I suggested this while visiting parent over the holidays 
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yeah i dont have a huge amount of compassion for the willfully unvaccinated too, but there are tons of people who cant get vaccinated or whose immune systems arent working properly and i have massive compassion for them, as well as for the health care workers who have to care for them all regardless.
clearly weāre way past the point where thereās hope of eradicating it. but we are not yet at the point where it makes sense to throw up our hands and accept āeveryone is gonna get it.ā thereās a lot of scope for actions between those two extremes but not much appetite to implement those actions so ā¦ here we are. this is fine 
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But everyone is going to get it arenāt they? I mean, we can try to modify the timeline on WHEN. But at this point, isnāt the science telling us weāll all have exposure, at some point, if we are part of society at all? Like so many other coronaviruses that circulate?
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I donāt have compassion for the willfully unvaccinated either, but theyāre clogging up hospitals and I know people who canāt get surgeries they need because of that. And there might not be the capacity to care for someone who IS vaccinated but gets in an accident or has a stroke or whatever. THAT pisses me off. I donāt know what the solution is though, short of
This was in one of the X-men movies, wasnāt it? Guns with anti-mutant vaccines in them?
There was also that episode of The Flash where he ran around at top speed jabbing the metahuman cure into all the evil metahumans in, like, 2 seconds. Can we do that? Where is the Flash when we need him?
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Dammit Barry!
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Vaccine passports are so easy in Europe 
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yes thatās correct. itās all about timing and the context in which people are infected.
but from what iāve noticed, the āweāre all gonna get itā crowd actually mean āsince weāre all gonna get it someday, i may as well not worry about it nowā which is, to me, problematic.
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I look at it like the flu. While, yes, we are all gonna get the flu at some point in our lives, I still try my darnedest not to get it.
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yup, and thereās some pretty terrible strains of the flu that have caused pandemics (i.e. 1918 flu that was particularly bad because it caused cykotine storms in young people) but most just, unfortunately, cause severe illness in far fewer people. And yes, vulnerable people have to get a shot every year because there are new strains, just like I expect weāll be getting boosters til kingdom come.
All this āitās just like the fluā downplaying does seem to forget that most public health experts thought the next pandemic would be a flu not a coronavirus, and that didnāt change the public health measures they recommended.
Iāve said over and over I wish that wearing masks in crowds/at sporting events/on transit/when you have the sniffles was normalized in the west like it is in much of Asia. This isnāt how I wanted it to happen, obviously, but I do think that the normalization of it will lower flu and other respitory illness deaths overall.
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I guess I just donāt understand why I see so much backlash to any āwhat nextā type articles, or health departments talking about ālearning to live with itā, etc.
We obviously need a plan for āwhat nextā, otherwise ādrop it all, immediatelyā seems to be the only alternative given.
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Iā¦ donāt know what we realistically can do to avoid everyone getting it, especially with a variant as transmissible as omicron. Masks can reduce transmission but they canāt stop it. Iām not willing to go into lockdown again. I donāt support closing schools and returning to virtual schooling; I think the loss of learning and mental health issues are too difficult.
And even when we did all of those things, we still didnāt stop virus transmission. And that was with a less transmissible variant.
I too, feel for the health care workers and those who need care but canāt get it. I would like to see the health care system prioritize patients differently - basically giving those who are not vaccinated by choice a lower priority.
Cases are going down. The load on the healthcare system, and the risk for those who cannot vaccinate, may be going down soon.
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Oh, but we did flatten the curve, which we needed to at the time, not to mention we made those choices pre-vaccine, pre-understanding the illness, pre-having treatments. If we hadnāt made choices recommended by public health experts, I shudder to think what wouldāve happened in 2020 and 2021.
I really canāt support this morally, because rationing care based on vaccine status isā¦ ugh. I feel the same way about charging people for covid care if theyāre not vaccinated. But I also agree we need a better system.
It does seem like weāre finally on a downtrend. Oregonās still higher than it was at any point before January 2022, and deaths are still rising because they lag from cases. But it seems like weāre finally getting lower cases.
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YOU HAVE FAILED THIS CITY.
(Wait, wrong CW show!)
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Except, we ARE rationing care. We are rationing it based on whoās sickest at that given instant in time instead of who is most treatable and most likely to survive, which is leading to deaths from things we know how to treat that could have been avoided.
Iām not advocating turning people away if thereās no need. Iām also not advocating turning away someone who is not able to be vaccinated, or someone unvaccinated who is presenting for something other than Covid.
We did, but at what cost?
Can any of us, realistically and considering mental health, do another lockdown like we did in 2020?
I donāt think we can ask that of our school children, or their parents, either. Developmentally I fear the children and students will never completely make up the lost ground.
And how long might we have to take precautions to flatten the curve?
Some simple (and macabre) math
US population of 330 million, 50% vaccinated
1% fatality in the unvaccinated
about 900,000 deaths so far
When the virus has infected everyone, it will have killed (330 x 10^6) * 0.01 * 0.5 = 1.65 million.
Thatās 750,000 more people that have died so far.
If 2500 people are dying a day, it will take 300 days, or until the beginning of 2023, until we reach a point where the deaths slow down.
If we drop that down to 1000 deaths per day, weāre talking over two years.
Does anyone really want to live like itās 2020 again for another two years? or more?
Iām willing to hang on until the final group (young children) can be vaccinated because it is close.
After that - weāre primarily protecting two groups, made up of
- mostly people who choose not to vaccinate, and frequently, often refuse to take the other precautions we are talking about here
- people who cannot vaccinate for some reason.
Iām done taking precautions for the first group. Theyāre not taken them for me.
And the second group? I think it goes one of two ways.
- Best case scenario, the sooner the virus goes through the population and falls to a lower level, the sooner they can resume something resembling normal life. āLet 'er rip,ā letting the virus burn itself out, actually restores their quality of life the fastest.
- Worst case scenario, the virus will never be reduced to low enough levels that they can resume normal life. Each person will have to make their own risk calculations and live accordingly. In other words, Take all the precautions we want, but itās never going to be as good as it was in 2019 for this group.
Maybe pessimistic, but thatās just how I see it right now.
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I absolutely donāt think we should have lockdowns like we did before vaccines, treatments, and a clear understanding of the virus. I donāt think a single person is recommending that!
But I think thereās got to be some middle ground between āletās speed this virus transmission up as fast as possible by lifting all precautionary measuresā and ālockdown like we did before 75% of the adult population was vaccinatedā
Maybe I find it easier to parse this out mentally because Iām vaccinated but far more likely to catch covid due to my medicationās immune suppression. Iām not taking precautions for the unvaccinated. Iām taking precautions for me.
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I meanā¦Iām just about to come out of a lockdown due to omicrom and Iām a parent soā¦yes? It was definitely hard on my mental health but I wasnāt willing to risk needing hospital care for myself of my family when we had the privilege to lock back down for a month.
ETA Iām not trying to minimize debate on this topic because I do think itās complicated and there are tradeoffs. But since I canāt actually trust anyone to have the same definition of ābeing safeā as I do, we had to lock down instead. If I could actually trust that people were wearing good masks when in public and limiting gatherings or the number of different households they were seeing during the biggest surge ever, I wouldnāt have locked down as much. But alas.
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Ditto not because Iām immunosuppressed (Iām not) but because they found new scarring on my lungs with the CAT scan in January that determined I donāt have appendicitis.
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Yep, right now my main concern is my own health (and that of the cuckoo egg, although once I get out of the first trimester in a week or two, fever wonāt be so dangerous) and my second biggest concern is keeping schools open.
No one Iāve seen is suggesting closing them as a precautionary measure, but my kids have already missed a day for lack of staff, plus another day that wouldnāt have been a snow day in the beforetimes, and I know that corners are being cut in other areas (food, transportation) because of lack of employees and absences among the ones they do have. And the school system has a vaccine mandate for employees.
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Something Iām very curious to know more about from an epidemiologistās standpoint is when and how we change our rules around asymptomatic positive covid tests.
This is particularly interesting to me given all the fully vaxxed, precaution-taking athletes that have tested positive for covid due to routine testing at the olympics and then are stuck quarantining. The russian ice dancing team was taking constant tests trying to come up negative because they were getting alternate day positives and negatives and they were required to have 2 negative days of tests in a row. They had covid back in december but were still coming up positive occasionally due to lasting antibodies
I know weāre doing the research and work around virus shedding in vaccinated people, but I wonder how soon we move away from requiring vaccinated people with asymptomatic covid from quarantining. 3 months? 12 months? never?
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To double-post and add on to that: health care and prison workers and people at risk of TB (due to immunosuppression) get tested annually for latent TB. Is there a possibility that covid will move to that sort of status?
TB has a reproduction rate similar to delta (and lower than omicron), is endemic in certain countries, and 25% of the world has latent TB, and the most important risk for contracting TB is having HIV. In rich countries, only the high risk are innoculated against TB. In poor countries where it is endemic, most children are vaccinated against it.
That being said, I think thereās been a big ask to get rid of annual TB tests for workers due to the risk for false positives (so itās not that effective). I get tested for TB every year because of my risk of developing it and its high fatality rate in immunosuppressed people.
But I wonder how covid testing and procedures may mirror TB given how much of the world will be infected
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