I don't think there is any argument the vaccines have helped, but the problem is its a global issue. If some shit variant pops up in some heavily populated poor nation, with our lax "give us your poor...." liberal wonks wanting to keep our borders porous, we're going to get it here. I think people now realize that the idea of a Covid free environment is possibly 2 or 3 years away if ever. As perhaps as misguided as Trumps immigration policies were, had people allowed him to enforce them - build a wall, increase border patrols, lock down flights - Covid might be under control in the sense that we wouldn't see the onslaught of variants here. His policies would be considered forward thinking instead of xenophobic.aTm wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 7:39 pm Unfortunately, as months and months pass, the post I made back in February when the new vaccines were the big hope, appears more true all of the time. There are a few places in the world, looking at you New Zealand, in particular, that have smugly and arrogantly looked at the rest of the world claiming how amazing and smart their response has been, but sooner or later they are going to realize that they have no exit plan, no return to normalcy plan. At some point, as soon as normality returns, COVID-19 is going to burn through their entire population no matter how long they continue to put it off. Australia it seems is possibly already on the brink of widespread civil unrest, which may end up being even worse than the virus would have been (which is obviously itself pretty bad).
Everything at this point relating to COVID is all just mostly a show. It's just "do something, do something, show them you're doing something." There is really nothing to be done except try to mitigate the total quantity of people who have it at any one time and hope someone eventually develops treatment that makes it harmless. The only real effective way to limit the spread is to simply keep people worried about getting it, the moment they aren't worried about it, they will go back to living their normal lives with normal interactions.
In my expectation, we will know elderly people that die from this (and unfortunately, potentially some of us on this board) for the rest of our lifetimes. The vast majority of people are currently waiting for an obvious moment where we can go "Aha now it is time for everything to go back to normal!" but that moment is never going to happen.
COVID will go on indefinitely. The human population and the virus will only adapt very slowly to dealing with each other over a period of many years until it's finally basically no big deal maybe decades from now, but that will happen very gradually. The idea that the vaccines will confer true long term immunity is really just a hope and a prayer. And the virus that causes COVID is so widespread that it will now be endemic in human population and can NEVER be eliminated altogether, and therefore it will always be a risk to flare up and eventually will be something that is in constant circulation.
Maybe (hopefully!) the vaccines will be able to give us some real resistance for a few solid years, but that really just means that the virus will just mostly slumber for a while but then in the future will start noticeably causing problems in regions by flaring up on a time period of like like every other year as vaccinations wane depending on when the majority of those people lose resistance depending on whatever particular version of the vaccine they received and when they got it.
We are now just waiting for people to realize one of two potential end games. The first is that this new lower level of activity (including economic activity) and interaction and "the public safety show" is just how we live now forever. Or, secondly, for everyone to finally get fed up and demand to live normal lives, risk-be-damned, until SARS-Coronavirus-2 is basically just another cold germ decades from now.
We'll mostly likely have to live with it and hope that there is treatment available that prevents severe reactions to it that can lead to death.
10AC is the fourth person I know now that has died of this in the last 2 months. He was the only one that was vaccinated. He did everything he was supposed to do I assume, and is still a victim on this. Up to that point I knew of one person who died of it, and he died because he trashed his lungs with a cleaning solvent, then caught Covid in the hospital while being treated.
If this was some fairly benign virus that was souped up in a lab, then the people involved with it - all the way up to funding it should pay. Lifetime imprisonment doesn't seem enough punishment.
Yet we won't do a damn thing about it, while people we know die and suffer from this.
