LogFAQs > #963280568

Unbridled9 posted...

I seem to recall pointing this out to you before.

It is NOT easy to eradicate a disease at all. Only two human diseases have been wiped out, smallpox and rindopest. While several others (like polio) are on their back legs, it's VERY hard even with diseases that are not particularly infectious and easily vaccinated. It took us decades to wipe out smallpox, until 1977, and that was relatively easy to stop once a workable vaccine was discovered. Covid 19 is highly infectious and has multiple strains already. Pretty much the only way it could have been stopped is if patient 0 had been identified immediately and the whole place quarantined. We still have no clue who patient 0 is or even if this virus came from a bat or a Chinese lab (let's not get into that). Even then the vaccine is NOT 100% effective especially if you're going with, say, the Chinese version. Even if it was and everyone was on board with it, it would likely take DECADES to actually finally wipe out and that's assuming no new strains immune to the vaccine popped up.

So no, there was never any realistic hope of 'wiping out COVID'. That's why the goal was to 'flatten the curve'. I.E. make it so that it spread slower so the hospitals could handle it; not wipe it out. Cause there was no way it was going to be wiped out from day 1.

While truly eradicating diseases is indeed far, far more difficult than many people realize, and the term gets thrown around a lot because it's a dramatic word that feels exciting to use (which is fair, honestly) even though it's not entirely accurate, there's a ton of middle ground between true eradication and reducing case rates to levels that can be easily managed long-term. That's what we've done with measles and polio and all those other diseases that kids get vaccinated for, and there's really no reason Covid couldn't have joined that list.

Instead, because people pushed back against control measures, herd immunity doesn't look like it's going to be attainable. We've got decent vaccination rates in many areas, but they're still way too low in many others, and even those areas that do have good vaccination rates are treating that as a reason to give up on the other precautions that lower the herd immunity threshold instead of waiting until case rates get low enough to justify that (which is not nearly as impossible as people want to think it is to justify resisting countermeasures). The end result of that has been Delta, Omicron, and whatever other variants we'll see in the future that will keep messing with the vaccines' ability to manage the disease.

In effect, the vision many countries seem to be accepting is to have Covid become what Polio was in the 50's: A persistent public health threat that will see periodic regional outbreaks that maim/kill a bunch of people until some new miracle treatment comes along that is enough to turn the tide (which, in Covid's case, will probably be a vaccine that's flexible enough to pre-empt future variants and/or vaccinate against all possible dangerous strains). There's no reason Covid couldn't have ended up stabilizing where Polio is today, but people were a little too attached to the idea of pretending that we're not at war.