America has fallen prey to many of the same self-destructive but alluring instincts that I identified last year. It went all in on one countermeasure—vaccines—and traded it off against masks and other protective measures. It succumbed to magical thinking by acting as if a variant that had ravaged India would spare a country where half the population still hadn’t been vaccinated. 

🎵I felt he'd found my letters and read each one out loud♮

...
“It’s the eighth month of 2021, and I can’t believe we’re still having these conversations,” Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me.

...

But something is different now—the virus. “The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “Obviously, that’s not where we are.”...  In part, he says, people underestimated how transmissible Delta is...the [original] virus spread in... super-spreading events...CDC estimates that Delta’s [transmissibility] “is shockingly high,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me... At that level [of transmissibility], “its reliance on super-spreading events basically goes away,” Scarpino said.

There you have it. Delta, as transmissible as chickenpox, does not need super-spreaders...But it's gonna get 'em. Folks, there are going to be 80,000 alcohol besotted products of incestuous unions sitting and yelling in football stadia all across the low-vaxed slave states in a few weeks. Is Delta going to reel from overchoice? Uh, no. It will feast in those super-spreaders.

The U.S. now faces a dispiriting dilemma...the first surge of the vaccine era is ongoing...victory is not you as an individual getting a vaccine. 

 Thank you. Bless you.

...

...Delta’s extreme transmissibility negates some of the community-level protection that vaccines offer. If no other precautions are taken, Delta can spread through a half-vaccinated country more quickly than the original virus could in a completely unvaccinated country. It can even cause outbreaks in places with 90 percent vaccination rates but no other defenses. Delta has “really rewound the clock,” Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease ecologist at Georgetown University, told me. “Communities that had reached safety are in danger again.” Vaccines can still reduce the size and impact of its surges, turning catastrophic boils into gentler simmers. But the math means that “there’s not really a way to solve the Delta problem through vaccination alone,” Murray said.

Thank you Dr. Murray!

Here, then, is the current pandemic dilemma: Vaccines remain the best way for individuals to protect themselves, but societies cannot treat vaccines as their only defense. 

I don't know who you are, reporter, but I LUV you.

...

The calculus around safety has shifted in another important way. [Young adults and children are getting hit by Delta where previously the virus picked the low-hanging fruit of the elderly.]...But kids under 12 remain ineligible for vaccines—and the timeline for an emergency-use approval stretches months into the future. 

Vaccines uber alles give the virus its oxygen, time. POJO killed Trump Plague dead. But it took so goddamned long for the vaccines to be produced and then for people to get the shots that the virus was able to mutate COVID. And, I will NEVER let CDC off the hook on this, CDC was blithely unconcerned about Delta. India, Shmindia. Unforgivable mistake.

Children are less likely to become seriously ill with COVID-19, but more than 400 have already died in the U.S....Rare, severe events are more poignant when they affect children, and they can accumulate quickly in the Delta era. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu reports, pediatric COVID-19 cases are skyrocketing and hospitalizations have reached a pandemic high.

Absolutely, and a vital point to keep in mind as CDC and pediatric professionals reopen schools. Argh!

Virtual learning took a huge toll on both children and parents, and every expert I asked agreed that kids should be back in classrooms—with protections. That means vaccinating adults to create a shield around children, masks for students and staff, better ventilation, and regular testing. “Schools must continue mitigation measures—I feel very strongly about this,” Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. Otherwise, Delta outbreaks are likely. Such outbreaks have already forced nine Mississippi schools to go remote...“Schools have no choice but to close once there’s a large outbreak,” [Emily Brunson, an anthropologist at Texas State said.]

The undersigned is going to continue to disagree, and to be disagreeable about it, with the school "experts." Reopening schools is going to be an unmitigated disaster with delta flying around.

...

...herd immunity—the point where enough people are immune that outbreaks automatically fizzle out—likely cannot be reached through vaccination alone.

Fuck herd immunity and the herd that birthed it. WE AIN'T GETTIN' THERE!

This means that the “zero COVID” dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy. Instead, the pandemic ends when almost everyone has immunity...

Wait. What? That's what herd immunity is.

...preferably because they were vaccinated or alternatively because they were infected and survived.

I have a question. Does immunity via previous infection confer immunity to Delta? Or is that theory applicable to previous versions of COVID only? So-called "natural immunity" is, I am very confident, more chimerical than originally thought. Put it this way: Vaccine immunity is less with Delta than it was with the original. Why would anybody think that having gotten  COVID in the Summer of 2020 provides ANY protection against Delta? Put it another way: Shit-for-brains got COVID last September or something. He crowed after his unfortunate recovery that he was now "immune." Then he secretly got vaccinated right before being booted from the White House. So I disagree with this writer that even in some fantasy world we can lump the vaccinated immune together with the naturally immune and get herd immunity. TAIN'T GONNA HAPPEN.

When that [almost everyone has immunity] happens, the cycle of surges will stop and the pandemic will peter out. The new coronavirus will become endemic...

ENDEMICITY IS HERD IMMUNITY BY OTHER WORDS!

It will be less of a problem, not because it has changed but because it is no longer novel and people are no longer immunologically vulnerable. Endemicity was always the likely outcome...

Okay, stop. This reporter is getting on my nerves now. Dude, dudette, whichever you are, go eat another magic mushroom. "It will be less of a problem, not because it has changed..." THE MOTHER-FUCKER IS GOING TO CHANGE! It's going to mutate again and again and again. People who are "no longer immunologically vulnerable" will be fucking immunologically vulnerable AGAIN! AND AGAIN AND AGAIN. Get that through your head.

...

Vaccinated people will eventually inhale the virus but need not become severely ill as a result. Some will have nasty symptoms but recover. Many will be blissfully unaware of their encounters. “There will be a time in the future when life is like it was two years ago"...Lavine said. “That’s where we’re headed, but we’re not there yet.”

None of the experts I talked with would predict when we would reach that point, especially because many feel humbled by Delta’s summer rise. Some think it’s plausible that the variant will reach most unvaccinated Americans quickly, making future surges unlikely. “When we come through, I think we’ll be pretty well protected against another wave, but I hesitate to say that, because I was wrong last time,” Rivers said. 

You should hesitate, Rivers. BECAUSE YOU'RE AN IDIOT! Has Delta gone through unvaccinated Americans as "quickly" as it did unvaccinated Indians? NO! How do you think "coming through" Delta is going to leave us "pretty well protected against", not "another wave" of the same old same old, another wave of another mutation of which you are "blissfully unaware"? IDIOT!

...

If endemicity is the future, then masks, distancing, and other precautions merely delay exposure to the virus—and to what end? “There’s still so much for us to buy time for,” Bansal told me. Suppressing the virus gives schools the best chance of staying open. It reduces the risk that even worse variants will evolve. 

Listen to what you and your experts just said. "Still so much to buy time for", and buying time "reduces the risk that even worse variants will evolve." Are you drunk and hallucinating? TIME IS THE ENEMY'S ALLY!-news flash. Time is essential for COVID to mutate. That is how we and the world got Delta! The vaccines were manufactured to protect against the original COVID. Even at "Warp Speed" the vaccines were outraced by three other variants before it landed on one that really flummoxed us slow human--Delta. What has happened to this reporter? It's as if (s)he got possessed half-way through the article!

[Time] gives researchers time to better understand the long-term consequences of breakthrough infections.

Oh wait. Sir, ma'am, we, the American public, understand the consequences of breakthroughs. We understand that breakthroughs mean the vaccine didn't protect us from infection and that as a consequence we made a whole bunch of others, vaxed and unvaxed, sick and whacked some of the unvaxed. We understand that. But those are short-term consequences to you and your experts? Okay, well that's what we're interested in, short-term, like now. You want us to give researchers time "to better understand the LONG-TERM consequences" of breakthroughs? Nah, we're not going to do that. Sowy!

...

Finally, the U.S. simply needs more time to reach unvaccinated people. 

Okay, I'm done with this article

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/delta-has-changed-pandemic-endgame/619726/