50% of Americans are apparently not willing to be vaccinated to begin with and rollout to significant parts of the population is going to take months.
While I'm obviously glad that vaccine development happened quickly, I really wish rather than being so focussed on vaccinations exclusively we paid more attention to the fact that some countries, Taiwan, China, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia have managed to quell the disease through correct social policy and appropriate levels of social coordination.
If every disaster will rely on us conjuring up a panacea we'll be screwed sooner or later.
In the US we've had a single $1200 check. American families don't have the option to stop going to work and have to do anything they can.
It's no wonder this breeds resentment to anything the government says, including to wear masks.
So is the UK, last time I checked they're not doing so hot either. You can add this kind of argumentation to the list of ailments. Geographic or some other sort of fatalism as an excuse for what is social failure.
Where you're located when a disease hits gives you either an advantage or a disadvantage, fair enough. But it doesn't explain away repeated and continuous inability to act. If NZ had acted like the UK, they'd look just the same. Once you've got community spread the virus doesn't care if you're on an island.
As for China, I don't think anybody trusts their figures, but it's also quite clear that they do have the outbreak well under control. If their ICUs were full, we'd know about it.
- a population that had experience with prior pandemics and was thus willing to play along
- a strong centralized government (this is a guess, and I'm not just talking about the power, but specifically the centralization - other nations that have states/provinces each implementing their own policies showed the dangers of that approach, e.g. USA, Switzerland, Germany)
- extremely aggressive contact tracing and enforced quarantine (for high risk cases, they were put in hotels or barracks, not told "please stay home"). Not just contacts but also contacts-of-contacts (the latter were only ordered to home quarantine).
AFAIK they didn't even have much of a shutdown, because the quarantining was so effective.
COVID-19, which is now endemic, will be here for the remainder of my lifetime. The vaccines have unknowns. I see less risk for both myself and family with avoiding the vaccines until there is strong data about their efficacy and safety.
>While I'm obviously glad that vaccine development happened quickly, I really wish rather than being so focussed on vaccinations exclusively we paid more attention to the fact that some countries, Taiwan, China, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia have managed to quell the disease through correct social policy and appropriate levels of social coordination.
They're either islands, took authoritarian measures, or both. And again, an endemic virus that will only come back as soon as international travel comes back and lockdowns go away.
We don't have long term data on either of course, but the data that has been collected so far paints a clear picture of safe, effective vaccines.
https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-ag...
On November 22, the New York Times published a fascinating account of the race to produce a coronavirus vaccine. The Times report included a number of interesting facts, but one really grabbed my attention: It turns out that the Moderna vaccine, which was just shown to be 95 percent effective, was actually developed by the company in just two days in January 2020.
That’s right, they developed the vaccine in two days in January, but then needed to spend the following ten months performing tests in order to meet the FDA’s standards for vaccine safety and efficacy.
During those ten months, 1.3 million people, including a quarter million Americans, have died from the coronavirus.
TL;DR: Large parts of the world won't have vaccines available to the general population until 2023.
In Sweden where we have no lockdown or similar there are no more deaths this year than other years, clearly showing that forcing people to lock down is not only immoral, but also inefficient.
Article in English but statistics from the public statistics bureau (SCB).
https://emanuelkarlsten.se/number-of-deaths-in-sweden-during...
I didn't see the context of the 2022 comment quoted in the article.
If this is the case could someone explain the reasoning here? The UK is expected to complete its vaccination program by April 2021 [1]. I can't imagine other Western countries will be very far behind them. I imagine the isolated nations such as AUS and NZ will allow travel with the necessary vaccination certificates [2].
I feel like I'm missing the link as to why lockdowns dragging on to 2022 is likely?
1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
2: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/qantas-coronavirus-va...
