We're lucky to have Israel as a trailblaser in all this. Extremely high compliance, all vaccinated with the same vaccine, comparable level of medicine in the country, yet the deaths keep spiking from time to time, only marginally below the levels where they were pre-vaccine. Seems like someone, somewhere, might have not been telling the truth about vaccines alone "ending" the pandemic. Even if we vaccinate at the same level (which is unlikely, since the issue is now highly politicized), we're looking at the same thing 6 months from now, with minor variations.
>yet the deaths keep spiking from time to time, only marginally below the levels where they were pre-vaccine
I just checked[0] and it seems like their data for 2021 is way better in terms of deaths than 2020.
>Seems like someone, somewhere, might have not been telling the truth about vaccines alone "ending" the pandemic.
Talking heads will say all sorts of nonsense or exaggerate and shouldn't be your yardstick. The better question is are we better with them than without and the evidence points towards yes.
>[deaths] only marginally below the levels where they were pre-vaccine
Neither of this has any relation to reality. Compliance isn't high (and can't be, since the country is younger than most Western countries, and the vaccine wasn't approved for these ages until very recently), and deaths are significantly lower post-vaccine.
The city-state’s Ministry of Health reported last month that about 100,000 people aged 60 and above were yet to be vaccinated despite having been in the priority category.
There was a new daily high of 18 deaths in Singapore on Wednesday - as well as a near record 3862 new cases - and the unvaccinated elderly accounted for more than two-thirds of patients who had passed away from the virus or were in the ICU, Health Minister and fellow taskforce co-chair Ong Ye Kung said.
“For the unvaccinated seniors in their 60s, our data shows one in four will require oxygen, ICU care or will succumb,” he said.
> one in four will require oxygen, ICU care or will succumb,
Note how this is deliberately constructed to scare the bejesus out of people. It's like saying "one in four will pick their nose, have explosive diarrhea, or blow their head off with a shotgun". If you don't read carefully enough, which most people don't, you'll be misled into thinking a bunch of people are about to die (rather than ruin their porcelain throne for the day), but they have plausible deniability. "We just didn't phrase it quite right". This does not improve public trust in vaccines _at all_.
Do we need folks 60+ to voluntarily vaccinate? Yes. No doubt about it. But _this is not the way_ to achieve that goal. Transparency and persuasion is how you do it, not verbal tricks like that.
Singapore has about 1650 isolation beds and 200 ICU places. 25000 people older than 60 (1 in 4 figure from the article) can easily overwhelm this capacity.
Even if that math works, we've been dealing with this for nearly 2 years, and it was clear right from the start the disease would end up endemic. Surely that's enough time to build capacity, or at least procure temporary capacity in neighboring countries? It's not like you need a ton of expensive equipment to care for a COVID patient. It's not a tumah.
When a person can no longer survive breathing on their own, the anesthesiologist is called on to intubate them. After that you have the anesthesiologists monitoring all intubated patients. There is no surplus of anesthesiologists anywhere.
Flanders has only 20% unvaccinated people, Germany has 34%, that already 75% more. If you subtract children on both sides, that leaves a lot more unvaccinated Germans to be infected, easily in the 2x to 3x range.
> Also in Germany for example 90% of the covid people in hospitals are fully unvaccinated people.
You'd do well providing some data for this quip. I've spent 10 minutes searching and could not find a confirmation. It's just the generic "hospitals are overwhelmed" BS. At least it's BS in the United States (which has a much higher case load), where you can see whether hospitals are overwhelmed or not (and yes, they are not), right on HHSs own website: https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization
https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/corona-fast-nur-ungeimp... Munich (2021-10-02): One hospital was at 100% unvaccinated covid19 patients (that's the twitter screenshot from 2021-09-28). They asked the other hospitals: 5 + 1 and 10 + 2 of unvaccinated + "vaccinated but couldn't build resistance for some reason". Further away in the region 100% unvaccinated (ICU and "regular" covid19 treatment)
So I haven't found national numbers but lots of regional ones, and while there are a few counts lower (at 2/3 and 85%), there were also hospitals with entirely unvaccinated covid19 populations, both on ICU and in regular care.
Title: About 90% of covid19 ICU patients not vaccinated.
The bullet points state: In August and September, about 1/10 of covid19 ICU patients were fully vaccinated. Those were often people with an impaired immune system, e.g. due to chemotherapy.
The numbers were (assembled and) released by the federal health office on request of a member of Parliament.
So 90% number is not supported. If primary occupants of the ICU are immunocompromised people, why the fuck are governments not prioritizing _them_ and instead wasting vaccine doses on young people and children who, if healthy, are not at risk at all? Even though Germany has done relatively well compared to other countries, the response still seems to make zero sense there. Blanket mandate is not needed. Raw vaccination rates are utterly meaningless without seeing details wrt age and comorbidities, or figuing out who ends up in the ICU, and targeting those kinds of people for vaccination. Why, 2 years in, such obvious things are so hard for the governments to figure out? Is it because most people in the government are lawyers and not engineers?
The idea that vaccines "end" the pandemic was proposed when there was the hope or expectation that the vaccine campaign leads to a covid19-sterile population.
My post and its parent post are _all_ about discussing what to do when sterilization is off the table (as appears to be the case with the vaccines we have), and I have no idea where your point fits into that.
By the way: The Occam's razor answer to "someone, somewhere, might have not been telling the truth" is that people were expecting a better outcome and were mistaken. "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" and all that.
It's not a matter of not telling the truth but not being able to predict the future. Just like you cant predict when a pandemic will emerge, no one knew it would happen to mutate to the delta variant before vaccines could do what we hoped. The vaccine probably couldn't have been developed any quicker, but maybe people taking better precautions somewhere with masks, handwashing and distancing might have given us enough time to wipe it out without a mutation. Now it looks likely to stick around long term, but at least we've got some more preventatives (vaccines are worse but not useless for delta) and treatments than earlier on.
I don't understand why you're downvoted. Buying time has always been one of the main strategies when dealing with the pandemic. We are much better at handling C19 now. As it seems to have become endemic, we now need efficient strategies to live with it.
And Israel did it with a very short interval between first and second dose. It's not unusual for vaccines to require a three dose regimen, with sufficient time between penultimate and last dose for the immune system to abandon high alert status, in order to achieve long term effect.
> Seems like someone, somewhere, might have not been telling the truth about vaccines alone "ending" the pandemic.
Who said that?
I am more inclined to believe authorities are aware covid is now endemic, that masking is the new normal for years and decades and that we likely will need yearly vaccination and that our health infrastructure will have to adapt as well as our face 2 face service industries but they choose not to outright tell because it would be a PR nightmare.
Pretty much the entire US mainstream establishment said that, from what I can tell. There was a huge push to tell people that the pandemic could be over by now if not for the evil Trump-supporting antivaxers, along with pressure on any media outlet that reported the growing evidence the vaccines weren't as effective as expected to shut up about it because it was "dangerous" and "misleading". The UK was different; it seems to be somewhat more widely reported and less controversial here that vaccines aren't going to end the pandemic and the media has been more honest about it, though even here I've noticed the Guardian pushing the narrative our government has "failed" to vaccinate enough and we could have herd immunity if the party they prefer was in power.
> Pretty much the entire US mainstream establishment said that, from what I can tell. There was a huge push to tell people that the pandemic could be over by now if not for the evil Trump-supporting antivaxers,
This is what I have seen on Twitter, reddit and imgur as well. In the forms of memes, with a very polarized and aggressive tones from left leaning people. I am surprised they don't see how their rhetoric and language constructs are the same as "the other side" and it will ultimately leads to the same kind of oversimplification and problems. The blame game is strong.
But was the CDC and the president and Fauci and others flat out saying that ?
Anyway, in continental western Europe the media hasn't pushed that narrative and I don't recall the establishment saying "we got the vaccine, covid is over".
edit: I do remember now that that at the beginning of the year, before delta and delta plus they were talk that if the vaccination campaign was fast enough we could get herd immunity (if 70% of the population is vaccinated) but rapidly in april or may I am sure they started to say alpha and delta changed that and we needed 90% and that wouldn't be possible.
But I have heard a lot of antivax saying that "vaccinated people think covid is over but they are wrong, they can still transmit it so they are more dangerous than unvaccinated people". A lot of straw men, a lot of bad faith in framing the situation to fit their worldview.
What I regularly see and frightens me though are headlines like "Finally we can let our masks at home, it's over". Newspapers and the establishment is making a huge fuss over wearing or not wearing masks in public transport or at work. I am of the opinion that the inconvenience is so minor and apparently it does help that I don't see why there's a debate around that, especially now that we are seeing raises in Belgium and Germany.
We don't hear (yet?) about how it's unvaccinated people's fault that there are new variants or restrictions. But I do hear from antivax that these restrictions don't make sense and are solely in place to annoy them and reduce their liberties because vaccinated people are scared of covid and they shouldn't be. This line of thinking is not yet present in our leader's speeches.
What they say though - when covid numbers are low - is that they should be able to lift off restrictions (that is proof of vaccination or negative test results) for their population and not be victims of their neighbour's bad handling of the situation. And that almost always come from right or far right leader, putting people against each other as usual. And they are now creating mini trump all over Europe to carry this message with all the tricks in Trump's book. That is scary.
Trump is the only reason why the US had two working vaccines in less than a year. We'd still be working through "FDA approval" bullshit if it wasn't for the guy, and hundreds of thousands more people would be dead as a result. Possibly millions, because Trump made it politically unpalatable to delay the regulatory approval of vaccines worldwide, same as DeSantis is making hard lockdowns politically unpalatable nationwide.
> Trump is the only reason why the US had two working vaccines in less than a year. We'd still be working through "FDA approval" bullshit if it wasn't for the guy, and hundreds of thousands more people would be dead as a result.
