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Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

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Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#231

Post by [deleted] »

mistersquid wrote: post #91
015a wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States has administered 2.3 million vaccination doses. Oh, lol no, not cumulatively. I mean Yesterday. We administered 2.3 million doses in about 14 daytime hours on March 12th. Naturally, the number of vaccinated individuals grows every day. That's what vaccinations do. But the number of doses we are administering every day is growing every day. One week ago, on March 8th, we administered about 2.05 milli…

> the US was hard-hit, but the US will be one of the first countries back to normalcy, and the rest of the world will quickly follow. Though I very much like this optimistic take, this is a bit revisionist. Specifically, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and a few others (including parts of mainland China) have already returned to “normalcy” in that their economies are growing and…

[deleted]

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#233

Post by refurb »

labster wrote: post #220
refurb wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly could have “closed” the border but how effective would it have been? How many road cross into CA? How many open fields? You’d need an army of hundreds of thousands to ensure nobody crosses.

Not very many roads enter California, as it has natural geological borders. An ocean to the west, hilly forest to the north. On the east, a 3 km high mountain range which leads into a hot desert, cut by the mighty Colorado. The terrain is a lot more forgiving to the south, but there’s an artificial border with Baja California there. Plus, most of the infrastructure is there for the agricultural inspection stations. J…

Logically that makes sense but we can't even seem to secure our southern border with Mexico.

And interestingly there are only 16 agricultural stations for all of California. They are only in place at major highways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_S...

And if I kind of zoom into Google maps I count 36 crossing between the Oregon/California border just between the Pacific ocean and I-5. Sure, a lot of those are probably logging roads and such, but that's just a 60 mile stretch.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#234

Post by ern »

cfn wrote: post #228
de6u99er wrote: post #112

A globally coordinated approach, similar to NZ's approach could have ended the oandemic already a year ago. Thanks to COVID-19 fatigue amongst the population, such an effort very close to impossible.

I live in the Azores on an island with less than 15k people which was mostly closed last year. There are only two ways to enter the island: the port and the airport there isn't a lot of movement and everyone coming in is tested twice. On top of that people here are terrified of the virus and take it very seriously (masks, distancing, etc) and can even be hostile to newcomers. Still, cases keep popping up even without…

I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable

New Zealand (and Australia) don't have cases, because every single traveler who enters those island nations is kept in hotel quarantine, and tested multiple times before being released only after the quarantine period ends. It isn't the same as testing people when they come in and letting them straight into the community if they test negative.

That said, with vaccines now being rolled out, it may well be that these countries managed to dodge the bullet. It's hard to see what was "inevitable" about Covid, except the dogma (still promoted by the WHO, when I last checked) that travel bans are bad.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#235

Post by sgt101 »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #195
onetimemanytime wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only chance for lockdowns was in China, early on. Being a country with virtually unlimited money, manpower and an authoritarian regime Covid could have died in there. Quarantine enforced by millions of soldiers and police. Once out, you're dealing with about 200 countries divided in tens of thousands of localities and hundreds of thousands of politicians with their own goals and beliefs. So, not doable.

That's impossible. China is not North Korea. All it takes is just 1 asymptomatic infected person to leave the country - perhaps 1 hour before the hypothetical country-wide lockdown - for the virus to spread. No, it's even worse than that. Signs of covid have been found in Europe dating back to October 2019, before anyone in China knew that this existed. Besides, western countries didn't take the virus seriously in th…

>Signs of covid have been found in Europe dating back to October 2019

I've always been skeptical of this; test enough samples and you will get positives. More careful and systematic analysis is required on this one.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#236

Post by makomk »

tshaddox wrote: post #188
Method-X wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Zealand is an island nation, which gives it a pretty significant advantage when it comes to controlling pandemics.

Hence a global approach similar to New Zealand’s. The globe has similar advantages to New Zealand when it comes to controlling pandemics.

Not really. There are two basically insurmountable problems with taking New Zealand's success and expanding it to the entire globe. Firstly, the effectiveness of this is limited by wherever it works the least well. Secondly, even if everywhere could implement the same measures as New Zealand as well as they did, over that large a scale there would be places which had much worse success just through random chance alone. You can see a few places where New Zealand got lucky already, like the recent outbreak of unknown origin not spreading as widely as it might've or the infections amongst border workers back when they weren't being widely tested. You can also see this in Australia, which is similar geographically but bigger and has taken many similar measures with slightly worse results. Scale up three orders of magnitude, and I've no doubt fun new failure modes will appear which aren't even visible yet.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#237

Post by jokteur »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #202
kikokikokiko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing an island nation of 5 million people, that can effectively close it's borders and "avoid" new focuses of infection, to countries of 100+ million of people, where the difficulties of border closing are effectively unsurmountable, is extremely disingenuous. The whole approach governments took in facing this pandemic needs to be studied in the next decades. It's an eye opening thing to see how viruses spread p…

well vietnam also did extremely well. and new zealands managed isolation (which i just went through) could easily be replicated anywhere there are hotels

In my country of 8 millions (Switzerland), about 340'000 people commute to Switzerland each day to work [1]. These people come from Italy, France, Germany and a bit from Austria. A lot of these people do important work, such as working in hospitals, administration, services, ...

Locking down the borders completely would just have been impossible. You would be suddendly in need of nurses and doctors. Sometimes, more than 50% of the personal in bordering hospitals are cross-border commuters [2]. Yes, you could discuss on how Switzerland is taking advantage of "cheap" labor from neighboring countries, but it does not change the fact that for Switzerland, closing completely the borders (with 14 days isolation) is just an impossible task.

[1] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/... [2] https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/fran%C3%A7ais-et-italiens-dans-...

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#238

Post by nickthemagicman »

de6u99er wrote: post #112

A globally coordinated approach, similar to NZ's approach could have ended the oandemic already a year ago. Thanks to COVID-19 fatigue amongst the population, such an effort very close to impossible.

Good luck paying for 6 billion people to stay at home.

That's not how our global economy works.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#239

Post by nickthemagicman »

silisili wrote: post #140

Perhaps unpopular opinion, but the US vaccination system is about the worst when it comes to preventing spread. Instead, it seems to be attempting to prevent death. I've always argued that preventing spread would as a byproduct prevent death, but I'm obviously not studied in the field. Put shortly, I would have vaccinated college kids and working age folks first. They are not likely to die from it, but are far more l…

People who can safely get the virus and not die meanwhile developing immunity? What a waste of a vaccine.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#240

Post by saiya-jin »

ern wrote: post #234
cfn wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the Azores on an island with less than 15k people which was mostly closed last year. There are only two ways to enter the island: the port and the airport there isn't a lot of movement and everyone coming in is tested twice. On top of that people here are terrified of the virus and take it very seriously (masks, distancing, etc) and can even be hostile to newcomers. Still, cases keep popping up even without…

I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable New Zealand (and Australia) don't have cases, because every single traveler who enters those island nations is kept in hotel quarantine, and tested multiple times before being released only after the quarantine period ends. It isn't the same as testing people when they come in and letting them straight into the community if they test negative. Th…

This is enforceable in remote island countries, but in ie Europe its not. You can't 100% lock the borders, there would be shortages of basically everything, from food to materials used in all industries. Europe is not so unified as US for example, there is a lot of independence, for better or worse. Food is transported on trucks, till it reaches from Spain say Poland it crosses minimum of 4-5 countries, each with their own covid situation, laws, rules, bans etc.

If we knew back a year ago how bad things would get and are still getting, I believe such a lockdown for say a month could pass, otherwise not and there isn't a central authority that could enforce it. And saying it was to be expected doesn't make much sense, spread of predicted outcomes was basically between yet another flu to another spanish flu.

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