No one is talking about allowing the disease to roam freely. It's why so much time and money have been spent on developing vaccines.
It would be great to get rid of it, but the consensus of opinion is it's not possible.
There is no such consensus opinion. When I talk of getting rid of it I mean getting rid of it roaming wild infecting and killing thousands a day.
Good, because that will happen, as we build up herd immunity, due to infection and vaccination.
I'm sorry that you can't understand what I'm saying. I have already explained to you why the vaccines won't be an impenetrable barrier to this disease. Rather than debate the facts you continue to make the same fallacious assertions.
What fallacious assertions? Reinfection is rare and generally milder than before.
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n99https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.13.21249642v1No one is saying people don't get reinfected, but the fact it's rare, even with the new variants and is generally milder, than the first time, as is the case with most viral infections, indicating it won't cause the same widespread level of severe disease and death, as we have now, throughout eternity.
But it is very easy to prevent. Just as dysentery and other diseases are prevented by washing hands, this pandemic is prevented by avoiding contact with others who may be infected. Best practices are to trace contact and quarantine those who have had contact so that if they do become infected further transmission is prevented. This brings the spreading rate below 1.0 and the disease dissipates and dies out. That is a guarantee. Vaccines are not guaranteed to continue to work as the virus mutates.
Contact tracing and testing are only any help, when the number of cases are low. It also relies on high levels of compliance.
I understand your high level of anxiety, continuously imagining the worst case scenario, but there's no evidence to suggest it will be killing millions of people a year forever. We've seen that vaccines designed for the variant a year ago are still effective against slowing the spread and preventing severe disease from the new ones. We can make new, effective vaccines every year to provide ongoing protection, in the same way we do for influenza.
As to the idea that we can vaccinate out way out of this it entirely depends on controlling the ongoing rate of infection. As I have already explained, quite clearly, it will take months for this disease to be impacted as we try to vaccinate the world. No, that's wrong. It will take years to protect the entire world. If we continue to allow the disease to roam the world infecting large numbers it will continue to mutate at a high rate and almost certainly reduce the effectiveness of the current vaccines.
Yes, they can work, but they depend on the virus not changing and we are not doing what we should to minimize the chances of that happening... by not reducing the infection rate. Too many people literally make up their own facts and spread them around.
Sorry, there's no way the entire world will be vaccinated against this. We've only done that with smallpox and are still not quite there with polio.
So you are arguing with yourself about this? Above you said the disease will end when we vaccinate everyone. Or are you suggesting we just allow the world to be infected killing huge numbers?
No, I didn't say COVID-19 will end due to vaccination, just that it will no longer cause such widespread severe disease and death, once a certain level of herd immunity has been achieved, hopefully by vaccination, rather than infection.
There's no reason why we can't vaccinate everyone who wants to be vaccinated. I can't imagine why you would even say that. The only problem are those who don't want the vaccine.
There will always be places in the world where the vaccine is unavailable.
First, that's wrong... Australian states are not isolated from each other. They all have common borders with people freely crossing them all the time. But even so, what does isolating states have to do with anything? The states of Australia were never quarantined. I'm not even sure what that means. People are quarantined.
Isolating states prevents the disease from spreading from an area with a very high prevalence. Last year, Australia managed to cut New South Wales off from the rest of the country, when cases were high there, to prevent it from spreading to the rest of the country. Trump talked about doing the same to New York, when it ran rampant there, but soon realised it wasn't possible.
In other words: it isn't fair to say well Australia did it, so why can't we do the same in the US? The two countries are very different, both geographically and politically.
What does that have to do with anything??? More nonsense. The island has ring of cities around the periphery. How is that relevant? What they have in common is a reasonable response to the disease taking action to quarantine anyone exposed to the disease, exactly as we would do if we had an Ebola plague. But with this virus, "It's just a bad case of the flu" that is killing more people than 10 years of the flu and still killing more.
This virus is more like the flu than Ebola, which doesn't spread via respiratory droplets. It's much more contagious and fortunately less deadly. Unlike Ebola, it spreads in asymptomatic people. One of the reasons we managed to contain the original SARS was because it was only spread by those who were already quite ill, making it easy to screen for with temperature checks. The very mild cases didn't spread to others.
What is your point? Of course the diseases are not identical. The point is about the need for quarantine for those exposed to the infection. I mention Ebola because it has a higher fatality rate, so people take it seriously unlike COVID.
My point is that COVID-19 is much more contagious than Ebola and that it spreads in healthy people, so is vastly more difficult to contain. If it was only spread by people who feel unwell, then we would have contained it by now. This isn't a case of not taking it seriously because it has a much lower infection fatality ratio, than other diseases. It's a matter of it being more contagious and harder to contain.
Several times you have talked about allowing infections to provide herd immunity and talked as if infections in children are not significant. I don't know what to call that other than trivializing human deaths.
I'm not trivialising human deaths. My point is that COVID-19 doesn't pose a serious risk of mortality to children. It mostly kills older people.
We've only had 9 children, from 0 to 14 years old, die in the UK, with COVID-19 mentioned on the death certificate, from March to 1st January 2021. Now I know that's terrible, but we need to put it into perspective. Quite remarkably the excess deaths in the UK, in the 0 to 14 year old age groups, has actually been lower than expected, from March to the end of last year. Correlation doesn't mean causation, so perhaps it's because fewer children have being run over, going to school and being killed by accidents whilst playing.
https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/static-reports/mortality-surveillance/excess-mortality-in-england-week-ending-01-Jan-2021.html#sectionhttps://fingertips.phe.org.uk/static-reports/mortality-surveillance/excess-mortality-in-england-week-ending-01-Jan-2021.html#section-7No, we can't save everyone in the world. In reality wearing masks, washing hands and getting vaccines are not about protecting any of us 100%. The sad truth is that they are about reducing the spread of this disease and saving some lives. But by not treating the disease seriously we are costing many more lives than necessary. Very importantly, by allowing the infection rate to remain high (even if not as high as a few weeks ago), we are keeping the doors wide open to rapid mutations in the virus that put the effectiveness of the vaccines at risk. Right now people want out from under this disease and many feel they will be able to open up again even before we are fully vaccinated. Many US states are opening again so that instead of the infection rate dropping to near zero where we could effectively track and trace, the US continues to see thousands die each day and many more new infections with the numbers no longer effectively dropping.
This is why the UK are being so tardy in relieving lockdown restrictions: to allow vaccines to protect the vulnerable and minimise mutations. Schools only reopened a couple of weeks ago, after being closed for nearly 10 weeks. Gyms, restaurants, most non-essential shops etc. are still closed at the moment. More is planned to reopen next month, but it will be slow.
Again, fallacious assertions. Australia has the virus. Some 10 to 20 people get infected each day.
If you are going to argue with numbers, at least get them right, we have ZERO local covid spread here.
Here is a the last 3 months for the entire country.
Practically all of our cases are people coming into the country and we catch them at the border.
How long do you think you'll be able to keep it up for?
What about the costs: tourism, business lost, quarantine hotels, the occasional lockdown, when it does escape?
I don't see how it's sustainable.
At the moment I gather your government is prioritising vaccines for your neighbours in Papua New Guinea, when it gets supplies. This is admirable, but I suppose there is some level of self-interest, as it will help keep Australia safe. Hopefully the vaccination in Australia will ramp up when domestic production starts.