Poll of the Day > Is loosening the restrictions before vaccine rollout a good idea?

(+) Yeah! (+)

id imagine we are going to see more deaths and more people fighting to get vaccinated.

I got my first shot today!

If cases have been down I don't see an issue with opening up with limited capacity

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It seems like we will find out in a couple months. With vaccines really starting to roll out there are reasons to be optimistic, but if we end up needing to stay locked down through summer and into fall again because of spring break outbreaks, itll be clear who is to blame for that.

Not to mention that further outbreaks give the virus even more opportunities to mutate into more vaccine resistant strains. We are so close. I know some places make a ton of money through spring break tourism but lets not fuck this up when there is finally hope on the horizon.

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Absolutely not. If anything we should tighten restrictions in the next probably 3 months to really try and squash covid. Mixing social distancing with a high amount of vaccinations would seriously knock down case numbers hopefully to a point where we never need to lock down again.

The goal is to get rid of covid or at least knock it down to a level where we can deal with it just from contact tracing, not to maintain an "acceptable" level of people dying from it that doesn't quite overwhelm hospitals.

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No, but that hasn't stopped us before

We've been fucking up the pandemic for lit rally a year now

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We don't know how well the vaccines work. We're going to need to keep up restrictions until then.

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people need to work
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Kungfu Kenobi posted...

We don't know how well the vaccines work. We're going to need to keep up restrictions until then.

but they are supposed to be super effective, all the companies making them say so...
and doctors agree, that must be why some healthcare workers didn't get them
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Krazy_Kirby posted...

but they are supposed to be super effective, all the companies making them say so...
and doctors agree, that must be why some healthcare workers didn't get them

ah yes because all healthcare workers are intelligent and informed

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Mead posted...

Not to mention that further outbreaks give the virus even more opportunities to mutate into more vaccine resistant strains. We are so close. I know some places make a ton of money through spring break tourism but lets not fuck this up when there is finally hope on the horizon.

This.

Plus the majority of Americans are still not vaccinated... And a sizeable minority refuses to get vaccinated.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Absolutely not. If anything we should tighten restrictions in the next probably 3 months to really try and squash covid. Mixing social distancing with a high amount of vaccinations would seriously knock down case numbers hopefully to a point where we never need to lock down again.

The goal is to get rid of covid or at least knock it down to a level where we can deal with it just from contact tracing, not to maintain an "acceptable" level of people dying from it that doesn't quite overwhelm hospitals.

I agree. It's 2020 all over again.
If people had fucking stayed in lockdown in spring last year, it could've stopped the spread and allowed us to have a summer. Instead, they crowded spring break beaches, packed bars, protested the lockdowns (maskless, of course), and it spread like crazy.

Now in 2021, we could just lockdown for 1-2 months as everyone gets the vaccine and by summer be "back in business" full swing. But nope...another wasted summer incoming.

I thought the summer travel / recreation market was huge, it's weird they haven't flexed their lobbying and advertising power to try and push for spring lockdowns, both last year and this year...

streamofthesky posted...

I thought the summer travel / recreation market was huge, it's weird they haven't flexed their lobbying and advertising power to try and push for spring lockdowns, both last year and this year...

Companies are largely driven by short term profits (annual and quarterly).

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1) "Before vaccine rollout"? wtf? Vaccines have been rolled out for a while.

2) Considering that most of the at-risk population -- with the exception of some states that would rather let their at-risk population die than prioritize them (mostly far-left states, surprisingly -- CT, California, etc, have all refused to prioritize their high-risk population)

streamofthesky posted...

If people had fucking stayed in lockdown in spring last year, it could've stopped the spread and allowed us to have a summer.

If you believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you >_>

This shit was never going to result in a normal summer. Even the best preparations would have kept things at the levels we've had for months now or even worse.

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Muscles posted...

If cases have been down I don't see an issue with opening up with limited capacity

While true, the tendency is to grossly underestimate just how down cases have to be and grossly overestimate how much loosening is appropriate. Here (Nova Scotia), restrictions loosened considerably back in July-ish because we'd been hovering around 0 cases per day for several weeks, as had the neighbouring provinces. Even then, though, precautions were still in place, including strict isolation requirements for travellers (though not between the Atlantic provinces, since they were all doing similarly well), masks in public spaces, and capacities being reduced by as much as is needed to allow distancing.

There are a lot of people that say "we've gone from 3000 cases a day to only 1000, we can stop restricting anything now!" , and that blatantly ignores how rapidly this can grow. We reinstated stricter restrictions back in November after a couple weeks of 10-15 cases per day stemming from a single cluster, followed by a spike of 37 in one day (which, thankfully, turned out to be an outlier because we went back to 10-15 for the next couple weeks before the tighter restrictions had an effect). Those are not big numbers (we freaked out over 37 cases on a day when London saw ~60,000), but reacting to numbers of that size is the only way to stop them from getting to be larger very quickly. New Brunswick and Newfoundland both ballooned from near-0 cases to several hundred almost overnight. "Cases are down" means "cases are close enough to 0 that we can track and control individual cases," and even then, it remains necessary to maintain some precautions because the threat is always there. It very much does not mean "that's a nicer number, we can relax now."

Zeus posted...

If you believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you >_>

This s*** was never going to result in a normal summer. Even the best preparations would have kept things at the levels we've had for months now or even worse.

It was never going to be truly normal, but it honestly wasn't that far off here, thanks to a quick response and the travel restrictions that are necessary to keep new cases from taking off. Travel restrictions mean tourism has suffered, obviously, but typical summer activities like visiting beaches, eating on patios, or travelling more locally have been mostly fine.

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adjl posted...

While true, the tendency is to grossly underestimate just how down cases have to be and grossly overestimate how much loosening is appropriate. Here (Nova Scotia), restrictions loosened considerably back in July-ish because we'd been hovering around 0 cases per day for several weeks, as had the neighbouring provinces. Even then, though, precautions were still in place, including strict isolation requirements for travellers (though not between the Atlantic provinces, since they were all doing similarly well), masks in public spaces, and capacities being reduced by as much as is needed to allow distancing.

There are a lot of people that say "we've gone from 3000 cases a day to only 1000, we can stop restricting anything now!" , and that blatantly ignores how rapidly this can grow. We reinstated stricter restrictions back in November after a couple weeks of 10-15 cases per day stemming from a single cluster, followed by a spike of 37 in one day (which, thankfully, turned out to be an outlier because we went back to 10-15 for the next couple weeks before the tighter restrictions had an effect). Those are not big numbers (we freaked out over 37 cases on a day when London saw ~60,000), but reacting to numbers of that size is the only way to stop them from getting to be larger very quickly. New Brunswick and Newfoundland both ballooned from near-0 cases to several hundred almost overnight. "Cases are down" means "cases are close enough to 0 that we can track and control individual cases," and even then, it remains necessary to maintain some precautions because the threat is always there. It very much does not mean "that's a nicer number, we can relax now."

It was never going to be truly normal, but it honestly wasn't that far off here, thanks to a quick response and the travel restrictions that are necessary to keep new cases from taking off. Travel restrictions mean tourism has suffered, obviously, but typical summer activities like visiting beaches, eating on patios, or travelling more locally have been mostly fine.

I wasn't saying open up completely, I forgot what number it was here, but we got down to a decent number and went from no indoor dining to 25% (and now up to 40%) without any spikes in that time as far a I'm aware

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