Re:The Coronavirus Is Here Forever by ajross on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @12:26AM (#28285102)
> There's no way to get the R0 of Delta below 1.0

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?