Look at current hospitalizations and deaths compared to previous waves. Israel surpassed its previous peak infection level from a few months ago but deaths are running at less than 50% of what they were. UK deaths per day peaked around 1200 per day last winter and are currently running 110 per day, a huge decrease. Infections are running around 35,000 per day, compared to 56,000 in January, a much smaller decrease.
The vaccines reduced deaths to "0" in Israel and to very low levels in the United Kingdom. Now because of declining immunity levels and the Delta variant they're increasing. But still the case fatality is much lower because of the vaccines. The solution is booster shots, preferably using vaccines formulated to work against the variants.
Originally Posted by Tiny
IOW it appears that the "solution" is to cede all of the rights we fought so hard for the last 250 years in this country. I thought the Patriot Act was the biggest attack on our right to be "left the fuck alone" to live our lives as we see fit, but these new "emergency powers" that now look to be permanent, (well some of us have said this would happen from the beginning) are going to go down as the beginning of the end of our freedoms as we now know them.
The problem that is MUCH bigger than COVID is that fact that Government officials all over the fucking world are giddy with their newfound power and they are going to do EVERYTHING in their power to keep it.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I am a LOT more worried about losing my "way of life" to COVID than I am in actually losing my life to this rather impotent virus that only seems to kill the old and the weak.
It will be interesting that if history books are still able to be written in any kind of honest way fifty years in the future, historians will be pointing out how the entire world gave up all their rights to self determination in the 2020's without a single shot being fired.