It’s really not hard to understand. If the entire population were vaxxed, some fraction would still get sick, fewer would die. Multiply by > 300 million and (with current tools and variants) it’s easy to imagine a “pandemic of the vaccinated” that still kills 50-100k a year.
https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1488401972789133314
Of course all else is not equal. We’re nowhere close to 100 percent uptake, particularly RE boosters. On the other hand, we have more natural immunity than before, next gen vaccines and therapeutics are also nearly here. So it’s a bit of wait and see how deadly the next wave is.
But if we get yearly death on that order (which would make us very lucky) I don’t know what the right course of action is. On one hand, prior to COVID, seasonal flu would occasionally be that deadly, and I never gave it a second thought. On the other…that seems bad in hindsight!
And the point will remain: in order to avoid very large absolute death figures with a disease like this, you need both extremely high population immunity AND near perfect efficacy, and currently we have neither. Thus: packed hospitals, with plenty of fully vaxxed among the ill.
The best way to make the numbers closer to tolerable is to get everyone vaccinated. Then every infection will be a breakthrough and we can stop struggling to wrap our heads around base-rate weirdness.
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