LogFAQs > #962196001

adjl posted...

As disheartening as it seems, remember that Omicron is an anomaly. From fairly early on, epidemiologists were predicting that Omicron hitting us as hard and fast as it did meant it would burn itself out quickly, and that's exactly what we're seeing. A virus simply can't maintain case counts like that indefinitely without creating too many clusters of herd immunity to sustain itself. It's more than a little scary to realize that it's this easy for a vaccine-avoidant variant to show up with no warning (ignoring for a moment that numerous countries had detected Omicron months before South Africa announced it and just chose to say nothing because they didn't want to look bad, robbing us of the ample warning we could have had), but this doesn't actually do anything to set us back in the fight against regular Covid.

As much as an estimated 40,000 new Delta cases a day is still a lot, that's still much, much better than the third wave from Nov 2020 to February 2021, and the fourth wave (Aug 2021-Oct 2021) was also considerably improved. That improvement comes in spite of people (vaxxed and unvaxxed alike) eschewing restrictions en masse, which is a testament to just how much the vaccine has achieved. Improving vaccination rates will continue to help with that, especially if better efforts are made to get vaccines to under-vaccinated regions to reduce the risk of new variants emerging and giving us another Omicron (though variants on Omicron itself aren't likely to be very successful, given how widespread natural immunity is to the base Omicron strain).

The problem, of course, is that vaccination rates are plateauing pretty hard, thanks to a very staunch group of people that refuses to stop being afraid of them. Those people have latched on to the vaccines' ineffectiveness against Omicron as evidence for their belief that the vaccines don't work at all, so getting them on board with crushing Delta is going to be a major challenge.

It's not just 'a belief that vaccines don't work at all'. Several of my friends and family do believe it works at least somewhat but are immensely opposed to the vaccine mandates and refusing to get vaccinated is their form of protest. Likewise some of them don't trust Fauci and/or Biden and feel they're being either dishonest, making a grab for power, or other such things. For example my mom was extremely eager to get the vaccine when it came out but then some mandate (I well forget which one) caused her to back off and now she's claiming I 'submitted to them' when I went and got it. My dad, meanwhile, is just simply old and can't handle the internet and other modern tech while our local pharmacy is requiring to schedule appointments and is turning down my offers to help (and afraid of mom).