They were billed as a way of protecting others, if not yourself - I remember one pharmaceutical boss saying ~that on the BBC. However, maybe they do reduce transmission a bit and as I say - it's great we have vaccines to protect the vulnerable. Yes we don't know about the long term impact of people getting a new virus (though maybe some people wouldn't get it at all), but we certainly don't know the long term impact, or unintended consequences, of nearly everyone getting a new type of vaccine passed under emergency conditions.
Yes, this is a new type of vaccine in the sense that it hadn't been administered on this scale, but research into mRNA technology has been going on for decades. So while the vaccine type may be "new," the research into it isn't. It also helped that researchers had learned about other coronaviruses from SARS and MERS (I think the SARS outbreak was in 2003, but I'm not sure).
Who knows. We have never tested for flu like this, nor have we pushed for 'within 28 days of a flu test'. Nor have we segregated staff that are not manifesting sickness AFAIK. I've never seen bizarre news reports of people trying to convince me that young people are in danger, then showing morbidly obese people with long flu, or 'sepsis with flu', as I have with covid.
The flu hasn't overwhelmed the hospitals the way the COVID has/did, so there isn't a need for widespread flu testing. COVID is not the flu. Yes, both can exhibit similar symptoms, but because this was a new coronavirus, there wasn't existing immunity, so way more people were susceptible to it. Testing was critical early on as a tool to help stop the spread and to track the prevalence of the virus. But in the U.S., the initial government response (both local and federal) was slow, and that didn't help.
The flu is nothing to ignore since it can cause death (hence the prevalence of flu vaccines), but it hasn't done so on the scale that COVID did, especially early on in the pandemic. RE: testing. If we have the technology for testing, what is so bad about that? If a person tests positive, he or she can isolate and hopefully not spread it to anyone else.
Zero covid then? Maybe fewer people than you would like to actually want to take the vaccines, but this must surely still be the best/fastest takeup in history?
I think without the vaccines way more people would have died. And 6.5 million people, regardless of what percentage of the population that is, is still a lot of deaths.
It depends how bad you are, but I agree, people going around as normal when they're ill has always annoyed me. That said, I prefer that to the recent madness (as I see it).
It's not madness to think about other people besides ourselves. It's selfish of people not to consider their impact on others if they are ill with a contagious disease that we're still learning about.
Or did flu disappear because we weren't looking for it, and were looking very hard for something else? How many lateral flow tests were done for flu and colds?
In Connecticut, they were testing for flu and COVID at the same time because both illnesses can have similar symptoms, so there was no "looking harder for something else." Flu was down a ton because of the COVID mitigation efforts, so that was a happy byproduct. And people were staying home, so all of the usual flu large-gathering breeding grounds were in lockdown.
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