Research suggests that after infection with some coronaviruses, reinfection with the same virus — though usually mild and only happening in a fraction of people — is possible after a period of months or years. Further research is needed to determine the protective effect of antibodies to the virus in those who have been infected.
Even if infection with the COVID-19 virus creates long-lasting immunity, a large number of people would have to become infected to reach the herd immunity threshold. Experts estimate that in the U.S., 70% of the population — more than 200 million people — would have to recover from COVID-19 to halt the epidemic. If many people become sick with COVID-19 at once, the health care system could quickly become overwhelmed. This amount of infection could also lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have chronic conditions. [1]
Which would result in ~1.3M dead Americans.
So no. The concept of defeating COVID by relying on a "natural herd immunity" is a bad idea on all fronts.
What should I tell my elderly relatives who are so creeped out by this fascist, disgraceful fiasco, that they will refuse a vaccine even though it has a decent chance of doing some good?
Thank you. My grandma tested positive on a Monday around a month ago and went into hospice the following Thursday night, when her oxygen dropped. She passed away the following Saturday morning.
My girlfriend's grandma also passed from COVID a few weeks ago. When it rains it pours, eh?
The whole thing is just horrible to deal with. Not having a chance to say goodbye or go through the grieving process together.
It's just so hard to comprehend how 419k+ other families in the US have experienced similar loss.
Same here. My grandfather died early in the pandemic (May). He tested positive for a period of three weeks and then tested negative a few times. He started feeling better and we were hopeful, but the damage was too great and his heart failed a few weeks later.
I really just can't put my feelings into words.
He was in a physical rehab facility after surgery. When the pandemic hit, visitation was forbidden. Turns out most of the staff were scared and basically abandoned the patients. The specific facility specialized in elderly patients who had severe mobility issues.
He told us on the phone once at the beginning that he was scared because all he heard at night were people screaming for help as they stopped being able breathe as COVID was destroying their lungs. He figured it wasn't long before he caught it. However, no one would sign off on discharging him, and by the time we got the bare minimum to care for him at home and the legal crap sorted out, he caught it.
He lived practically opposite the country to me (I'm in LA, he was in Boston), so I didn't see him very often. He also wasn't the kindest person to me growing up, so I didn't really talk to him all that often either.
With that, it just doesn't feel real that he's gone. There was no funeral, no memorial service, as everything is tabled until after the pandemic. I don't think it'll really set in until I visit my grandmother and he's not there.
And you see the assholes who want to say taking precautions should be a personal choice or are an invasion of their personal freedoms. I wish every single one of them could experience the fear my grandfather did. Stuck in a bed, unable to walk, waiting for a plague to take them as their fellow patients succumb one by one. It's just disgusting.
My grandmother, wearing a full hazmat suit with an oxygen tank, was able to be there with him when he passed.
I am at the same level of loss-shock as you, I suspect. My mom lives and my grandma lived on the Iron Range in Minnesota, so a very rural area, which seemed to help keep infections at bay for a while.
It's been incredibly hard for my mom, because my grandma was her best friend and her rock. The day she passed, I remember my mom saying "I never got a last hug", which was heart breaking. My mom has MS, so there was no possibility of her visiting her through that whole process.
It's been really hard. I want to see my mom and give her a hug. But I also don't trust the time in between getting the results of a negative test to feel confidant about visiting her.
Hopefully we'll all find some closure once we have a chance to grieve together, properly. There are many memorial/celebration services that have been postponed. I hope we can reach the day where we can hold them safely together.
Thank you for sharing, really, but understand that I could also slip into blind hatred over what I see as the suffering you and your culture have caused (not least being caregivers so scared by the hyped-up risk to younger and healthier people that they abandoned patients?!) but that would not be useful. As the minority opinion I’m also more likely to get flagged or banned, and I do use that handicap as a crutch sometimes (thanks @dang).
Perhaps the best option would be for us to get drunk and rage about this for a few hours or days. I bet I could rant for a lot longer than you, and I bet I understand your position better than you understand mine. Perks of being in the counterculture, I guess.
I feel like your point is probably important somehow. Could you make it with more sensitivity and less indignant contrarianism? Remember that you're replying to someone who has just lost a loved one!
Someone who in their grief also wishes me suffering and an agonizing death, perhaps as revenge:
> I wish every single one of them could experience the fear my grandfather did. Stuck in a bed, unable to walk, waiting for a plague to take them as their fellow patients succumb one by one.
Sensitivity is a nice-to-have, but the goal right now is averting outright war. If none of these bubbles can be cracked open, and everyone just keeps lurching toward violence, where it ends will make today’s tragedy look like mild inconvenience.
Please note I specifically said I wish they could experience the fear. It is not a wish for anyone to experience death, let alone a painful one.
People rarely have to confront the extent of the results of their actions and as a result don't really think on those terms. Personal experience is an effective, often painful teacher.
I can't claim to know your entire perspective, but from the outside, refusing to accept a temporary, minor inconvenience to one's life so we can reduce how many people have to die an agonizing death seems ... selfish, at best.
I myself am a person who suffers from depression issues that have only been magnified by isolation. And yet here I am, following the guidelines as best I can. I'm not at much of a risk of dying from COVID, but if I got it and infected someone who ended up dying from it - I'd never forgive myself.
Thanks for the reply. And er, good that you don’t actually want to go as far as killing me - there’s some wild shit out there right now. I would still be in favor of arguing about all the details over drinks, but for now I’ll just offer the roughest outline of the other perspective, which is:
Refusing to accept a temporarily increased risk of disease, and instead dramatically increasing the chance that your fellow humans will be crushed under the boot of fascism is... also selfish at best.
Ah, you're one of the ones who actually is rational about things.
Put it this way: your liberty to spread your germs ends just where my nose begins. Else we're just permitting tyranny by another route.
Currently there's a very infectious and deadly germ on the loose, so -under the above rule- everyone's freedom becomes more constrained than we'd ideally like.
It's certainly evil; but it's not the human evil of fascism causing it, but rather the natural world evil of a pandemic.
You exhale viruses. You exhale CO2. The campaign to remake society in response to these threats is, in its purest essence, a campaign to redefine the free human as a toxic animal. If successful, it will then be used to justify slavery and murder.
And to borrow a page from the global warming folks, we’re not going to wait and see whether that hunch is right, because by then it will be too late. It’s time to end this.
The USA actually dealt with a similar situation just over 100 years ago in 1918, and people did similar things, and the USA came through just fine as a nation (albeit 600000 citizens lighter :-( ) .
If you don’t already understand that argument as a perfectly obvious concern, we will probably not agree. It is obvious to hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people all over the world.
I recommend you look for conversations outside your usual bubble, and when you find someone to ask questions of, don’t pair the questions with insults.
I don't think I can excuse abandoning patients, but not all caregivers are young and healthy; so some of them would have reason to fear for their safety, or the safety of those they live with, or not want to spread disease among their patients.
Lots of stuff went wrong, and it's tragic that
Teknoman117's grandfather couldn't get discharged quickly. It would have been better to be at home without appropriate mobility care than to be in a facility without appropriate mobility care and an active outbreak.
My grandma too. A week from first positive test to dying. It must have been very scary for her. No funeral. I found the part that continually makes me melancholy is all of these people alone in the hospital, separated from family, and feeling themselves get worse and worse.
Death is quite natural, but the fact that a single pathogen, which other "western" nations managed to get under control has become the second leading cause of death in the United States is a horrific thing.
Heart disease is a systemic issue of our lifestyle and diet, and we don't know how to prevent cancer. A pathogen is fairly simple by comparison - if you don't catch it you can't die from it. Prevent the spread and people won't die from it.
Except other western countries haven't "gotten it under control"... they are all having second waves and resurgences with or without large lockdowns and with or without draconian processes.
> fairly simple
Until you start looking at how many lives are saved vs the second and third tier effects. Higher suicide rates from losing jobs and stress? People in third world countries dying from a cratered world economy? etc.
COVID needs to be handled and those more affected by it need protected. More hospital prep and masks around grandma... but the "fascist" and unproven shutdowns which by any measurements not only don't work but - as mentioned - causes more damage than it prevents?
Lockdowns, social distancing and masking – done consistently – do work. Even the half-measures lockdowns the US has gone through has stopped the entire medical system from collapsing, and at times it has been very close. In NYC in the first wave, it did.
But that isn't what has happened in the US, largely for political reasons.
There are no good options, only less worse ones, and aggressive lockdowns have got Australia, for example, back to work. The cumulative cost of the US's failure to grasp the nettle and just shut everything down for two months properly back last March is enormous.
and yet states that didn't - and aren't - locking down - like Florida - are doing fine. Or better than states that have extensive lockdowns like New York, New Jersey and California...
> Political reasons ... aggressive lockdowns in Australia
Locking down a small country like Australia is much different than locking down a country like the US. Australia is only 20% smaller than the US yet has 10% of the population. The layout is different. Temperature. Density. etc.
Locking down Australia would be like locking down one of our less densely populated states - not only does the President not have the ability to do it - he's a President not a King... but locking down the country make zero sense for a virus with a 99%+ survival rate.
again... we can take precautions to protect our hospitals and to "flatten the curve" (which we are loooooong past) and to protect the vulnerable (old, existing conditions, etc)... but locking down America? Coast to coast? No chance this side of turning the President into a Dictator - which was never on the table for Trump and definitely not for Biden.
> Locking down Australia would be like locking down one of our less densely populated states
This is very wrong. Australia is very, very dense, where people live: it just has a lot of absolutely uninhabited land. Functionally Australia is almost entirely urban.
Yea, Florida is not "doing fine" by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that they don't want to report numbers that show them not doing fine, as the entire state is funded by tourism.
They seem to be doing a pretty good job with vaccination though, so there's that!
Australia has had recorded zero locally acquired cases for more than 7 days now. At one point, Melbourne recorded 700 cases in a day, after several months of hard lockdown, it's down to 1 case in 30 days.
Yep, and Melbourne had it's "second wave" in the middle of winter. Locked down and got it under control. We've had the opportunity for things to go pear shaped, but due to decisive action, an educated and thinking public and fairly strict enforcement we've got no community transmission. The only issue we have is that our methods of isolating people returning to the country are proving to be somewhat inadequate with people like cleaners picking up the virus from the isolation facilities (Hotels). These issues are being improved and it looks like we are going to continue to be virus free.
And depression can be a slow killer, I’m more interested in the 2020 numbers for strokes and heart attacks. People have been hesitating in emergencies for almost an entire year (and counting).
Living on the border of two such western countries, I'd like to point out that they are definitely taking measures (currently lockdowns) to keep things under control, the lockdowns have a very measurable effect on R, and the death rate in both countries is something like 1-2 orders of magnitude less than the USA.
Basically you're trying to control R. As long as you keep R under 1, you can increase and reduce measures to keep the disease under control. If R goes too far over 1, you bleeped up, and you need to resort to a lockdown to get it back under control.
The theory a lot of (european) western countries are working on is that they want to allow as much freedom as possible, but keep the worst of the disease out.
I'm not entirely convinced this is actually the strategy that optimizes freedom though. It might be better to use the method some asian countries used: close the borders, do maximum effort lockdowns anytime the virus shows up at all; and you might have less days total in lockdown or restrictions, and more days where you are free to go out and eat indoors etc.
The one huge tragic problem with that plan is that when we surrender our freedoms “temporarily” to the government, they never give them back! Or at least we do not trust they will give them back, based on vast experience (see: Patriot Act), so this plan cannot work.
The naïveté on display here is staggering. "You can vote your way into fascism, but you have to shoot your way out."
In other comments people pointed out that New Zealand followed this more stringent strategy.
Right now, they're all outside enjoying summer with almost normal freedoms, while we're still stuck indoors. I must admit I'm jealous!
I don't think the Kiwis are currently preparing to shoot their way out of anything right at the moment. Probably because they're pretty much free to do whatever they want.
I will grant that New Zealand had an easier time of it as an island nation with a low population density, but it does give you pause for thought. Maybe we all could do better next time when the next pandemic rolls around.
Oh for sure. Grieving over death in 2020 is just all around a bad experience.
But I think it's fair to say that the excess deaths [1] in 2020 have certainly amplified the reality of death, especially within the context of a shared experience. My grandma was otherwise healthy and I had had a lot of conversations with her about how much we looked forward to seeing each other once the pandemic was "over".
Right, that's my point is that death sucks and it happens a lot. Obviously we would love to prevent all the death we can but just living is not always a good trade off. My grandma for example hasn't been allowed visitors for basically a year and says she would rather be dead.
I’m not sure how much of it is fear of the MRNA vaccine itself, and how much is an objection to the creepy fascist context. Probably a lot of both, and maybe yes a bit too much of the former.
But in any case their reply is, “We would rather take the risk.”
If they get sick and die like your grandma (condolences), they will have done so at least partially by choice, a choice which they have damn well earned by their mid-nineties. I would not prefer that to them avoiding the disease entirely (they would be especially mad at being shut away in a closed ward to die alone), but it sure as hell would still be better than seeing them enslaved by technocrats.
You could encourage them to keep in mind that by refusing to get vaccinated, they're likely going to be living the rest of their life under threat of contracting COVID.
It seems that those who are vaccinated can still spread it, and I don't believe we're going to be in a place where COVID is eliminated altogether anytime soon. There will continue to be outbreaks, and it's possible that those who are vaccinated will pick it up and pass it around, and the further mutations of it seem to be increasing its rate of spread.
> You could encourage them to keep in mind that by refusing to get vaccinated, they're likely going to be living the rest of their life under threat of contracting COVID.
I think you might be blind to how a person who values freedom more than safety, and who sees more danger to free civilization than to public health in this affair, would receive this threat. It would be an utterly awful thing to say.
I agree that my understanding of that mindset is limited to the rationality I can make of it, but I wouldn't consider that a threat. It's the reality that we exist within, as this virus only really "cares" about replicating itself.
I personally don't comprehend how someone can extrapolate receiving a vaccination to a loss of freedom, but I'm fortunate that I don't really have to.
Best of luck and safety to you and your family. I look forward to the day that we get to begin returning to some semblance of normalcy. Hopefully it's sooner rather than later.
Thanks, same to you. Don’t count on any “return to normalcy” though, at this point the only way out is through, and the other side is gonna look a lot different.
Let’s grant that one thinks that the various COVID restrictions are a danger to free civilization. How exactly does this translate to getting a vaccine being a danger to free civilization?
The funny thing is that a lot of the measures are based on either bad science or not science at all. Still, the masses will tell you to fall in line and accept the meaaures because "science says so". If you ask them to explain the scientific method on the spot 99% won't be able to do so. No wonder why they're so easily fooled. The "experts" are the new priests and science is the new religion. And don't you dare question it.
Have you considered relocating them to New Zealand? No COVID, no masks, no need for a vaccine. I’m not sure about government overreach in other parts of life though.
It's not just NZ. Australian states have carried out similar decisive actions.
An example. We had one person in Brisbane (capital of Queensland) who was infected with the UK variant whilst working in one of the isolation hotels (used to isolate people returning to Australia for 14 days).
The infected person reported that they had travelled extensively through the greater Brisbane area during the previous days. Given the unknown factors around the increased ability to transmit of the UK variant, the Queensland government called a 3 day lockdown on Brisbane. No travel unless absolutely necessary (food, medical care, critical job) and if you were outside your house for any reason masks were required.
The three days were to allow the health department to trace all the contacts of the infected person and get them tested. General public were also told to get tested if they had any symptoms and testing facilities were reactivated across the area.
Three days later, no new infections and the restrictions, only retaining the mask mandate in confined areas for another three weeks. We are now about three weeks later and no new community cases.
So was the three day lockdown excessive. I don't believe so. Would the outcome have been any different if we didn't have the three day lockdown? As it turns out, probably not, but it has to be noted that the purpose of the lockdown was to force a stop in possible transmission and give the health department a chance to find out how many people had been infected. Turns out that the infection rate was very low (some immediate family).
If we'd found from the tracing that there was active community transmission there would have been an extension to the lockdown until the rate reduced.
But here we are, essentially living lives unrestricted our freedoms intact until the next time this thing escapes into the community. Then I trust that the government will take prompt action and the public will groan but comply and we will be inconvenienced for a short period before we again return to normal.
Australia has learned a lot about what works and are acting on it. I don't know what lessons can be transferred to the tragic situation in the US apart from showing what would have been possible if your government had taken this seriously from the start.
I feel very sad for your country and wonder how the greatest democracy on the planet has allowed individual freedom (if you want to call it that) to be considered so important that it has been allowed to compromise the freedom of all.
> I’m not sure how much of it is fear of the MRNA vaccine itself, and how much is an objection to the creepy fascist context. Probably a lot of both, and maybe yes a bit too much of the former.
I don't think the two concerns are all that neatly separable. I find it impossible not to notice the relentless campaign to put forth _vaccinating everyone with an experimental jab_ as the only legitimate escape from indefinite lockdowns and distancing. Evidence piles up in favor of easy & cheap measures like vitamin D supplementation or ivermectin treatment having the potential to significantly reduce the threat of Covid and it just gets drowned out by media noise.
I view mRNA vaccines in much the same way as nuclear power: they could be an important technology to address our problems, if we could trust our institutions to adequately guard against their potentially enormous hazards or misuse. But we can't. And while I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to get the vaccine, one thing that will make me much more likely to fall into the "refuse" camp is if they decide to impose some kind of restrictions on basic freedoms and make travel or attending concerts contingent on getting a vaccine.
Even with all these concerns, if I was in my 90s, I think I would still find the danger from Covid so severe as to tilt the risk/reward balance in favor of getting the shot. But I don't find your relatives' approach absurd by any stretch.
> I don't think the two concerns are all that neatly separable. I find it impossible not to notice the relentless campaign to put forth _vaccinating everyone with an experimental jab_ as the only legitimate escape from indefinite lockdowns and distancing.
Who said that?
There are quite a few ways out: we can reach a state of herd immunity (as a practical matter, this would mean that going back to normal would result in a low enough rate of serious infections as to not be a big deal), we could find an effective, practical treatment or prophylactic, or we could vaccinate everyone. Or a combination.
Many things are wrong with the process, but, right now, all credible models suggest that we are nowhere near herd immunity. We have two vaccines that, in proper RCTs, appear very effect. We have a third vaccine that had an incompetently run RCT and appeared somewhat effective.
As for other treatments, we have some things that help a little. There’s ivermectin, which (if you read Derek Lowe’s blog, for example), seems dubious. It’s cheap and safe, but the dosage that works in vitro is impractical in vivo. The studies saying it’s effective are, in my opinion, dubious. Vitamin D (injected) looked good in a tiny study. Fluvoxamine looked good in a well run but very small study. HCQ does not appear effective. Convalescent plasma looks so-so. The mABs look less effective than hoped, and they don’t really scale well enough to use for everyone who gets exposed. Remdesivir seems to be barely effective.
We should absolutely run serious, expedited trials of everything credible. The fact that we haven’t set up a national clinical trial system for this is an embarrassment.
But please check your assumptions. Under the previous administration, the federal government did not impose significant restrictions on your freedoms (even your freedom to go around in indoor public spaces without a mask). The government did not do much of anything useful. To the contrary, the government gave premature EUAs to untested treatments that actively interfered with the private sector’s ability to run trials. The current restrictions have been largely imposed by the states, democrat and republican, whose governments have been some combination of ill-equipped to do anything else and insufficiently creative to come up with anything better. There is no “they” setting up a campaign to convince people that the new vaccines are the only way out. Heck, there isn’t even a “they” doing a good job of jabbing people at all — note the bizarre contrast between the number of doses shipped, the number administered, and the medical providers who have run out of doses.
If you want to look at a country with an organized vaccine campaign, try Israel. If you want to look at countries that are managing COVID effectively with minimal invasion of peoples’ freedom, look at Taiwan, New Zealand, and China. (China has taken extremely harsh measures, and their administration is not dumb. Taiwan’s measures are not particularly harsh. All of these countries have serious travel restrictions, which the US states cannot implement on their own.)
W.r.t. vitamin D I was referring to supplementation to prevent deficiency in the first place, not to administering shots as treatment to desperately try and get the levels back up once an infection reaches an advanced state.
I find any "the required dose for in vitro neutralization is too high" reasoning to be dubious for the simple reason that we are not trying to battle the virus in vitro. A good meta-analysis on ivermectin: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-148845/v1 There are also some accounts of possible successful use as prophylactic in Chiapas and India but I'm not familiar with any studies on that subject.
I don't really feel any cognitive dissonance in observing that the same TPTB (if you prefer that term to "they") which clearly strongly desires that everyone gets a jab is not necessarily all that competent at running the administration and logistics side, particularly not on the enormously compressed timescales which have characterized Operation Warp Speed.
Japan used to be included in the usual lists of "here's how it's done" countries until they had some relatively significant community spread this winter. New Zealand has been in their summer but just reported their first case of community spread in months as their autumn gets underway -- being an easily isolated island I imagine they might have more success keeping things under control, but if Covid goes endemic I don't expect lockdowns to halt it in its tracks there any better than they have in the US or Europe. I don't buy China's numbers given that they have laughably reported a single Covid-19 death for a country of 1.4B people in the last 8 months, and find including them on a list characterized by "minimal invasion of peoples' freedom" bizarre.
A good place to start to reduce the number of infections would be to work out a proper test. With PCR tests you can modify the number of cycles to fit your goals, from "serious pandemic" to "we are almost case free" within days. Also it seems like these tests test positive for people who have been infected months ago, so it's more than likely to pile up the numbers of cases even though most of those aren't really active anymore.
> And while I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to get the vaccine, one thing that will make me much more likely to fall into the "refuse" camp is if they decide to impose some kind of restrictions on basic freedoms and make travel or attending concerts contingent on getting a vaccine.
Ding ding ding, I’m already refusing in solidarity with anyone else who wants to refuse for whatever crackpot reason they like. The system pushing the vaccine is far too corrupt, and the bullying is already far too aggressive, to justify any other position. But it is still a tough decision, because the expected risk of war and fascism is pretty fucking hard to calculate.
By the way in a vacuum I like both MRNA vaccines and nuclear fission, despite the risks.
Perhaps if you encourage them to think of it as something other than a creepy, fascist, disgraceful fiasco, they might be more inclined to think rationally about it?
So no. The concept of defeating COVID by relying on a "natural herd immunity" is a bad idea on all fronts.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...