What are those "smart, comprehensive measures" people are talking about exactly and what purposes would they serve? Those are just empty slogans that people keep using to perpetuate the myth that policy could save us from COVID-19. Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing.
https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1464994776365871105
She's talking about containment measures to "buy us time". But buy us time for what exactly? I've read some people talk about using that time to make a vaccine tailored against Omicron and inject people with it, but this is a fantasy. How can people not see this?
Even if regulatory agencies didn't get in the way, which they almost certainly would, it would take months before it could even be produced in large volumes. And then what? After almost a year, we still haven't managed to convince a lot of people to get the original vaccine!
But let's suppose that we somehow pull this off. What then? For all we know, there might be another variant taking over by then, descended from a different lineage, against which this vaccine would not be optimized. How long are we going to be doing this?
Suppose that we're lucky and no other variant emerge before we have injected that vaccine into enough people. (I'm setting aside the fact that even current vaccines will likely protect well against severe disease even with Omicron.) Eventually there will be another variant!
Are we supposed to use "smart, comprehensive measures" and put our life on hold every time a new variant emerges that *might* evade prior immunity or suck in some other way? This is going to keep happening, there is no end to this process, so that's complete lunacy!
Don't even get me started with all the alleged panaceas that smart people regularly fall in love with — mass testing, "contact-tracing", etc. — even though there is usually not a shred of evidence they actually help. That's not even the important point.
The important point is that SARS-CoV-2 is not going anywhere, it's going to keep mutating, there will always be more waves and people are always going to die from it. So what is the point? You can't "buy time" to win a race when there is no finish line!
The population is no longer immunologically naive and, as more people get vaccinated and/or infected, the IFR will fall and SARS-CoV-2 won't be so bad anymore. This is already happening. So let's just encourage people to get vaccinated and move on!
I don't think people realize that, even in the worst case scenario (say COVID-19 kills 50,000/year when endemic in a country like France), this would only mean that we'd lose a few years worth of mortality reduction at previous trends. It sucks but it's not the end of the world!
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