Thread by @soncharm

Since (as I think more people are inevitably conceding) we’re not going to eradicate covid on anything less than a generational timescale, and vaccines are leaky, the best thing for it is early/regular exposure in kids so their immune systems are trained for it.

How am I wrong.

Vaccinate and protect older people who had no exposure to it as kids, as best one can. But meanwhile, neither lament nor freak out about exposures in kids. It can’t be avoided anyway, without massive vigilance & rendering them extra-vulnerable for their lifetimes.

One reason for peoples’ resistance to this is simple innumeracy. Yes it affects a small portion of kids horribly, no one wants that to be their kid, so, super-vigilance. But parents following the same rationale consistently must never let their kids leave the house. Too risky.

There’s another reason though which is simple confusion about strategy. Early on in the pandemic there was a widespread conception that we faced a ‘fork in a road’, a bifurcation point, in how we handled the pandemic, in which the outcome would pivot hugely.

The way this bifurcation notion went in broad terms was that if we did policies ABC then the eventual infected percentage might be kept below P (think P=0.5%) but if we didn’t do ABC it would instead whip up to Q>>P (think Q=80%). A giant fork in the road.

This bifurcation logic was given to me by several pro-lockdown advocates at the time as justifying lockdowns. It wasn’t crazy.

It’s just moot now. IMHO it was probably moot by March 2020 we had no realistic prospect of taking the ‘good fork’ anyway. But it’s certainly moot now.

I can’t even understand why I have to explain it’s moot now, why it doesn’t suffice to point at numbers. Months and months ago CDC’s estimate of how many Americans had been infected was >100mm. No idea what it is now.

Guys, we missed the ‘good fork’. It’s gone. Way behind us.

Even if we look at a place like Australia, which for the time being appears to have (via regular lockdowns) preserved its ability to take the ‘good fork’, to stay on the golden path, you need to explain to me what you think their golden-exit is, given reality of leaky vaccines.

It’s neat, I suppose, that they, and NZ, have kept themselves on the knife-edge of harsh containment, but the virus is endemic in basically The Rest Of The World. So what’s the plan guys?

It’s possible their situation just ends up like a macro/aggregate version of the child who is sheltered in a bubble from all exposures (viruses colds etc) to keep them ‘safe’ throughout their childhood, and now, has no immune system. Is that ‘good’?

For a while it had seemed good, cuz they were bridging themselves to vaccination. But now? I keep being told that the vaccines are having trouble against ‘delta’. To say nothing of other variants. So, now it’s not so clear.

The point is, way too many peoples’ thinking on what is and is not to be desired in covid policy is still con-fused with that early dream of staying on the golden side of the bifurcation-point, as if it’s not obvious that (for whatever reason) we failed to do that long ago.

So you still see ppl thinking it’s a valid/necessary objective to prevent outbreaks among kids ‘to keep grandmas safe’. No. We crossed that bridge. &blew it up. If grandmas will be safe now it’s cuz they’re vaccinated (or, survived it) not cuz we suppressed the epidemic-front.

And that simplifies the question back down to: how dangerous is the virus, itself, to kids. Thankfully, the answer appears to be: not very, statistically speaking.

The sooner people internalize that & accept its implications the better.