What it will do is that when those people who haven't got the shots start to be sick, they will throw their beliefs in the bin and go to the hospital. They will stretch the capacity and then when I need to go for an ailment different from this disease, I'll be queued up behind them and the treatment I get would be subpar. Disclaimer: I don't have the stats on hospitalization rates/capacity in places that have low rates of vaccination but high rates of infection.
That is a concern, and I think we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need.
There are also other treatments that we know greatly reduce the severity (and thus would decrease the need for hospital capacity) that haven’t been rolled out as widely and aggressively as the vaccine has.
> we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need.
Hospital capacity limits are mostly about personnel and not equipment/space. Equipment and space are issues too, but temporary measures are possible.
Everywhere is having trouble hiring because employers don't want to pay enough wages for people to do the work. The same is true in the healthcare setting, but nursing requires a significant amount of training (AFAIK, 2 years for entry level nursing, I think more time needed for ICU nursing) and doctoring is even more. Hospitals (and healthcare providers in general) are not incentivized to retain enough staff to deal with spikes in demand. AFAIK, there hasn't been increased training, and probably a lot of training was delayed while in-person education wasn't an option. Healthcare workers were also a lot of the early victims. COVID mitigation measures probably reduce healthcare productivity too, requiring even more workers.
Not enough ICU (too late when you get there anyway) is a political problem. In my country they reduced it with state funding (you got money for reducing beds, active monetary incentives) and now they ponder about vaccination mandates.
This is infantile blaming of others in my opinion. Worse, you don't even hold those that are really responsible to account. So my sympathy if you fail to get an ICU is limited.
It is not practical to have hospitals to cater to extreme spikes - it takes trained doctors, nurses, infrastructure to run all which is in limited supply. Further, even if that can be managed, during normal periods, all that excess capacity wouldn't maintain itself. You need a balance of additional capacity and responsible behaviour supported by science/medicine/evidence. Ignoring that is infantile.
Just because driving a car isn’t risk free doesn’t mean you outlaw cars. You take the sensible precautions that are available and accept that a life worth living involves a certain amount of risk.
We don’t know what happened in the alternate universe where there were no seatbelt laws. Maybe there are people here who died because they stubbornly refused to ever wear a seatbelt because they had taken a public stance against seatbelts and made not wearing a seatbelt into a noble fight against tyranny. Maybe in the other universe they’re still alive because they were able to come around and change their mind without feeling like they lost a fight and were admitting defeat.
But I guess we’ll never know, because if you think something is a good idea what you should do is immediately use the government to coerce everybody into doing it under threat of fines and punishment.
But we have speed limits, stop signs, seat belt regulations, airbag requirements, crumble zones, crash tests, driver training and testing, significant drunk driving laws, ...
If we had equivalent sensible precautions for COVID as we have for cars, mask mandates and vaccination requirements would be the minimum and carry significant penalties.
I think most people consider 91% to be “truly” protective. Nothing is 100%. The vaccine is more than effective enough to reduce the risk of Covid to the general background risk level of life in general (things like car accidents, slipping in the shower, eating red meat, contracting a flesh eating amoeba from swimming in a lake etc.)
It's quite clear that the person who wrote the comment I'm replying to believes that "truly protective" means 100% protection, and that if the vaccine was "truly protective" you no longer need to worry about getting COVID.
This is a very dangerous idea and why there is so much confusion and misinformation.
By insisting that 91% is "truly effective" in conversations like this you are not helping.
Not to be condescending, but because people have been saying for a year now or more now that the virus will rapidly evolve and any vaccines will become less effective over time because of it.
And the virus rapidly evolved and the vaccines we have became less effective to new strains, as expected. A quick deployment of vaccines would greatly reduce that risk (see: Japan currently having infections in the double digits following a rapid deployment in vaccines and universal masks, leaving little room for new strains to adapt).
The pandemic has been a long chain of some insightful people saying "This bad thing will happen if people don't take X precaution." People say that's a lie--then don't take X precautions. Bad thing happens. People get angry and say they were lied to because bad thing happened when they were told it wouldn't happen (because loads of people took no precautions). Then there's a warning about another bad thing happening, followed by denial.
If you catch the flu once your immune system remembers it and can easily deal with exposure much better, but this memory fades in time. Your immune system isn't perfect either, and there are breakthrough cases, and this is more frequent in the elderly, albeit frequently milder. The vaccine offers protection similar to catching the flu (albeit much better in the case of the mRNA and J&J ones (<10% infected compared to ~50% infected in traditional technology) but protection is not guaranteed.
I'm disappointed I'm explaining this, I thought it's common knowledge that vaccines offer great protection but not invulnerability.
I know all that. I can fully accept that the vaccine doesn’t make me invulnerable. I have the vaccine and am fully prepared to go back to living my normal life while accepting that I still have some risk. I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low). At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom.
Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t. People are free to do other risky things like skydiving or free climbing. If you don’t want to accept the risks of those things you can opt out of doing them.
According to the Mayo Clinic[1] 72.2% of the US population already have at least one dose. Presumably the people with one dose will continue to get the second one.
Among the people who aren't vaccinated, some of them will have already had it and have a natural immunity. Some of them will get the vaccine eventually even without a mandate.
So, there's some number < 27.8% of the US who could theoretically be forced to get a vaccine with a mandate who wouldn't otherwise get it. How much does vaccinating those people really reduce the risks you mentioned?
Only a small percentage of cases require hospitalization. Are we at an extreme risk of hospital overload now?
The variants that have emerged so far seem to be trending toward being less serious and the current vaccine still provides protection against them. So what are we really gaining by forcing more people to get vaccinated?
There is probably a higher risk of contracting a breakthrough case, but how much? And how risky is it to get a breakthrough case anyway? It seems like with the vaccine, if you get it, it's not really all that serious.
Meanwhile, there are real costs in increasing division and creating further animosity among people by mandating a vaccine that the vast majority of people are already willingly getting anyway.
In Wyoming, < 50% of people 18-65yo are vaxxed. (citation: your link). In Massachusetts? Its > 80%. I just picked two states at either end, you see similar pattern for other states. The highly politicized nature of the vaccine also means that some people that should get the vaccine, and normally would, are holding out. This is disservice to everyone. I have extended family members where people have died because an immune-compromised person didnt get the vax because their care-taker was too focused on the politics to help them get it, only to later bring covid into the household.
The issue is not 27% of the US, its 50% of that state. Some localities are more at risk, or at a lower herd immunity potential.
> Only a small percentage of cases require hospitalization. Are we at an extreme risk of hospital overload now?
Yes. [1].
> current vaccine still provides protection against them
still provides protection against them, but less protection.
> So what are we really gaining by forcing more people to get vaccinated?
1. Less hosts for virus, so less room to mutate, or slower mutations.
2. Less hospital beds used by covid patients. See earlier point.
3. Less people sick, and less death. 27% of america is millions of people.
> with the vaccine, if you get it, it's not really all that serious.
We don't know the long-term side affects of the virus if you get it while vaccinated. We know that a statistically significant cohort of un-vaxxed people get "long covid" where they have long-term side affects. We don't have data on breakthroughs yet getting long covid.
> increasing division and creating further animosity
Most people who mandate masks and vaccines are trying to save lives, however misguided or unnecessary you and others think the chosen implementation of that goal is. I've seen (here in HN) people say that getting covid is "basicallly optional" and therefore if hospitals are at capacity we should just turn away covid patients because its their own fault. I think the division and animosity is borne by those that don't seem to care about others very much, tbh, and therefore maybe health policy isn't "divisiveness" as much as a disregard for other's lives.
I appreciate the numbers-game aspect of saying the risk of death is down to x% of 27% of america, (and shrinking). Its the right approach to proving that the costs are being amortized across less lives saved, because one day (today, tomorrow, whatever) we do have to say that we've saved all the lives we can bear and we have to move on. I don't have a target number, and neither do politicians - maybe the CDC or others should state an actual goal to use to base policy decisions off of.
That said, based on the {unknown long covid risk, hospitals still being at capacity, mutation risk, regionalized risk} i personally still support covid policies to continue to be in affect, despite the (truly minor) inconvenience. I don't really care about the animosity of people who think we should let our fellow neighbors die in the street.
I never said anyone should be left to die. People should be treated, even if their problems are because of their own poor choices. If we refused to treat anyone who made bad choices, we could close most hospitals, because we wouldn't treat hardly anyone.
WY has 576,851 people. MA has 7,033,469. So, at 50% and 80% vaccinated, there are 288,426 unvaccinated people in WY and 1,406,694 in MA.
WY is also nearly 10x larger at 97,914 sq mi. vs. 10,565 sq mi. in MA. So, in MA there are ~133 unvaccinated people per sq mi and a little less than 3 per sq mi. in WY.
If you want to minimize your chances of encountering an unvaccinated person, your odds are much much better in WY, despite the percentages! It's misleading to talk about percentages when the absolute numbers are so different.
Also, think about a rancher living on 1,000 acre ranch in WY who spends most of their time outdoors chasing cattle (and is in great shape) and goes into town for groceries every other week vs. a sedentary office worker in MA who takes the T into downtown Boston every day. Very different risk profiles for catching Covid and having a serious case. You're not gaining a whole lot by forcing the rancher to get vaccinated.
> The highly politicized nature of the vaccine also means that some people that should get the vaccine, and normally would, are holding out.
And who politicized it? Who wrote articles comparing the percentages of "Red State" vaccinations vs. "Blue State" vaccinations? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't the people in the Red States. Now the vaccine is tied in to people's identities. Now getting the vaccine is a "liberal thing" so now people are forced to go against their tribe to get the vaccine. Sure, I guess it helps you score political points with your in-group and get lots of likes on Twitter when you can dunk on the dumb conservatives who won't get vaccinated, but it is literally killing people. The mandates are not about saving lives, they're about having a political cudgel to make one party look good and the other look bad. People are getting vaccinated anyway, they would be getting vaccinated faster and with less resistance if one party were not trying to use it is a ploy to appear sanctimonious.
As a bit of anecdata, both of my parents are conservative Republicans. My dad especially is an ardent Trump supporter. They both got vaccinated the second it was available to them and got the booster as soon as that was available. So, it's not even an accurate characterization. The vaccine was developed under Trump (although back then, it was Biden, Harris, and the rest of the Democratic party who were pushing vaccine hesitancy). There was an opportunity to paint this as a bipartisan triumph that could have brought people together, but that wasn't allowed to happen.
And if you can still transmit the disease even after getting the shot, then it doesn't protect those people anyway. They will still have to exercise whatever caution is necessary to protect themselves, which they would have to do anyway, because there are other diseases as well.
Yeah, it's a partial measure that carries no guarantees... which makes it a poor candidate for a fix to roll out to everyone, in my opinion.
It doesn't make sense to me why officials aren't focusing just on getting as close to 100% as possible of the vulnerable vaccinated. It's well known that surviving covid is a much better protection, and thus contributes more to herd immunity, than the mRNA shot+boosters.
Perhaps "following the money" can provide answers? A vaccine mandate is a great way of making a lot of money for some people...
Yeah, but that's really up to me, isn't it? There's a reason I choose not to live in China, Laos, or Vietnam.
Now that the vaccine is so widely available: (a) health officials should drop all orders and regulations, and (b) hospitals ought to say "look, here's our COVID capacity; if we're full we can't serve you, sorry" -- with that capacity set at a reasonable, sustainable number for them.
... unless the shot isn't what they say it is in terms of effectiveness or safety. But if it is really that effective and safe, I don't see any reason not to implement (a) and (b).
> Perhaps the answer is not a secret conspiracy but a rational, human desire to protect people.
That's not what I see when people's basic human rights and freedoms are being removed. People in Australia are being kept in freakin' internment camps.
When a 91+% effectiveness shot is available for free to everyone, the bar of rationally protecting people has been more than cleared. This doesn't appear to be about that anymore.
No. You can still get breakthrough cases with the vaccine. Your chance is higher the more un-vaxxed people around you. You can't control that number easily. People who work in service industry really cant control that.
Additionally, the more the virus spreads the more it'll mutate to avoid the vaccine, so the more likely that you lose that control.
> There's a reason I choose not to live in China, Laos, or Vietnam.
Well, really you were born where ever you were born, which is probably where you are now, and getting a visa to one of those countries really isn't solely up to you, because they need to let you in. I vaguely see your point (except most people dramatically overstate global mobility), but if you actually wanted to avoid getting sick you'd move to australia because their rates are really low - for reasons you allude to.
> hospitals ought to say "look, here's our COVID capacity; if we're full we can't serve you, sorry" -- with that capacity set at a reasonable, sustainable number for them.
But we don't do that here, in the civilized world. We don't turn people away. Its inhumane to not help people and turn them away. Doctors take an oath to help all in need.
It would solve the hospital problem to say "tough s*t if you get sick, did you try the vax?" but thats not a practical response. No politician or organization wants to take responsibility for that measure, and no doctor would turn away someone sick.
In what world is turning sick and ill people away at the hospital a valid response to all this? I would MUCH rather wear a mask than have hospitals turn people away.
> people's basic human rights and freedoms are being removed.
In america? I haven't seen any freedoms being removed except the freedom to feel safe. Vaccine mandates and masks aren't an infringement on your freedoms. What
bill of rights protects your right to not breath through paper?
Hell, speaking of freedom, if everyone who complained about masks and vaccine mandates in america cared equally about the infringed freedoms of minorities then this nation would be the land of the free for everyone.
> Your chance is higher the more un-vaxxed people around you.
People keep repeating that line, as if unvaccinated folks who have survived Covid present the same risk as those who have had neither. In fact, surviving Covid is more protective than the vaccine (studies have shown this).
Conflating unvaccinated Covid survivors with those who actually put the population at risk is at best disingenuous.
Classical epidemiology teaches us that everyone will eventually get Covid, just like everyone will eventually get influenza. Treating it like the plague (which it isn't) is creating a concentration of power among certain elites, which is never good for society.
> Vaccine mandates and masks aren't an infringement on your freedoms.
Masks aren't, but vaccine mandates and other regulations certainly can be, depending on how they are enforced. For example, restrictions on freedom of assembly (which is articulated in the bill of rights), including churches (who did sue in California and win on constitutional grounds).
> But we don't do that here, in the civilized world. We don't turn people away. Its inhumane to not help people and turn them away. Doctors take an oath to help all in need.
> It would solve the hospital problem to say "tough s*t if you get sick, did you try the vax?" but thats not a practical response. No politician or organization wants to take responsibility for that measure, and no doctor would turn away someone sick.
> I would MUCH rather wear a mask than have hospitals turn people away.
> It doesn't make sense to me why officials aren't focusing just on getting as close to 100% as possible of the vulnerable vaccinated.
That's what the priority classes were for. But at this point we have plenty of shots for everyone, at least in the US. So anyone who will take the shot is a good target.
> A vaccine mandate is a great way of making a lot of money for some people...
We've already done so many shots that a vaccine mandate wouldn't be that much in terms of profits. And in the longer term it could easily mean less shots total, if we shut down the virus.
Yes, broadly speaking. That is the principle of herd immunity. We managed to eradicate smallpox with mandatory vaccination programs without all this political fuss.
Smallpox was way, way worse than Covid. If Covid were killing and permanently disfiguring children en masse, you can be sure there would be no resistance to the vaccine.
