I have this bad feeling about those new strains that popped up, but then again I don’t expect good things to happed anymore.
Follow up: Who will get to go back to normal first, and who will never get to go back to normal?
Which communities will Covid become endemic to? Which children will grow up to have "normal" biopsychosocial development and career trajectories? Who will go back to housing and who won't? Where will re-open entirely and where will have rolling shutdowns? What will our world look like 1 year after? Will there be unrest and even revolution; what will our world look like in 5?
Covid isn't just a disruption of life, it's a crisis in the Gramscian sense, it is a complete break from the past. To quote Zizek misquoting Gramsci, "the old world is dying, the new struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."
Not liking the italics on that “if.” Think antivaxxers are gonna be that a big a problem? I mean, bigger than they already are?
With the new variants, you need something like 80% of the population vaccinated. Only half of the adults in the US say they plan to get the vaccine. I also remember reading the amount of actual anti vax people in the US is like 10%; though I suspect it has grown since then. So yeah, it could actually be a real problem (though acquired immunity for those having been infected helps).
Does that number give a distinction between those who say they won't get the vaccine and those who say they won't until they know it's safe and effective (now granted, I'm sure some people in that group are just anti-vaxxers who realize that it won't make them any friends, but still).
It doesn't, which is why I mentioned the rough number of actual anti-vax people as well.
Basically you’d need to reset the timer on vaccine production every time a variant effectively escaped all known vaccines
That is not how it works.
Moderna submitted it for testing like a week ago, I'm not sure what you mean by it being an example. Same thing will happen with other companies too if they want to stay in the game. The escape variant mutations aren't nearly the main danger for people right now, it's gonna be some time before that happens. I'm not sure what "enough" means to you, but the surge whether we're talking US or globally is generally subsiding. The one thing that is kind of worrying is India (although it is pretty low right now) and Brazil but beyond that this wave is ending. This gives time. There is a large shift in resource allocation happening right now and it's not going as well as they pretended it would but it's happening. I want to see how well the production schedule of Johnson and Johnson is gonna go since that's a single dose vaccine and that helps.
The point about the surge subsiding has to do with the rate of mutations and the available time for vaccine rollout.
Again you're talking about it as if the rate of vaccine production and rollout doesn't change at all compared to the first time they came out which is just not the case. To go from not producing something at all to producing a modified version of it and to go from not distributing something to distributing a slightly different thing are not the same. Especially with mRNA vaccines, these have never again been mass produced and production as well as distribution is still ramping up globally. If people can receive a new flu vaccine every year, there is no reason why the same and better can't happen with COVID, where there's like 100x the pressure for that. The main concern is countries which can't afford to vaccinate many people. Although at least these countries are on average at least handling it less catastrophically than Europe and the US.
The variants were known and sequenced in December. They announced work on it in January. They are testing now. That is 3 months lag time already and testing isn’t done. This is all in the context of variants against which current mRNA vaccines, like Moderna’s, are still pretty effective.
You're talking as if variants don't have lag time for spreading themselves. Also it was closer to 2 months, the month just started.
Why are you acting like a reddit master debater lol it is perfectly relevant, you were wondering why I mentioned the surge subsiding so I told you why.
Pretty normal here in Australia for the most part, no fucking idea how that happened
Japan, TERF Island didn't manage to do the same. The tactics counts a lot more imo than geography.
Much more so than being an island, the fact that most of the eight states and territories instituted domestic border closures was pretty significant and made contact tracing viable.
Even internally within states, there were hard borders for some major cities and regional areas with larger numbers of vulnerable First Nations people.
Handing the UK a detention slip that simply says "inappropriate use of oceans"
You all laughed about us boasting about being "Girt by Sea", well who's laughing now?
Yeah you're right, the only reason the US has issues with covid is because Mexicans and Canadians keep crossing the border and spreading it
Or Mexico and Canada are in worse shape covid-wise as a result of their shared border with America
Of course they could have restricted entry and forced all entrants to quarantine but that would be too effective
It was a near run thing, but from what I hear, half the Senior Federal and State Civil Service threatened to resign if the Liberals didn't get with the program. Dictator Dan also did a good job shutting down the Melbourne outbreak hard, though he could have moved faster. Bullying works.
I don't have any factual knowledge to share with you, but I just wanted to say that you should keep in mind that people everywhere online (including here) like to be massive doomers and say things like "things will never go back to normal" or "we'll be wearing masks forever" even when there is often zero evidence to support such claims. Don't believe random shit you read, and don't let the doomerism get to ya comrade. o7
Wearing a mask when I have to go to the grocery store makes it much more bearable for some reason.
I honestly think this is a strawman while the rate of deaths is continuing to increase at rates never before seen - yes, vaccines are on the way, yes we will be out of this some time in 2021. But the only people I'm seeing who are arguing against "we will never be back to normal" seem to be arguing in bad faith, tbh. Shit is literally still accelerating and we have people who are pretending everything is sunshine and rainbows. It's not, and it won't be until some time in ~summer or fall based on the current data.
400,000 deaths was January 19. 500,000 deaths was about a week ago. Last I checked, we're at about 515,000. Don't call me a doomer for reporting on the facts.
I think this line of argument is extremely counterproductive.
It's a tough question to answer because at the rate we're going, we're going to get really close to herd immunity by the summer but then just kind of hover in that really close range for a while. Forget the doomerism over vaccine rollouts, that's largely been fixed and shots are getting into arms at a pretty solid clip right now to the point where you'll have like, 40% of the population vaccinated by May or June and 60% of the population vaccinated by the fall. Forget the variant doomerism, too. The fact is that the vaccine provides enough protection against the "vaccine resistant" variants. The variants are "vaccine resistant" the same way that a Kevlar vest makes you bullet resistant. If you get shot enough times with a vest on, you still die. The vaccine rollout has been fine, and the variants aren't going to beat the vaccine (though they will make what's left of the pandemic much deadlier). And even if they did, we can modify the vaccine to handle mutants.
And since we're vaccinating the highest-risk people (elderly) and those who transmit the virus the most (essential workers, by nature of their jobs) first, that can absolutely kill outbreaks. New infections and deaths will probably be 10% of what they are now by the summer and 10% of that by the fall. But you need more than 60% of the population immune for herd immunity, and that's where things get dicey. There are experts who put the herd immunity threshold at 70%, but I've seen estimates as low as 60% and as high as 90%.
25% of the population can't get the vaccine because it's not approved for kids. That means, right there, we can't get above 75% immunity even if everyone took the vaccine. And vaccine hesitancy is then your next-biggest problem. If 10-15% of the population refuses the vaccine, then bam. That's enough to make it impossible to crush the virus entirely.
But "normal" is as much as question of our political will as much as it is actually beating the virus. What do you do in a world where, say, 10 or 20 people a day die to COVID and most people are immune? That daily death count is fewer than the number of people who die on highways, and we don't shut those down. It's less than the number of people who die from the flu, and we don't shut down for that. Do you still have masks and distancing? Maybe, at least in places where localized outbreaks happen. Do you still have lockdowns? Probably not, but you might have the occasional short quarantine.
And even if they did, we can modify the vaccine to handle mutants.
Senator Kelly instensifies
Really though, thanks for that input. My supply of thoughtful, levelheaded optimism has run low and that’s what I needed today.
I think that wearing masks and staying a few feet distance from strangers as a courtesy is here to stay for a couple years.
As far as being able to see friends and going out to have fun and feeling safe doing so, I honestly think that’s a real possibility by fall, easily.
People are being vaccinated fairly quickly, and although many people have said they won’t get the vaccine, I tend to be optimistic in my thinking. Many of those same people will get it done once they see people around them having it done and being fine. Just my two cents
The pandemics will not stop until global warming/"climate change" ends
I might be pessimistic but I think it will be like the flu, lingering and adapting to vaccines constantly but not enough that lockdowns happen. We’re not going completely back to normal
I don't see why it should be all year. There isn't much specific to flu that makes it come in seasons that covid doesn't. The more people have been immunised even with a weakened immunity by vaccines or having been sick the more resistance covid will find each time it comes. The trick is to make sure the mutations are kept in check and new vaccines come.
How do you define normal? Being able to go out to bars or festivals? International travel? Big festivals with an international audience?
I've heard that herd immunity will happen will around 70% of the population is vaccinated (this is for the USA). According to the NYT that is likely to be in late September. I've kind of been thinking that maybe we would permitted low scale halloween parties/ would feel actually safe based on science to have them even if it's permitted by then.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine-doses.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
I think we're going to be back to "normal" sooner than many people here seem to think. Vaccine distribution in the global north will be faster than in the global south so depending on where people live it will occur in different time frames. I don't think we'll ever reach a point where semi-lockdowns and no gatherings is considered normal, humanity has encountered epidemic diseases before and while they seem to be all encompassing and society altering in the midst of it, society at large will return to its previous state within a few years. You will see some changes as a result from this, for example after the plague labour was in much higher demand and shorter supply which altered the serfdom/worker system in Western Europe. But we won't be seeing a change where bars/clubs/other gatherings are completely closed forever, because it's unfavourable for both the average person and the government/capitalists.
Things will have gone back to normal in a given country once the government there has both created and abolished a vaccine passport system, but not during. Please do not use a vaccine passport if possible.
Probably as soon as vaccination gets at 60%-ish, if you live in the US, I expect that to be somewhere around June, though I also expect people will wear masks regularly from now on and you will have to take a covid vaccine yearly or whatever, I think measures are going to get lifted bit by bit, seeing if there are negative impacts with each restriction lifted, until stuff is back to normal (so don't expect like a huge triumphal "we got 'em" moment). Covid will stay with us forever, but it won't have the same impact against a vaccinated population as it does against an inmunologically naive population, even accounting for strains, nobody vaccinated has been hospitalized for covid so far (that's great news). I assure hardly anyone will talk about covid by mid 2022, and by 2025 it'll feel distant, like this was a different era.
If you're outside any of the vaccine production centers though (US, UK, China to an extent), probably somewhere between autumn 2021 and spring 2022, maybe 2023 if your country is in a particularly bad spot.
