Heebie,
I keep telling myself that we'll know it's safe, when community spread ends, and contact-tracing suffices to find all cases. At that point, yeah, we can start to relax, and at some point soon after that, we'll be able to take off our masks, start going to crowded bars.
In short, I think we need to do what the public health folks tell us: stop thinking about vaccines as something that protects any individual, and instead think of them as something that protects us as a community.
That doesn't really answer your actual question, which is: "when is this over?" And the truth is, it all depends on how fast people get vaccinated, and whether some variant escapes the vaccines. There's nothing we can do about that, except hope, and get people vaccinated.
1. IANAExpert, but I think the answer is currently "no one knows". I don't think anyone is even guessing yet whether the vaccine is effective for 1 year, for 10 years, for life, or what. (Maybe the medical research has some educated guesses about it, but if so, as I can tell no one is talking about it on the record.)
2. I think it's just a matter of protecting the adults around them, or the kids themselves if they have risk factors. Again, though, IANAExpert. And "around them" doesn't just mean parents but also anyone in contact with them, since I think whether the vaccine prevents retransmission is also still up in the air.
3. I think the CDC is going to announce a bright line, and I think it'll be irrelevant for individual peoples' lives and schedules compared to their personal vaccination status, work situation, political beliefs, etc.
4. I think I've experienced the other side of the coin. Last week or earlier this week I saw a coworker for the first time by accident for about two weeks. (We were figuring out a Teams setup we hadn't had to use before.) We've worked together fairly closely since July or so, we've spoken on the phone at least weekly, we've typed chat messages and/or emailed daily, but we hadn't seen each other on camera until now. It was disturbingly intimate.
I would say that I'm not wondering emotionally how much longer, so much as for planning purposes, which things are okay at which stages. Like signing kids up for camps this summer, or planning if my classes should be remote or not in the fall, or wondering if I need to consider my parents' vaccine wearing off if I try to visit them.
I want states to be ramping up real contact tracing. It's not much use now, with rates as high as they are, but once vaccination has brought rates down it might be part of getting them down to zero.
a return to in-the-office must be on some kind of mid-term horizon bc for the first time in a year i've just bought a new dress. or maybe that's down to it being an unmissable one-off, amazing price in a sample sale ...
3, 4: For whatever it's worth, I think we'll know enough in time to make decisions about visits to family in the summer or hypothetically even late spring. (Unless you want to buy plane tickets months in advance.) If our parents are getting their shots in March or earlier, and we need to book our vacation time by May, then it will have been 5 months since the first vaccines went out. If it turns out that they're only good for 3 months, I assume we'd know.
Not sure what to do about summer camp/daycare/whatever, though. Those tend to want registration much farther in advance. A month ago when I had just got my first shot, I was thinking Cassandane might get hers by March or April, and then at least for us basically everything could be back to normal by June. But considering how slowly vaccines are rolling out to the general public, I'm worried that was overly optimistic.
I want a personal email as soon as I can start going to bars again. Maybe one about church too.
I scheduled a wedding for the fall so...
5: Given the asymptomatic spread and the duration of peak infectiousness, I'd prefer cheap at home rapid tests taken frequently.
Tim really wants to go to Canada this summer, but I'm worried the border won't be open because of the timeline of their vaccination campaign.
My sense is that:
1- Vaccines give protection for at least a year based on what we know about immunology and nature of coronaviruses. I think I saw something about how some people exposed to SARS 1 had immunity a decade later. It's important not to confuse antibody titer with immunity because circulating antibodies do fade over several months but memory cells, which can be tested but not as easily, can ramp back up upon re-exposure.
2. They'll be leas effective against variants and there will be redesigned boosters for different strains like we do for flu every year.
3. There will be deaths and illness every year like there is for flu. People will still be carrying it around and if we continue routine testing there will be a baseline positive rate that will never go to zero, but the overall prevalence and risk will be similar to other seasonal respiratory diseases.
I want to go to Canada this summer too. I didn't eat enough in Quebec.
Our statewide mask mandate ends . . . tomorrow!
SP - re: your comment somewhere about borrowing a 75-year old in MA. Apparently a black market has sprung up.
Nothing looks as rented as a rented elder.
Our governor wrestles viruses as if they were reporters.
I expect vaccination to happen faster and faster. It has been slow so far, but I expect that to speed up about as much as testing did. Last April I couldn't get a test for anything and by July there was lots of free fast testing. I bet that by, say April, the vaccine will be as ubiquitous as the flu shot.
The WP says Biden just got 200 million doses, but I didn't read to see when they will hit the streets.
Our kid did a very local, all-masked summer camp last summer. He's been good all year(!) about staying masked; I expect something similar this summer, but with the adults (well, the 16+ crowd) vaccinated. The camps that use adolescents as junior counselors are going to be the tricky ones to make judgements about, but again, outdoors & masked and if levels are down... it's not crazy.
School in the fall is where I'm worried, since I don't think the current arrangement can be renewed for next year and I have serious doubts about whether my district can/will be ready for something by September.
"The camps that use adolescents as junior counselors"
Is there any other type of camp?
17- Yeah I saw Craigslist offers of $250 if you'll let me drag your wrinkled body somewhere for an injection (laydeez...) I'm not sure 75+ people are reading Craigslist- more likely to get scammers claiming they're old and asking to pre-send the payment.
22- I happen to know that there is a discussion tonight about a reopening plan for your district.
Alaska's vaccination program continues to gallop along at high speed. Starting today they're opening up eligibility to all teachers and anyone over 50 with at least one risk factor. They're also going to start vaccinating non-resident seafood workers. There have been some big outbreaks in canneries lately.
Yes, there is, and I have not heard good things from the rumor mill.
Epidemic COVID is not like the flu, but endemic COVID likely will just be like the flu. When you've already been vaccinated or exposed, even if you don't stay immune forever you'll have partial immunity and it won't be as dangerous. If you're high risk or responsible you'll get a COVID vaccine yearly like a flu vaccine. Old people will die of COVID pneumonia at rates not wildly different from how they die of flu pneumonia now.
Which is to say, Spanish flu never ended, but we don't think about it much.
Nobody expects the end of the Spanish flu.
Our main weapons are fear, surprise, aerosolized droplets, wet markets in provincial Chinese cities, and the Republican party!
22 last surprises me. Schools have been less-bad than feared, and Biden is about to dump a metric ton of cash on them, and teachers should all be vaccinated by August. Why wouldn't they be open nationwide next fall?
Schools are going to be open next fall.
I don't know why I'm so optimistic about this but: case rates are falling, vaccine rates are going up to the extent that Utah will have everyone vaccinated by the end of May, we have two months till spring and summer give us a reprieve before we head into fall. Odds are very good the vaccine also prevents the spread of disease -- that hasn't been tested yet of course but it would be really weird if it didn't. I think schools will be open because the continued cost to kids will be too much once their teachers and elderly relatives are vaccinated.
The virus may still be a *personal* worry -- no one wants to get ill with COVID -- but it might well be more like fearing a bad flu than a public health shutdown of most of life.
24: Where are you getting enough vaccine? Hawaii is still working its way through 75+ and high-priority non-medical workers (not entirely clear who all is in that, but it includes teachers) and running well below the capacity of the distribution system because there aren't enough doses available.
That said, fall planning is a bitch. We have to have the fall schedule set next week, and we're not allowed to change the catalog once it's entered, so this is pushing faculty to offer more virtual classes because we aren't confident that students will want face to face classes if the vaccine rollout is bad.
Where are you getting enough vaccine?
Alaska was the only state that opted to get its vaccine allocation in monthly rather than weekly shipments, which has helped a lot with the distribution logistics, plus the IHS and VA get their own separate allocations and those cover a lot of people in Alaska.
My friend's 85 year old dad is scheduled to have his first shot five weeks from now. That seems a bit slower than optimal.
37: Indeed. In WA, my 80 and 78 yo parents (with cancer and an aftermarket kidney, respectively) got their first doses last week, but 70ish aunt and uncle (latter recuperating from cancer surgery and prepping for radiation) haven't been able to find appointments yet.
Part of our school pessimism is being in a district that is one of the only two in the state (out of ~350) to not have any in-person anything at all since last March (including what I'm told is legally mandated special ed stuff), the teachers' union being somewhat militant about it, and the Mayor more-or-less backing them. They've also made a lot of noise about HVAC improvements for safety, which are great, but mean that two out of the seven primary schools are screwed, since they're too old to do anything like that. It kind of feels like if there's any reason to not be in person (say, concerns about virus variants vs. vaccine effectiveness), they look like they'll try to take them.
How does your infection and deaths rate compare to the rest of the state? Did schools being more closed seem to make a difference?
Now they want me to watch a 30 second commercial.
Nathan: the JAMA (IIRC) article referenced from the latest CDC guidance that said schools could reopen, was pretty clear that it was only safe if masks, distancing, and ventilation were all scrupulously and thoroughly implemented. No half-measures. IIRC the JAMA article also stipulated that community spread had to be under-control. There was a recent NYT article where a bunch of pediatric infectious disease specialists removed the "no community spread" requirement, but left the others.
Here's the thing: we already know that kinds don't typically get -sick- from covid. But we also know they pass it along to their caregivers, who -do- get sick. A pediatric infectious disease specialist would be .... not as qualified to judge this issue, as compared to a public health and infectious disease specialist who deals with adults. And those have spoken. They've laid out conditions for reopening schools.
So what happens next, is that everybody interprets those hard rules as soft ones, as "to whatever extent practicable" rules. And then .... well, who can blame teachers for not wanting to die on the job? Here in SF (and some other places) teachers were clear that they'd go back to in-person teaching after being vaccinated, or once the region was down to "orange" (we're at "purple", which is ..... "the sky is falling, stay indoors!")
All that said: it seems pretty likely that by fall, most teachers will be vaccinated; heck, most Americans should be vaccinated. And so, unless we get a variant that really breaks out from the vaccines, yeah, schools should be safe for in-person teaching.
The vaccines seem to provide near-complete protection against serious covid cases, the signs are good for protection against new strains (depending on the particular vaccine), and the vaccine production is faster than expected. Anybody in charge of schools or teachers and not currently working to open in the fall or sooner is a wrecker and a class enemy*.
*Not sure which classes, but at least some of the good ones.
Just got my first dose of vaccine by loitering around the Moscone center at 6PM, having been tipped off that they're frequently looking for volunteers at that time to prevent doses from going to waste. SF-dwelling Unfoggeders plz make use of this tip and follow in my footsteps and lmk if it works for you. Pretty fun scene. They were grabbing joggers off the street. [Not like grabbing them with a vaudeville hook.]
Pfizer just announced they've found a way to double their rate of production. (Initial manufacture was built for speed to clinic and not fully optimized). I have never been fond of their corporate strategies, but I'm impressed they're getting this so right.
Now, we need the FDA to decide how approval for mRNA variants will work. I hope they get on board with treating it like the flu vaccines. That's the next big hurdle. After that, it will be making sure labs have the resources to monitor appropriately for COVID variants. Luckily, we are no longer governed by assholes and idiots, so this all seems feasible.
Co-sign SP's predictions above. Re: immunity, no one wants to overpromise. Solid data just came out that you get at least 38 weeks, and there's no reason to think it will tail dramatically at 1 year. It's hard to say exactly, but each new round of data support being optimistic that we'll have a solid year, and probably more. How much more is hard to say. 3 years? 5 years?
Also, scientists are being extremely conservative re:transmissibility. The communication around this makes it sound like it's either sterilizing or not. My friend in the field strongly suspects it's not sterilizing, but I (a dilettante) think it will drastically reduce transmission and severity of disease by lowering viral load (same as masks). So, I think even without hitting true herd numbers, we're going to see meaningful improvements.
FDA has indicated that they are considering allowing vaccines for variants to follow the modified NDA process available to flu vaccines, although nothing formalized yet:
"We will utilize our experience with influenza to help inform a path forward if SARS-CoV-2 variants emerge against which currently authorized vaccines are not sufficiently effective."
50: Yes, they've been in talks for a while (months?). They need to decide and announce. I gather the sticking point is the newness of mRNA vaccines and being conservative about safety rather than having a science-based reason not to handle it this way.
42: our local schools are opening for some grades (to allow distancing) after teachers get second shot. Most at risk students (ELL, ones who weren't signing on, etc) are already in person. Hoping to bring back more grades once it gets warmer and can meet outside. It seems sensible but they're not sharing publicly just what they've done for ventilation.
42: our local schools are opening for some grades (to allow distancing) after teachers get second shot. Most at risk students (ELL, ones who weren't signing on, etc) are already in person. Hoping to bring back more grades once it gets warmer and can meet outside. It seems sensible but they're not sharing publicly just what they've done for ventilation.
Oops.
My first grader is currently in virtual first grade, attending "fancy Friday" as a superhero.
sand, i am so sorry - thinking of you and your family.
torque, that is a solid tip will definitely try it thank you!!!
Our schools are remote today, because it is 30° and drizzly. Not Covid-related, though.
How distressing Sand, so very sorry.
It killed a lot more than that, Moby.
But the snow day was social distancing better than almost anyone.