How many more people need to get sick/die before herd immunity starts helping? Also, do you want to sacrifice your life or put other lives in danger just to get there? Is it worth having hundreds of thousands more getting sick just so you don’t have to wear a mask?
Even if everyone wears a mask properly and we actually do flatten the curve (like most other countries have), a vaccine will still come out eventually.
IMO, the ‘we have to build up herd immunity’ line is just an excuse people use to justify not wearing a mask or staying home as much as possible.
Personally, I’m going to continue doing what I can to avoid getting or spreading it. I’d rather wait out the vaccine than risk dying or killing my family.
Can you provide a cite that this is the only way out of this? Because China, the EU, Canada, etc., don’t seemed to have infected 60% or 80% of their population, but still seem to have things under much better control than we do. Why is it only the US has to kill off some huge number of people, whereas the EU can just wear masks and social distance?
So, please provide a cite that this is how we have to deal with this. NY and NJ, once the worst hit, are now in much better shape than most of the rest of the country and we didn’t get close to herd immunity.
I don’t have the luxury of hiding. Everyone in my household is dependant upon me going to my job which requires attendance at their facility. I mask in stores so I reduce risk of transmitting to my wife. She cares for the elderly at her job.
I keep it in perspective. Covid deaths globally have recently passed the annual death toll of malaria and still hasn’t reached the toll from falls. It will soon Wow barely over half the total from AIDS/HIV and that has an over 30 years of vaccine research head start.
You’re talking about countries that have been far more successful in containing this pandemic than the US. Furthermore, the outbreak in Beijing appears to already have been contained thanks to…lockdowns, mandatory mask use and social distancing.
How on earth can you look at examples like this and draw the conclusion that the US should not follow such common sense policies, it should instead just fail so hard that eventually no further failure is possible?
Yeah, coronavirus is such a paper tiger that the only way we can fight it is by letting it kill with impunity until it runs out of healthy people to jump to.
The point is they are still at an all-hands-on-deck response and will need to continue to do so until, in absence of a vaccine, herd immunity is achieved or the the virus mutates into a more benign form. The genie is out of the bottle and there will always be at least one case somewhere in the world whether it be in humans, bats, or cats.
No, the data shows I and almost everyone else has many more likely ways to die or get sick than this.
I live in China. It’s not all-hands-on-deck; my life here has been basically the same as pre-corona since about mid-March (IIRC). Tourism has almost returned to pre-crisis levels, schools are open with universities to follow soon, malls etc have been normal for ages. Sporting events and conferences are back on (I went to a conference a couple of days ago, and a beer festival the day before that).
The lockdown in Beijing seems to have snuffed out a potential outbreak within a couple weeks.
Sure China could go pear-shaped in the future, there are no guarantees in this world, but all we can go on is the data we have. And the data says the lockdown approach here worked, and the US approach of a patchwork quilt of inconsistent rules and playing politics, has not.
…so far. The infection rate is still going up and deaths are sure to follow, they just lag the case rate.
Also…what an argument to make! It implies any crisis that the US encounters can be handwaved as no biggie until it kills as many people as heart disease or cancer .
Which isn’t much. The whole point of those cloth masks that everyone’s supposed to wear in public is that they protect other people from the mask wearer, not the mask wearer from other people.
I’m not sure what AIDS has to do with covid-19, but I’m willing to bet a lot more research would be put into it if it was airborne or could be transmitted by touching the same surface that someone with it also touched.
Besides, in that 30 years of research, while there’s not a vaccine for it, there are other meds that mean people with it can live for decades instead of months.
And maybe that’s why Europe closed it’s boarders to non-essential travel by Americans.
