Can I ask where you choose to live right now that isn’t a socialist society or on the way to one? Genuine question because I am thinking of emigrating after this pandemic is over and that would definitely make my shortlist.
Even if it's made mandatory, which may not happen, manufacturing and distributing enough vaccines for everyone to get one will take years. Ideally we want to get everything back to normal once we have enough vaccines stocked up to strategically deploy in hot spots, but if the vaccine doesn't severely reduce the disease's spread that strategy won't be effective.
Logistically you can't give everyone the vaccine at the same time. If immunity is only temporary (few months) front line hospital staff are likely going to get vaccinated before the rest of society.
It would matter for those who can’t be vaccinated (the immuno compromised, very young children) or for those whom the vaccine might not be effective (very elderly with weak immune responses)
It would also matter for eradicating the virus. If it keeps circulating, and vaccines only provide protection for less than a lifetime, then we will have to keep vaccinating just about everyone in the world indefinitely. Any place that falls into civil strife could also expect a virus outbreak eventually.
It would still be great to have vaccine that merely made the virus without effect! But eradication would be better.
Well, it really depends on the timeframe. If we need a new one every two years, no problem. If every six months, that’s worse.
Current flu vaccine coverage is 24-50% depending on jurisdiction, once per year. So, aiming at, say, 80% coverage twice per year would be 3-6x the current level of flu vaccination effort.
You don't need 80% coverage though. Influenza would be a pandemic too (and has been!) but is well controlled by the existing regimes. There's nothing all that notable about covid really, beyond its novelty. Once the bulk of the population has some immunity, even if incomplete and even if it needs a regular refresh, we hit herd immunity: R0 drops below 1 and the disease stops spreading. There's no reason to expect this to work any differently.
There are a lot of diseases that everybody gets vaccinated for routinely and regularly. I thought the assumption was this was going to be one of those, it is just a (currently unknown) matter of how frequently you'd need to get it.
Are any epidemiologists talking about possibly eliminating it completely? Seems like the toothpaste is out of the tube for that.
Yes. Devi Sridhar has mentioned it as a goal, fairly sure I have seen others.
We have only eliminated one virus globally (smallpox) but plenty of others have been eliminated nationally. Then to travel to those countries from a country where the disease is endemic you generally need proof of vaccination.
There are also many countries that have basically eliminated the virus at present. They’re not going to want to import the virus just because other countries failed.
Once you have two things the probable future becomes clear: a vaccine, and very fast tests. Combined, they will make it fairly easy for a well governed country to eliminate the virus.
Then, any entering traveler from an endemic country would require proof of vaccination and a quick test at customs to confirm. That would keep the virus out of eliminated countries.
After that it would be a global effort to eradicate the virus country by country, just like we’ve been doing with other diseases such as polio.
A key feature of sars-cov-2 is that it is not like the flu. Coronavirus spreads in clusters and this is containable.
I once thought it would be difficult for big tech company recruiting processes to tell the difference between:
a) A really good problem solver
b) Someone who has ran through all the example interview problems on leetcode or something similar
Then I thought that this might be similar to the Turing test. Once you’re that good at faking it that you can convince someone else - maybe the difference doesn’t matter at that point.
I’m using an echo show for this use case. My granddad has dementia and lives at home on his own. I set up some blink cameras in his house to watch for falls and setup an echo show so family could speak with him during lockdown. The big advantage I found about the echo show is the “drop in” feature which allows starting a video call with no interaction from his side.
How do you feel about “drop in”? It feels a little invasive. Do you have the option to have the device ring rather than just dropping in, whilst still maintaining the option in an emergency?
There’s no doubt that the cameras and drop in features are an invasion of his privacy. Unfortunately his dementia is advanced enough that we couldn’t ask him if this was ok before we put it in. His son has power of attorney over him (allows him to make legal decisions on his behalf) and as I am the only person who has access to these features and the intent is to help protect/care for him, we felt it was a fair trade off.
You can limit the people who can “drop in” on the device, so I guess you could let most friends and family use the call feature and save the drop in feature for certain trusted family members to use in an emergency.
