The same day Tennessee reported record cases and hospitals were full, August 12th, Governor Bill Lee tweeted pictures of himself, without a mask, at the State Fair, and encouraged people to come out. A month before that a top state vaccination official was fired.
I’ve lived most of my life in Tennessee and have seen some real stupidity but we’re sinking to a whole new level.
To a whole lot of middle-men. We have for-profit health care providers. There’s often absurd administrative costs. Insurance companies are restricted to charging a percentage of the cost of the health care provided, so they have an incentive to increase the cost of health care - which they’ve done, for years.
My one hope, since the beginning of the pandemic, when it was clear that not only were a lot of people going to die and/or end up with large medical bills, but also end up with long-term debilitating conditions, was that we’d finally have a critical mass of people in this country that want serious medical reform as a result of their personally being affected.
I’ve seen studies that suggest 1/3 of American had been infected with covid by the end of 2020. (The number must have significantly increased since then, since a number of states have had their biggest peaks this year.) Add that to the 50-something percent of the country that has been vaccinated, so we’ve got over 80% of the population with some protection, which was previously thought to be the point where herd immunity would kick in… an idea which I guess we’ve now disproven. Although delta probably needs 90% of the population with real immunity, which even some vaccines don’t give, much less a previous infection.
I don’t think it’s exactly safe to add that 30% onto the 50% one to one like that. There’s probably a lot of overlap. At a guess I’ve seen that 30% number mentioned, and I’ve seen people estimating we’re right around 65-70% vaccinated + infected.
As for herd immunity, we’ve never beaten a disease by infectious herd immunity. I don’t think we’re starting now. We’ve always had to have massively high vaccination rates, and then the fuel of the disease was starved. The other way probably won’t work.
My moron antivax sister and her moron antivax family have all the himalayan salt baths and healing crystals they need, thank you very much.
At least I successfully convinced my historically antivax mother to get the shots, what for working in elder health care.
edit: All of whom are in this great Volunteer State
Meanwhile in Texas:
There was some early talk of 60-70% providing herd immunity, but that was always absurdly optimistic even with regular covid, never mind delta, and reinfections made a mockery out of the idea of achieving it without vaccines. But, yeah, there’s a reason why the whole concept of “herd immunity” only came about after the development of, and in the context of, vaccines.
Well, technically it’s probably logistic rather than exponential, but we’re still in the early part of the curve where exponential is also a decent approximation given the amount of noise in the system. The logistic model allows for the fact that the spread rate eventually has to decline as the virus runs short of uninfected people to infect. It can’t grow exponentially forever, since you can’t have more than 100% of the population infected.
If we had 50% of the population vaccinated with a PERFECT vaccine, then a decent first guess would be a logistic curve asymptotically approaching 50% of the population. Currently our vaccines aren’t perfect, so it could go beyond 50%, but they are pretty good, so it hopefully doesn’t go much above 50%. But then we do also have the probably of hospitals being overloaded and people dying from treatable diseases and injuries.
And on rereading the above I had qualms that this post sounds far too flippant given how serious the topic is. So I’ll state for clarity that flippancy is not the intent. I feel when trying to deal with something as serious as COVID19, it never hurts to learn a bit more maths. It’s good to know that a logistic curve is often a good model for spread of a disease, and that in the early stages it looks a lot like an exponential curve but it flattens out and approaches an upper limit. So I’m posting this anyway, but I won’t claim any pedant points for it, because that would be flippant.
EDITED to add:
Since the topic is now closed I can’t send a reply to Shuck’s response to this post, so I’m putting a reply here.
Shuck: I think your post is referring to the total number of infections to date. Yes - If someone has been infected and recovered, they can become infected again. Since people can be infected multiple times, the total infections to date can exceed the population. Some might say this gives an “infection rate” greater than 100%, though that’s not what we normally mean by “infection rate”.
But that’s not what this article is about. This article is saying 1 in 75 people in a particular state (which I will not attempt to spell because I’ll get it wrong) are CURRENTLY infected. The number of people infected NOW cannot exceed the population. Thus for the meaning of “infection rate” that is relevant to this thread, the infection rate cannot exceed 100%.
Except it turns out that being infected doesn’t provide great protection against re-infection, so unless people get vaccinated…
It’s also starting to turn out that , as variants happen, getting vaccinated isn’t necessarily a solution either. It offers MUCH better protection than not being vaccinated, but it’s starting to slip into areas where depending on the population and viral load of the area, an infection is inevitable.
Unfortunately I live in TN.
I manage a small production facility making explosives for the military and when I told the staff vaccines would soon be mandatory because it’s a government contract so please just go get the damn vaccine already - they all refused! Some of them even know people who have DIED OF COVID! I’m going to have to replace my entire staff because they would rather LOSE THEIR FUCKING JOBS than get vaccinated against a deadly virus!?!?
How can this be?
Yesterday my wife told me she could hear the radio of the guys down the road while they were getting up their hay. Not right-wing talk radio, just the local oldies station. The dj was saying - apropos of nothing, just in between songs - that he didn’t think COVID was “a big deal.” He said: “What you do is, you just get a 6-pack of Bud, not Bud Lite, but Bud, and drink it all in five minutes. Use a funnel.”
My familial roots are there… in a sense it’s “home” though I was too young to have remembered living there. So, while TN has a big place in my heart, when I see a phrase like “the Tennessee Department of Health” I can’t help but mutter to myself “wow, good, there still is one!”
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