My plan in March 2020 was to wait it out and do whatever I could not to get infected myself. I think at the time I said something to the effect of "I can't imagine this lockdown lasting less than six months." At first I think I expected most people to get it eventually, and the main concern was to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed all at once. Then after awhile it became apparent that it could be kept under control or not depending on how well people adhered to social distancing and masking. The vaccines arrived, which were supposed to be the thing to end the pandemic. It almost worked.
Now we have Delta variant which is far more contagious. Looks like we may be over the hump in the current wave (speaking from a U.S. centric point of view). What happens next depends on whether we can achieve a level of immunity that prevents the virus from spreading.
> What happens next depends on whether we can achieve a level of immunity that prevents the virus from spreading.
Sir Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group that developed the AZ vaccine, does not think this is possible because vaccinated people can still get and spread the virus.
> “The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population,” he told the U.K.’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on the coronavirus.
> Pollard said that while Covid vaccines might slow the spread of the virus — because fully vaccinated but infected people appeared, in studies, to shed less virus, giving the virus less opportunity to spread — new variants were likely to emerge that would also spread.
> “I suspect that what the virus will throw up next is a variant which is perhaps even better at transmitting among vaccinated populations and so that’s even more of a reason not to be making a vaccine program around herd immunity.”
It is increasingly obvious that we are going to have to find ways to live with this virus. It will be (and basically already is) endemic. Hopefully over time it will become more and more like a cold but until then, aiming for the impossible is only going to make the situation worse because more and more people are seeing that the narrative and claims presented by politicians and technocrats don't add up.
Living with the virus means people getting vaccinated. We will continue to have mass death so long as there are segments of the population that are unvaccinated. Vaccines are still the answer.
people say that delta is more contagious but they don't provide hard data to support that. any calculation of r naught is synthetic and there has been little effort to share such models. also, the idea that every new infection is delta isnt based on any randomized testing of samples, but some outdated surveys in the past.
Now we have Delta variant which is far more contagious. Looks like we may be over the hump in the current wave (speaking from a U.S. centric point of view). What happens next depends on whether we can achieve a level of immunity that prevents the virus from spreading.