(Replying to PARENT post)
There is a resistance to accepting that this pandemic is soon going to end the way that just about every pandemic in the entirety of human history and pre-history has ended: enough people have had the virus and developed some level of immunity to prevent pandemic-level spread. The only difference is that we are giving the natural process a little boost through vaccination (but not by much since we got a late start because we refused to do challenge trials, so the vaccine that was done in May was not distributed until December because more tedious and less accurate non-challenge trials had to be done).
I think there will be a hesitancy to accept this because lockdowns[0] and universal vaccination, reasonable ideas, have moved on from being points of pragmatic policy to being points of political dogma, such that they are resistant even to changing facts. And after being fed the nonsensical “if it saves even one life” line by their political heroes, it will be difficult for many people to accept that the real calculation involves accepting some “advanced” deaths (a strange concept because old folks on their death bed succumbing to the next common cold are usually not considered to have died earlier than they “should have”) for the sake of getting on with life, just like we do every year with all sorts of diseases in circulation.
It also represents of failure by the public health officials and experts. Because the vaccine was needlessly delayed, not many more lives were saved than if the virus was just allowed to run its course sometime last summer (once we discovered that ventilators were actively harmful in many cases) along with some basic precautions for vulnerable populations. We were held back by rigid medical ethics requirements banning challenge trials. So while individual cities could have hundreds or thousands of new cases per day, deliberately infecting a few hundred healthy people for the purpose of testing the vaccine was PROHIBITED. We lost half a year to this, trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and millions of livelihoods. All because we let a bunch of medical ethics theorists in ivory towers told us that we couldn't run common-sense low-risk trials.
(Replying to PARENT post)
If those measures are so effective, why did they take nearly a year for an effect to be seen?
(Replying to PARENT post)
Not in Britain.
(Replying to PARENT post)
Lets consider Gallant. Gallant does all the things to stay safe. Is the infection rate among Gallants 20%? Hell no. It's probably a 1/3 that or 6-7%.
Consider Goofus. Goofus is a dummy. He does nothing to protect himself. And hangs out with other Goofus's. Is the infection rate among Goofus's 20%? No, it's probably 3-4 times higher. Or 60-80%.
60-80% means the Goofus's have herd immunity. 6-7% infection rate means Gallants don't.
(Replying to PARENT post)
He's completely ignoring all other reasons why infection might go down, the most important one being effective countermeasures, like wearing masks and social distancing. He's also ignoring that the case rates are stagnating due to the British variant. Germany is in that phase now. Cases of the British variant are in exponential growth, current lockdown measures are not effective against it.