> There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start

I think it's worth considering a different framing:

> "There would have been so much less confusion if COVID variants and transmission/hospitalization/death rates remained consistent from the start"

It's easy to call out the communication, and don't get me wrong, it surely could have been better. But I often see this sentiment without acknowledging that the communication problems are a symptom, and driven by a very unpredictable situation, and very appropriate changes in policy based on that evolving situation.

Exactly. It’s quite an unfair criticism, and it keeps being applied retroactively to thinks like masking, lockdowns, etc. It’s like people expect a government to have completely knowledge from day 1 of a new virus and all of its mutations across all of time.

Throw in politicization of it, tons of non-mutual “facts” going around, a heap of anecdotes, and you’ve got a communications nightmare.

The problem is that if you communicate to the public at the level of normal scientific certainty -- with all the methodological and statistical caveats -- it's very hard to generate the moral authority needed to push sweeping mandates on a population.

Political and scientific leaders knew this, and they made a decision to exaggerate the level of confidence they had or should have had in several of these matters. No one seriously expected leadership to have complete knowledge from day 1, but that's not the criticism. Nor is the criticism that facts change on the ground in fast-moving situations. Of course they do.

The criticism is that they knowingly overstated their factual case at the time so that they could implement their chosen strategies, even to the point of suppressing legitimate scientific dissent, and are now unconvincingly trying to use "facts on the ground change", "science learns over time", and "of course we couldn't have been expected to know everything" as excuses for those decisions.

If you're making very confident policy-guiding assertions to the public on behalf of Science (TM), and when you're right, it's evidence of how great Science is, and when you're wrong, it's because Science is a process of continual revision and uncertain information, that creates a bit of moral hazard. It works internally in science, where there are no consequences for being wrong other than wasted time, but not in the real world where there are real consequences for being wrong.

I agree overall, but I do think the CDC should’ve known better with masking, at least not to discourage it like they did originally in spite of lots of experience in Asia.

Discouraging is one thing, but they discouraged with a false made up reason (masks don't work). Supposedly their real motivations were: if we say to use masks, then people will just distance less and spread more; and healthcare workers need the masks that do work right now. It would have been better if they simply admitted the true reasons at the time.

Remember that in the beginning there was an enormous shortfall of the masks that were known to be effective in preventing respiratory disease. The CDC (and others) were very worried about medical personnel not being able to get them, very justifiably in hindsight. Just imagine how much worse the (already bad) panic buying of masks would have made it if the CDC had told everyone to mask up.

We absolutely did not know that cloth masks would help. We (incorrectly) thought that anything less than a N95 mask would not help at all, and so that is what was communicated. Since then we have done a lot of science and have learned that while N95 masks are a lot better than, say, double-layered cloth masks, the latter are still much better than nothing in slowing down infection rates.

We also were very focused on the effects for the wearer of masks. We were not focused on the effects of a possible spreader wearing the masks. Part of this was that all of the previous pandemics had diseases that people were symptomatic when they spread the disease. With Covid-19 we have a disease the mostly spreads when people are a-symptomatic. So the potential spreaders are the ones who most need to be wearing masks, and since we can't tell them apart, we need everyone in masks.

All of these things are things we learned along the way. Harping on the CDC (or others) for not knowing them is just wrong. For some of the references here please see:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

No, it's absolutely right to harp on the CDC for this. If you intentionally tell a lie to people in order to manipulate them into doing something for what you think is the greater good, you set your own reputation on fire. The truth about what you did will come out, and for everything you say from that point on to pretty much a generation of people, everyone will constantly second-guess whether you are once again telling a lie to serve what you might think is some greater good. Getting a semblance of that reputation back is a slow and painful process.

Haven't the horrors of history given enough examples? The ends do not justify the means. Lies like this have most definitely already backfired hard. Anyone who thinks they are some special elite who is entitled to lie to the public for the greater good is wrong, evil, and unfit to hold any sort of power.

> It’s like people expect a government to have completely knowledge from day 1 of a new virus and all of its mutations across all of time

No, that's not what is being said. In the case of boosters, the communication (c|sh)ould have been "we're gonna give booster. For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options. Further research will tell us whether other categories, or perhaps the whole population, could need it, although this does not seem the case at the moment."

Of course there's multiple problems with this: you don't sound on top of things, media will extract the most definitive quote from it anyway, hard to imagine the worst case scenario, etc. But it does seem that most government are messing up the communication badly (either sounding very paternalistic, blaming the citizens, never showing uncertainty despite the situation, changing measures before the previous ones can show an effect, etc.), at least for what I would consider a good, mature way to communicate with citizens. I'm no expert, tho.

Reposting what I wrote in another thread:

I like to say "I believe in science". However, what I've seen in the last 2 years is only science by name and by fiat.

We've been fed wrong information after wrong information "for our own good", which has caused the population to lose confidence as the article perfectly explains.

This is terrible, as trust and confidence take a long time to build. Now we have a wonderful new technology (mRNA vaccine) that could be helpful against many ailments, but that the population has learned to fear.

The root cause seem to be the government desires to cover their own mistakes (ex: the masks being inefficient: because they didn't have enough at first, how hands washing was so important... for airborne virus (!!!): because air filtration was too expansive, how the old vaccine is so important against omicron: because they haven't adapted the vaccine so hey let's give a 3rd, a 4th shot and so on, sending people known to have covid in retirement homes full of vulnerable people: because they hadn't built adequate facilities...)

I believe in science, but I can hardly blame people who now subscribe to weird ideas: in their defense, they have noticed some of the lies so in a Bayesian setting they have adjusted their priors: by default they now distrust every official message, and unfortunately for them they may not have the proper scientific knowledge to better adapt their probability distributions.

I seriously hope there will be official inquiries about a level of mismanagement that borders criminal negligence, and that will have cost human lives.

The foundation of science is skepticism, not belief. Nullius in verba.

The root cause seem to be the government desires to cover their own mistakes (ex: the masks being inefficient: because they didn't have enough at first

This isn't what the government said. The government said that masks were inefficient at preventing the wearing from contracting Covid, which is true to this day. They didn't want people to hoard masks at everyone else's expense, especially healthcare workers.

This announcement of "we're going to have boosters (probably)!" (August 2021) seems to cover this quite well: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0818-covid-19-boost..., as does the then-published first version of general booster info page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210821000645/https://www.cdc.g... (later iterations via https://web.archive.org/web/20210715000000*/https://www.cdc.... )

What would you improve in the message sent? To me it seems the parts you ask for are pretty much there?

Two things to note: I'm not in the US, so my comments are based on the communication standards of IT and NL, which I follow more closely.

While in NL the scientific advice and communication has been simply ridiculous (mandatory masks introduced at the end of last year, with still the idea that "science doesn't know if they work, but we are gonna make them mandatory" from the government, and "we're against that, they don't work" from the head of the CDC-equivalent), in Italy it does contain the cautious wording that I advocate for.

However, this is the official communication that is written in "legalese" and not passed through the people by means of interviews and press releases. The media of course bears a lot of responsibility for the dilution of the message, chasing scoops and making headlines that leave no space for doubt; but the communication of the government to the public ends up using similar headlines, which I see as the problem in this case.

Given that you know all the downsides of "wishy washy" communication, as well as the downsides of "overly certain sounding" communication...

isn't the rational thing to do to start ignoring some of the "meta-policy" framing and just treat it as "this is the best idea people have at the time, but I expect it's subject to change."

Truthfully, we should be more open to all sorts of policy changing over time. Every other entity in the world is expected to evolve.

I don't know all of either :)

And I'm open to policy changes as well.

I'm just disappointed by the (as I said in another reply, Italian or Dutch) governments treating people like kids, washing away the complexity and nuances in communication with the public, expecting them not to understand that they don't have all the answers and that decisions might change in light of new (possibly even contrasting) information. Is that wishy washy, or treating the population as adults? For me it's the latter.

It does, however, assume a certain degree of scientific literacy that is lacking in many people (including politicians?), so maybe that's an answer for why it's not like that.

In the beginning I feel like communication was very much about how they’re learning more and don’t much yet. That was pounced on for its non-information, and the uncertainty was ignored in the great mask debates in early 2020.

I don’t think you can be wishy washy, and the lack of respect for science and science education in the US certainly doesn’t help.

> For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options

Oh no no no.

This is probably the absolute worst possible wording. Any time a government agency has had to chance their stance on something, they get accused of lying.

They have to be careful with how to present preliminary information. If they state anything "may" be true, then news outlets will treat it as true, and then hells breaks loose when they discover it was wrong.

Of course, if they wait until they're absolutely certain of something, then until then, they get accused of incompetence and of doing nothing, while some news outlets just make up bullshit.

>In the case of boosters, the communication (c|sh)ould have been "we're gonna give booster. For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options. Further research will tell us whether other categories, or perhaps the whole population, could need it, although this does not seem the case at the moment.

Could have? Yes. Should have? $20 says 90% of the population simply ignore communication worded this way, and that "GET BOOSTER NOW, YES YOU" is more effective.

It's also true that most governments have not been very clear about what they actually wanted to achieve or perhaps more accurately have changed the goals over time. There's a big difference between eliminating COVID vs coping, for example.

To be fair Delta is a very different beast from Omikron.

The virus is mutating so the government strategy has to adapt too. Elimination was an option for a while.

Elimination stopped being an option the moment the first infected carrier left Wuhan on an international flight.

Not necessarily; the first few carriers don't seem to have successfully seeded outbreaks, in general it takes a few attempts to get a disease like Covid established, and almost all countries seem to have stopped it spreading directly from China including closely-linked ones like Taiwan but also places like the UK and US. As far as I can tell something just went really badly wrong in Italy that no-one is interesting in examining too closely, and when this spread Covid to other countries it was spun as proof the other countries had screwed up and failed.

Temporary local eradication was an option for a while, before delta: see Australia and New Zealand.

However these countries were always going to have to open up and accept the virus eventually as it became endemic in the rest of the world. They were just delaying the inevitable. As it happened, the evolution of the virus made the decision for them. However if Delta had not happened they would still have had to make the decision to open up at some point, probably after a significant proportion of the population was vaccinated.

It's easy to blame changing science. Science always changes.

But let me ask you this. Are we going to need a fourth shot / second booster in 2022? I'd say it's almost certain. Find me a public health authority who is saying this in the United States. I can't.

There's some legitimately changing facts. But there's also nonsense, like health officials saying masks don't help with a respiratory disease, that has nothing to do with changing facts.

incorrect. during unpredictable situations it makes it MORE important to be consistent in communication.

consistent communication could have been: boosters are recommended, we'll open them to relevant age groups in the future.

though honestly they should have opened boosters to everyone in september and called it done. we knew then everything we needed to know. which are:

1. risks of the boosters. 2. average declines in protection.

The impossibility of this is embedded in your opening paragraph.

> during unpredictable situations

Unpredictable: adjective - "not able to be predicted"

> it makes it MORE important to be consistent in communication

Consistent: adjective - "unchanging in nature, standard, or effect over time"

If you wish to deliver a message that is accurate during a time that cannot be predicted and actively changes, you cannot do so and remain consistent without starting to misrepresent the truth.

If you wish to deliver a message that is consistent during a time that cannot be predicted and actively changes, you cannot do so and deliver current/accurate information.

In essence, your options are:

1. Be accurate/informative, but the message will change as the situation changes.

2. Be consistent, but the message either a) cannot contain any meaningful guidance or b) will be wrong

it all depends on what particular detail wasn't able to be predicted. in this case the need for boosters.

we knew by late june boosters would be needed. so all messaging after june should have been consistent. it wasnt.

what wasn't predictable was when precisely we needed to issue boosters and to whom. because we simply didn't have the data on that until around september. However since september it was very predictable that we needed them for the holiday season. I got mine in early november because it was fucking obvious. omicron wasn't 100% assured but it was in the news and most sound bites were 'more contagious'.

its entirely possible to be consistent in the face on unpredictable events.

1. outright say 'we don't currently have the information needed yet check back later' or 'worst case scenario would be X, we're going to start with those assumptions'

2. repeat step 1 until you have the data or know you never will

3. once data is acquired adjust statements.

this is being consistent and clear. another example of this is masking and viral spread.

1. assume worst case for viral spread (airborne)

2. message masks are necessary until more is known about how the virus spreads.

3. if results come back disproving airborne spread, say so.

instead we got:

1. masks not necessary. virus doesn't seem to be airborne.

2. OOPS VIRUS IS AIRBORNE.

the first case is consistent, assume worst case and then ease restrictions. the 2nd case is completely inconsistent.

This is effectively a disconnect between science and public policy. Science teaches us to keep our minds open to new data, so we can make new conclusions as we go. People just seem to get pissed when public policy changes in light of new data, lending to the narrative that scientists don't know what they're talking about.

People are getting pissed that public policy and messaging is changing WITHOUT new data.

In the past week:

- The CDC director acknowledged and downplayed the severity of omicron by stating the vast majority of hospitalized patients have multiple comorbidities. This has been true since the start of the pandemic, but is only being addressed now.

- CDC and several states are making the distinction between "hospitalized from" and "hospitalized with" COVID. This has also been a point of contention for the past 2 years. For some reason we're changing that now. Your guess is as good as mine, but I'd bet it has to do with the omicron spike making govt. middle manager KPI graphs look bad.

If I've learned anything through this pandemic, it's that people are always much more enraged than I could have imagined. It seems like everyone's looking for something new to focus all their rage onto.

The way CDC and media swing between "this Greek letter is fine; no mask is fine" and "everyone get your (n+1)th dose real quick" is just hilarious.

Public policy and science are not the same thing. Public policy has a goal, science doesn't. If your goal were simply "stop human transmission of the virus", well science could help you come to a policy of exterminating all human life - it's scientifically provable that it's the best way to meet that goal.

"Trust the science" is a nonsense term. We're being asked to "Trust the policymakers". Why should we? Ok, so they're informed by science. But if the scientific consensus is obviously in rapid flux and can't be used to predict anything, then why should we trust the policies or their makers?

I don't object to policy changes in light of new data, but do object to policy made based on preliminary data, knowing full well that we don't understand everything yet, and then changing every few months or even more often, and just shouting "SCIENCE!" if anyone questions any of it.

In an emergent situation, you'll never understand all the data in time. Imagine a loved one that's hurt who calls you for help after a crash. You could spend time trying to figure out their symptoms and their feelings, probing them for more information to make an accurate decision so that you don't have to actually waste the time to go over to them physically. Or you could just go over immediately and potentially waste time when it turns out your loved one would have been just fine without you. Most people choose the latter.

There's a reason emergency services dispatchers have such a stressful job, they're making these decisions all the time based on very limited amounts of data. Unfortunately we're all living in a situation right now where we're making emergency decisions as new information emerges.

Wouldn't a closer analogy be a loved one has a crash, so you immediately force everyone else to wear driving masks to prevent crashes?

'we're all living in a situation right now where we're making emergency decisions...'

Not me, but you seem to be hooked on fear. May you find some peace in life.

> Not me, but you seem to be hooked on fear. May you find some peace in life.

This is an unnecessary insult. You could have left it with "I'm comfortable not treating this as an emergency situation." I'm not sure what you gained from this post. Hopefully you got the performative internet points you were looking for.

What's the alternative to setting policy on preliminary data? Are you proposing something like "government should never react to anything until 12 months have passed since it started happening." So something like COVID just cannot be responded to initially?

It has been nearly two years and government MSHA hasn't mandated anything to specifically change for workers. The inspectors did reduce the small group chats, which I suspect is going to be counter-productive for injury counts in the medium term. Someone senior in MSHA has big stones for not getting on the safety theater bandwagon like OSHA did.

It's not policy change that is the problem, the problem is that nobody can figure out what the current policy is because the CDC is bad at making announcements.

Furthermore, there is now widespread suspicion that the CDC's current recommendations are not based on science anymore: for example, the 5-day vs 10-day isolation period.

What's especially bad is the advice not to use tests after 5 days, followed a few days later by advice that tests are optional after 5 days -- everyone knows that advice would be different if there were not test shortages. That's not science, that's pragmatism, and that's fine and they ought to just say so, but the CDC continues to make the transparently false claim that their advice is based purely on science.

That really hurts the CDC's credibility -- now, when they make an announcement, we all have to ask ourselves whether it's truly based on science. Smart people of all political stripes now realize this. Even the liberal cable TV talking heads are attacking the CDC over this.

I think that sums it up pretty well: people would be more tolerant of the CDC changing their minds on things if it was clear how they arrived at their decisions in the first place and they say what data they base their decisions on and what the trade-offs are.

People will put up with just about anything if they think there's a good reason for it, but if instructions seem arbitrary then people tend to stop giving officials the benefit of the doubt.

Transparency can go along way towards maintaining public trust. I'd rather the CDC err on the side of over-sharing than the reverse.

The fact that recent science can be proven wrong after more data come out seems to be some sort of "gotcha!" for them.

"Science" can't be wrong, just the interpretation. And if the popular interpreters are frequently wrong, they should be called out.

I'll wait until the booster actually becomes specific to the current strain. Ideally I'd also like the vaccine to not make me sick for 2 days, since most other common vaccines don't (e.g. influenza). But maybe that's just not possible.

Not having increased risk of heart inflammation and rare dangerous thromboses would be nice too, but then again it seems like Covid causes those anyway. So maybe we just need to update our base rates for those conditions and move on from the way things used to be.

Plus, if I can still spread Covid and make grandma critically ill even after I have the booster, whereas I'm at super low risk for serious illness, is the booster even doing anything to reduce hospital utilization?

I had what I think was omicron, and it seems like I don't really need a booster on top of it... or do I?

The point is that I have no idea what the right thing to do is.

I feel like there's no public health response in the USA anymore. The President is just telling people to f*cking "Google it", everyone seems to be either a paranoid wacko anti-vax Covid denier Bill-Gates-is-coming-for-your-body-fluids-and-children cultist or a "trust the science" cultist, and the big pharma companies (Pfizer, Moderna) seem to be just raking it in hand over fist with all these vaccine doses.

Seems like everyone has to brush up on their statistics and start reading the research, because the news and government agencies just aren't worth a damn anymore when it comes to communicating. It seems that the Trump legacy of "abject societal dysfunction" is here to stay.

</rant>

> I'll wait until the booster actually becomes specific to the current strain.

By the time the Omicron-specific vaccines are approved by the various government health bureaucracies, Omicron will have run its course. Unless you want to live like a hermit for the next few months, it's probably best to get a booster and live your life. All of my friends & acquaintances who've contracted omicron have had a booster shot and all of them said that the worst part was isolating. Their symptoms were extremely mild- just a sore throat or cough for a few days.

It would be nice if one could choose a lower dose of vaccine. The second shot (and booster) of Pfizer were absolutely brutal for me. A baby aspirin version of the vaccine would provide most of the protection without the days of debilitating pain and fever. When I got my booster I asked the guy giving the shot if he could inject a partial dose because my previous reaction was so bad. He just laughed, emptied the syringe into my arm, and told me to drink lots of water. :(

That's fine but the booster has shown that it likely incurs much longer term stability to immune resistance to all current strains that we know about, including omicron. If you look up the history of vaccinations you will see similar results and why some are carefully spaced apart at certain intervals as they train the human immune system

Consistent messaging from the start in a situation where information and knowledge is very limited in the start = not learning.

The problem here is that we have a lot of internalization of changing your mind is bad in the political arena. "Flip flopping," etc. Inquiry is discouraged.

The article is actually much more interesting because it's about how views are changing differently for different groups even inside the same partisan grouping. It shows that conversation and messaging is an ongoing thing.

Changing your mind because of new evidence is good. Changing your mind because the evidence is pretty much the same, but the previous conclusion has become inconvenient for you, is not good.

So what you're saying is the government should have predicted the future perfectly, and given Post-Omicron guidelines months before it emerged?

The government said, at first, that nobody needed to go out and buy masks, because they won't do any good. And then the government said you had to wear a mask or you couldn't enter into buildings.

Now, the reasoning for the former was that they were concerned about PPE supplies, but that doesn't change the fact they reversed themselves very shortly, and expected people to forget the earlier messaging.

The government didn't need to be an oracle with a perfect track record, but I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that they should have been honest. If you can't see how the pandemic was used for political purposes, I don't know what to say.

Everyone thought that covid spread via touch back then. remember all the hand sanitizer and UV lights? then we learned that it was mostly airborne

This goes back to the comment you replied to. The government can't give perfect hindsight advice at the beginning of any situation. it seems like your complaint here is "science isn't perfect"

> “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.”

It seems to me from this excerpt of his email to a colleague on February 5, 2020, Fauci really did not think masks were effective initially.

This was the medical community's censuses at the time. Turns out now we know that this hinged on a few misunderstandings and generalizations, and have turned that corner. But at the time it was the best information we had:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

I think you are reading way more into my response than I wrote. I literally rephrased a position specifically about the government's communication of booster shots in the form of a question highlighting the illogical portion of the position.

* I have not made and continue to not make any statements regarding mask communication, nor about reports on reasoning for that.

* I am not engaging in nor countering absurd conspiracy theories

* I am not broadcasting my feelings and thoughts on political purposes and what I do or do not see to you, so I don't know why you think you are capable of surmising what I can and cannot see.

* I do find hilarious how very angry you are that I pointed a logical inconsistency.

Your response inferred something from the OP that was clearly never implied. Nobody expects perfect knowledge of the future, and suggesting the OP was asking for that is (charitably) a snarky way of pointing out a logical inconsistency.

But pointing out the the messaging from the government has been, at best, muddled--and at worst, misleading, if not downright dishonest--you interpret as "anger"? I find that pretty disingenuous. You are again inferring that which is not implied.

It is the they don't do any good communication that is irresponsible. There was already evidence otherwise that they ignored, and the rest of the statement was based on zero evidence.

Nope. The government knew the vaccines were getting less effective back in september. They knew everyone would eventually need a booster. If they had put in a plan to get that done, I wouldn't have had a problem.

As things stood? The CDC basically said 'you should get a booster only if you're high risk'. They went back and forth over whether to recommend it to the general public for the longest time. This lead to a lot of confusion, and a lot of folks essentially shrugged and went on with their life. If they had been consistent with messaging a much higher percentage of the population would currently be boosted.

I'd appreciate if the government could just predict the future as well as hacker news. It doesn't need to be perfect. Look, they're gonna tell us to get booster again in 2022. I know it. You probably know it. Everybody knows it. Why haven't the CDC said it?

the bigger problem is that their initial selling point for the vaccine was "get your 2 shots and everything goes back to normal". Many people grudgingly got it despite some hesitancy and now have even less trust of the government now that the goal posts are shifting yet again

With the Alpha variation of the virus that would have been good enough. The study numbers showed someone vaccinated and exposed to Alpha had such a low risk of spread that even while fighting off the virus they were still safe 'enough' to be around.

If we had gotten 80% (some magic number between 70% and 95% I pulled out of nothing) of the US adult population vaccinated, and quarantine locked down the borders we could have snuffed covid out and been in a bubble paradise like New Zealand managed to do with just hard and long enough quarantines.

We didn't get there, and Delta and Omicron did get to us; two variations that are each insanely more viriliant and spread despite the vaccinations which are now only good enough to prevent serious infection and death most of the time.

The USA has never had secure borders before. How could anyone believe that would be possible now? Have you ever actually been to the borders?

In my adult lifetime I have legally crossed a northern border by car; they checked ID on the way back. Canada mostly only cared that I had sufficient ID to go back home. In both cases there was a controlled crossing that law abiding citizens used. During much of the pandemic that crossing was closed (mutually).

Yes, physical borders are long stretches that are difficult to secure, and I have seen the TV footage. Doesn't mean that a policy can't be _sufficiently_ effective to make a difference.

Also, reflexively speaking of borders; effective policies probably involve a mix of carrot and stick. The carrot being a legal path to do what people are going to do anyway, but in ways that are documented and regulated. Exact details of either side of that are far, far off topic in this thread.

It COULD have been "get your 2 shots and everything goes back to normal", but vaccine adoption stalled at about 60%. That's not nearly high enough.

The virus stuck around and we got Delta, and now Omicron.

And we're STILL at less than 70% vaccinated. I don't know what's required for herd immunity, but it doesn't take a Ph.D in virology to know that 70% isn't it.

It doesn't take a Ph. D in virology to know that 100% isn't it either, now that omicron is in the picture.

So I'm not sure what the intended end game of the people trying to limit the spread is. "Flatten the peak so hospitals are less likely to be overwhelmed" may or may not be realistic, but at least it's a coherent goal. "Keep vaccinating and closing things until COVID goes to zero on its own" just seems like denying the reality that COVID is endemic at this point, so any non-acute mitigation measures we want to take now had better be mitigation measures we're willing to keep taking forever.

To a certain extent, I blame the use of the term "reaching herd immunity" instead of "reaching an endemic state" for giving people unrealistic expectations.

> Keep vaccinating and closing things until COVID goes to zero on its own" just seems like denying the reality that COVID is endemic at this point

At this point, yes.

But last year? In Spring and early summer? Look at COVID cases compared to vaccination rates. Case counts were dropping fast, but then vaccination stalled. A couple months later, Delta began ripping through and we got our second wave.

I sincerely believe that we could have been through with this if we had reached 95% vaccination by July.

I'm undecided if we should still continue masking and any restrictions at this point. I want to say "Fuck it. Everyone who wants a vax can get one, if you don't, I will have zero pity if you get infected.", but the fact is, ICU's are still being overrun.

> I sincerely believe that we could have been through with this if we had reached 95% vaccination by July.

All omicron cases in the US can be traced back to infections from outside of the country. Getting 95% of eligible people vaccinated and getting cases within the country to zero prior to omicron being introduced would have been nice, but that alone would not have stopped the current omicron wave. We'd be in a somewhat better place now, but since a significant factor in hospitals being under load now is vaccinated medical personnel being out with covid, we'd still have a hospital load problem.

I can see maybe some justification in instituting restrictions to try to flatten the peak of the omicron wave, until such a time as case numbers start to decrease again. But such restrictions, if put in place, should be done with the understanding that all we're doing is shifting infections in time, not changing the total number of infections.

> I want to say "Fuck it. Everyone who wants a vax can get one, if you don't, I will have zero pity if you get infected.", but the fact is, ICU's are still being overrun.

This is basically where I'm at, except at this point it doesn't seem like there's any coherent idea of when the inevitable infections that occur won't overrun ICUs, and I don't particularly think it's worse to have ICUs overrun for a few weeks right now than it is to have ICUs overrun for a few weeks a month from now.

> I sincerely believe that we could have been through with this if we had reached 95% vaccination by July.

It would not have made a difference.

Singapore, Israel and a large chunk of Western Europe had very high vaccination rates before they got pummled by a Delta wave.

And for anyone wondering if boosters are enough to quell Omicron: Israel is the perfect case study as they're currently being pummled by Omicron after having finished their booster campaign (they're onto their 4th dose now).

Are lockdowns the answer to Omicron? Well the Netherlands went into a preemptive lockdown several weeks BEFORE Omicron took off and I think their case trajectory paints a very clear picture now that Omicron has taken off (they are still in lockdown).

To me, it looks like the vaccine's efficiency in terms of reducing transmission wanes after 3-5 months and it's quite clear when you look at the different waves countries are experiencing around the world.

'I sincerely believe that we could have been through with this if we had reached 95% vaccination by July.'

Do you understand it crosses between humans and animals such as deer and even house cats? You can sincerely believe in the Easter Bunny along with sincerely believing all animals can be vaccinated on approximately the same week, but sincerely believing in something does not make it possible.

In the U.S. it's mostly kids that aren't vaccinated at this point. Among people over 18 years of age, 73.3% have at least 2 doses and 86.4% have at least 1 according to the CDC. Two shots and a booster is obviously better, but the number of adults that haven't been vaccinated at all and haven't gotten Covid at least once is dwindling.

Covid seemed to be on track to have be almost entirely wiped out in the U.S. until Delta and Omicron came along, and now it's not clear that even 100% vaccination rates would be enough.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...

If enough people had got their shots worldwide that would have worked. However enough is at least 80% of the world population, and maybe as much as 95%. There wasn't enough supply in the world. If the 95% number is correct kids young enough still are not approved to reach that, mutations keep making the number higher, though we might need to get a new vaccine that covers new variants.

>If enough people had got their shots worldwide that would have worked.

One of the theories on the origin of omicron seems to be that it evolved in animals for a while before jumping back to humans (the weirdness being that it's not evolved from Delta, and it has a number of mutations all at once). [1]

And even if it's not the origin of this variant, it could easily be the origin of a future variant (that's why they're considering it).

And it's quite unlikely we could vaccinate every animal on the planet, so this idea that if we had just gotten all our shots this variant would have never happened is pretty ridiculous.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-did-omicron-covid-varian...

If we had vaccinated soon/fast enough we could have prevented the to animal transmission in the first place

I don't think that's a realistic expectation. If millions of people have a highly infectious disease, then it's very likely to spread to any wildlife (that aren't naturally immune) in the same general area as those infected humans. By the time the vaccines were available, Covid was basically everywhere.

It is clearly impossible for supply reasons.

> There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start.

While that's true, I don't think it's reasonable unless, like a sibling suggested, the disease would be consistent from the start.

What would be nice is if they contemplated and acknowledged that the recommendations would be changing. Rather than saying 'others don't need a booster', they should be saying 'at this time, based on current understanding, etc, others don't need a booster'. In some situations, they can probably suggest what conditions might cause a change in recommendations.

> What would be nice is if they contemplated and acknowledged that the recommendations would be changing.

But they do. E.g. go through https://web.archive.org/web/20210715000000*/https://www.cdc...., it's always wrapped in "We are monitoring the situation. High-risk populations first. Recommendations will be adjusted as needed." disclaimers. But we have a strong tendency to only remember the short head-line version, even if we looked at the full statement at the time. And if you go by headlines or equivalent short news, it's likely you haven't seen the disclaimer, but good luck getting the details into headlines. It's a pattern that repeats over and over in discussions of this.

> Then this new omni variant comes out and they're badgering everyone to get boosted NOW or your no longer considered fully vaccinated.

Currently the CDC still considers someone fully vaccinated after the two dose series. As far as I can tell there aren't any booster requirements at the national level.

> There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start, and did a phased rollout of the booster just like they did with the original vaccine.

The problem is: science is continuous discovery of and adaptation to new facts. In a society where significant amounts of the population have such a low respect for science that they seriously believe that Earth was created by God 6000 years ago, it is obvious that these people literally cannot grasp or cope with the fact that new discoveries come in timespans of single-digit weeks... Omicron was discovered at the end of November, barely a month later cases worldwide reached Delta records and now they went through the roofs.

I agree that there have been communication fuck-ups by politicians and the media, but basic science education in schools (and scientist staff in mass media) would have lessened the impact dramatically.

> There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start, and did a phased rollout of the booster just like they did with the original vaccine.

Biden called for a booster dose for everyone in September. The CDC and the FDA didn't agree.

I think the CDC did as good as you could when you design by committee. I didn't have any trouble following their recommendations or logic. It was an ongoing problem with incomplete knowledge on their part. It's certainly better than what Fox News was spewing. Science is ugly, but it is self-correcting, Fox and antivax people are not. At least that's how I see it.

I still don't understand how people don't get that recommendations change. It's like two years in, how are people not getting how this works?

Because when the recommendations change, it's usually a "we were wrong all along" change, not a "the recommendations were right before, but now circumstances have changed" change.