What's the infection rate, any idea? At some point everyone will have been exposed and either shrugged it off or died...have you seen projections about how long they anticipate before it's actually just burned through the entire population?
Infection rate for whom? It's infuriatingly difficult to calculate. It's not like radiation, where 100% of the people who come into contact with it unprotected have some effect. Viral load for something this small is hard to count accurately, and the estimates are pretty wild in their variations. Also, if it burns through the entire population....millions will die. That's not going to happen. Again, 330 million infected or exposed, assuming a 10% infection rate is 33 million infected (which we've surpassed), and 3.3 million with long term health issues, and between 300-500k dead. I'd wager the infection rate is much higher, especially for the variants in circulation now. It doesn't burn through the population and disipate, it mutates as it spreads. Given the wildly disparate symptoms, and how easily this thing has spread, letting it run rampant to get to immunity is A) not how this works, and B) likely to unleash untold hells and C) going to up-fuck our healthcare system. Even with vaccinations in the high 90's, or for stuff that isn't nearly as dangerous (like the flu), waiting until everyone is exposed simply increases risk. I don't know of credible estimates for when all 330 million of us will have been exposed, infected and/or immune that dont' factor in vaccinations, etc. If you're not vaccinated, it's a fucking minefield out there right now, worse than in 2020.
I wasn't advocating that that's what should be done; I was trying to get a sense - in Texas, because that's what was being discussed - of when infection rates might begin to level off in spite of the vaccine hesitancy.
Again, it's fiendishly difficult. It'd be a lot easier if there were countermeasures, y'know? Like, if you get infected when someone else in your household, that's a pretty easy vector to study. If you get infected when no one is wearing a mask, no one is vaccinated, and you're in the gym, the office, the supermarket, the bar, the mall.....and there's literally nothing other than social distancing to eliminate those possibilities, it turns it into a bunch of semi-educated guesses and triangulation exercises. If you're not going to wear masks, social distance, lock down or vaccinate, (essentially do nothing to stop the spread), then it ends sometime between the likelihood of the cases petering out because no one is spreading (ie, locking down) and/or the likelihood of everyone getting exposed. I'm too tired to accurately regurgitate the "shrinking infectious pools" notion, but essentially it tapers off when we run the contagion playbook: test, identify hot spots, isolate, contain. The faster we cycle through that, the more likely it is the other 25 million Texans don't get COVID. We now have pretty good testing capacity (could be better), the vaccine is a strong countermeasure with masks and social distancing, so your risk pool is essentially shrank to the people who are at high risk of exposure (teachers, doctors and nurses, for example) or for some reason can't get a vaccine. With a high percentage of the population not wearing masks, or getting vaccinated, it perversely ensures flareups will occur. They are keeping the "at-risk" pool abnormally high, and the virus continues to circulate largely through them. Again, the percentage of unvaccinated in the hospital with COVID is in the high 90's.
Haven't you been paying attention, Dcc? There's new variants. There's always going to be new variants. Vaccines do no good against these, but get the jab anyway. That 1% death rate is going to keep rolling over to the next variant. This is how the human race goes extinct.
I appreciate you mean this as facetious, but there's a kernel of truth. Particularly in a scenario where you have a border crisis - hundreds of thousands of unchecked people streaming through - even if you get your country completely sorted out, it's never going to be enough because you have to wait until every other country also gets themselves sorted. Or you have to lock down the borders so tight that it greatly inhibits trade and the economy; something I'm not even sure is possible. @downndirty said it well (It's a lot easier with countermeasures); I think it would be wise at this stage to start looking at the landscape and saying, "How will we function if we can NEVER get it under control?" And put those systems in place. Because even if you do hit either perfect vaccination rates, or full population exposure, it's gonna take YEARS.
Vaccine does decently against most variants. From what I can decipher, it's all about the protein spike the virus uses to enter the cell and training the immune system to recognize that as a threat. Nearly all the variants have some version of this, thus the vaccines work to some degree. The lowest figure I have seen is low 70s for one of them. The basic playbook hasn't changed, it just wasn't really appropriately run from the start. The cocked up Messaging in the beginning has a lot to do with where we are now. How we live with this as endemic depends on how well we get countermeasures to work. If masking becomes easier and more wide spread, we go with that. Masking plus vaccines? Cool. Some sort of rapid screening in public places wouldn't surprise me either, especially in airports. It also depends on our ability to keep it under control. If the medical outcomes are somewhat predictable, that influences the countermeasures. As long as the impacts are disparate, it's hard to say the countermeasures have a good ROI.
This. Piss poor messaging from the very beginning has been about the only thing that’s been consistent. Many times I’ve been in conversation where someone is questioning a mandate. I would offer the interpretation or whatever and they’d ask, “Well why didn’t they say that?” I don’t know, because they’re fucking idiots? And these people have publicists and speech writers?
I agree with that. But I’d also add that getting the messaging through while combatting people with an agenda who not only don’t care about other people but actively take steps to worsen the spread makes it much harder. Trying to take a complex epidemiological principle like how vaccines work, the statistics behind how they work, and also try to explain in layman’s terms the nuance about disease spread is hard for anyone, even experts. Especially with how dumb the average America is. Fighting the “muh freedums” morons with science and facts will never work.
80K infected people (Approximately) entered the state in July/August, that would be 1.9% of the total cases. But we are talking about a highly infectious disease...how many people did those 80K infect? If each one of them infected 1 person, we're then at 160K. If each of those infected 1 person, we're at 320K and closing in on 10% of the cases. I'm not saying they are the whole problem, but they are part of the problem. And I do agree that blocking counter measures is foolish, but there are additional issues that are amplifying the problem that also need to be addressed in coordination with the counter measures being put in place.
The issue is Texas refusing to enact and enforce countermeasures. The migrant crisis is a separate issue. California, Arizona, New Mexico and Florida aren't using "infected migrants" as an excuse for their issues with COVID-19. I disagree that the migrant crisis is part of the problem of "Texas refuses to enact mask and vaccine mandates". If anything, the persistence of infected migrants crossing the border would suggest these mandates be enforced, especially at the border. FFS, if you know you have an influx of infected patients at a hospital, you double down on the PPE and make sure you're not exacerbating the problem. Confounding these two things like they are related seems to dissolve responsibility where it's needed most. At best, it's clouding this issue unnecessarily. At worst, it's racist dog whistling to obscure the fact that Abbott can't get this under control and has essentially stopped trying, because he and his party have painted themselves into a corner. FWIW, my next assignment might be the border (I speak Spanish, my team has worked this issue before, and they are cycling through folks). It's a quagmire, and it's a political minefield. COVID has changed the nature of that mission, and certainly exhausted some of the humanitarian aspects of what drew people there. I have little idealism when it comes to the migrant issue. Having worked with Texas politicos, however, when they start hollering "migrants", I am hesitant to believe it's the problem they make it out to be. When they talk out of one side of their mouth, it's "so independent, we should secede!" and "down with big gubmint!" and out the other side it's "we can't, because migrants!" or "we can't, because COVID....please help us, federal government...." Meanwhile, at least 80,000 Texans have died from this virus, and a few dozen more every day..... Less seriously, the logic of "we can't have mask or vaccine mandates!....why?....because immigrants!!" is the most Boomhauer Texas shit logic I can think of.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be mask and vaccine mandates, I'm not sure where you're getting that from my posts. What I am saying is there are issues besides the lack of mask and vaccine mandates that also need to be addressed...and one of those is the border problem. Every single Texan could be masked up and vaccinated and there would still be approximately 40K new cases a month coming across the border, including new variants, which may or may not be resistant to current vaccines. Being angry about the lack of mask and vaccine mandates is the certainly understandable. Dismissing other contributing factors as not part of the problem because it's not politically convenient seems kind of counter productive to getting things under control.
I think whatever the migrant issue is adding to COVID-19 isn't an excuse for doing nothing. I agree it needs to be addressed, and I've certainly seen ways to do so that are simply not being pushed forward. As to why, your guess is as good as mine. Right now, the TX executive leadership is refusing to impose and enforce mask/vaccine mandates. Those countermeasures are fundamental to stopping the spread, and I think should take precedence over the spread caused by the migrant population. I don't mean to dismiss that element of it as not a contributing factor. I do mean to say it's not what the TX exec branch should focus on. You're saying they should also address the COVID-19 situation at the border. I disagree, in part because that's the fed's job (I know, I know, "and they do it SO well..."), and TX politicians have made lifelong careers grandstanding on issues with the border that they have no real authority to address. It's one of the defining tenets of the state politics, and I can think of relatively few issues that aren't somehow influenced by it. It's something they routinely howl about to distract or detract from their actual responsibility to the state's citizens. I can certainly get behind the notion of "a migrant crossing the border with COVID-19 is CBP/ICE or a DHS issue, not the state of Texas'". I agree that CPB/DHS can do a better job of testing and quarantining migrants. That's not limited to Texas, however, and it's not prevented Arizona, New Mexico or California from imposing and enforcing mask/vaccine requirements. Right now they're doing NOTHING. Getting them to do 3 things instead of 2 seems unrealistic, especially when one of them isn't a state job at all. It seems to hit the media and public discourse as "why should we (X,Y or Z) when these immigrants coming over here ain't (A, B, or C)??". I think this is heaping an inordinate amount of the blame on migrants, and it's self-defeating. Even if migrants are responsible for 10% of the cases in Texas (which is unlikely, I'd wager on closer to 5%), that means 90% are not. Rather than address 90% of the cases at their root cause, in coordination with what every other neighboring state is doing, the intractability of this (again, at best) 10% validates doing nothing? It's basically saying "solutions to address 90% of the problem aren't worth doing because of the remaining 10%" and that logic isn't something I can get behind. This is one of the issues with public health measures: they are predicated on reducing probabilities. Few of them are 100% solutions. The folks that politicized this virus and are now fighting efforts to get it under control (who the fuck pulls for a VIRUS??), seem to use the acknowledgement of "It's not 100%" as an excuse to eschew the entire thing, and just let it run rampant. If they started rolling out mask mandates for schools (in my mind, the largest and most terrifying risk pool), and vaccine mandates for businesses/organizations of a certain size, then yeah, the migrant issue can go front and center. Beat up on this issue all day long. They refuse the basic "blocking and tackling" of requiring vaccines and masks, and complain about the inordinately complex issue of migrants crossing the border with COVID-19. It feels like refusing to learn how to read, then complaining you can't get a driver's license, so you just drive illegally. Or like refusing to wash dishes or take out trash, then complaining when someone else let a pile of dust accumulate. Sure, contributing to the cleanliness problem, but not at all the primary issue.
I hope the Moderna booster gets approved. Being fully vaxxed and just getting over having COVID, possibly for the second time, my goal is to have the most antibodies on the planet.
Little fucking peeved at the whole percentages promised up front and what happened in reality. I got the Pfizer and a study out of Israel is saying it's down to the 30s percent strength after 2 to 4 months. The fuck? Other studies say vax+recovery from a real infection gives you more antibodies by far. The data overload is a bummer.
I wasn't thrilled to have a breakthrough infection, but I always assumed the vaccine would ensure my symptoms were mild rather than completely preventing me from getting it. On that basis, I'd say the vaccine did its job.
Agreed on that, I was exposed by a coworker who rode in my truck for two days and still tested negative when we got back in town. On the other end my sister and BIL both got sick. She was down for a week and he spent 8 days in the hospital. I think what we are seeing is that for many of us the vaccine will likely help it's no where near as effective as it was thought to be. Still worth getting but it's not the miracle it was hoped to be.
I think that's one of the big problems with this... it's not true/false, it's shades of grey and nuance. Is the vaccine (any vaccine) 100% stopping COVID? No. But what it IS doing is reducing the number of people who are full-on infected and marching straight to the ICU to be intubated. Sure, some people are getting sick, some going to the hospital, but not as deep into the ICU layers of the hospital. That zone of hell is reserved mostly for the unvaccinated. So when MSM reports on high level numbers, people see "hospitalized" and think that all hospitalizations are the same, when they're not. Even if the vaccine is 30% effective, that's still 30% more than it was before. "Here, this only keeps your head 30% out of the water, allowing you to breathe and stay alive, instead of 0% out of the water and dead." "Yes please."