Start with the servers.
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I think you misread @anon29537550. He was explaining (defining) the term “endemic.” That’s not at all his attitude. He is fighting at the front lines against this pandemic. He is not going silent into an endemic.
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Somehow I missed this post. I do try hard to keep up with this thread, at least, but I do miss a few. No, not my attitude at all, as my way-too-many posts here should testify. I am way to ornery to go down quietly.
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Either I misread you as well, or you also think ‘endemic’ is something bad?
To stress my point: we will reach endemic status of SARS-CoV-2 anyway. The question for everyone is: do you want to get infected without being vaccinated?
Doc’s arguments above are in the same line when he tries to convince parents to get their children vaccinated.
I’m just here to stress the point that SARS-CoV-2 becoming endemic is a given. And that this does not mean that we give up fighting the pandemic. Au contraire, as we say in French. That is why I think this is not semantics. We have to accept that SARS-CoV-2 becomes endemic, like the other human Coronaviruses - but we need to fight ideas related to the stupid that ‘natural herd immunity’ is the way to get there.
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I will disagree with you here. For a disease like Covid, endemic is bad. And we have had a number of previously endemic illnesses made not so, including smallpox (the only one actually eliminated), polio, measles, diphtheria and mumps. None of these are endemic in the US or Europe (mostly) at this time, even if there are occasional imported outbreaks. All have been managed via vaccination. Natural herd immunity is not a thing, and never has been. It is not a given that Sars-cov-2 becomes endemic, and accepting this allows the naysayers to throw up their hands and walk away from vaccination as useless.
Not sure what you mean by this? Vaccination is the only hope of preventing covid from becoming endemic, and yes, it is possible. Depending on what long covid turns out to be (reminder that we have no idea what “long” means yet in this context), I think there is very strong motivation to make this happen. I do not accept that we will just have to learn to live with this bastard.
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The decrease for both Black Americans and Hispanic Americans was even worse: three years.
No surprise there.
Hispanic Americans have longer life expectancy than white or Black Americans, but had the largest decline in 2020. The three-year drop was the largest since the CDC started tracking Hispanic life expectancy 15 years ago.
TIL!
due mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which health officials said is responsible for close to 74% of the overall life expectancy decline
Killers other than COVID-19 played a role. Drug overdoses pushed life expectancy down, particularly for whites. And rising homicides were a small but significant reason for the decline for Black Americans, said Elizabeth Arias, the report’s lead author.
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Was that new Cordless Bungie Jump ride sold out through the end of the month or something?
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Vaccine uptake here is beginning to stall as younger people appear to be less likely to take up the offer:
With 73% of the population, and 90% of the adult population (Under 18s still not being offered the vaccine unless they’re in a high risk group, unfortunately.) having been given their first dose, the momentum of the vaccination programme here is falling, with low numbers now coming forward for their first dose. The causes are more complex than the article states- it isn’t all due to apathy or not wanting the vaccine. It’s also due to:
- We’ve just had a fairly large outbreak of delta variant cases, concentrated mainly in young people, and you have to wait four weeks after recovering from covid to be vaccinated, so there are a bunch of people who need to wait for now.
- Younger people are more likely to not be registered with a GP, which makes it more difficult to get appointment information otut to them
- Younger people are also more likely to have moved address frequently, which can make it even harder to reach them with a suitable appointment.
- They’re also more likely to be in precarious, part time employment and be unable to make set appointments at short notice- though to be fair, the NHS has been introducing drop in vaccination centres to make it more convenient to get the vaccine.
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We don’t have to accept it going endemic at a high rate of morbidity and mortality, which is the current state.
That’s the point.
And, as Doc writes above, we don’t have to accept COVID becoming endemic. It gets more difficult every day, but if we can pull people together to fight it, it is possible to effectively eliminate it.
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Deeply immoral, reckless and unethical. Boris in a nutshell.
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Can we get DeSantis to test it?
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Think of all those old school company pensions that can finally end, and less to pay out on Social Security and other plans! /s
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Um. I am not in the best condition to argue right now, but I’m concerned that we misunderstanding each other.
To explain why I think that it is inevitable that SARS-CoV-2 is going to become endemic, I’ll go through what currently is the state of knowledge.
The virus is spread worldwide. It also has already evolved several variants which are highly contagious, apparently with a high R0 in immuno-naive (sub-)populations. We recently have seen the Netherlands reaching an Rt of 3!
The virus may have an animal reservoir (likely in bats) in it’s wild type, and it also seems to be able to jump into carnivorous animal populations in it’s current human pathogenic form.
Vaccines do not completely block transmission, sterile immunity is not available.
Also, immunity wanes, it isn’t life-long.
Additionally, the virus evolves to a certain extent to escape the immune response.
However, finally, vaccination does prevent severe cases of Covid-19 to a very high degree.
So, we can controll the lllness. But I can safely state it is a given that yes, this virus is going to become endemic at some point.
You explained how you are trying to convince people, especially parents, to get themselves / their kids vaccinated.
I tell my colleagues, friends and family this:
Either you get vaccinated. Or you are getting infected.
Getting infected may kill you. Vaccination reduces this risk of a severe case with a very high confidence, and reduces the risk of dying from it to a very low level.
It also reduces your risk to get infected by the virus. Vaccines have some side effects, but even more severe ones are much, much rarer than severe Covid-19 cases and all are treatable.
So, which branch of this particular case study are you on? How do you calculate your own risk?
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https://www.yahoo.com/gma/texas-hospital-reports-1st-case-183000620.html
“[Infections are] on the increase. How many more cases are we going to get?” Long said. “We’re going to need more folks to get vaccinated and folks who aren’t vaccinated in particular to practice all the safe practices that we learned through the pandemic to help slow the spread of COVID. All those are critically important to keep this delta wave under control.”
At the moment, 51% of Texas’ state population aged 12 and up is fully vaccinated, according to state data.
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