For the mods: I know you guys are trying to avoid posts on COVID and politics, but this thread is rife with such comments, so hopefully my providing some facts on COVID, below, is ok in this thread.
Kyk - this is just one more example of you being completely ignorant. Not opening up society fully, including practicing masking and social distancing until we had lifesaving COVID vaccines widely available by the end of April 2021 likely saved hundreds of thousand of lives. As it was, we ~600K people died in the US through that point from COVID from 33MM verified infections - without non-pharmaceutical interventions, we would have probably lost twice that many people during that time. But hey, the economy would've been less impacted.
Still boggles my mind that there are people out there who still don't understand how effective the COVID vaccines are in preventing hospitalization and death. Sure, protection against infection is much lower than it was with the original strain, but this is evolutionary viral biology, folks, and things change, as we now have omicron variants that are more than ten times more infectious than the original strain (which did do an excellent job of preventing infections). Fortunately, the protection against hospitalization and death, especially if boosted, has not waned much at all.
And if you want some sense of the magnitude of lives saved just in the US from the COVID vaccines, here's a simple analysis using data from Worldmeters (linked below): we had ~600K deaths by May 2021, when vaccines became available to everyone (so almost all the deaths were among the unvaccinated to that point). Since then, we've had about twice as many infections as we had to that point (given how infectious omicron is), which would've likely meant another twice as many deaths post May 2021 if we didn't have vaccines, i.e., another ~1.2MM deaths, yet we've only had another ~500K in deaths since then (the vast majority of which were still unvaccinated), meaning the vaccines have roughly saved about 700K US lives.
My estimate above seems reasonable, especially given the HHS study that came out earlier this year estimating that the COVID vaccines saved about 330K lives of medicare recipients, just in 2021 (shorter timeframe and not the whole population, as my analysis of 700K lives saved through today includes). It has also been estimated that over 20MM lives have been saved by the COVID vaccines worldwide just in 2021.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/07/cov...t-330000-deaths-among-us-seniors-in-2021.html
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-per...cines-saved-estimated-20-million-lives-1-year
And the vaccines/boosters continue to do a great job of saving lives (and preventing costly and scary hospitalizations) and if you don't believe me, read the latest tweet, with data on this from Dr. Topol, below, who said, "What if you had something that decreased death by >90% and hospitalization by >80% but <25% of the people who would benefit got it?" He was, of course, talking about reductions in deaths for those over 50 who had been vaccinated and fully boosted, yet only 25% of those people have been fully boosted. The report shows modest protection of being fully boosted vs. just double-vaxxed and huge protection vs. being unvaxxed, especially if never infected. The message is get boosted, especially if you're over 50 or in a vulnerable population.
