Some perspective

[onthemove]

So, here we are.

Arguments over mask wearing, shouts against children going back to school, indignation over people not wearing masks in supermarkets and public transport, cries about whether the NHS can cope, demands for distancing to remain, crippled supply chains, shortage of HGV drivers, food and crops going to waste, empty shelves in the supermarkets, and so on.

At times it makes you wonder - why on earth did we bother developing a vaccine?

Which brings me round to the point of this post...

"Why we might not get a coronavirus vaccine
This article is more than 1 year old
Politicians have become more cautious about immunisation prospects. They are right to be ...
... Why might a vaccine fail?
Earlier this week, England’s deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said the words nobody wanted to hear: “We can’t be sure we will get a vaccine.”

But he was right to be circumspect....

More than 30 years after scientists isolated HIV, the virus that causes Aids, we have no vaccine...

..A chief concern is that coronaviruses do not tend to trigger long-lasting immunity.

.. "
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... us-vaccine

Back at the beginning, there were dire warnings that we might never even get a vaccine.

It's now easy and very tempting to avoid the debate because, as it turns out, we don't just have one vaccine, but several, all of which have surpassed even the wildest hopes of scientists at least in terms of the protection offered against hospitalisation and death.

But imagine if the vaccines hadn't worked - imagine the results of the trials had come in, and none of them showed any signs of offering protection.

Here we would be, over a year and a half since the beginning of the pandemic... and now what?

Would or should the government have been able to treat us as perpetual prisoners, only allowed out for a few weeks each summer - it's citizens just pawns in a covid numbers game being played by the prime minister? Our individual existence serving only to manage covid numbers.

Or should the government have backed off the mandates and left it to every individual to decide their own level of risk?

Should there have been an alternative strategy of locking down by age, and letting younger, working age people carry on? After all, the high outbreaks in student lodgings didn't translate into high numbers of deaths.

Should the government have gone even further, and tried for elimination? Though the recent experience of New Zealand suggests that would unlikely have been successful... New Zealand having just admitted defeat on their elimination strategy, and now accepting it's going to spread.

I would be curious to hear people's thought's on this 'what if', though I'll be surprised if people are all that bothered about engaging with it, due to fatigue and reality now being different.

But if nothing else, I think just considering this 'what if' prospect, might at least provide some degree of perspective on the reality we now find ourselves in, vs the reality that we might have alternatively found ourselves in had the vaccine efforts turned out rather differently.

I mean, if nothing else, it's a reminder of just how far we've come.

Things like, putting it in perspective, is there really still any need to lose sleep over whether people in the supermarket choose to wear a mask or not? Really? Is there really still a need for the prime minister to refuse to rule out further lockdowns? Really? Come on.... get real!

[MrFoolish]

It's a good question, and I've wondered about this myself.

Those of you still urging great caution in the face of this virus - where would you be if the situation was catastrophically worse, with no vaccine on the horizon? Presumably you'd have us in eternal lockdown and facing economic meltdown?

There are no easy answers, and I don't claim to have them. But at some point we'd have to say, ok, way less than 1% are going to die - we'll have to take our chances. Life was never safe anyway.

[tjh290633]

But imagine if the vaccines hadn't worked - imagine the results of the trials had come in, and none of them showed any signs of offering protection.

We could be exactly where we are now. We could have herd immunity.

No one will ever know.

TJH

[vagrantbrain]

I think society would have just become more polarised into one group scared of their own shadow and insisting on permanent lockdowns and the end of society as we know it, and another, after seeing a large amount of people infected with little to no consequences, deciding to defy authority and vocally ignore any lockdown restrictions.

At some point though we would have surely reached something approaching to herd immunity, perhaps in 2023-4 with a much higher death toll in the process.

[XFool]

It's a false argument!

My 2p, speaking as one who has always followed the conventional line (and believed in 'the science'), followed the rules and the advice * - and still does.

Right from the off there were deniers and conspiracy theorists (not so much on TLF) and minimisers - and yes there were (still are?) examples of those on TLF. You know: "It's not that bad", "The Great Barrington wotsit...", "Sweden...", "Protect the vulnerable...", "It's over now", "We now have full herd immunity","Saw in The Spectator..."(!) etc.

IMO, all these people have been proved wrong by events. Some are still at it, one way or another. But they still seem to me to use false, strawman arguments. Now the line seems to be that those who have been and are still sensibly cautious (like me) are at one extreme between: "Let's just get on with life now, it's over" and "They are hiding under the sofa, want us locked up forever."

Nonsense! Lockdowns ended yonks ago now, haven't you noticed? (Doesn't mean they couldn't come back if needed). If you want to get out and about doing stuff you can, haven't you noticed? I have.

It's just that things are not (yet?) exactly the same as they were before, understandably. But I don't feel that to be any kind of a big deal and AFAIAC it is the people who now keep going on about it are the ones who are fussing completely unnecessarily.

That's what I think.



* And grasped the concept of "infectious"! Which I still believe seems to defeat surprisingly many.

[MrFoolish]

Right from the off there were deniers and conspiracy theorists (not so much on TLF) and minimisers - and yes there were (still are?) examples of those on TLF. You know: "It's not that bad", "The Great Barrington wotsit...", "Sweden...", "Protect the vulnerable...", "It's over now", "We now have full herd immunity","Saw in The Spectator..."(!) etc.

You forgot to include "The virus doesn't discriminate". Oh, that was your side, wasn't it?

[XFool]

You forgot to include "The virus doesn't discriminate". Oh, that was your side, wasn't it?

Viruses don't have "side(s)".

[jfgw]

Arguments over mask wearing, shouts against children going back to school, indignation over people not wearing masks in supermarkets and public transport, cries about whether the NHS can cope, demands for distancing to remain, crippled supply chains, shortage of HGV drivers, food and crops going to waste, empty shelves in the supermarkets, and so on.

Whether the NHS can cope has always been a factor. The UK strategy was to go for herd immunity (through infection) but protect the NHS, and the three-week lockdown would (hopefully) be sufficient. We were so confident that many shops that were allowed to be open (such as hardware shops and builders' merchants) closed, the thinking being that it would be short-term. This didn't work out, but the strategy (to manage infection rates to build immunity while not overwhelming the NHS) seems, to me, to have been the strategy ever since.

The current vaccines are not sufficient, on their own, for us to reach the herd immunity threshold, and I have heard nothing recently about plans to tweak them.

But imagine if the vaccines hadn't worked - imagine the results of the trials had come in, and none of them showed any signs of offering protection.

Here we would be, over a year and a half since the beginning of the pandemic... and now what?

Would or should the government have been able to treat us as perpetual prisoners, only allowed out for a few weeks each summer - it's citizens just pawns in a covid numbers game being played by the prime minister? Our individual existence serving only to manage covid numbers.

I think there would have been a gradual return to freedom as natural immunity increased. It would just have taken longer without vaccines.

Should there have been an alternative strategy of locking down by age, and letting younger, working age people carry on? After all, the high outbreaks in student lodgings didn't translate into high numbers of deaths.

There is an argument for isolating more vulnerable people while better treatments are developed. However, there has been an enormous loss of quality of life for those people. The virus is unlikely to go away, and isolating older people would, in the absence of a vaccine, have probably just delayed infection for most of them (if they didn't die of old age first). Maybe video links could have been used until hospitals were under less strain.

Should the government have gone even further, and tried for elimination? Though the recent experience of New Zealand suggests that would unlikely have been successful... New Zealand having just admitted defeat on their elimination strategy, and now accepting it's going to spread.

Covid was endemic in Great Britain before we knew it existed. Elimination was not a viable option.

New Zealand did not have an exit strategy — we did! Imagine what New Zealand's position would be like now had effective vaccines not have been developed. We didn't know that we would be dealing with a far more infectious variant, but we are.

I would be curious to hear people's thought's on this 'what if', though I'll be surprised if people are all that bothered about engaging with it, due to fatigue and reality now being different.

But if nothing else, I think just considering this 'what if' prospect, might at least provide some degree of perspective on the reality we now find ourselves in, vs the reality that we might have alternatively found ourselves in had the vaccine efforts turned out rather differently.

I mean, if nothing else, it's a reminder of just how far we've come.

Things like, putting it in perspective, is there really still any need to lose sleep over whether people in the supermarket choose to wear a mask or not? Really? Is there really still a need for the prime minister to refuse to rule out further lockdowns? Really? Come on.... get real!

I certainly don't lose sleep over it. I don't bother with a mask if I am eating or drinking (what was the point of putting a mask on to walk to a table only to take it off again, or to put it on just to go to the loo?). I still wear one in a shop but most people now, in my experience, don't. I see masks as a way of slowing infection, not reducing it.

Not everyone has been vaccinated, some people have had one jab but have not bothered with the second one, and uptake at the moment is slow. Also, the vaccines are far from 100% effective. While the OP asks a mostly hypothetical "what if" question, that "what if" is, in part, real.

Everyone will eventually be exposed to the virus and, if you haven't been infected yet, I think that there is a good chance that there is a virus particle somewhere with your name on it.


Julian F. G. W.

[dealtn]

IMO, all these people have been proved wrong by events. Some are still at it, one way or another.

And every doomsday scenario from the alternative wing of the Covid spectrum came true?

[servodude]

IMO, all these people have been proved wrong by events. Some are still at it, one way or another.

And every doomsday scenario from the alternative wing of the Covid spectrum came true?

I'm pretty sure that the "doomsday scenarios" I read were strawmen constructed by those that couldn't be [expletive deleted] washing their hands or believed that a government should bugger themselves if they thought it appropriate to ask folk to self quarantine at home
- you know the types; the sphincters that made it political
There's a theme there; their output always smelled "fundamentally" wrong
If you're bored you could probably use search to go back and look
Try it - then rewrite history if you fancy
Enjoy
-sd

[dealtn]

IMO, all these people have been proved wrong by events. Some are still at it, one way or another.

And every doomsday scenario from the alternative wing of the Covid spectrum came true?

I'm pretty sure that the "doomsday scenarios" I read were strawmen constructed by those that couldn't be [expletive deleted] washing their hands or believed that a government should bugger themselves if they thought it appropriate to ask folk to self quarantine at home
- you know the types; the sphincters that made it political
There's a theme there; their output always smelled "fundamentally" wrong
If you're bored you could probably use search to go back and look
Try it - then rewrite history if you fancy
Enjoy
-sd

Not sure I need to rewrite it if you have undertaken that task already. You must both search and read very fast to have done all that in about 10 minutes.

[XFool]

And every doomsday scenario from the alternative wing of the Covid spectrum came true?

I'm pretty sure that the "doomsday scenarios" I read were strawmen constructed by those that couldn't be [expletive deleted] washing their hands or believed that a government should bugger themselves if they thought it appropriate to ask folk to self quarantine at home
- you know the types; the sphincters that made it political
There's a theme there; their output always smelled "fundamentally" wrong
If you're bored you could probably use search to go back and look
Try it - then rewrite history if you fancy
Enjoy
-sd

Not sure I need to rewrite it if you have undertaken that task already. You must both search and read very fast to have done all that in about 10 minutes.

I reckon it was all done at the time! But the err... 'sceptics' (Huh, huh) will happily rerun the 'debate' from here to infinity...

(Tony Blair 'said' we in the UK were going to be "nuked in 45 minutes". Remember? )

[dealtn]

I'm pretty sure that the "doomsday scenarios" I read were strawmen constructed by those that couldn't be [expletive deleted] washing their hands or believed that a government should bugger themselves if they thought it appropriate to ask folk to self quarantine at home
- you know the types; the sphincters that made it political
There's a theme there; their output always smelled "fundamentally" wrong
If you're bored you could probably use search to go back and look
Try it - then rewrite history if you fancy
Enjoy
-sd

Not sure I need to rewrite it if you have undertaken that task already. You must both search and read very fast to have done all that in about 10 minutes.

I reckon it was all done at the time! But the err... 'sceptics' (Huh, huh) will happily rerun the 'debate' from here to infinity...

(Tony Blair 'said' we in the UK were going to be "nuked in 45 minutes". Remember? )

I don't particularly care for what the sceptics think. Most people seem to be towards the middle ground and accept that few people knew what was happening, and more importantly likely to happen. Most forecasts, from both "wings" turned out to be inaccurate, even with the best of intentions.

There were predictions from both ends of the spectrum from the deniers to the Covid prevention at all costs advocates that looked odd at the time, and certainly proved wrong with the benefit of hindsight.

[Lootman]

Not sure I need to rewrite it if you have undertaken that task already. You must both search and read very fast to have done all that in about 10 minutes.

I reckon it was all done at the time! But the err... 'sceptics' (Huh, huh) will happily rerun the 'debate' from here to infinity...

(Tony Blair 'said' we in the UK were going to be "nuked in 45 minutes". Remember? )

I don't particularly care for what the sceptics think. Most people seem to be towards the middle ground and accept that few people knew what was happening, and more importantly likely to happen. Most forecasts, from both "wings" turned out to be inaccurate, even with the best of intentions.

There were predictions from both ends of the spectrum from the deniers to the Covid prevention at all costs advocates that looked odd at the time, and certainly proved wrong with the benefit of hindsight.

Pretty much. We always had the two extremes of the Covid-deniers and the Covid-overreactors. And in the middle you had the truth, where reasonable people took reasonable precautions but avoided the hysteria of the extremists, avoiding both denial and paranoia.

[XFool]

I don't particularly care for what the sceptics think. Most people seem to be towards the middle ground and accept that few people knew what was happening, and more importantly likely to happen. Most forecasts, from both "wings" turned out to be inaccurate, even with the best of intentions.

There were predictions from both ends of the spectrum from the deniers to the Covid prevention at all costs advocates that looked odd at the time, and certainly proved wrong with the benefit of hindsight.

OK. But I do remember that one of those frequently quoted "wrong forecasts" was that of so called "Professor Lockdown" and his oft quoted 500,000 dead in the UK. Except it wasn't and couldn't be a "forecast" or "prediction". Indeed it seemed to me a benchmark figure if nobody did anything. i.e. Government took no action, population carried on exactly the same as before the pandemic - neither of those was ever going to be the case.

In fact, "Professor Lockdown's" estimate, if I remember correctly, was that "We'd be doing OK if only 40,000 died in the UK"...

[XFool]

I don't particularly care for what the sceptics think. Most people seem to be towards the middle ground and accept that few people knew what was happening, and more importantly likely to happen. Most forecasts, from both "wings" turned out to be inaccurate, even with the best of intentions.

There were predictions from both ends of the spectrum from the deniers to the Covid prevention at all costs advocates that looked odd at the time, and certainly proved wrong with the benefit of hindsight.

Pretty much. We always had the two extremes of the Covid-deniers and the Covid-overreactors. And in the middle you had the truth, where reasonable people took reasonable precautions but avoided the hysteria of the extremists, avoiding both denial and paranoia.

True enough! But then, where was the correct place to draw the line that divided the "denial" from the "paranoia"?

[Spet0789]

I think the right balance is struck where as many people as possible can get as close as possible to normal life.

To the point about mask wearing, I think it’s such a small inconvenience for the significant additional safety it confers on you and those around you that it should be more widely encouraged and mandated.

[dealtn]

I think the right balance is struck where as many people as possible can get as close as possible to normal life.

To the point about mask wearing, I think it’s such a small inconvenience for the significant additional safety it confers on you and those around you that it should be more widely encouraged and mandated.

I am happy for it to be more widely encouraged, but not mandated (except in maybe a few scenarios).

[Arborbridge]

I think the right balance is struck where as many people as possible can get as close as possible to normal life.

To the point about mask wearing, I think it’s such a small inconvenience for the significant additional safety it confers on you and those around you that it should be more widely encouraged and mandated.

I am happy for it to be more widely encouraged, but not mandated (except in maybe a few scenarios).

I'm of the opposite view: it should be mandated in any enclsoed spaces. Leave it to the common decency of people on trains buses etc and see what has happened: mask wearing is dropping off significantly and infections are staying constant (though admittedly not necessarily due to that - but it has to be one factor).

Arb.

[Arborbridge]

Why, I wonder, do some oddballs opposed covid vaccine, but presumably not other injections, many of which was have in childhood and throughout our lives.

I don't remember any "resistance" to previous medical breakthroughs - polio, etc. Why has this noisy minority of population become so self-destructive? Or was there always such a minority but without social media to act as an echo chamber, it was simply ignored?

Arb