While I find that unfortunate, I was speaking more along the lines of risk versus reward; I simply don’t see the value in stepping into a seething cauldron of Covid and risking death or disablement (for myself or someone I might not even know) for a one-night event when all you have to do is wait for the upcoming vaccines that cover both current and potential variants.
It doesn’t look that way from here. Maybe I’m missing it. I’ll get the vaccine booster when it comes out, but until then, the Mariners are in the playoff hunt!
Your consideration of risk is simply different from others. My wife and I carefully controlled our outings in 2020, wore masks everywhere, and then got the vaccines and boosters. We looked at the guidance from the CDC and didn’t pay much attention to what random people on the internet said.
That’s still true today. The vast majority of cases emerge from the unvaxxinated and unboosted population. Those emerging with COVID cases who have taken proper precautions generally have light symptoms and few aftereffects.
Is anything worth taking that risk? Before COVID, dozens of varieties of flu existed and could be deadly. Being around kids or going to work was almost certain to give you several colds a year. Other contagious diseases spread in various places at various times.
The risks were considered small and most people who did not have special reason to do so lived active lives. You may think that we have not returned to those days, but you haven’t given any facts or evidence for that belief.
No vaccine will ever cover all potential variants. If you wait for one you will never emerge.
Same here. I transitioned into this mindset just over a year ago when the first round of vaxxes came out. I’m waiting for the bivalent one for my booster. Until then, I’ll just live life normally. I got my BA.5 case this year – it went fine – one bad day of being sick then back to almost normal the next day. I knew I would eventually get one form or another. I just stopped giving a shit given the risk:reward ratio and my personal risk tolerance. My mental health has been so much better – if I continued to live in fear, I’d be a basketcase (as I was at the end of 2020), plus I’d not be able to continue my career, as it centers around mostly event (wedding) photography with hundreds of unmasked people every weekend. I’ll take the chance.
What this thread tells me (and it’s not the first time, go read the comments on a NYT or WaPo article about covid) is that the problem of risk assessment is on full display. Some concentrate on the absolutely possible worst case scenario. However, such people then seem to want their level of risk assessment to be society’s, which is simply not going to happen.
Yes, this happened. Partially escaping immunity, but yes.
To be blunt, the popular media is today overselling a lot of aspects of the pandemic. That may reflexively be seen as denialist response, but it isn’t.
The idea that a new “bad” COVID variant is just around the corner and that a new "bad variant will just keep happening once or twice or three times a year into perpetuity … that’s just not true. One thing I’m placing a lot of stock in is that in the end, when the tape of the pandemic is reviewed and dissected, it’s NOT going to turn out that SARS-CoV-2 has acted in ways no human pathogen has ever acted before. Whatever limitations are on influenza viruses, legacy coronaviruses, enteroviruses, etc., SARS-CoV-2 will also be subject to those same limitations.
To me, that means SARS-CoV-2 can’t just turn into a runaway “forever” virus that’s worse in 2100 A.D. than it was in 2090, in 2080, in 2070 … in 2022. High levels of community seroprevalence – which the U.S. now has (~95%) – make a determinative difference. We are very definitively on the downslope of COVID as a pandemic human illness. Even at the current levels of detected cases, infirmities, and deaths (the latter two of which will drop over time from current levels).
… long Covid disabling people and being ignored by everyone …
Rate of occurrence matters here, as well as rate of severe outcomes. Saying that “long COVID disables people” as if that’s the default and most common long COVID outcome … that’s just incorrect. It’s another aspect of the pandemic from which the popular media gets a lot of mileage. Long COVID is simultaneously a potentially serious health outcome that needs ongoing study and treatment AND something that is played up for clicks and eyeballs.
… health care workers and teachers burning out and leaving in droves …
Nothing pithy to say here except that as we stand in summer 2022, the damage is almost certainly largely done. It’s not as if we’ll have an ever-diminishing number of healthcare workers and teachers for many years to come. It will take time and a ‘healing’ of a sort, but these professions will bounce back. The damage that has occurred to date is truly regrettable, but there’s no going back to fix the past now.
…
In sum: We’re a lot further down the path to post-pandemic society than you may be willing to countenance right now. And that’s all right – everyone is going to have to come to it in their time.
“Worst case scenario”? People are dying right now. Nurses and teachers are quitting right now. Thousands of immunocompromised people are being forced into literal hermitage right now because, even worse than nobody caring about them, people are willingly and openly sacrificing them upon the altar of getting a cheeseburger at Denny’s. Because wearing a mask is so goddamn hard.
(These last couple of months have been thought provoking and difficult for me, because I absolutely judge the intellectual or moral capacity of anyone not wearing a mask in public indoors with other people, just the same as everyone did at the start of this. Although ironically, it’s also a factor in my posting these threads, because I do have to wonder if I’m the crazy one, despite the numbers and the burnout and the warnings from almost every medical professional on the planet.)
We the people may be done with Covid, but Covid is not done with us.
I completely acknowledge that, but I think that’s unsupported by the realities on the ground. All we have to do is slow roll it just a little with, say, mask mandates and universal WFH options. That’s probably not enough, but at least something to make it feel like we’re putting in a good faith effort, instead of letting it rip and shrugging at the dead.
Were I the Grand Poobah of Public Health Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, first I would leave in place overall guidance that is geared toward preventing transmission, including masking, distancing, quarantining/isolation, and whatever else as necessary. It costs nothing, no one has to follow it, but at least you’re actually leading people in the direction of improving public health.
Second, I’d take a number of mitigation measures (some possibilities: *94/95 masking, booster requirement, recent negative test, reduced occupancy count, air quality indicators such as carbon dioxide monitoring or air changes per hour, contact tracing, limited to outdoors only) and devise mandates that kick in at different community infection thresholds with an eye toward 1) essential businesses get safer faster 2) larger indoor events get safer faster and 3) generally encourage/least restrict the safest options (outdoors, small gathering, high ventilation). If not mandates, make them guidelines and people can judge whether business are being responsible enough and adjust their patterns accordingly. I don’t foresee businesses needing to be shut down, but they can be nudged toward the right thing, with a heavier nudge when things are worse.
Third, I would put together some government assistance towards achieving the above including gear (masks and tests and more) and financial incentives for improved HVACs/monitoring. It doesn’t have to be a huge stimulus thing like the CARES Act, just enough to grease the wheels towards public benefit.
All of which is kind of off the top of my head and not really a rigorous assessment, nor do I think this or something like it would “end COVID”, but it would put us in a much more manageable, health-oriented place and be more forward-looking for new variants and potentially new diseases. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. Don’t just stick your heads in the sand cause people don’t want to listen to you.
What I would definitely not do is look at my own risk map, see large swathes of the country, including many if not most of the high population centers, in the high risk category (which has already been loosened once to hide the higher risk of personal infection), and think to myself, “You know what? I think I should tell people to do less about transmitting this disease. This is fine.”
Very well put.
Yes, worst case scenario. There are roughly 40,000 fatalities from car crashes every year. We have made car travel ever safer by mandating three point seatbelts and airbags, changing to better engineering with things like crumple zones and unibody construction, and actively discouraging and criminalizing things like drunk driving, aggressive driving, and distracted driving. Yet on average over 100 people a day from car-related accidents.
A person who defensively drives, wears a seatbelt, has a reasonably newer car, and obeys the speed limit is generally comfortable driving thousands of miles a year. The risk of an accident is always present, but is far more likely to be survivable than someone driving an old car without wearing a seatbelt. Yes, sometimes shit happens. It’s unfortunate, unfair, and inevitable. But most people decide to mitigate risk as much as makes sense and then get on with their lives.
Sure, driving could be even safer if we all had five-point restraints, roll cages, and a max speed of 15 MPH. But nobody would put up with it, in much the same way that people today are generally willing to be vaccinated and try to follow other guidelines when possible while having zero willingness to live like it’s March 2020.
The specific realities on the ground don’t have a society-wide meaning divorced from society’s collective risk tolerance. If 450-500 deaths per day is “voted on” as “acceptable” … then, by gum, it is. For better or for worse.
Regarding the current death numbers – What might be left unsaid or unconsidered are the following:
(1) Right now – since deaths still strongly correlate negatively with vaccination status – “death by COVID” for some people is kind of considered something you do to yourself by not getting vaccinated. On one hand, this is not 100% fair … but on the other, it’s not 100% off the mark, either.
(2) Few people believe that current COVID death rates represent a bottoming-out and that it will just continue to be 450-500/day forevermore. Seroprevalence – though very high in the U.S. right now – will increase still more, treatments will improve, better vaccines will come to the fore, etc. Death rates notwithstanding – the situation is generally seen as improving markedly and rapidly. Even as we acknowledge most every COVID metric has considerable room to improve.
How do people who sell hamburgers, or assemble cars, or a do a thousand other jobs, work from home?
I’ve been in the lab since April 2020, first half time and then full time starting that September. So close to two years since things were slowly transitioning back to normal. Sure, I could write some reports, read some papers, have some meetings from home. But science gets done on site, wherever that site is, and I’m very tired of white collar workers complaining that they have to go to the office. Especially when it was many thousands of people who couldn’t work from home in a cushy computer job that were making their work from home, their “I haven’t gone shopping in six months”, and other ways they used to virtue signal how seriously they were taking the pandemic possible.
I do think a lot of this comes down to virtue signaling at this point. It just felt oh so good to do all of this in 2020, shouldn’t we continue?
Maybe I’d like it to be 2020. My mom’s health has declined since then, nothing to do with Covid. I have kids with degenerative issues, my concerns for them are a million times that of Covid frankly. My kids may not have months and years that Leaper wants to cheerfully punt down the road without a care. Frankly none of us do, none of us will get any day back ever.
I set a retirement date before Covid and retired a few months into it. Before that I was a manufacturing engineer and making what was considered an essential product shipping in record numbers at that. I guess that some of my job could theoretically have been done from home but no one can plan for machines breaking and needing to be fixed RIGHT NOW from home. Two-thirds of the company could stay home but those of us who working on the line had to be there like normal so I feel you. And the same goes for people whining about not being able to breathe wearing masks. Try wearing one all day long as part of your job for years.
That said, I am going to concerts now. Lots of them. My life long dream was a retirement of going to lots of live music. Tonight is my 101st show of 2022. I am vaxxed and double boosted. I got a mild case of Covid in January and refrained from shows until I stopped having symptoms and tested negative.
It is worth noting that 150,000/year is probably more than 10X the old annual flu death rate. Possibly rather more than that because we know the CDC flu statistics were artificially inflated a bit by basically treating all pneumonia deaths as flu-caused.
Now I myself am slowly relaxing my own safety regimen, so I don’t throw this out as a gotcha. It’s just something to think about. If we accept 150,000 deaths/year (or 100,000, or whatever) as the new normal, that is substantially ON TOP OF all the other old sources of mortality, which mostly haven’t gone away. And we are talking an annual death rate that would have caused outright panic and outrage if we had suggested it in, say, 2018.
This is human habituation to privation and loss. It is just like slaves, serfs and people in war-torn hellholes normalizing their shitty environments to get on with the business of living. We’re incredibly adaptable as a species.
But the scale of the societal loss that we are starting to just shrug about probably shouldn’t be minimized. It’s a BIG deal, even if nothing practical may be possible other than moving forward with continuing medical research.
Frankly, I see it much like the article in the Atlantic last year about the liberals who can’t quit lockdown. I think effectively catastrophizing covid even now has become part of some people’s identities. To worry about it even now, to bring up the possibility of long covid (which is always so vague as to be meaningless), to ask “How hard is it to wear a mask?” is meant to be coming from a good place, one that shows that the person is a serious person who cares about others and takes things seriously. It also has gotten very mixed up into politics, which were already acrimonious enough and this just adds to the fire.
Look, I honestly think such people really are serious. I don’t think they’re trolling or anything like that. But people are willing to accept many things, to take levels of risk, and some who are saying “nope, this is still too much risk” simply cannot accept that they are in the minority even among those who otherwise agree with them on many issues.
Oh, yeah, for them, there should be serious investments in PPE and air filtering.
At least pay ‘em more, for Pete’s sake.
I think one problem is that there is very little knowledge or agreement among the public as to how much excess mortality there actually is. Along those lines, there’s been a blurring this whole time of “died from covid” versus “died with covid”. As the numbers go down and as society decides when to go back to pre-pandemic behaviors and protocols, the distinction becomes more and more important.
The problem with numbers is that they must be put into a context before they become meaningful. The raw number of people dying from COVID must be separated into those that are vaccinated and boosted, those that are just vaccinated, and those that are unvaccinated.
The rates for those have changed rapidly over the course of the pandemic. The best table I’ve found is from Scientific American and covers March 2022. It says that COVID deaths per 100,000 is 1.71 per 100,000 for unvaccinated; 0.22 for vaccinated; and 0.1 for boosted.
Those figures are staggering. They say 1 in a million boosted people died from COVID while 17 times that many unvaccinated died. Here’s a chart that updates that to May. Same result.
Is that still true today? I found a report from the Washington State Bureau of Health that is up to the minute. It only includes Washington residents and the number of deaths from those under 65 are too small to do comparisons on, which should be an interesting data point right there. Their conclusion is that of August “COVID-19 death rates among 65+ year-old individuals are 3.1 times higher in the unvaccinated population than in the population of those who have completed the primary series.” A look at the historic chart shows that the spread has been increasing steadily since April, after falling from a peak in February. However, for the entire past year, the rate for unvaccinated people has far exceeded the rate for “completed primary series.”
Not getting vaccinated is clearly a very bad, possibly deadly, option. Getting fully vaccinated and boosted is far - far - safer.
Those are the only numbers you should be looking at. People who are actively trying to kill themselves should not be included in your risk calculations.