I disagree, you can lay the blame for Brazil’s performance absolutely squarely upon Bolsonaro.
Just as you can lay the blame for the relatively poor performance of Sweden compared to its neighbours squarely upon Tegnell.
We can go further, the US performance can be squarely laid upon Trump.
Whilst folk might say that one person is not a government and lots of enablers have also contributed to these failures I would argue that if you remove those individuals from the original onset of the pandemic and left in place all the others then the responses would be magnitudes less serious.
In the case of Bolsonaro in particular, he has gone through many ministers who have either resigned in protest, or he has dismissed them for failing to follow his incompetent lead - the Brazilians have argued many times that Brazil faces two pandemics - Bolsonarism, and Covid and they are not selecting either as the worst one.
As for India, too much attention is given by most pundits using numbers as scary headlines so generate more mouse clicks, but the fact is that when you compare like with like, India’s relative numbers compared to it’s population size are way better than the vast majority of nations - look at the Worldmeters data and you’ll see that their death rates and infection rates per million are magnitudes less than most of the world - even if you allow for serious under reporting India is still faring far better than the vast majority of the world.
The “lightswitch” effect that you’re seeing is because it takes a certain amount of time for new lymphocytes specific to the virus to develop and mature. It’s not a “narrow & fast” production line where new antigen-specific cells start appear soon but take a while to accumulate. It’s a “wide and slow” production line, where nothing appears for a while, but then a large number of cells mature around the same time and all get to work.
Reminder: This is a breaking news thread. Do not bring politics into breaking news threads.
Most of the recent posts, starting with @mandala’s post about India and continuing forward from there, are bringing political issues into this thread.
We allow some discussion of issues in breaking news threads, otherwise it would just be posts of news articles, but let’s try to avoid politics as much as possible, please. You can discuss those issues here on the SDMB, just not in breaking news threads.
They join the rest of the USA. Right now Worldometer has the US case rate at 9.65% of the population. Actual cases would be some proportion higher than that. That means, at absolute minimum, one-tenth of the US population at least is currently suffering or has had covid.
I hope the year of misery and heartache that has accompanied attaining that mark may finally close down any remaining suggestion that naturally acquired herd immunity, which would be something like 7x that level, is in any way a suitable strategy for getting through this pandemic.
Yes, its different, depending on what you’re looking at. If there was a choice between the two options, Republic is not the one I’d pick because it sounds like any health care they have will implode soon enough. But a 10% national figure is a composite of a whole lot of little Republics [and big cities] each having had their moment of chaos in the past 14 months.
Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.
Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.
…
Another shift in expectations WRT our future with this virus. Learning to live with and among it-- looks like that’s where we’re headed.
This article made me really mad with the oh-so-polite phrase “vaccine hesitancy.” Is there some reason we’re respecting people’s fears and false beliefs as if they were rational?
Probably because insulting people doesn’t make them more likely to do something. Since society is hoping that people will actually do something (get the vaccine), it’s not in its best interest to insult them.
There’s a middle ground between an insult and a euphemism. Even just describing people as “unwilling to vaccinate”—accurate, but not insulting, and without the gentle connotations of "hesistant."d