This this month I did catch covid. I'm not even sure I'd class it as a bad cold, it was far less debilitating than the bug I had in November - although seems to be lasting longer (4 days of coughing so far). My last vaccine was in July (went positive literally the morning by booster was due).
I suspect most people have either had covid or know someone close who has, and see that the main problem is the effects of restrictions -- not going to work while waiting for results (leading to public transport cancellations for example), kids being kept off even though they feel fine. (One symptom of covid is a headache, but that's because I've been trapped in a house with 2 very energetic very excited children for the last 10 days)
Throw in the constant disregard for the rules that the government has shown, and I can't see the acceptance of restrictions surviving in the UK past January.
The brexity type people I'm 'freinds' with on facebook began covid all in favour of restrictions and vaccines. They are fortunatly still in favour of vaccines, but are increasingly shifting to being anti restrictions. Further restrictions will push them more into the Piers Corbyn echosphere, and that's a bad thing.
My brexity friends started covid feb 2020 - "There have been no white people die of Covid, white genetics are superior to chinese genetics and immune to covid - this is an EU conspiracy to punish the UK for brexit" - since then a few died of covid, most lost parent / aunt / uncle / family member.
Its still 100% an EU plot to destroy brexit.
So I think preventing all that loss of quality of life is also worthwhile.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
Whether that is a net benefit over the economic consequences of lockdowns and secondary effects of that I don’t know. I wouldn’t even know how to begin answering that question.
I’m just trying to say that there are other effects than death which seem more likely and impactful for longer for youthful people as they are more likely to get one of the other effects than they are likely to die from COVID.
In this case my eye care provider has seen more cases where patients lost eye sight after covid. Typically this amount of loss of eyesight is not observed over a single period of three weeks.
Mitigated, how exactly?
Well sorry to say that with Omicron that all bets are off. Two out of 3 mAbs don't work and the third isn't so great. And the covid pills are still a long ways off.
> I find that very scary, close to a "giving up" mentality.
Everyone can have a vaccine, there are multiple highly effective therapies and even the risk of death without intervention to the majority of people (under 55) is already astronomically low.
To put it in perspective, if you’re under 30 with asthma, your risk of death from the original covid variant (not the less lethal variants) is the same as being struck by lightening.
We haven’t given up, we’ve successfully mitigated fatalities until we have effective treatments and a vaccine. Now it’s time to move on.