When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - other than to flatten the curve and relieve the burden on services. But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?
> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it
No, it means that it tends to be maintained at some (whether very high or very low or other) stable baseline level in a region in the absence of external inputs or interventions.
> Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless
No, it doesn't, and wouldn't even if “endemic” did mean everyone would get it, since the control measures are not intended to prevent people from eventually getting COVID in the absence of a fundamental change in available countermeasures, but to reduce the speed of particular outbreaks and mitigate acute impacts to health systems (which affects ability to treat anyone needing the system) from caseload and to other essential social services from temporary incapacitation of key staff.
> But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now
Rarely for more than a couple weeks in a row, on a local basis, in response to particular sharp outbreaks, and invariably with much weaker measures than were taken for the same purpose earlier on in the pandemic, despite outbreaks that are much worse by every measure (in part, because the ultimate goal is much more limited and temporary, and in part because the political faction that deliberately avoided fighting the pandemic in the hopes of blaming the effects on political opponents has turned avoiding control measures into a quasi-religious doctrine to avoid accountability for their earlier malfeasance.)
> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it.
There's a substantial difference between "everyone will get it in a year or two" and "everyone will get it all within a couple of weeks", especially where hospital capacity is concerned. My city has one ICU bed available and hospitals have been diverting ambulances.
> But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?
We've done it several times. After each spike flattens and then comes down, restrictions get progressively lifted. I'm in a blue state that took things quite seriously, and this summer still largely felt if the pandemic didn't exist.
We sort of expected that when you spend a trillion or two of our federal tax dollars, the hospitals might get better at dealing with it. This does not appear to have been the case.
Nursing's a 2-4 year degree. Doctors take substantially more, and training both requires docs/nurses as professors and clinical instructors. I'm quite dubious that chucking money at the problem would've solved the staffing issue effectively.
Why would we require either a nursing or a doctor degree? I do not understand why we didn't just train a crop of "covid specialists" who could handle caring for covid positive people and recognizing when they needed help from the real medical staff. Doing something like this I feel we could have easily and quickly increased medical capacity as much as needed for covid.
Most COVID patients even in hospitals aren't vented ICU ones, are they? While I get that you can't just throw money and catch doctors, is a fully credentialed doctor or nurse really necessary for every single task that could save a life in this kind of emergency situation?
It'd buy you an extra percent or two; the numbers have been vanishingly small. Mayo Clinic lost about a percent. Factor in the fact they're more likely to get sick and it's even closer to a net zero.
I'm not inclined to treat antivax beliefs as "professional", especially in the healthcare field.
Hospitals are already working at or over capacity, they don't have 1 or 2 % to loose.
If the workers have made it this far, either they have had it and have immunity or they are very good at keeping themselves safe. In either case we should want them working.
"The new report (Report 49) from the Imperial College London COVID-19 response team estimates that the risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant is 5.4 times greater than that of the Delta variant. This implies that the protection against reinfection by Omicron afforded by past infection may be as low as 19%."
"Depending on the estimates used for vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection from the Delta variant, this translates into vaccine effectiveness estimates against symptomatic Omicron infection of between 0% and 20% after two doses, and between 55% and 80% after a booster dose. Similar estimates were obtained using genotype data, albeit with greater uncertainty."
> Hospitals are already working at or over capacity, they don't have 1 or 2 % to loose.
All the more reason to have a vaccination mandate.
This is fair in that there's a lot we'll need to learn about how our system works and fails under pressure from this all. Maximizing efficiency in peacetime leaves you ill-prepared for war, as it were.
> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless -
This couldn't be more wrong.
Even if everyone eventually gets it, you'd much rather get it as late as possible and outside of an infection spike like this one where rescue medications are depleted and hospitals are overburdened.
The medical knowledge and treatment options available today are far, far better than what we had at the beginning of the pandemic. And they continue to improve. Availability of the best treatments is also scarce, but continues to improve. The virus itself also appears to be slowly mutating to less fatal versions.
Even if you think it's inevitable, you want to delay it as long as possible.
That was true at the beginning of the pandemic, but we're long past that now. The recent variant is literally popping up all over the place. Despite the masks and the testing. And this latest variant seems to be extremely mild as in a three day cold - just like you said. So why are we making scaring the kids like this? Protect the kids with existing conditions, we know which ones are at the most risk, which are very few in that age group.
Hospitals tend to be most burdened in the winter anyway, which is unfortunate given transmission patterns, but I definitely think we're moving to a world of "only base policy on hospitalizations, not on raw case numbers" - and believe public health officials are largely moving in this direction too. In this world, once this surge is on the downswing, a lot more things look reasonable to relax.
One major change there, I think, is that we need to change the messaging on masks to get a mask to protect yourself if you are vulnerable or will be near those who are. Cloth masks have shown themselves to be better at a population level than nothing in some studies, but that's hardly the same thing as a medical-grade mask, which are now much more widely available than they were a year ago.
Where I live that has been the policy from the beginning. Keep the hospital system running.
That said, because hospitalizations lag case numbers, I assume they are trying to extrapolate from case numbers to future hospitalizations. Of course that changes depending upon the individual variant that is currently spreading.
