From Canada? Want to go to the U.S.A.? Better have the right vaccine

Not a real option now, since most countries aren’t buffet-style vaccinating like the US, but it’s a good idea to have in pocket for early next year when the boosters are more available and one I hadn’t thought of.

You wouldn’t be able to travel to Japan at the moment - they only recognise fully vaccinated if both doses were adminstered in the same country. I wonder how other countries that are looking to use the International Vaccine certificate are going to address people in your situation.

1 Like

Is that bad news though? I’m not in the UK, and don’t have a feel for the other aspects. But the plan with every sane vaccination policy is a) eradication via herd immunity (which has only ever been achieved with vaccines, just to be clear), or b) prepare people’s immune systems to the point where the disease isn’t a mass killer. The people I trust (doctors, public health researchers who are obviously not rich, etc) say that eradication of Delta isn’t currently an option. It’s too contagious.

The UK charts show lots of cases but not a lot of deaths, which is a “plan b” success. A longer-term view shows past case peaks and the death rate. This latest wave is still bad, and also 10 times better (in a “fewer people suffering and dying” sense).

This is a very different case to the US, where the unvaccinated vulnerable population is big enough that the effects are devastating. By the numbers in the US: it’s the same virus as the UK but a completely different public health situation. The US equivalent of the UK chart above shows that the current US outbreak is following the same case-fatality curves are previous outbreaks, which is heart-breaking.

Like I said: I’m not in the UK, and it’s likely I’m missing some nuance the data isn’t showing.

ETA: I am no fan of the current UK gov’t. And I’d really really prefer nobody dying of Covid. My point is that the words “confirmed case of Covid” have a different meaning in the UK than they do in the US.

It’s still not “good” in the UK: depending whose numbers you’re using, Covid still has a case-fatality rate around 0.2% for the vaccinated. The vaccines have rendered it about as deadly as a worse-than-usual seasonal flu (which is pretty bad).

The graphs above also don’t answer whether the UK hospital system coping. (we already know the answer for the US system in covid-hit regions).

As I understand it that is largely a response to how poorly the vaccine roll out is going. Between the high refusal rates in certain countries, and access problems in so many others it isn’t feasible. Particularly with the vaccines being less effective against Delta.

I’m not really sure how feasible an idea it was to begin with, nor whether it was ever an explicit goal. We’ve only ever eradicated Smallpox globally, and it took decades to do so. There have been some regional eradications, but that tends to be fairly short lived. Particularly anything that has animal reservoirs. And Covid has plenty of those. Dogs, cats, white tailed deer.

1 Like

It looks like there’s a couple other factors, the first being that testing company failure which resulted in over 40k false-negatives being sent out. The second is that a sub-variant of Delta appears to be steadily increasing in share of confirmed cases, it’s believed this sub-variant is even more transmissible than Delta itself.

You can see the area most hit by the false-negatives (South-West England) run away with actual cases.

As much as the UK government has screwed up their response (worst raw cases and deaths figures in Europe), the sheer volume of testing and genomic sequencing of those tests that labs in the UK have been performing has worked as an amazing resource for researchers and policy makers across the globe.
Sadly, it gives me a feeling of experiencing 28 Weeks Later in real-time.

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.