does anyone have recent excess death statistics, most local areas say something like 500 cases. like i see thousands of people running around at pride with no masks.... i feel like people are insane
does anyone have recent excess death statistics, most local areas say something like 500 cases. like i see thousands of people running around at pride with no masks.... i feel like people are insane
95-98% of new cases are among the unvaccinated, which is 30-50% of a given region.
It's not over for that group, though rates are down more than proportionally, likely due to the protective effect of the vaccinated. And that 2-5% is still vulnerable and is going to be constantly put at greater risk of new variants so long as infection rates are high and travel is not restricted.
Culturally, the system has given up and the population wants to believe it's all over, having received signals from the system that everything will reopen and be "normal" now or very soon. Those suggesting caution will now be a slim minority: those rejecting the cynical incompetence of institutional recommendations and that aren't anti-maskers, which is to say, basically just a subset of leftists, i.e. a percent at best.
Only a horrific new variant would jostle the public out of this, imo. Fingers crossed that won't happen.
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I wonder if the variants will only get slowly worse. It won't be a terrible variant all the sudden but just a slow degredation of the vaccines effectiveness as new variants slowly evolve.
It's very hard to predict. The only certainty is that high infection rates dramatically increase the chances of escape variants.
Yeah, I think boosters will help initially, but after a while people will get tired of those too and we'll have another 2020.
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The delta variant already did this.
There is a strong selective pressure to escape the vaccines, it's just a matter of how large the space of functional escape mutations is and how quickly it can be explored. That space is of unknown size, but the speed at which it can be explored is directly proportional to population size, i.e. infection rates. In addition, the larger the population, the more likely that slightly deleterious mutations will survive long enough for a new optimum to be reached in subsequent mutations.
If every country had followed China's example, we'd at least have a low rate of new allele generation, possibly even eradicated it by now. Instead, we're playing with fire.
Source: took virology and lots of pop gen.
Good points. Yeah I'm definitely no biologist but that makes a lot of sense