Which doesn’t mean we all have to get it at the same time.
I’m so tired of these false dichotomies. There’s a lot of middle ground between full lockdown and completely giving up so everyone gets it at the same time. We’re already running out of ICU beds and emergency treatments like monoclonal antibodies where I’m at.
Yet the prevailing logic seems to be that because masks and distancing aren’t perfectly effective that we should just give up and go full-on into infections for everybody.
Once hospitalizations are in decline most of the population will have been exposed.
It's not that simple. It's not a matter of doing something good vs not doing it, that's what an oversimplified black and white thinking is. It's about priorities, and about looking at certain types of damage compared to other types of damage, and choosing the best path that causes the least overall damage.
The case peak from omicron was 7x the delta numbers, hospitalization numbers were 2x, and icu was actually down.
I feel like omicron has burned through here, and there’s not a huge risk to opening at this point.
At the point when we have another infectious strain going around, they’re going to have to reevaluate, but that’s later.
I dont think all or even most of people who use those is truly confused and dont understand. Instead, allowing anything else then "if not 100% miracle it dont work" would force them to admit they are wrong or politicians they root for are wront.
It is much easier to beat the other side in argument if you pretend you are too simple to understand percentages and shades. Because contemporary culture treats nuance as weakness and pretty much accepts that kind of argument.
If anything, attacking anything that hints of "maybe we should reassess given current data" as being the same as the antimask/antivax rhetoric of the last two years is itself exactly what you are criticising.
It's a pity, but no, it's not the same as antimask/antivax rhetoric.
Pretending that all those people don't understand does not help anything. Which is why I made that point.
It is repeated patten from the start of pandemic. If something is not 100% perfect, there is not point on doing it and anyone doing it is stupid sheep. No matter how full hospitals are, you are stupid sheep for doing small things that take chances down (like getting vaccine). Pretending that massive powerful media machine broadcasting these are just confused serves no one.
The same applies to people who assume that unvaccinated people must be idiots.
Alternatively, many who were caught in the flood washed up safely on the shores, returned back to town to see people ripping down their houses to build barriers against the flood that they thought was the end of the world.
But by your reckoning it's not many, and given Hitler killed 6 million Jews, which is a lot less than 78 million, he didn't kill that many either.
It's an enormous loss of life, but a tiny number for a worldwide pandemic, especially given current travel technologies that would have made ancient plagues orders of magnitude worse than they were.
In comparison, we're talking about the targeted, deliberate, highly organized extermination of two thirds the entire Jewish race in Europe.
It is another fact that excess mortality has been shown, clearly and repeatedly.
It is also a fact that there is a theory in psychology that anger stems from fear.
This is a misleading way to say your risk of hospitalization is about half of what it was with Delta.
Vaccination is making it safer to get closer back to normal — which is why Ireland can consider it with their much higher rate of over 92% versus the U.S. 63% — but we still need to be thinking about masks and improved ventilation when it’s spreading, especially since kids are still unable to be vaccinated.
2. Reducing R flattens the curve, and pushing it below 1.0 ends the pandemic.
> vaccines have been shown to make anything else than a dent in the levels of infections
Oh?
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2022011...
This applies to all ages, but if I had linked to an ICU with adults I'm sure you would have blamed the pattern on old people.
Vaccines make a big difference, it's just that the vaccine doesn't protect people who don't take it. Even so, it kinda does: herd immunity and R are real. It's hilarious that anti-vaxxers seem to think that anything less than the vaccine somehow managing to protect 100% of people who don't take it is some kind of failure on its part.
I have two children and they are not getting any COVID vaccine unless a second generation one that is not experimental is developed. I don't want any shot developed during the Trump administration in a rushed federal program injected into my kids and you shouldn't either. They've already both caught the virus and had no symptoms whatsoever. We wouldn't have even known they had it if not for the fact that I had lost my sense of smell and got tested.
Children are at lower risk from COVID-19 than they are from influenza. That is the data and it might not agree with your priors but it doesn't change the fact that that is the data.
It should be noted that the second generation of the COVID vaccine is going to look nothing like the first. They are likely not going to use the same components of the virus that they did with the first generation because the spike protein payload has unintended consequences in some human beings. I acknowledge that this subgroup of human beings is a small minority but it happened to include my mother-in-law who is now dead after suffering cardiac arrest 4 hours after her second shot.
In case you think I am a nutty anti-vaxxer I assure you I am not. I firmly believe that my father is alive today because of the vaccine. He was in a high-risk category and I just don't believe he would have survived COVID infection if he had caught it. It's a great idea for people like him and people in his age group. Hell, it was a good idea for my mother-in-law, but unintended consequences are going to happen when you have a practically untested vaccine administered to a massive population. Both of them are at high risk from the virus. My children are simply not. People seem to be unwilling to admit that a vaccine developed for a rapidly evolving virus in 2020 isn't very effective in 2022. I don't know why this cognitive dissonance is so strong, but it's just the fact. It prevents hospitalization but not spread. That's a good thing, but it's a private health effect, not a public one.
"small" is doing a lot of work here. As a society, we are generally comfortable with mandates that contain a small amount of risk. This had better be a large value of "small."
> Among more than 2.5 million vaccinated HCO members who were 16 years of age or older, 54 cases met the criteria for myocarditis. The estimated incidence per 100,000 persons who had received at least one dose of vaccine was 2.13 cases (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.56 to 2.70). The highest incidence of myocarditis (10.69 cases per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 6.93 to 14.46) was reported in male patients between the ages of 16 and 29 years. A total of 76% of cases of myocarditis were described as mild and 22% as intermediate; 1 case was associated with cardiogenic shock.
Oh, it isn't. It's tiny. How many thousands of people do you have to stack on the railroad before you pull the switch on the trolley problem? Not this many. Not a hardship.
I really dislike these public health studies where they wave their hands at myocarditis and treat it like it's not a big deal. There's no cardiologist that would tell you that. It's very serious and carries with it a dramatically elevated risk of lifelong cardiac problems down the road.
I will not allow the paranoia of a bunch of self-righteous cowards to put my kids at risk. Get the shot, move on with your life and leave the rest of us alone. We aren't responsible for soothing your paranoia anymore. The virus is now endemic courtesy of a lab in China funded by self-righteous arrogant scientists in the US. That's a controversial statement but it's the truth. Unfortunately, most of the people complaining about my kids not being vaccinated would rather be angry at me than angry at the people who unleashed this virus on the world.
https://ravarora.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-vaccine-indu...
https://peterattiamd.com/why-im-for-covid-vaccines-but-again...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-vaccines-are...
The other thing to remember is that kids don’t have a problem with the extremely mild inconvenience of wearing a mask — that’s mostly adults complaining for political reasons. If you ask a teacher, it’s just something they do like wearing shoes, and vaccination is no different than all of the other ones they get (95% rate in the US prior to Republicans choosing to politicize medicine).
This should all be indexed to vaccination and spread rates: relax restrictions on high risk activities like indoor dining as the former climbs and the latter declines, and prioritize keeping schools safe to avoid disruptive closures.
All care should have focused on the elderly (early treatment, access to doctors even when positive...). No restrictions (mask, mandatory vaccine, lockdowns..) makes sense for those aged under 45yo.
Not necessarily 'long covid' stuff, just the basic injury that comes from the illness. I sure don't want to lose my sense of smell.
Even in young children, the consequences of infection appear to be worse statistically than the consequences of vaccination. It's of course not all that well understood yet, but for example, compare this syndrome that appears to be associated with Covid infection to the myocarditis due to vaccination:
https://www.cdc.gov/mis/mis-c.html
If you look at what pediatricians and epidemiologists with children are doing, they are being pretty cautious and are eager to vaccinate them.
> Vaccinated people suffer much less from a course of infection than unvaccinated, in all age groups.
I don't know how you can measure that. And that's not how these vaccines have been sold. They were supposed to have 95% efficacy at lowering risk of getting COVID-19 compared with the control group. We know now that is not the case as it does not help to control the epidemic (most vaxed countries with the highest cases). Transmission and contamination are not reduced with the vaccine.
So now we are told that it was never supposed to stop transmission, but miraculously, it makes your body handle the COVID better.
I don't know what data is used, but if you look for example in scotland (Page 44 https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11223/22-01-19-covid...) There is no obvious difference between the vax or unvaxed in term of hospitalization or covid positivity (p.38) unvaxed even seem to do better.
This is health, people are always going to get sick, not just from COVID. We need to fight all diseases with the best weapons we got. Against Covid, vaccines are 1 weapon, so is anti-viral drugs, antibiotics anti inflammatory and anti coagulant.
But we should let each individual choose with his doctor what treatment he wants. And not guilt young children to take an experimental drug where we don't know the long term efficacy or side effects.
And it's a mistake to evaluate the vaccines in terms of what was said about them over time versus the impact they currently have. They currently confer lots of protection to people that have received them.
Like the fact that the officials and manufacturers failed to properly communicate that it's a dynamic, changing situation doesn't actually undermine the very real value that the vaccines still provide.
What? This is completely, wildly,untrue. See for starters Spanish Flu (killed mostly those aged under 45), smallpox (disproportionately affecting children)
For the stated and proven reasons, the commonly known basis of vaccination: 1: It is much, much, much more dangerous to get COVID than the vaccine. 2: The immune response from vaccination is much more protective and much more consistent than the immune response from infection, especially with this disease.
This is known.
Also, established scientific knowledge lies counter to the statements you have as premise.
Source? I think you are mis aggregating data.
92% [1] of Ireland Adult population has received it-least 1 dose vs 85% [2] of the US Adult population has received it-least 1 dose.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58522792 [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/who-are-the-a...
Here's the one I used, which shows full vaccination on 91.7% and partial at 93%:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-trac...
Others have it around 80% so that's probably in error:
https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/pages/vaccinat... https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=IRL https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
Well, there has been at least some change. While in the beginning, those people negated the existence of covid alltogether. Only after many of them did in fact suffer from the real virus, I heard those stories less and less and rather now many recommendation of chlordioxid and ivermectin. (Without ever hearing anything about being wrong for once)
In other words, those people rather take something, that is usually used for desinfection and bathroom cleaning - instead of the vaccination. You cannot reason with that.
That being said, I can very much understand, being sceptical of a brand new proprietary genetic technology to be injected in my system.
But I cannot understand completely misstrusting worldwide efforts of so many people - and then rather trust someone on the internet. So, why care, what they think? They can be wrong a million times and you can proof it and they can ignore the facts, a million times more.
If it required a Herculean effort to prevent the health care system collapsing, why didn't Sweden's healthcare system collapse? Why didn't Florida's health care system collapse? There's this certainty that these policies that were more restrictive were absolutely necessary, but nobody wants to acknowledge that locations on the planet that did not have strict policies seem to have done just as well over two years. I welcome you to look at the Swedish data and compare it to the rest of the EU or the United States. Sweden did very well compared to other nations with large global cities. It did not do great compared to Finland, but that's like comparing Colorado to Nebraska. They are neighboring but nothing alike.
I was very pro mask in the beginning until I realized that it was quickly turning into a cultish religion with no regard for actual efficacy. People didn't care that you were wearing a bandana on your mouth that was absolutely not effective, they just wanted you to signal to them that you agreed with their beliefs. My kids being forced to wear masks while playing sports outside on a field was utterly absurd and I have deep resentment towards public health authorities and the cultists who allowed their fear to hijack their brains and their common sense.
Your statement shows a confidence in your own prior beliefs with a muted acceptance of the new reality with omicron. But you just assume that countries that did not have policies as strict as yours had health care system collapses and the data shows they did not.
I do note that their Omicron model was last updated on January 4, and they say "we suspect that Omicron also does not affect the hourly multiplier, but do not have data for this". Their suspicion comes from a paper published on December 16 that uses data collected in the last two weeks of November.
In the UK we're still waiting on results from trials in schools [2] and we've barely started running trials in care homes [3], and this is 2 years in. In March 2020 our government was trying to comission Dyson to mass produce medical ventilators of questionable use for emergency, and yet we never really tried to get them to mass produce something that is their core competency and put it in classrooms and care homes.
HEPA filters are unobtrusive and can be made quite silent by using larger fans. Its mind boggling enough that we're barely using them, but its even more mind blowing that we have no trial data for them 2 years in.
There is also reason to believe they would work synergically with masks. All masks leak [8], some more than others - portable HEPA devices should take care to limit the (cumulative) effect of leakage to a minimum. Especially in indoor spaces where people spend long amounts of time, and especially in winter as well as in these "modern" business buildings with windows that don't open.
So why does this matter? Mainly because we keep pretending long covid doesn't exist. In the UK, ONS esimates that a 1.3 million (2% of the population) [4] people report long term symptoms, of which 1/2 million (nearly 1% of the entire population) have had them for 1 year or longer, with 247,000 (20%) reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been “limited a lot”.
Information on vaccine protection from long covid has been conflicting [5], with some studies showing they enable return to baseline [6] while others showing almost no effect [7].
Additionally, since Omicron is so new, we don't (and cannot) have any long covid data on it.
It therefore makes sense to continue limiting spread and focus our effort on understanding long covid risk, prevention and treatment better, before completely lifting all restrictions. Especially if it can be done with the help of tools that are almost completely unobtrusive, such as portable HEPA filters.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02669-2
[2]: https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-health/news/article/4953/can-ai...
[3]: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2021/october/airfilter-study....
[4]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
[5]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2
[6]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v...
[7]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v...
[8]: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118#:~:text=Medi...
This is misinformation.
I am pretty happy that the vax-mandaters are being taught a lesson by the virus. They would have pulled through otherwise.
Was that already the argument?
Those days are gone because of vaccine mandates.
* 70% asymptomatic
* 25% minor symptoms with a 2 week recovery
* 0.5% chance of infecting central nervous system
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/effective...
Yes, maybe. I think that there is no good data that supports that for people under 70 without co-morbidities.
> However, the point has also been made that being vaccinated helps prevent more serious illness[1] which in turn can help prevent hospitals from collapsing under the weight of the severely ill.
Recently I found out that in my country at the peak of the most deadly wave only 5% of patients in hospitals were admitted because of Covid.
It does not prevent transmission, it does not stop hospitals from being overfilled and it does not stop symptomatic disease. What is a good science-based reason for mandatory vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 for everyone?
The fact that you had mild symptoms, or any sort of symptoms for that matter, while vaccinated does not actually imply that you would have been substantially worse off without the vaccine, given the statistical likelihood of mild infection.
This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.
Omicron is 90% less deadly than delta for unvaccinated people and there is a 100% lower risk to need mechanical ventilation, according to this paper:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...
During the delta wave covid survivors had better immunization than people with only vaccination. This contradicts some of the mandates that are currently in place, such as in Germany, were people who previously recovered are still required to get a subsequent shot:
https://news.yahoo.com/natural-immunity-more-potent-vaccines...
> This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.
During the pandemic I looked up information about the public reaction to the Spanish Flu. It was almost exactly the same, including vaccines with unclear efficacy and anti-mask groups. However, the Spanish Flu killed up to 50 million people while the world's population was only 1.6 billion and it only took a couple of months.
Some non-clinical studies suggested a drop in transmission (e.g. CDC study in spring 2021 which examined healthcare workers who got the jab early and were tested weekly), but it's clear now they were just picking up a transient effect, months long but wearing off thereafter.
So the mRNA vaccines are doing exactly what they were trialled to do 1.5 years ago. What your local politicians and public health authorities misunderstood from that is their problem.
AND also my problem.
Did you get this from an official source? I mean, no-one should have stated this because it is simply not true, nor has been for most common vaccins out there. At least in my country none of the official sources nor epidemiologists nor virologists ever said this. They'd only go as close as stating 'can prevent transmission in xx% of cases' or something like that.
Are organizations still making policy decisions based on the specifics of the original application implications? Or from observation that it only notably reduces hospitalizations / symptom severity?
If the former is the case, that would warrant clarity, but I also have no idea what a resubmission process looks like. Is that a one week turnaround? Or is it six months with no vaccines being able to be distributed?
The vaccine helps to prepare your immune system to deal with the virus - in some cases that means it can fight it off entirely, or in other cases it will be able to fight it off quicker and your symptoms will be milder because your body is prepared.
> On November 30, 2020, ModernaTX (the Sponsor, also referred to as Moderna) submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) request to FDA for an investigational COVID-19 vaccine (mRNA-1273) intended to prevent COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
I realize that you don't want to admit having been so wrong about this for so long but the evidence is very clear that the vaccines are safe and effective:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitali...
Here's a VAERS entry about a patient turning getting abducted by aliens and turning into the Incredible Hulk after the MMR vaccine. https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?IDNUMBER=221...
Reasoning from VAERS without controlled studies is, at best, like cutting the ends off a roast before you bake it because you heard your grandmother did it that way. At worst, it's like irradiating a spider and enticing it to bite you because you read once that somebody got spider powers that way.
Also VAERS is not the only data source we have for vaccine safety, it’s our hypothesis generation system. We have good data from the vaccine safety datalink system that let us actually quantify the risk of different side effects. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.15072
https://labeling.pfizer.com/ShowLabeling.aspx?id=14471&forma...
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 5 years of age and older.
https://www.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/eua-fact-sheet-...
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINE, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 18 years of age and older.
https://www.fda.gov/media/146305/download
> You are being offered the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2. This Fact Sheet contains information to help you understand the risks and benefits of receiving the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, which you may receive because there is currently a pandemic of COVID-19.
The real question should be, why do you refuse to even just acknowledge basic facts right from the official EUAs? They are for prevention, not for lessening symptoms, and they simply are not preventing COVID-19 with Omicron.
> Note: Confirmed cases were determined by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and at least 1 symptom consistent with COVID-19 (symptoms included: fever; new or increased cough; new or increased shortness of breath; chills; new or increased muscle pain; new loss of taste or smell; sore throat; diarrhea; vomiting)
That’s kind of squishy, but I think it’s a clear distinction.
I agree that the effectiveness against symptomatic Covid is lower with omicron, but omicron also evades immunity from prior infection as well.
For Omicron? And even if. It is great if it is a result of my personal decision to get vaccinated. It is awful to force others to get vaccinated, especially if most claims regarding efficacy get weakened a lot over time and people ignore that. Vaccine mandates and mandatory passports everywhere have failed and we should be happy about that.
Who also supports forced vaccinations like in Rwanda?
https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-aga...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/01/21/cdc-studies...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
As for Rwanda, that’s moving the goalposts — there are many things which the Rwandan government has done which most of us do not approve of.
I am only moving the goalpost back to its initial position. Vaccine mandates are draconian - at least when the data is so weak as for SARS-CoV-2.
No, you're conflating two separate things to try to make a weak case appear stronger. Part of living in a society is accepting restrictions on your personal choices which impact those around you. Vaccination mandates are one of the big public health success stories since they reduce spread, load on the medical system, and the cost to society of having to care for people who are no longer as productive. Polio was significant asymptomatic, too — 70% of people had no symptoms and 25% had only mild symptoms, with a fatality rate under 1% — but we almost eradicated it by using public health measures like requiring vaccination to attend schools.
The key difference is that these restrictions are linked to the activities which vaccines make safer: prior to the Republican Party choosing to politicize the issue, ~95% of American school children were vaccinated against common diseases. Someone who objected to that didn't have a paramilitary squad track them down, they just had to homeschool, not travel to many countries, etc. so they bore the cost of their decision rather than everyone else. That's a pretty important difference compared to what allegedly happened in some parts of Rwanda.
Like using Polio for making the case for mandatory SARS-CoV-2 vaccines look stronger?
Smallpox and measles mandates worked.
And which western/first world nations actually had COVID mandates? The US sure didn’t.
(Vaccine mandates) and (mandatory passports everywhere) have failed
> And which western/first world nations actually had COVID mandates? The US sure didn’t.
Germany, Austria, Australia, France, Italy, ...
How's that "wrong" or ignorant?
The t-cell response to infected cells learned from the vaccine, though, is very effective. Which is why vaccinated people still get infected (at a lower rate) but are many times less likely to get very sick, and almost none end up in ICU. The vaccines are effective.
When you do read the lengthy material at https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro... note that the approvals are based on fighting the disease. Reducing transmission — at which the vaccines were clearly highly effective prior to Omicron — is one part of that but an even more important part is preventing severe outcomes. Even with Omicron, the vaccines are highly effective at keeping you out of the hospital and even better at keeping you out of the ICU.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro...
> The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine is authorized to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 18 years of age and older.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211103065325/https://www.fda.g...
> The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and is now marketed as Comirnaty, for the prevention of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older.
Again, they were approved for prevention. The applications were for prevention. The FDA is trying to rewrite history, but if you look at the actual applications then you can verify what I'm saying is correct.
SARS-COV-2 is a transmissible virus that causes the disease COVID-19.
In the medical jargon, disease and its causality are separate concepts (and this bifurcation honestly makes sense... There are quite a few diseases where the treatment is to regulate symptoms without any hope of doing anything to modify the underlying active agent other than wait out the immune system to deal with it). It is entirely possible for a therapy to "prevent disease" without reducing the transmission of the underlying virus that causes the symptoms that make up a disease.
It is unfortunate that because of the conflation of these ideas in the layman terms space, people misinterpreted what the vaccine was cleared to do. But blaming doctors or the FDA for that is like blaming computer engineers when users turn off their computer and then don't understand that everything in volatile memory wasn't saved to disk. "Where's my spreadsheet go? It was in the computer's memory, it should be here."
Also, prevention of the disease would mean that people are asymptomatic and/or that they aren't getting COVID. Hospitals in many areas are publishing data showing majority of people there for COVID are vaxxed. So much for prevention of the disease.
If you were paying attention, note the difference between saying it will prevent all retransmission versus reducing it, which is what happened. Also, try to compare what actual medical experts said as opposed to the political entertainers whose talking points you're repeating. The actual medical experts were quite clear on this, and Biden has been pretty clear that breakthrough infections are possible — hence the interest in masks to prevent spread and vaccination to mitigate the damage for the people who we know statistically will catch it.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/...
> Biden said Dec. 14 that people vaccinated for COVID-19 "do not spread the disease to anyone else."
It's also many times less pathogenic than Delta, and it's a gift that nothing at present can outcompete it. I believe it's the version that will be endemic, if not than something very similar. So as someone who has spent too many months raging against people who refused to look at the facts of Delta - my mom missed essential surgery because the ICUs were crowded with antivax people, to add emotion to the mix - I'm onside that it's the time to start opening up, at least in jurisdictions where Omicron is 95%+ of cases and where hospitalizations have peaked.
The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along. Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days.
edit: In the above I say I believe all of us will be exposed - not necessarily infected though.