https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
In the US, adults who want to be vaccinated have been vaccinated. Children aren't at significant risk. So the best approach is to drop all restrictions and accept the risk.
1. Many diseases have been considered endemic but were eradicated. Don't be a doomer.
2. The whole schtick about anyone who wants to get the vaccine can get it, so it should be a personal choice makes this common but very much mistaken assumption that a vaccinated individual is safe from harm. It just isn't so. Your personal risk is not affected only by your acquired immunity, but the acquired immunity of everyone around you. Vaccines fundamentally require a communal, cooperative endeavor to succeed.
Vaccines are highly effective at preventing deaths and I do encourage vaccination, but vaccinated people can still catch and spread the virus. They are probably less contagious on average, but unfortunately that isn't enough to control community spread.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03944-y
Acknowledging reality isn't being a doomer. Don't engage in magical thinking.
You are overstating the extent to which vaccinated individuals are likely to be infectious. But more importantly, you are ignoring the importance of the network effects involved.
For x to get to z through y, x has to infect y, and y has to infect z. If probability of infectious breaktrhough and a contact event is 20%, the probability of it getting to z from x, is .2^3 = 0.008. And yet, a 20% is really high-end estimate of that likelihood. You need to both have a breakthrough infection and be in the vicinity of others for potential transmission.
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html
Your other numbers are just made up and not worth discussing.
2. The measles is way more contagious. It's dreadful for you to simply ignore that when it matters so much to the calculations.
I think this study tries to address this. But haven't had time to read through
https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/reac...
Name two (and also, how long did it take for each one? Is that a reasonable amount of time to wait?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_dise...
> Eradication is the reduction of an infectious disease's prevalence in the global host population to zero.[1]
> Two infectious diseases have successfully been eradicated: smallpox in humans and rinderpest in ruminants.
There is exactly one disease that has been eradicated in humans: smallpox, which took somewhere between 19 years and 27 years depending on when you consider the eradication effort to have started in earnest. We've gotten close with polio (after 40 years) and guinea worm (37 years). There are also a bunch of other diseases on that list where elimination efforts are in progress, but have not yet been completed.
Regardless, "eliminate COVID", should we decide to go down that path, is going to be a multi-decade project at best. It's also likely to be much harder than eradicating smallpox given the asymptomatic transmission and animal reservoirs. It might still be worth doing, in the same way that our eradication effort for measles is worth doing, but it's not worth holding up anything important until the effort completes considering that "until the effort completes" is likely to be a couple generations at the earliest.
The point I was responding to was this idea that we should just settle for covid being endemic. So I'm really not sure why you are going on at about semantics.
My point is it will not be just a few months. It will be decades. Even in the case of measles, it took almost 10 years to get from 250,000 cases / year in the Americas to 100, and we're starting from a lot more than 250,000 cases a year in the Americas this time.
If the alternative is 10 or 20 more years of restrictions, I think "settle for covid being endemic for now, with vaccines available for anyone who wants them, and maybe push eradication at a later date when most everyone has either natural or vaccine immunity and that job is easier" is in fact a better solution.
We have these "rules" to play by: Vaccines don't stop transmission, vaccines majorly help prevent major complications, kids at zero risk, overwhelming majority of adults at zero risk, unvaccinated people are unlikely to convert for whatever reason (political, fear, friends won't, etc), and natural immunity after infection is very helpful.
If given these "rules" - aka reality - what would you do? The dumb people are like, "Durrr, we need more vaccinated people, those evil bastards they are" even though it blatantly ignores reality and will therefore accomplish nothing, besides being an illogical fear since they're protected anyhow. But if you just accept this is how reality is, there's no other logical option but to drop restrictions and move on. It's a relief that at least a couple countries in Scandinavia are normal enough to recognize this. We're too stupid, too broken with fear.