America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate

[babylonsister]

America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate
A realistic Covid-19 endgame requires accepting some risk. The question is how much.
By German [e-mail]@vox.com Sep 7, 2021, 7:30am EDT
This story is part of a group of stories called
Future Perfect
Finding the best ways to do good.


More than a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, America still doesn’t agree on what it’s trying to accomplish.

Is the goal to completely eradicate Covid-19? Is it to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed? Is it hitting a certain vaccine threshold that mitigates the worst Covid-19 outcomes but doesn’t prevent all infections? Or is it something else entirely?

At the root of this confusion is a big question the US, including policymakers, experts, and the general public, has never been able to answer: How many Covid-19 deaths are too many?

The lack of a clear end goal has hindered America’s anti-pandemic efforts from the start. At first, the goal of restrictions was to “flatten the curve”: to keep the number of cases low enough that hospitals could treat those that did arise. But that consensus crumbled against the reality of the coronavirus — leaving the country with patchwork restrictions and no clear idea of what it meant to “beat” Covid-19, let alone a strategy to achieve a victory.

The vaccines were supposed to be a way out. But between breakthrough infections, the risks of long Covid, and new variants, it’s becoming clear the vaccines didn’t get rid of the need to answer the underlying question of what the Covid-19 endgame is.

America is now stuck between those two extremes: The country wants to reduce the risk of Covid-19, but it also wants to limit the remnants of social distancing and other Covid-related restrictions on day-to-day life.

“We’re not trying to go for zero Covid,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “The question becomes: When do, in most communities, people feel comfortable going about their daily business and not worrying, excessively, about doing things that are important and meaningful to them?”

more...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22651046/covid-19-delta-vaccines-social-distancing-masking-lockdowns

[lagomorph777]

1. "consensus crumbled against the reality of the coronavirus" - wrong.

We never had consensus. We had factions: sane vs insane; intelligent human beings vs Reptilians.

We can completely blame the insanity in this country, and our COVID failure, on the Reptilian Party.

[Wounded Bear]

2. Indeed! We've been fighting the willfully ignorant all along...

repubs and their anti-vaxx legions have apparently decided that death tallies in 7 figures are 'tolerable' to them.

[gratuitous]

13. A lot of detail has been elided in this report

Yes, at first we were working on flattening the curve. Once vaccines were synthesized and made available, the goal was to get as many people vaccinated as there was vaccine to administer.

Every step of the way, however, public health officials found themselves battling not only the virus, but national leadership. The president fancied himself the smartest guy in any room, and with a whim of steel he interrupted best practices, sowed doubts about the efficacy of countermeasures, and openly ridiculed the medical professionals who didn't agree with his hare-brained uninformed opinions. The cult that envelops his political life imitated their leader and hero, and the virus spread like wildfire until it had claimed more than a half million victims.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. Whatever ThE eCoNoMy says is acceptable.

[Mad_Machine76]

4. At this point

I feel like Biden and other Federal Health Officials need to organize a 50-State Summit with all governors and get on the same page with a few things. We can't keep going about fighting COVID like this. If we can't just get on the same page about wanting to keep the cases, hospitalizations, and deaths down and needing to take some basic NATIONAL precautionary measures to stem the tide of all of those things, then we're basically SOL as a country. I would say that it's a global issue too that we all have to fight together, but we have to get ourselves as a country in order as well.

[genxlib]

6. Sure

I am certain that deSantis, Abbott and 25 or so other GOP governments are just waiting for that kind of effort to be reasonable.

You make it sound like coordination is the problem. Indeed, there is a coordinated effort to undermine any efforts to make things better.

[Mad_Machine76]

7. I said it is what should happen or what I would do

Force everybody to sit around a table and be forced to confront or grapple with the situation together. I'm not naive enough to overlook everything that you just said, however. You got any suggestions?

[genxlib]

9. I don't actually

My best suggestion so far is vaccination by tranquillizer dart so I am all out of ideas.

I just think that any policy that relies on the good will of Republicans is at best a waste of time.

What is happening now is what was destined to happen. The policies need to play out and people needed to see just how horrific they were. The only question is how bad it will need to get before the tide turns against the GOP leaders in those states.

Frankly, I am not even optimistic that will happen despite how bad it gets. People are just too invested in their viewpoint to admit that it is killing people. Facebook and RW news gives them enough cover that they can go on pretending that things are not what they seem.

And before you say anything, yes I am cynical and defeatist. But the last 18 months (5 years) has taught me that 30% of our Country are selfish assholes without a lick of sense. And another 20% can't be bothered to notice that they are.

[Mad_Machine76]

10. I can't disagree with anything you just said and I'm not gonna try

Like you though, I just keep wondering what the "tipping point" might wind up being for people living in states like Florida and Texas (in particular). Abbott and DeathSantis' poll numbers DO seem to be taking a hit right now, but then again so is Biden's and he's actually trying to be the responsible one.

[genxlib]

11. Those same 20% in the middle

Are what polls are all about. They can't be bothered to actually understand why things are why they are. They just blame whomever is in charge at the time.

Of course the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers are screwing Biden. But they seem to be willing to give up their life for that. I am not sure how to change behavior when mortal risk won't do it.

[genxlib]

5. The answer has been there in plain sight all along.

And that is what right-wingers said it was last year.

- Just a flu
- No more deadly than a typical flu year
- Not dangerous or deadly to the vast majority of people that don't have underlying conditions.

Of course they were saying that last year and they were wrong.

But I am struck that what they wrongly described then can correctly describe what happens to vaccinated people.

If they would just get the fucking shot it could be what they always claimed it could be.

If I can be reasonably sure that my outcome will be good (no hospital or death) then I will risk a miserable week to live my life. That's what I have done for all the other 5 decades of my life.

[maxsolomon]

8. I'm definitely more comfortable with higher Covid risk than my wife - or most of DU.

I mask indoors because I don't want to be a Delta vector, but I don't outdoors, even on an urban street. I've successfully eaten in restaurants unmasked, and visited with relatives unmasked. I'm lucky, everyone I know is vaccinated.

My office has re-opened, but is all-masked regardless of vaccine status, which is probably overkill in a highly-vaxxed city/county. I plan to give it a try but it will be a ghost town and will feel unneccessary.

We've got to get over the Delta hump. Too bad the GQP has decided to make the vaccine a loyalty test for dumbshits.

[BumRushDaShow]

12. "The lack of a clear end goal has hindered America's anti-pandemic efforts from the start."

There have been "goals" and what happened is that the "assumptions" about the virus itself and how it was being spread, kept changing and evolving, effectively keeping the goal-posts moving.

For example, the idiotic term "herd immunity". The "goal" was first set at "70%", but then there is a realization that this might not be enough and it is a struggle to even get to 60% vaccinated. The irony of this being that as much as people keep trying to say that COVID-19 is "like a cold or the flu" (where some variants of coronaviruses are sprinkled among the "common cold-causing" germs), no one has "herd immunity" against the cold or the flu. Yet we are supposed to magically have "herd immunity" to this.

Plus it's difficult to set "goals" when you have such a large and diverse geographic and demographic population.

And even if you set a "goal" or "goals", the variants can inevitably upend it/them and there will always be disagreements on how to reach that "goal" or those "goals".

I actually do believe that all the research going on with the mRNA vaccines will eventually reach another breakthrough to better deal with this type of coronavirus, but that is going to take time. So meanwhile, we'll be patch-working for at least another couple years.