Poll of the Day > Is the worst of Covid over?

(+) Yeah! (+)

am I missing something, why would it be over? cases are off the scale compared to anything previous, and deaths are almost as bad as ever.

the only "good" part is we seem to have just crossed the omicron peak (at least maybe in USA and Canada), but statistically there's phenomenally more covid spread right now than ever, and about as many deaths as ever.

but statistically there's phenomenally more covid spread right now than ever, and about as many deaths as ever.

at this point its like asking if Tom Brady is going to retire

What gets me are the people that are like "the vaccine doesn't work against Omicron, and that's 95% of the cases in the US right now!" The Omicron wave peaked in the US at a 7-day average of over 800,000 cases a day. At 95% Omicron, that still means 40,000 non-Omicron cases a day, which is roughly on par with the daily case count for the second wave back in July 2020. Omicron is overwhelmingly dominant right now, but it has achieved that on top of other variants, not by replacing them, so there will still be plenty of value in the vaccines once Omicron finished burning itself out (to say nothing of the protection they do offer against Omicron, however limited it might be).

at this point its like asking if Tom Brady is going to retire

If or when?

(Remembered this post when I saw some 30 minutes old news...)

Probably not, no.

At the current rate we'll hit 1,000,000 deaths by mid-March.

The news article was changed 7 minutes ago, guess things are confusing right now..

I'm not anti-vax, and things could only be worse without it, but at the same time it sure is underwhelming in its effect. we've administered more doses of vaccine than there are people on the planet, and it still feels like it has done next to nothing. I don't know how/if things could be better though.

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.

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.

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.

vaccination rates are plateauing pretty hard

There was a pretty considerable period of time between when vaccines became available (especially for older people, and I'm guessing your mother is at least in her 50's) and any sort of mandate coming into effect. If she didn't get it before mandates started showing up, she wasn't actually that eager for it.

canada has over 2 vaccines administered per person (percapita). of course it's "plateauing" there are only so many people.

meanwhile 1000 people are still dying weekly which is almost as bad as it ever has been.

I don't think that was it. I know her after all and that's not in character for her. I believe her reason for not doing so (I didn't exactly feel the need to ask) was more of not knowing where to get it at the time than something like that.

It is for me. Time to move on.

They're not plateauing because of a lack of people, they're plateauing because the remainder refuse to get the shots.

and we'll be back to primarily fighting vaccine-susceptible variants

it's plateauing because there is no scenario in which you don't asymptotically approach 100% vaccination. we are close to administering 1% vaccine doses percapita daily (in canada). anti-vaxxers or not, you will reach the limit very quickly at that rate. and again, we already have over twice the population in doses administered (and are still maintaining that rate, for now).

this doesn't make sense to me. I would say/guess omicron is not going anywhere. it will remain highly contagious; it will probably become less deadly (by taking out those who will die from it), but it's not going to disappear, how can it? it would have to be something like once you get it once, you never get it again, but that is not anywhere close to the case. if you know something I don't, let me know.

100% is never going to be a realistic goal, but we're stuck at like 80%. There's no inherent reason why we couldn't break that threshold and plateau at 99% or something like that, but we don't because of holdouts that refuse to get the jab.

We can expect another plateau as we get to the point where most of the people who got the first two have their booster, but again, that plateau is going to happen because of people who don't want #3, not because it's impossible to reach near-100%.

It's so aggressive, however, that it's infecting enormous numbers of people faster than the resultant immunity can fade (unlike basic Covid). That creates pockets of herd immunity, where it dies out locally because it struggles to find susceptible hosts.