Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
So, is that it? After wave upon wave of infections, the combination of vaccination and Omicron’s comparatively mild (though still serious) properties has led the UK to declare the pandemic, essentially, over.
After two lockdowns, a huge burden on healthcare and at last an extremely prompt and effective vaccination campaign, the UK has still registered more than 160,000 lives lost to the pandemic, roughly half of them in the Alpha wave.
And in case you hadn’t noticed, “herd immunity”, much like Godot, has stubbornly failed to arrive and expel the virus from the population. Nobody should be under any illusions that it could have been much worse. Poor Peru was hit by dreadful waves of infection before vaccines could be deployed; it has lost roughly three times as many people as the UK, accounting for population.
It should be astonishing given these facts, but some stubborn voices have continued to argue that in the autumn of 2020 we should have rushed to remove restrictions on all except those most at risk – who would be somehow saved by untested, implausible means gathered together under the heading of “targeted protection”. At that point no vaccines were widely available, and the effective therapies we now have against Covid were pie in the sky. Shockingly, there are now attempts to rehabilitate these ideas in parts of the media.
www.theguardian.com
I'm not aware of any strategy to deal with any future variant, or introduce mitigations like improving ventilation etc.
After two lockdowns, a huge burden on healthcare and at last an extremely prompt and effective vaccination campaign, the UK has still registered more than 160,000 lives lost to the pandemic, roughly half of them in the Alpha wave.
And in case you hadn’t noticed, “herd immunity”, much like Godot, has stubbornly failed to arrive and expel the virus from the population. Nobody should be under any illusions that it could have been much worse. Poor Peru was hit by dreadful waves of infection before vaccines could be deployed; it has lost roughly three times as many people as the UK, accounting for population.
It should be astonishing given these facts, but some stubborn voices have continued to argue that in the autumn of 2020 we should have rushed to remove restrictions on all except those most at risk – who would be somehow saved by untested, implausible means gathered together under the heading of “targeted protection”. At that point no vaccines were widely available, and the effective therapies we now have against Covid were pie in the sky. Shockingly, there are now attempts to rehabilitate these ideas in parts of the media.
From ‘herd immunity’ to today, Covid minimisers are still sabotaging our pandemic progress | William Hanage
Every time you hear someone say it’s time to ‘live with the virus’, remember that doesn’t mean doing nothing about it, says epidemiologist Dr William Hanage
www.theguardian.com
I'm not aware of any strategy to deal with any future variant, or introduce mitigations like improving ventilation etc.
