Vermont has seen COVID-19 cases surge to their highest levels in the pandemic. Here's what health officials think is happening.
www.yahoo.com
Yeah, it seems like over 80% of the population (not adults only) recently vaccinated is kind of the sweet spot to avoid significant resurgence. We'll see how it goes this winter with infection-acquired immunity. It's really unclear how many people have had it. Some estimate 50% of the US population. I tend to think that is still too high. There's this persistent estimate of 3x the number of cases which would be 150 million, 45%. I think that even that may be a little high. It would be really nice if they actually did some good studies of this to nail down a solid number.
Also I am not convinced that infection-acquired immunity is much better than vaccination in term of waning, so that would open up the vulnerable pool when infection-acquired protection does wane. I'd also like to see a comparison of people with this natural immunity vs. people who have had boosters.
It just goes on and on, and as long as there are a lot of unvaccinated people out there (and vulnerable people who haven't been boosted), the CFR and hospitalization rates aren't going to drop much.
Glad to see states opening up booster vaccinations to all. The messaging has been terrible and remains terrible. There is very little time before Thanksgiving. People need to get boosted.
By next year, we will end up treating COVID like the flu
I hope so. The end game is still pretty unclear to me. There seems to be a lot of certainty that it's going to be endemic, and I understand the reasoning, but I'm not completely convinced of that.
I think the Pfizer Paxlovid drug being 90%+ successful (it's not clear to me exactly how restrictive they were with the population they tested, haven't looked) with minimal side effect profile, if that happens, is likely going to be the key that gets us out of this, at this point. It's impossible to get hospital loading down sufficiently with current vaccination levels, so there has to be a tool to provide to those who were too stubborn or lacked access to get vaccinated. $700 isn't bad. It's the hospital loading that seems to determine most of the restrictions, so if that goes away, things can get back to mostly normal.
The worst case is that the continued waning of protection, with endemicity, results in a constant disease burden, without a means of addressing it properly except through continuous periodic boosting (which will be imperfect) and by increasing hospital staffing. So I do hope that multiple rounds of infection and boosting end up providing very long-lasting robust protection which doesn't need boosting to maintain the protection against severe disease.
where with the flu you need annual boosters since it mutates so quickly in comparison.
The spike has actually been mutating faster than the H3N2 flu, which is disturbing. Virologists think it is may slow down a bit, but still continue, and they're probably right, but I'm hoping that now that it has adapted well to humans that it will mostly stop changing.