High vaccination rates are however highly correlated with low hospitalization rates.
Also, that Yahoo article does not say what you're implying that it does. It is discussing two issues: people forgoing preventative medical care, and the strain on the hospital system. Over the past year and a half, these have resulted in substandard medical care for a lot of people, raising the death rate from non-COVID causes. Your comment implies that the article is about people being killed by the vaccine, which is a severe mischaracterization of what is actually written.
You’re being downvoted for pointing out an internal inconsistency that exists in the response we’ve had to COVID19, but I agree with you. If hospitalizations matter then we should track that, yet we track cases and dictate public policy based on cases (assuming it’s a proxy). If cases matter and eradication is the goal then we should abandon the vaccine for likely more draconian measures. You can’t (honestly) argue that cases should dictate response while also ignoring that our primary weapon right now is ineffective at preventing our primary metric from growing.
Oh, I know why I'm being downvoted, this isn't my first rodeo, but I appreciate the support :)
The biggest thing, as far as I understand, is people want to go back to normal, and by definition, normal was a world before covid-19, so normal must mean that covid-19 as an active virus in the world should not exist.
The problem is the covid-19 vaccine does not remove covid-19 from being transmissible in the world, as admitted by the CDC and every vaccine manufacturer [1] [2] [3]. We don't even know if these vaccines, in spite of being developed by very intelligent teams, will have any long-term serious side-effects, there are no long term tests. Guess what, the human race is the current test, and if the test goes bad, if we do have a >50% vaccination rate, in the worst case scenario, that will be very very bad for everyone.
So what problem are we solving with the vaccines? If we are solving hospitalizations, I have read many conflicting articles about the actual state of hospitals, so it is hard to know if we are actually solving that problem. If we are solving the problem of going back to normal, then the vaccines are not a good long term route.
Every solution that does not contribute to solving the problem is just busy-work at best, and creating other problems at the worst.
All that said, I'm not saying people should or shouldn't isolate, social distance, vaccinate, but I am saying that the current solutions our world leaders are pushing do not bring us back to "normal," as-in pre-covid.
>If cases matter and eradication is the goal then we should abandon the vaccine for likely more draconian measures.
This reads like "seatbelts and airbags don't stop all auto accident deaths, so we should remove them and stop people from driving if preventing auto deaths is the goal.
This is exactly right except the one modification I would make is that your seatbelts and airbags have a 50% chance of not working during a crash if it happens after 2 miles of driving with an unknown decreasing chance of working for every mile thereafter. Also, there’s no way to know if they will deploy or not until after you’ve crashed. If our goal is preventing auto deaths in there scenario then yes we should stop people from driving until we get something that works consistently and reliably.
The approach we’ve chosen is, of course, more like when my rock warded off tigers for the first 2 months but there was a tiger last week and tigers are bad so I’ve got to get more rocks.
Also, that Yahoo article does not say what you're implying that it does. It is discussing two issues: people forgoing preventative medical care, and the strain on the hospital system. Over the past year and a half, these have resulted in substandard medical care for a lot of people, raising the death rate from non-COVID causes. Your comment implies that the article is about people being killed by the vaccine, which is a severe mischaracterization of what is actually written.