One question answered, now I have more

[DenverFinFan]

Questions:

1) What variant is causing the surge in China?

2) Has that variant invaded the US yet?

I am trying to write this out to figure it out.

1) Both the US and China started rolling out vaccines in 2021

2) The US vaccines were effective, China's were not. 

3) Omicron is more transmissive, but less severe than Delta

4) Because the US vaccines were effective, even those in the United States who received only one booster have more protection than similarly vaccinated people in China.

5) Therefore, the US has not been affected by any recent surges, whereas China, because of their ineffective vaccines, is now experiencing a surge because the Omicron is much more transmissible and their vaccines are far less effective.  Because the US vaccines were so effective, even people who have only received one booster have increased protection against Omicron than the unvaccinated and those who received China's vaccine

Is this correct?

I disagree with point 5. The US has been affected by recent surges. You get an increase in winter. We’re still having 30k reported cases a day but many states don’t bother recording cases any more.

We will probably see a surge with the new variant that is currently out but mortality will be stable because of vaccines and the virus being weaker ( in terms of lethality, it’s evolved to be more contagious as less deadly it is its survival strategy, killing your host isn’t a good way to live )

As Dave mentioned somewhere, the virus is now endemic and part of life. As we get older it is something we will have to worry about, just like pneumonia and the flu already are.

Many of us here will lose parents and grandparents to this, and some of us will die from it ourselves. Every winter for thousands of years the elderly and the immune compromised faced an increase in death, now there is one more thing added to the mix.

So it goes.

[Brian Fein]

Also, something you're overlooking....

China has roughly 3x more people than the US.  We don't know if anyone in China is receiving boosters, or if some are getting vaccines at all.  Who has data on that?  Some people in the US have 3, 4, even 5 boosters.

In the US, Covid shots are free.  They are paid for by our government.  Do we know if they are free in China?

[Dave Gray]

Many of us here will lose parents and grandparents to this, and some of us will die from it ourselves. Every winter for thousands of years the elderly and the immune compromised faced an increase in death, now there is one more thing added to the mix.

So it goes.

Good summary.

I just read the other day that COVID is still the 3rd biggest cause of death in the US.



I think we collectively learned lessons from COVID and I'm hoping that the long term we take with us is stuff like normalizing staying home when you're sick, masking when you're sick and you need to be in public, getting vaccinated when you're at risk, etc.