This is pretty much how I feel about it. The vaccines that are sitting in CVSs or Walgreens have an expiration date. I have zero problem with a senior or other vulnerable people getting a booster immediately, and it’s just sickening that the feds aren’t moving faster on this.
That said, there’s no question that the best way out of the pandemic is to make vaccination more available globally, and we need to address that. If we want to focus on what we can do to stop the spread globally, the federal government should allocate more vaccine supply for use abroad and allocate less supply here.
At some point, we’re just going to have to accept that the idiots here are not going to get vaccinated on their own, and if we want to keep more supply available domestically, then we will have to have the political spine to impose a vaccine mandate and proof of vaccination in order to do anything – we already know that our ‘leaders’ (both parties, I’m afraid) don’t have that will.
You know those hypo-dart-guns they use on lions and rhinos and such?
I envision a new sport, AntiVaxer Hunting. You have to ID an AntiVaxer, generally not too hard, often their clothing is enough, but they’re rarely reticent to announce it. Then you stalk them, or maybe set up a hide where you expect them to pass, then PSSST! Another one for your trophy count.
I’m not sure what you’d use to prove a successful strike. Maybe a photo of them with the dart sticking out of their rump?
I was wondering how deaths and cases were tracking now compared to before people were vaccinated:
Here are the two graphs overlayed from the peak back in January. It looks like the deaths are tracking cases just like they did before. I was thinking that with the vaccinated cases not leading to as severe symptoms, the deaths would be more muted and wouldn’t have the same track with cases like they did before. That doesn’t seem to be the case. The deaths seem to be tracking cases pretty much like they did before we had the vaccines. Maybe Delta is more deadly and is killing a greater percentage of the unvaccinated, which makes up for the breakthrough vaccinated cases that don’t become serious.
I hope that the feds find a way to put a stop to this. People who do this should be jailed immediately both for making and using fake vaccination cards. They should be convicted and sentenced to the maximum penalty under the law.
Deaths are heavily weighted towards Florida though. Florida seems like the USA version of Brazil. Deaths never really went down there the way they did in other states.
Are the deaths-to-cases ratio in FL worse than other states? Certainly FL might have lots of deaths because they have lots of cases, but are they essentially proportional to the rest of the US states?
Speaking of FL, their children’s hospitals are becoming overwhelmed and school hasn’t even started yet:
The rapid increase in frequency and fixation in a relatively short time in Magdalena, Atlántico, Bolivar, Bogotá D.C, and Santander that were near the theoretical herd immunity suggests an epidemiologic impact.
Well, almost 100% of the deaths are of unvaccinated people, so the deaths should follow cases almost identically to before we have vaccines, right? The fact that vaccines lower one’s risk of death doesn’t do anything for people who haven’t bothered to take them.
…
The U.S. was averaging about 11,000 cases a day in late June. Now the number is 107,143.
It took the U.S. about nine months to cross the 100,000 average case number in November before peaking at about 250,000 in early January. Cases bottomed out in June but took about six weeks to go back above 100,000, despite a vaccine that has been given to more than 70% of the adult population.
The seven-day average for daily new deaths also increased, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. It rose over the past two weeks from about 270 deaths per day to nearly 500 a day as of Friday.
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Not the place to debate it, but the problem with that 70% number is that a lot of those people are still single dose Pfizer/Moderna recipients, which doesn’t do very much against Delta, and it also is only counting against those currently eligible, not the total population. The actual fully vaccinated make up right around 50% of the US, which is really bad considering how early to the table and well-stocked we’ve been.
This new surge absolutely sucks, but it’s not fighting a very high fully-vaccinated rate here in the states.
Are they mostly people who have gotten their first dose just within the past few weeks, or people who for some reason got one dose and never went back for another? I ask because the latter seems like a bigger problem to overcome.
Looking at the New York Times numbers most days, the 1-dose to fully vaccinated rates seem to be travelling together reasonably well. With that 50% total, don’t forget that the US has around 50 million children under 12 who can’t get it yet.
The Lambda variant has been around for some time, and it seems that the Delta variant has out-competed it. I am increasingly concerned about variants like the Colombian variant, which seems to be the first variant that is responsible for significant-impact clusters in areas where Delta is the dominant strain. It seems to be evading vaccine immunization more effectively than the Delta variant, which is sobering.
I think the death rate is lower except in places with very low vaccination rates. Here’s a comparison of Louisiana (low vax) and California (high vax).
Here’s some more. Vaccination may be slowing cases, but the real benefit is reducing hospitalizations and deaths. What has been predicted weeks ago is now playing out.
Not necessarily, because vax rates are not the same across age and other groups.
For example, the vaccination rate among 80 year olds is higher than 20 year olds, so the number of cases is skewed toward younger patients now. But younger patients are less likely to die, so the death rate should be lower. Of course, the deadliness of the variants is another variable.
Average cases have increased nine-fold since early July. As of Friday, America’s seven-day average of daily Covid-19 cases was more than 107,100 – the highest average in nearly six months, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
The last time average daily cases topped 100,000 was February 11.
