This thing isn't over before vaccine availability isn't production-limited anymore.
The real mistake that the EU made was to not realize early on that vaccine production was going to be a huge issue in 2021, and make fixing that a priority.
And the first 15-20% or so of vaccines administered are CRITICAL. In true pareto principle, 80% of hospitalizations come from 20% of the population.
I'm in Belgium. We are facing a third wave. We're going back into lockdown pretty soon (it's almost certain). With just 400k more vaccines administered, we would not be in this mess.
400k. The US vaccinates 3 million every day.
Besides 20-40 range, also people that work at grocery stores, which are always open and can spread COVID. Elderly stay at homes have less contacts with other etc.
There was a preprint regarding that in the US, but everyone focuses on deaths and doesn't think of causes.
The US has like 30x as many people as Belgium. A better comparison would be Ohio, which has about the population of Belgium and is administering ~90k doses per day, which is sorta like vaccinating ~60k people a day (based off a guess that ~15k doses are the one dose J&J vaccine).
I agree that prioritizing the most vulnerable, regardless of nationality is the morally better choice.
Zero sum, it is not.
At 10%, there's still an endless number of old people left unvaccinated, and if you infect a large percentage of mid aged people, that alone is easily enough to wreck your health system.
If you chose not to do a lockdown in the third wave because "older people are already vaccinated" that would just mean that your hospitals would fill up with younger people instead, since total number infected would be much higher than ever before.
If you vaccinate the old, hospitals don't just "fill up" with the young. There are just straight up less hospitalizations. The virus still spreads but the percentage of severe cases go way down. Which need i remind you is the reason why we do lockdowns at all: because without them, hospitals are overrun and there is a risk of a healthcare system collapse.
The aim of the lockdown was never to eradicate the virus. It was to keep the healthcare system working.
That is exactly what would happen if you let the pandemic roll at R > 1. People aged 40-60 are about a third as likely to get hospitalised as people 60-80. So if you triple the amount of cases in a population while having zero cases in the old age bracket, your hospitals will be just as full.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
Models (for BE) point to this current wave being the mildest one yet, with a peak well below the previous two. And remember the population has more and more immunity built up over time regardless of vaccines. Getting to triple the cases we had at the peak of the previous ones is not really in the cards.
You claimed we wouldn't need a lockdown if we had vaccinated twice as many people, which is just incorrect, for the reasons outlined above: we're still left with vast parts of the population with no immunity, enough of whom would be hospitalized to oversaturate hospitals.
Edit: just looked it up, and Belgium has already doubled compared to one month ago, and is at double the rate that Germany currently has.
@houterkabouter's models have been excellent since the beginning so this is definitely where I'd place the most weight. The situation in Belgium is different from Germany because the day-to-day measures have been different since October.
Virus mutates and if it can't infect elderly it will infect younger and does.
Median age of hospitalized people is getting lower and we will soon see that vaccinating elderly wasn't the best choice (they don't spread COVID that much - don't take part in waves, are just victims to those).
And median age of hospitalizations going down is a good thing lol. It means the vaccines are doing their job. Look at death rates and instances of severe illness per infection, those should be going down as well: the disease is less harmful if its highest risk groups are vaccinated.
(Are people here really having this hard of a time with basic statistics?)
No, no one is disagreeing with the narrow point you're making that protecting the oldest leads to fewer bad outcomes given equal numbers of infections.
But that's just one part of the story. In most of the EU, most people have not yet been exposed, so the pandemic will need to be ended by vaccination.
The situation now is treacherous, since it may initially seem like hospitalizations don't track infections like they used to. But if the conclusion from that is to just open up, nothing will be gained.
This is clearly borne out by both complex models and back of the envelope calculations.
And that's ignoring that there are health issues other than death to consider...
Number of hospitalized young people is higher than it was in Autumn (with similar number of infections). Number of elderly obviously is smaller (because vaccinations).
Besides hospitalizations of younger population, their outcome is also worse - ratio of severe illness to mild is higher than it was before.
This is a trade-off, who should live, or how miserable the life of those that survive will be.
A children (< 18 year olds) wards in hospitals in second larges city are full (number of released patients = newly added). Yes, children - those that wre mostly asymptomatic stopped being asymptomatic.