I’m not sure I’m fully understanding what you saying here. There are still large numbers of unvaccinated people are there not?
There are still 20% of the 75+ age group exposed (unless my references are way off)
That may be so but it seems to be an issue that there are many who are not willing. Whatever the reason for that there are large numbers unprotected and who are a potential statistic-in-waiting.
I think we are using the same phrase in different, imprecise ways.
I don’t think of those people as being unvaccinated because of a patchy roll-out. The fact that they remain unvaccinated is how I would assess the roll-out as patchy. The methods used in the roll-out may be sub-optimal in many ways or it may have been the very best that could be achieved under the circumstances. No point in getting hung up on the words. The end result is that, for whatever reasons, there are large groups of people in the USA that are not covered and will continue to provide a happy hunting ground for the virus for some time to come. I think we both agree on that.
So tying that all together to the thread topic, as a vaccinated American, I am pretty much at the point where I view covid as just a bad flu and we just have to live with it. The only real difference is I mask in public, but honestly that’s the same (ultimately trivial) level of change as when the seat belt laws went into effect when I was a teenager.
I’ve essentially written red America off to the disease to have its way with them. Obviously this could take me down too if they spawn new variants, but that’s just a looming threat like global warming. What are you going to do, right? I’m a liberal American in a liberal state, in a highly vaccinated county, and in a town with excellent mask compliance. I’ve done my part, I feel like. I can’t control what they do in West Pennsyltuckie, y’know?
No more lockdowns, no more restrictions, covid has already become a regular part of life. I’m sure it’s worse in the red states than it is here, but I can’t live their life for them.
It was mentioned that rates in the US are as bad as they were in December, but look at it from my perspective. In December, Connecticut’s weekly average cases was in the 600s or so. Right now they’re in the 100s. We’re not spiking particularly badly because we’re well vaccinated and wear masks.
…New Zealand has more land area than the UK (268,838 square kilometres vs 243,600 square kilometres) and we aren’t in the middle of nowhere, we are in the middle of somewhere. We are a travel hub to the Pacific islands, and covid doesn’t respect international borders.
You made the assertion that “The same thing would have occurred in the UK.” The same thing didn’t happen in the UK. If you think that it did, then its over to you to prove that it did.
Over a million and a half people have been vaccinated in the US in the last week. Obviously that’s horrifyingly low given how many are still unvaccinated, but somebody is getting convinced at this point.
This is definitely where we have wires crossed. Vaccines are freely and conveniently available to every single American right now today. To me, that is the definition of a completed rollout. The opposite of patchy.
There is an ideological divide that appears to be as entrenched as abortion and gun rights. Hopeless, one might say. Blaming the vaccine rollout for not magically crossing that divide seems like missing the forest for the trees.
oooo! my no. You couldn’t be more wrong. I’m obliged to steer clear of giving too much detail but I’m on record elsewhere as stating what sort of industry and area I’m involved in. For the last 18 month it has specifically involved the manufacture and distribution of Covid vaccines.
Supply has not been a problem from the get-go.
You can distribute as many vaccines as you like and vaccinate 100% of the people who want it, but if that figure is only covering a substantially smaller proportion of the overall population then it is hard to say that the vaccination program itself is an unqualified success.
Right, exactly. They are getting convinced. They weren’t willing until this week, and then the moment they were convinced, boom, they got an easily accessible shot.
The aged parents thing was definitely real, even up here in Canada. I was able to get an appointment for my first shot, booking online with no hassle, while my parents (both in their seventies, and neither one as computer-savvy as they used to be) struggled and called endlessly trying to navigate the system.
Not taking the vaccine is part of Red America’s identity. I don’t see how you can reasonably attribute their recalcitrance in any way to a poor vaccine rollout.
I think there’s a fair point here. We have successfully made vaccines available to every American who can be vaccinated. We have failed to vaccinate every American who can be vaccinated, by quite a significant margin.
The first one is necessary to achieve the second one. The second one is what we’re actually trying to achieve.
Oh gotcha, that makes much more sense. My bad, sorry about that. (Meant as sincere.)
When I think vaccine rollout, I think operation warp speed and the logistics of getting hundreds of millions of shots into hundreds of millions of arms over an area of 3 million square miles. Mission Accomplished, as it were.
When you think vaccine rollout, you think convincing the knuckleheads who stormed the Capitol to stop the election that the vaccines aren’t really microchips from Bill Gates. (Read in a playful joking tone, mocking them not you.)
Your definition of vaccine rollout seems… expansive. I fully concede that the vaccine rollout has utterly failed to cross the divide and convince die hard red staters that everything they believe is wrong. Because nothing short of that will convince them to take the vaccine willingly.
They can be forced to take it unwillingly, I suppose. That would fix that patchy rollout right up. Might be a pesky civil war as a side effect but at least the vaccine rollout would be better.
EDIT: Rereading this post it came off as confrontational when it was not intended as such at all. I added tone notes.
I think @Banquet_Bear is right that if, instead of having a patchwork of county centers and pharmacies deliver vaccines only to those who sought them out, we had an organized program in which each person was contacted by a doctor or medical group they were already familiar with, and that group said, “we have scheduled your first dose for xx/xx/xxxx, is there any compelling reason we need to change that?”, that we’d be looking at a much higher percent vaccinated today.
…the divide here is between strong public systems with universal healthcare and the strong idealogical “cult of the individual” that is prevalent in the US. You say it yourself. You’ve “essentially written red America off to the disease.” Or when you said the rates are bad, but “look at it from my perspective.”
It’s something I can’t imagine ever saying, or thinking. And it isn’t the way our society and culture here in New Zealand (and other places in the world) work. Our pandemic response has been so good here because we did it for each other. We call it the “Team of Five Million.” At the core of our elimination strategy is the equity principle.
Also the wellbeing principle:
Central to the decision making is this:
Every pandemic decision is run through this process, including our vaccine rollout.
I mean, this is an important part of the rollout. But this part of the rollout is really just logistics: and (especially as its handled at the State level) is the easiest part to both figure out and implement.
But the other part of the rollout, the “getting as many people vaccinated as possible” isn’t a matter of logistics. And in America, you are dealing with something that most of the rest of the world don’t have to deal with.
And I’m gonna risk getting political here. But that thing is the intentional sabotage of the pandemic response by one political party at the Federal and the State level, by some very rich people, and by some parts of the media. I don’t really have an answer for you on how to deal with that here. But I think the first thing that needs to happen is that focus, the blame, the responsibility needs to be refocused on them. Its easy to blame the “redneck who thinks the vaccine is a microchip.” But its the powerful who benefit from those “rednecks”, and you will never be able to reach them while those power structures remain in place.
The problem isn’t just the unvaccinated, it’s also their doctors with the horse dewormer nonsense and whatnot. I suspect those doctors wouldn’t be making those phone calls.
I think I agree that it would be a higher percentage today, but I’m not entirely convinced it would be much higher. It would have been much higher in June in July, but I think we were going to end up with this remaining group of hardliners pretty quickly regardless.
Our response here in Connecticut has also been pretty good – nowhere on your level but few places are – for the exact same reason. We did it for each other.