The goal posts do keep moving, because vaccination uptake is slow, people keep arguing against public health measures, and while we waste time delaying measures or implementing half baked measures, the virus evolves.
The goalposts move because the experts were wrong.
Today is your lucky day, it’s your chance to enlighten me: what were the experts wrong about?
- driving R-value below 1 will cause Covid to extinguish itself
- vaccine will prevent infection
- vaccinated can get infected but don’t really infect others
A simple google search about those points also reveal optimistic opinions by various people and not one instance where experts claim so.
The CDC said that the vaccinated can only “rarely” infect others.
And before you say “but Delta!”, Delta was already dominant around the time of the statement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/health/cdc-vaccinated-del...
You seem to be trying to squirm out of your earlier statement.
As for the rest, you’re taking ideas that have some truth to them, and probably misinterpreting what these things actually mean and taking them unreasonably far or to the extreme:
- Herd immunity is a thing, but I'm not sure how you imagine it in your head, or what you think that means.
- Vaccines do prevent infections, but not perfectly well. This (or the contrary) has been communicated to the public in very confusing ways.
- It is true that vaccinated people have a lower likelihood of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others. I'm not sure if you think that means it should be perfect, but biology is messy.
Yes, those things are infectious disease concepts and they were touted as to how COVID will be dealt with.
Lots of talk of “once we get to 80% vaccination rate we’ll hit here immunity”. You don’t hear that any more huh?
“If we drive R below 1 we can extinguish Covid”. Now it’s “Covid is endemic, it’s not going away”.
“Once everyone is vaccinated, Covid goes away”, then “It really rare for the vaccinated to get Covid” to “holy shit, most new cases are in fully vaccinated”.
You can honestly look at that narrative and NOT completely understand why people are not listening any more?
No, the problem is that this was communicated in imperfect ways to the public (as you said yourself), who then filled in the gaps themselves. Risk communication is complicated and the govt, the experts, and the media all failed the public here.
It literally does not matter how right you are or well you communicate something: there will always be groups of people who misinterpret what you say, don't understand what you say, or weaponize what you say for political purposes.
Rt is a measure of the real-life infectivity of a pathogen at a specific point in time, under no assumption of “normal life”, and possibly within some arbitrary geographical bounds. The purpose of Rt is not to measure the inherent infectivity of a pathogen, but rather its infectivity in a specific environment and set of circumstances: it’s the high-level metric that informs you of the combined impact of public health measures, social behaviour changes, immunity, etc, on the pathogen’s infectivity.
You can see Rt as being equal to R0 times some correction factor that accounts for everything else.
82%
> Hospitals on the verge of being overwhelmed
There's 191 people in the hospital in BC for covid right now[1]. Current preparations are for if omicron has exponential growth over the next several weeks.
[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/a6f23959a8b14bfa989...
We know there are many viruses we can manage with mass vaccination and herd immunity, such as smallpox and measles. But the important difference is those diseases don't mutate as quickly as covid. Therefore it's not a given that covid is something that can be snuffed out with the same methods. We're clearly in a position of playing catch-up and fire-fighting.
Your post implies a sentiment like: "if only we didn't half ass things, we could've beaten this virus. The problems aren't with the measures themselves, just that we didn't go far enough."
Ok, how much further should we go compared to countries that have the strictest measures? Take Australia for example, they have quarantine camps, lockdowns for the unvaccinated, advanced tracing and databases, etc.
For a while this worked pretty well. But their cases have been skyrocketing as of July this year, and it's likely a delta wave. What will omicron look like once it gets there? Would you say their measures were half-baked?
You express indignation but don't say what we should have done differently or what we should do now.
Those who share your mindset come off as having a kind of denial-ism, and an urge to point the finger.
The fact is we're not as "in-control" as we like to think. Nature is inevitable. Our technology and ability to organize is bad.
Let's recognize that an endless state of emergency also has consequences, health measures should be proportional, and for the most part we've done our best. If we can't snuff out the disease and the variants are getting milder anyway, then it's time to start thinking about moving past covid.
I would take New Zealand, Greenland, Taiwan and even China as models of most of what needed to be done. None of them did things perfectly, but they all had some of the right ideas.