GannonFan wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 8:17 am
Well, nothing has really impeded the circulation of the virus other than shutting everything down (especially since it started right back up again after we opened things up), and since we're not going to do that again it looks like we're reaching what the endemic will look like.
I think there are things that strongly suggest things have been done that have
impeded circulation. Not impeded it to the extent necessary to end the epidemic/pandemic. But it looks like some things have impeded it. Vaccination in particular.
We can look at stuff like the page at
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracke ... ine-status. You can see the graph. Also, you cans see that, over the period considered, unvaccinated persons had 5 times the risk of testing positive as compared to fully vaccinated persons.
I think the negative correlation between vaccination rate by US State (and DC) and case rate is also very suggestive. I just used the Worldometers data and the State by State vaccination rate data at
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/cov ... ker-states (scroll down) to do a quick correlation between State (plus DC) cumulative cases per million population and State (plus DC) percent fully vaccinated. The coefficient is -0.669. That indicates an association between higher vaccination rate and lower cumulative case rates that is significant at >99.99 percent confidence. That is remarkable given the fact that a lot of the cases nationally occurred before vaccinations were even available.
Yes, it is true that correlation in observational data do not necessarily infer cause and effect. But, before the fact, an association that strong whereby States with higher vaccination rates tend to have lower cumulative case rates by chance is on the order of one in 5 billion.
Any reasonable person should be able to see that vaccination impedes circulation. The problem is that we can't get sufficient vaccination rates. The more contagious the disease, the higher the vaccination rate has to be to achieve the desired population effect. According to the article at
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... ut-measles, for instance, we need to have a >90% vaccination rate to achieve the desired effect. And the measles vaccine is about 97% effective (see
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/measle ... hickenpox). .
The current US fully vaccinated for COVID-19 rate is about 60%. That is nowhere near sufficient to achieve the desired effect. Neither is the 73% fully vaccinated rate for the State (Vermont) with the highest fully vaccinated rate.
To me it is very clear that the vaccines have the potential for achieving the desired effect. But public health officials are fighting a very difficult battle against ignorance and misinformation. It's very sad that we have the tools to have a good shot at putting this thing behind us quickly and can't even take a full shot at doing it because there are so many ignoramuses in our population. Not just the US population either. They are having similar issues in some other countries.