Honest question - I'm after good articles to read about this:
Why is it that we have been able to eliminate things like Polio and Smallpox, yet there's doubt about COVID? They were both viruses, must have mutated, were fairly easily spread and it must have taken longer to vaccinate enough people given the advances in logistics and vaccine tech we now have. What's the fundamental difference?
>"Why is it that we have been able to eliminate things like Polio and Smallpox, yet there's doubt about COVID?"
COVID is incredibly more contagious, but also far less deadly than those. The real sinister thing about this virus is that 20 people can pass it to each other without anyone knowing, then all of the sudden someone's grandma is dying from a hug. It's just so much more contagious than anything any living person has seen before. No one in general had ever experienced literally just being in a room with someone completely asymptomatic leading to transmission of a deadly virus.
You must have missed it - its in the article itself.
>But as vaccines were developed and distribution ramped up through the winter and into the spring, estimates of the threshold began to rise. That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B.1.1.7 and first identified in Britain, is about 60 percent more transmissible.
>As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.
>Though resistance to the vaccines is a main reason the United States is unlikely to reach herd immunity, it is not the only one
>“Disease transmission is local,” Dr. Lipsitch noted.
>“If the coverage is 95 percent in the United States as a whole, but 70 percent in some small town, the virus doesn’t care,” he explained. “It will make its way around the small town.”
>At the same time, the connectivity between countries, particularly as travel restrictions ease, emphasizes the urgency of protecting not just Americans but everyone in the world, said Natalie E. Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Any variants that arise in the world will eventually reach the United States, she noted.
My take would be that those diseases affect children while COVID does not. I think we would have seen pretty much everyone on board with COVID vaccines if COVID was severely crippling children.
Those diseases effected children because children didn't have immunity. However childhood diseases often killed adults that somehow didn't catch those diseases as children.
> Why is it that we have been able to eliminate things like Polio and Smallpox, yet there's doubt about COVID?
The vaccines for polio and smallpox are extremely effective (some polio vaccines are up to 100%) and pretty much everyone received them, for decades. Covid vaccines are likely somewhat less effective, and there's considerable hesitancy in some countries. The US will be lucky to get to 70%, at the moment, and France may be even worse, for instance.
"Slightly" is incredibly wrong. Estimates are that it's around 10x as deadly, and that's only counting death, and not the permanent lung damage some survivors are experiencing.
Either way, my point stands, one set of diseases leaves obvious physical marks, the other just kills your or leaves invisible harm.
Which do you think will prompt people to be more happy to get a vaccine? Some invisible injury, if that, or knowing people with permanent deformities from a long time scourge?
Why is it that we have been able to eliminate things like Polio and Smallpox, yet there's doubt about COVID? They were both viruses, must have mutated, were fairly easily spread and it must have taken longer to vaccinate enough people given the advances in logistics and vaccine tech we now have. What's the fundamental difference?