But not with this. The most at risk people are physically unable to isolate, because they need care from other human beings. And a lot of the next-to-most at risk people needed to work. We were right to try to prevent spread. We just did it badly.
And part of that is because we were totally unprepared. We didn’t have masks, not even half decent masks. But masks are cheap, and prevent spread. Masks are physically cheap to make, but they are also cheap to use. You can do almost all of your economic activity masked. Everything except eating. You can teach, go to school, sell groceries, buy groceries, run electrical wires in someone’s home… all while wearing a mask. But masks work better outbound than inbound, so everyone needs to wear them to reduce spread and to protect the most vulnerable.
We should have focused on ventilation and masks early on, as soon as it was clear how covid spread. (And that was much earlier than when the WHO or the CDC admitted it.) That’s what most of the Asian countries did. Japan never shut down, but they wore masks. South Korea, Vietnam, all focused on masks instead of shutdowns. Look at the cumulative death tolls of those countries as compared to ours. They made the right choice.
Like all vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing infection. Some people who are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations will get COVID-19 breakthrough infection. However, staying up to date with your COVID-19 vaccinations means that you are less likely to have a breakthrough infection and, if you do get sick, you are less likely to get severely ill or die. Staying up to date with COVID-19 vaccination also means you are less likely to spread the disease to others and increases your protection against new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
I think the compromise statement would be that staying up to date on vaccinations helps reduce spread. It doesn’t prevent spread, just like it doesn’t necessarily prevent transmission. But it does help limit spread because it does reduce transmission and reducing transmission reduces spread.