>With this being the case, how does it even make sense for companies like Ticketmaster and Quantas to announce that they'll require their customers to be vaccinated?
This is such a weird take imo. There is no need to vaccine non-risk people afaik. I thought the whole deal with covid is how mild it is for the general population but deadly for a subset of it.
you can't completely predict who it's going to be mild for. 14-year olds with no known underlying issues have died, 25-year olds have lost their sense of smell and taste permanently or suffer from long covid months later.
Not to take away from the argument that we should vaccinate everyone (we should, at least adults. not sure if this vaccine will be approved for kids, which usually requires more stringent approvals), but your argument isn't a good one.
Covid has killed 42 people from age 5-14 in the US according to the CDC, for example. That alone is really not something we should be making huge policy decisions around. It's sad, of course, but it's extremely isolated. All it does is distract us from making good policy decisions.
If I was making policy decisions I'd order vaccine rollout as follows:
Essential workers => 80+ years old => 70+ => 60+ => etc. as we produce and distribute the vaccines.
At some point we might look at the data and say "that's good enough, we can resume normal activities while we work to vaccinate the rest of the population".
Oh, I'm with you that vaccines should be triaged by risk factors, and that reopening should be guided both by % of high-risk population vaccinated and case statistics. I was responding to OP's assertion that we shouldn't bother to vaccinate "healthy" people at all.
IIRC the IFR is ~0.2% for people in the 20-39 age bracket. I still find that risky (though I'm risk-averse), but the better argument is the lingering effects of moderate/severe cases, which I'm not sure is counted.
Also, I assume your policy decision would include younger people with risk factors like heart disease and diabetes, rather than going strictly by age. I'm chronically ill and I want my vaccine.
Sure, throw in risk factors. My lack of completeness is why I shouldn't be the one creating this policy :)
My main point is that there are sub-populations that have a small enough risk that we shouldn't stress over them too much. And talking about them is a distraction.
I would expect that reopenings wouldn't be based on vaccinated percentage, but caseloads, just as they are now. Once more people are vaccinated, however, those will decrease.
I'm not sure what you mean by x-0, but if there is no risk for young healthy people, then they don't need the vaccine? I understand there are other arguments to be had but this 100% invalidates at least on of them
EDIT: After re-reading I understood the sentence, my bad.
We don't know a priori who will have very adverse reactions. Comorbities and old age increase your chances, but those are categorically not the only variables at play.
Anything we do now to reduce the R0 of this disease will disproportionally enable people to live long enough for herd immunity to be attained, courtesy of the exponential growth curve. The amount of people that has to get sick to overwhelm hospitals is smaller than you might think. When hospitals get overwhelmed people die of other preventable cases due to reduced resources, tired physicians, lack of time to see patients at all and people being scared of even going to the hospital in the first place. Old people are not "disposable" and for younger people that happen to have the genetic (or other) predisposition to bad or fatal cases it will be hard to tell them "sucks to be you" when the preventive steps are well understood by now: interact with people as little as possible and when you do, do so outside while wearing masks.
Also, the death rate among poorer people is a multiple of that of the general population, among other reasons because they are working essential jobs to not starve. Those of us that can isolate and don't are saying that these people's lives (essential workers, including health care workers) have no value, they are just meat for the meat grinder.
You appear to have confused case fatality rate with infection fatality rate. There have been far more infections than confirmed cases because most never get tested or formally diagnosed. The actual IFR is under 1%.
That comment was meant to answer two people at once, my bad.
I was referring to the proportion of population that was not at risk. That population has an insanely small chance of having long term side effects from data I've seen. Which was the reason I'm not sure why we would force them to get these vaccines.
EDIT: To be more precise; Of course we want a vaccine and vulnerable people to get it. You'd rather risk getting whatever potential side effects of that vaccine than get covid. I'm more torn about why healthy young people should get it.
But the proportion of people who are both at risk and can't get the vaccine (and alternatives) must be small (from intuitive maths, I actually haven't looked into this).
Why would this vaccine be mandatory while plenty of other aren't? E.g. I've never got flu-tested before a concert/the flu shot, even though it could pass to other people/kill people.
I'm wondering where's the line between freedom to one own's body and other people's well being. IMO it's not as clear-cut as people make it out to be.
You've mentioned "Low risk" a few times. You're right, the risk for young people is low. That doesn't mean no-risk though. There are plenty of examples of young people suffering harm because of covid.
At the moment we think covid is at least ten times more lethal than flu. If you're comparing numbers of people killed you need to make sure you're counting death the same way, and most people aren't doing that.
It is possible, but from my understanding, a lot of diseases can have extreme cases. And even so, being free to take on that risk is what I'm refering in when I talk about one own's body.
You're missing my point. These deaths will be insanely reduced once we get the vaccine out to the people that need it. I wasn't saying they are the same; i was saying they are similar in the way they are infectuous and we don't seem to be doing much for young people for most other diseases.
This is such a weird take imo. There is no need to vaccine non-risk people afaik. I thought the whole deal with covid is how mild it is for the general population but deadly for a subset of it.