Thank you. I don’t understand why more people won’t argue like you do. We have 4 endemic human CoVs. Why not learn from the experience we had there?

I get the impression anything we could learn which doesn't support a foregone hyperbolic conclusion gets vastly ignored by the media and misconstrued as fringe in the court of popular opinion. All of this started with panic-buying toilet paper and baker's yeast from the grocery stores. I'm not surprised despite a considerable majority of US citizens being vaccinated, all reporting is underscored by pandemic levels of fear and sensation. The general public will still hatefully rebuke any claim that among a significantly vaccinated population Covid-19 statistics are largely comparable to many other endemic diseases. We were told this whole time that it wasn't just another flu, but to a vaccinated person it is just another illness. You don't want to get the flu, you don't want to spread it around, but you don't let fear of it consume your everyday life. But here we are, front page circa 2021, a bunch of vaccinated adults obsessing over reinfection.

Millions of people have died in less than two years, 650,000 where I live in the US. More specifically here in Florida, ICU capacity is at 93%, and cases/hospitalizations/deaths are at record highs for the entire duration of the pandemic. People are being turned away for cancer treatments because there is simply no room at the hospital. The peak of daily deaths and infections in our state is right now.

This is news because the flu doesn’t do that every year or any year since 1919. It’s news because it’s the deadliest pandemic in over a century, and the death rate in some areas is at its peak and climbing, despite higher vaccination rates then a typical flu season.

I cannot understand why denial of this information is so important to you, but if you continue to spread doubt about taking more precautions than the flu, people may listen to you and those people may die.

I don't deny any of this information, on the contrary I'm well aware of it. Average age 79, 99% of had a significant confounding illness. The vast majority of people who have died were already sick and living in a nursing home, literally waiting to die. Meanwhile in my state until March of last year deaths from child abuse, which has sky-rocketed at unprecedented rates world wide since the start of the pandemic, outstripped deaths from Covid. I don't understand why you and so many other are living in denial of that information. It's like you don't even care about the costs of your actions, just a the vague justification of the number of people who have died from covid. The fact is people are going to die no matter what you do about it, so not acknowledging these policies themselves have caused suffering, let alone seriously consider whether or not they were effective, is a more egregious sleight than not doing anything at all. 5 years from now people are going to look back at humanity's reaction to Covid and say, "wow, that was astonishingly stupid."

COVID-19 just recently surpassed the number of war casualties from World War I forward.

625K war casualties[1] < 635K COVID-19 casualties[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt... [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

Exactly. Modern day healthcare is keeping most Covid patients alive. But the disease is also putting a strain on modern day healthcare more than anything else ever has.

Note that I actually agree more with you two about the overall impact of the pandemic and the collapse of the hospital system, not with ManBlanket up there.

I'm coming at this more from the perspective that the panic over delta being something straight out of a Big Bad TV Trope that breaks all the previous rules, is that it completely undermines the effectiveness of the vaccination campaign. The current best antivaxxer argument right now is just that all the headlines show that the vaccines don't work. I'm pushing back against that. It still looks to me like nobody has given me any indications the vaccines don't work. I think their VE against delta has been dramatically understated, the waning immunity has not been proven, and their efficacy against transmission is probably a lot higher than currently assumed.

At some point in the future I'll agree with the perspective that we need to start treating this more like the flu, but if the hospital systems are falling over we aren't there yet.

There may be no scientific reason but it would make focusing on mRNA vaccine exclusively look like a strategic mistake. The driving factor behind the approach is the belief that the encoded domain is essential to virulence. Immune escape from mutation would imply failure of that reasoning. Unfortunately other approaches that focus exlusively on a segment of the S protein would face the same challenges.

You're thinking in absolutes, and there very likely will be immune escape eventually against the mRNA vaccines, and that is pretty much expected.

But that doesn't mean the mRNA vaccines would be failures.

Focusing on the spike was also done because mRNA vaccines against the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-CoV-1 showed evidence of ADE in animals models so nobody wanted to go down that road. That decision to run with the spike protein is very unlikely to be shown to ever be a mistake in hindsight and will have been the right choice (and certainly the right choice given the information at the right time and a decision which produced an entirely successful vaccine).

It is also a really pretty safe bet that this virus will evolve to achieve immune escape just like HCoV-229E does and will start reinfecting everyone again. That won't make this vaccine a failure. And that's a good thing since its more likely that forcing it to evolve to achieve immune escape will force it to made tradeoffs between immune escape and transmissibility/virulence/fitness.