Vaccines help prevent severe disease, which is wonderful. However, I am far more worried about transmission. What happens in ICU’s is important but a very small % of what this virus is doing to us all.
We need to make sure we are not only looking where the light is. Far more is happening that what can be gleaned from studying patients in hospitals or talking to experts who work there. (I was mostly bedridden for 7 years and it took 7 years to even get admitted to a hospital.) 
I look at MDs, Ph.Ds, and science journalists all over my Twitter feed, and while the information they are offering the public is largely accurate, it is incomplete. They have sold the public a false picture of their actual risk by focusing on death and on the “at risk.”
Two years in, we are still doing this and it is beyond me to understand why. A fully vaccinated population in which the virus’s effects are attenuated (a good thing) but spreads readily is STILL a pandemic causing untold carnage…
…even if it doesn’t show up in your ICU and you turn it away when it crashes into you ER.
Case in point. I’m not arguing against vaccination. Simply that we have to stop pretending it’s our “get out of pandemic free” card.
https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1469320869411540993?s=20
Your reminder that New Zealand (while yes, a small island country) wasn’t even a part of this pandemic until (I imagine) it relaxed public health measures in the wake of vaccines we were all told would “end the pandemic.”
In sum: if all MDs, scientists, public health professionals could incorporate the fully reality of #longCOVID into their schema, I believe we would be in a much better place. Remember that for many people “long” will mean the rest of their lives. We have to use every tool.
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