What I meant by that was that I doubt the people @EnglishGrey is talking about protested those vaccines back when they got them or had to get them for their kids. My point is that there is no difference between the ones they accepted before 2020 and the ones they seem to think destroy bodily autonomy.
I think that they will say it was inevitable, and trying to prevent it did more harm than good.
And, in case there is any confusion, they are pro vaccines and have all had them.
I think people, even intelligent ones, don’t realize the impact of the numbers. They hear things like 99.5% survival rate and think …oh, it’s not that bad.
Here’s what I’ve been telling people like this.
Suppose that instead of infecting people, this emergent virus affected airplanes. This new virus causes half of one percent of planes that take off to fail in midair and crash.
Using the figure of 100,000 flights a day, this means that about 500 flights are crashing each day. If this were to happen, would you think it was overreach for the government to ground all flights indefinitely , despite the drastic economic impact?
Or would you decide that it isn’t appropriate for the government to deal with this new threat? Would you decide it should be a personal decision - if a one in 200 chance of dying doesn’t scare you, get on the plane and cross your fingers - if it does and you chose to “live in fear”, you can stop using air travel- but it should be a personal choice? Do you think you should have the “freedom to take that risk? Do you think the economy should come first?
There’s this stupid meme if seen with a stock photo of someone laughing derisively and a caption that goes something like “if there was a 99.5% you wouldn’t get cancer, would you still get chemotherapy?
If it didn’t have serious side effects, the right answer is yes, of course….and if faced with that exact situation, most of the people posting that stupid meme would, too. An anti- cancer vaccine would be a total game changer.
Yet people still post that stupid meme, not realizing that a .05 death rate is horrible. Just because it could be worse, that doesn’t mean it isn’t horrible.
For general discussion, anyone shop for Black Friday - How was it? Me, I stayed in with lumbago.
Besides, the last time I shopped there were too many effectively unmasked. (What IS it with those people who cover their mouths and leave their nostrils exposed./)
I had to get some wide egg noodles for the wife. Local market had only thin ones. She suggested the nearby Super Walmart. NOT. GOING.THERE. I try to avoid it even on normal days, forget Black Friday. A Foodland had the noodles and a few other goodies without a crowd. 
I say they’re right. Our President put it pretty much the same way:
We are deeply disappointed by the decision of several countries to prohibit travel from a number of Southern African countries following the identification of the Omicron variant. This is a clear and completely unjustified departure from the commitment that many of these countries made at the meeting of G20 countries in Rome last month.
They pledged at that meeting to restart international travel in a safe and orderly manner, consistent with the work of relevant international organisations such as the World Health Organization, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Maritime Organization and the OECD.
The G20 Rome Declaration noted the plight of the tourism sector in developing countries, and made a commitment to support a “rapid, resilient, inclusive and sustainable recovery of the tourism sector”.
Countries that have imposed travel restrictions on our country and some of our Southern African sister countries include the United Kingdom, United States, European Union members, Canada, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Japan, Thailand, Seychelles, Brazil and Guatemala, among others.
These restrictions are unjustified and unfairly discriminate against our country and our Southern African sister countries.
The prohibition of travel is not informed by science, nor will it be effective in preventing the spread of this variant. The only thing the prohibition on travel will do is to further damage the economies of the affected countries and undermine their ability to respond to, and recover from, the pandemic.
No, they don’t. The WHO for one does not recommend travel bans.
The WHO has given bad advice from the start of this pandemic, starting with their insistence it wasn’t airborne.
But given all the countries that have already found this variant, this feels a lot like closing the barn door after the horse is gone. And it punishes South Africa for doing the right thing and reporting a new variant.
Nevertheless, it would still be incorrect to say they tend to recommend more restrictions, so it must be that they don’t count as part of “the science and data”, then?
I honestly have been underwhelmed with the extent to which the WHO has advocated for science or data. They seem to have been more concerned with politics throughout. I happen to think they are correct on this point, but don’t consider them having advocates this position to be very persuasive.
It does seem like a temporary pause on travel (a stricter one) might be justified while we quickly determined how widespread the variant already was. But, given that it is clearly not contained within the initial area, the ban, even a more restrictive one, would not be sufficient. (It could still be somewhat effective at slowing its spread if the greatest concentration of the variant is in the area covered by the ban.). The ban could be raised once either the variant is determined to already be widespread, or if it is determined to not be as worrisome as feared.
But a pandemic is a time when temporarily closing borders while seeking information is sometimes necessary. We should keep a close eye on whether we are doing so preferentially, though.
The G20 quote referred to safe travel. Not a commitment to open all borders no matter what.
The human mind seems to be wired to give more weight to things that happen suddenly and dramatically, versus things that happen little by little, and whose impact is so spread out and diffuse as to be nearly unnoticeable.
An alien observer who studied our reaction to plane crashes and terrorist attacks would be utterly baffled by our reaction to the toll taken by car crashes.
Sometimes you can read an article and then you hit a line that makes it lose credibility. Like this article, for example.
The possibility of seasonality is reasonable enough. At least until you get to this part here:
By sifting for seasonal patterns across individual states, Jalal and his collaborators found very robust results. They argue that the calendar of COVID in North America has already taken shape, in the form of three repeating waves like the ones that swept the continent in 2020: one starting in New England and eastern Canada in the spring, the second traveling north from Mexico over the summer, and the third emanating in all directions from the Dakotas during the fall. In keeping with that idea, their paper predicted a summer 2021 wave in the South, and a fall 2021 wave in the north-central states—which is more or less exactly what happened.
So…it’s “seasonality” that causes the Dakotas to be the epicenter of a spike each fall. Really? Come on. Not a word about Sturgis having gone on from Aug 7, 2020 – Aug 16, 2020 and August 06-15, 2021 in the whole article.
I mean, seasonality could mean something like “tourist seasons” and not the 4 seasons, I guess. It seems clear that it can’t be seasons as in temperature/weather, given the patterns.
(NE and E. Canada spring – cold, but not as cold as in the previous few months; Mexico and SW in summer – hot; Dakotas in fall – cool to cold?)
ETA: like, there may be seasonality to childhood diseases that follows the back-to-school and school’s out dates.
How about Yale university’s Institute of Global Health? That article also links to journal articles in Science and Journal of Emergency Management that make the case that travel bans aren’t called for.
That article makes two excellent points:
Travel bans could lead to less scientific transparency
Omer, of the Yale Institute of Global Health, has another concern about implementing travel bans during a public health crisis: It can dampen the commitment to scientific transparency.
And
And one of the most effective ways to address inequity, Omer said, is to allow for all regions, low-income countries in particular, to produce their own vaccines.
As i said in another thread, it’s somewhat naive to expect politicians to allow enough vaccine to leave their country that their own citizens are clamoring for it. By far the most reliable way to address vaccine inequity is to develop manufacturing capacity in lots of places, both to have a larger total supply and also to have more diverse political control of it.
The US, which partially owns the Moderna patent, could be doing a lot more to push for this. (Although just giving patent rights is inadequate. Effective technology transfer requires that people in new sites be trained, too, by people who have experience in the technology.)
It seems like that could possibly help with some of the uptake problems some places are having.
Hesitancy is, in part, being driven by conspiracy theories and suspicions (some based on real experiences) about whites/wealthy countries experimenting on them, giving them substandard medicine, or looking to sterilize them.
It seems like letting less well off countries make their own vaccine, if they choose to, could help create trust in that vaccine.
I can tell you that the attitude of a lot of locals (not me!) is that we did a good thing and got punished for it, so why would we possibly be that open again? Let’s take our own sweet time confirming new variants next time, is the kind of thing I’m hearing. Which is dumb, but kind of understandable.
If Belgium and Israel were travel-banned at the same time, it would not have gone down so badly, I can say that.
That’s sure as hell what it looks like from my perspective, too. And I’m willing to bet that the only reason it hasn’t been found in the US, yet, is that we do a piss-poor job of sequencing the virus.
I feel like if a nation thinks they may not have it, yet, and wants to “buy some time”, they should just shut down all international travel except for the stuff that can’t be shut down, and quarantine/test everyone who they do let in. This, “let’s ban a handful of African countries that happen to have good monitoring” looks to me like medical theater that is harmful to international cooperation.
People are dropping like flies out this way, but the annual Christmas bazaar is still going to be held at the community center tomorrow. The building has two doors, no windows and the ventilation system hasn’t been updated in years.
I have a lot of needlework kits and patterns that I was hoping to sell and paid my table rent last month. Today I was informed that it is too much trouble for them to set up tables outside the building and that I would be inside in a back corner. I informed her that I wouldn’t be attending and wanted a refund.
I have since been told that covid is a hoax, nobody from this area has ever had covid (I’m from this area. Hubs is from this area. That’s three cases right there.), everyone in town has been vaccinated so nobody needs to worry or mask and that if I don’t want to support the community, I can’t expect any help from them if I ever need it.
It seems your “community” has left you and collectively lost its mind.