The virus is now endemic and can never be eradicated. The Delta variant is so contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect to protect unvaccinated people. All of us can expect to be exposed occasionally no matter what we do.
In the US, adults who want to be vaccinated have been vaccinated. Children aren't at significant risk. So the best approach is to drop all restrictions and accept the risk.
1. Many diseases have been considered endemic but were eradicated. Don't be a doomer.
2. The whole schtick about anyone who wants to get the vaccine can get it, so it should be a personal choice makes this common but very much mistaken assumption that a vaccinated individual is safe from harm. It just isn't so. Your personal risk is not affected only by your acquired immunity, but the acquired immunity of everyone around you. Vaccines fundamentally require a communal, cooperative endeavor to succeed.
We eradicated smallpox and (almost) polio because we had highly sterilizing vaccines and no animal hosts. That situation doesn't obtain with SARS-CoV-2.
Vaccines are highly effective at preventing deaths and I do encourage vaccination, but vaccinated people can still catch and spread the virus. They are probably less contagious on average, but unfortunately that isn't enough to control community spread.
Delta variant has an R0 of about 7-8. Measles 12-18. And yet, measles is nearly eradicated in the US.
You are overstating the extent to which vaccinated individuals are likely to be infectious. But more importantly, you are ignoring the importance of the network effects involved.
For x to get to z through y, x has to infect y, and y has to infect z. If probability of infectious breaktrhough and a contact event is 20%, the probability of it getting to z from x, is .2^3 = 0.008. And yet, a 20% is really high-end estimate of that likelihood. You need to both have a breakthrough infection and be in the vicinity of others for potential transmission.
Two doses of the measles vaccine (MMR or MMRV) are highly sterilizing and 97% effective. That's far better than any COVID-19 vaccine, so measles isn't a valid comparison.
The thing about these results is that its mostly in people who show symptoms, and it isn't clear to me that symptomatic covid infections in vaccinated people are associated with similar viral loads as when asymptomatic.
I think this study tries to address this. But haven't had time to read through
> Eradication is the reduction of an infectious disease's prevalence in the global host population to zero.[1]
> Two infectious diseases have successfully been eradicated: smallpox in humans and rinderpest in ruminants.
There is exactly one disease that has been eradicated in humans: smallpox, which took somewhere between 19 years and 27 years depending on when you consider the eradication effort to have started in earnest. We've gotten close with polio (after 40 years) and guinea worm (37 years). There are also a bunch of other diseases on that list where elimination efforts are in progress, but have not yet been completed.
Regardless, "eliminate COVID", should we decide to go down that path, is going to be a multi-decade project at best. It's also likely to be much harder than eradicating smallpox given the asymptomatic transmission and animal reservoirs. It might still be worth doing, in the same way that our eradication effort for measles is worth doing, but it's not worth holding up anything important until the effort completes considering that "until the effort completes" is likely to be a couple generations at the earliest.
You're arguing semantics now. Measles is effectively eradicated. Sure, if we all stopped getting the vaccine, there would be outbreaks. The important thing is that it can be controlled to an extent that it no longer poses a substantial burden on people's lives --- and the reason it isn't eradicated is less than full vaccination.
The point I was responding to was this idea that we should just settle for covid being endemic. So I'm really not sure why you are going on at about semantics.
My understanding is that you are advocating for continuing to wear masks, restrict gatherings, and push for vaccination until COVID is eradicated or close to it, and are also under the impression that "until COVID is eradicated or close to it" could be a matter of just a few months if everyone would just work together.
My point is it will not be just a few months. It will be decades. Even in the case of measles, it took almost 10 years to get from 250,000 cases / year in the Americas to 100, and we're starting from a lot more than 250,000 cases a year in the Americas this time.
If the alternative is 10 or 20 more years of restrictions, I think "settle for covid being endemic for now, with vaccines available for anyone who wants them, and maybe push eradication at a later date when most everyone has either natural or vaccine immunity and that job is easier" is in fact a better solution.
Are you ready for another 5 years of partial restrictions over a virus that's as deadly as the flu (after vaccination) for the chance we develop a vaccine that's even more effective than what we have today?
Bingo. It's wild to me that with these simple and undisputed facts, so many people are still unwilling to operate within that reality.
We have these "rules" to play by: Vaccines don't stop transmission, vaccines majorly help prevent major complications, kids at zero risk, overwhelming majority of adults at zero risk, unvaccinated people are unlikely to convert for whatever reason (political, fear, friends won't, etc), and natural immunity after infection is very helpful.
If given these "rules" - aka reality - what would you do? The dumb people are like, "Durrr, we need more vaccinated people, those evil bastards they are" even though it blatantly ignores reality and will therefore accomplish nothing, besides being an illogical fear since they're protected anyhow. But if you just accept this is how reality is, there's no other logical option but to drop restrictions and move on. It's a relief that at least a couple countries in Scandinavia are normal enough to recognize this. We're too stupid, too broken with fear.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
In the US, adults who want to be vaccinated have been vaccinated. Children aren't at significant risk. So the best approach is to drop all restrictions and accept the risk.