Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Is herd immunity to COVID-19 possible? Experts increasingly say no.

Just wanted to let everyone know that the goalpasts got moved...again.

Aside from my snarkiness though, this article has some stuff that's goofy to me.

The entire tone of the article is sort of "we're f'd because we're never going to reach herd immunity because people are dumb" but then in the same breath it says stuff like:

Israel, which at 62% has the world's highest vaccination rate so far, gives a preview of what can happen.

“As soon as vaccination rates hit 50%, you saw cases and deaths just start to plummet,” said Christina Ramirez, a professor of biostatistics at UCLA.

Data from Israel shows that the vaccinated not only are much less likely to get severely ill or die, but if they do get COVID-19, it's almost always a mild case.

“It almost doesn’t matter if the virus is transmitted in the population if it’s not causing serious problems,” said Dr. Timothy Brewer, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles."

And then something like this:

The future of COVID-19 in the U.S. ultimately will be up to the willingness of Americans to embrace the vaccines, experts say.

“We’re going to be battling pockets of low vaccination for a long time,” said Meyers, of the University of Texas. "COVID-19 is such a stealthy virus – it spreads quickly and silently – it won't start to fade away until the vast majority of the people are immunized."

So once those people get sick, isn't it essentially the same as a vaccination? So why would we be battling for a long time? Let the morons get sick and let's move on.

(And yes, I understand it's more subtle than that at the granular level, but in general, across a large population, this is how it would (should?) work out.)

More direct contradiction:

With the virus still circulating, however, things won't reset to November 2019, before the virus swept the world, UCLA's Brewer said.

"Plexiglas barriers in the supermarket are never going to go away," he said. "But I think we'll get to where there won't be universal mask-wearing."

For many people, COVID-19 may become a background illness like the flu, waxing in the winter and waning in the summer, requiring a yearly or every-other-year booster shot.

“It’s entirely possible that a few years from now, people who are immunized might have a bit of snuffle and it’s actually SARS-CoV-2 but they never know it,” Hanage said.

So which is it? We never get back to pre-2020 normal or COVID becomes a background illness we don't even notice?

My guess? Both will be true...as illogical as that approach is.

Pardon my annoyance, but this is the moving of the goalposts, dragging our feet forever future I'm not down with.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ted-nugent-tests-positive-covid...10881.html

My favorite quote was this:

"What has surprised me most is the incomprehensible rejection of science even among otherwise intelligent people," Poland said. "I’m truly flabbergasted to be watching this on a grand scale."

Does he ever actually leave the ivory tower?

USA Today can't write science articles to save their lives. They're really terrible at synthesizing information.

Getting to a place of fewer barriers and going maskless isn't hard to understand. When infection rates drop to negligible rates, and vaccination rates are higher, we can do that. I wouldn't get hung up on the specific numbers yet, but it's probably about the time that hospitals no longer have dedicated Covid wards.

I may have missed the memo but have the goalposts even been installed yet?

From a marketing perspective, if you talk about herd immunity, hesitant people can be free riders getting the benefit without getting the shot. If you say that herd immunity is not going to happen, your only path to protection is vaccination.

Bozman said:

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ted-nugent-tests-positive-covid...10881.html

That's surprising. I always pegged Nugent as more of a COVID-15 guy, COVID-17 max.

If you read Dollywood’s mask policy it’s no longer “at all times.”

Face masks or face coverings are required in areas where visitors cannot socially distance outdoors for all visitors ages 2 and older, with some exceptions. Some of the exceptions where masks are not required are while eating, on water park attractions or select coasters at Dollywood. Employees will wear face masks.

The goal posts are going up!

So who will be the next big operator to follow Dollywood's lead and "follow the science" with their mask requirements? Or if the current Ohio trend holds up, ditch the requirement altogether?

Current Ohio trend--

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

The challenge still is that we don't have conclusive data about vaccinated people's ability (or inability) to transmit the virus, which makes sense since that's hard to measure, especially when only 1 in 4 adults are fully vaccinated. The experts believe it's likely they're good, but it's reasonable for them to say, "We don't know yet." And like the marketing problem of vaccine laggards, you probably have to go with the lowest standard to get people to do the basics in the mean time.

I think the real problem is the logistical one, not the science one. It's almost certainly much easier to enforce a "mask at all times" requirement than a "mask except when eating or outdoors when you can distance safely or if you're vaccinated or...." As a church leader, we ran into this many times over the past few months. People wanted to do things inside the church buildings. They took the training. They passed the quiz. The swore up and down that they would follow the county and state guidelines. 5 minutes into the event, they were standing next to each other with no masks on. (This has happened on multiple occasions). My experience is that any gray area will immediately be overrun well past ambiguity and straight into clearly prohibited activity, putting the burden on the enforcement team to split hairs and be the "bad guy."

If the rule isn't super black and white, people will abuse it.

ApolloAndy said:

If the rule isn't super black and white, people will abuse it.

Like the new Disney employee dress code/grooming standards.

Jeff said:
The challenge still is that we don't have conclusive data about vaccinated people's ability (or inability) to transmit the virus, which makes sense since that's hard to measure, especially when only 1 in 4 adults are fully vaccinated. (...)

But it’s coming. The figure I saw last week is that so far the breakthrough infection rate is 0.008%, or if you prefer, 99.992% of fully vaccinated people have so far escaped *infection*.

Generally speaking, transmission requires replication, and replication comes from infection. If these vaccines are preventing infection (which makes sense since they work by specifically targeting the virus’ infection mechanism) then it is practically certain that they are preventing transmission.

Today’s interesting statistic is that according to the most pessimistic estimate that I have been working with based on that chart I posted earlier (data from the Ohio Department of Health) your odds of meeting a contagious person in the State of Ohio today are about 1:263, the lowest that figure has been since March 23. Meanwhile your odds of meeting a fully vaccinated Ohioan are greater than 1:4. At the moment both of those statistics appear to be moving in the desired direction.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

Here in Broward County...the more restrictive part of the State of Florida...the local Emergency Officials/County Administrators recently shared what the goal line will be:

New metrics to benchmark progress that would further lift restrictions.

• 50% of residents receive at least 1 vaccine shot.
• Positivity rate of less than 5% on a 5-day rolling average for 10 consecutive days.

Should these metrics be achieved, then the County will be prepared to:

• Remove 6’ distancing requirements for restaurants, outdoor gatherings, hotels and function spaces.
• Remove capacity limitations for restaurants, retail, movie theaters, auditoriums, community rooms and function spaces.
• Remove gathering limitations on private residences, outdoor non-professional organized sports and function spaces.

At least we know what progress will look like. Now, they better stick to this if we achieve the results or all hell will break loose.

Aren't the rules one county over, "Do whatever?"

I think we are getting close. In Allegheny County the average age of new cases is below 30 years old. That points to the vaccines starting to work.

Yes. Here in Santa Clara county (San Jose), we’ve seen a slight uptick in cases since the plummet in Feb/March, but hospitalizations still remain exteremly low.

Yes Jeff, Palm Beach is a hot mess. Wonder why? Who might possibly be calling Palm Beach home now?

It's been 6 weeks since we all pointed and laughed or shook our heads in disbelief, but Texas has still yet to become to cluster**** that was predicted.

Then again, Michigan.

*shrug*

Yeah. I think around last July when TX and FL were being dumb, I tried to draw direct causality from "state lifts regulation" to "cases increase", but it's not borne out in the data that way. That doesn't mean I don't think it's happening. I'm sure even the people who think the regulations should be lifted will acknowledge that it will lead to some increase in cases and I'm sure in aggregate, the places that have less restrictions have more cases. But I gave up on trying to find each particular "no mask mandate spike," especially because of all the mental gymnastics required to ignore data points that don't fit with that narrative. In short, it's futile to try compare states like New York which has almost 2/3 of its population in the densest urban area in the country with Texas which, while still generally urban, has much less population density (about 1/4 the statewide population density of NY) and to draw conclusions about the efficacy of mask mandates from those data points.