I agree with your assessment of a vaccine with a few exceptions.Early on CDC said that masks would not protect you which was true then and is basically true today. Actually, there is a very small amount of protection for the wearer but not much. Herd immunity as defined by the scientist is a calculated estimate based on transmission rate and reproductive numbers for the virus. For this virus herd immunity is 70% of the population having been exposed, that is they have antibodies. That can be off by 10 or 15%. If the scientists definition of herd immunity is used, there should not be much difference in the calculation.I think there is a huge consensus among just everybody in the healthcare field in regard to mask wearing. Of course it probably does not include your local bartender who is out of work, Sam the Surfer, and my granddaughter that thinks wearing a mask makes her look ugly. And there is a lot evidence coming contact tracing that shows that people that are asymptomatic are spreading the virus.A growing body of evidence supports the idea that wearing face masks in public, even when you feel well, can help curb the spread of the coronavirus — since people can spread the virus even without showing symptoms. That's the main reason to wear a mask: to protect other people from you.Since that Uterus holds a life and removing it would cause it's death.I can't breath with a mask on. I couldn't stand oxygen masks when i WENT in for an operation, I tolerate the mask less than those. I have problems breathing. I'll stay home until whenever. I don't want to live in a world where everyone wears a mask.
Not wearing a mask will not cause me to die and even so, I'm an adult able to make my own choices but the child isn't.
However that's not written in stone, it's what the left wishes to believe. While you can find studies and such to show they work, I can find studies that say they don't. It's subjective, just like man made global warming, or the effects of hydroxychloroquine.
Because there is no consensus, then it should be the individuals choice whether to wear a mask or not.
I read the opposite from the CDC just a few weeks ago. This tells you how everything changes. First a mask was no good, now it's mandated in cities and states across the country. Before asymptomatic people were low risk for spreading, now the risk of spreading is the same.
I think there is a difference between going to a restaurant and going to a doctors office. Doctors are exposed to ill people day in day out. For most of us, we will probably never be around a person with Covid unless you are a socialite, or your business relies on personal contact with people all day long. Although our antibody testing is far from perfected, some are suggesting that we are already in the herd process and there's no stopping it.
The problem with this thing is we've never experienced anything like it; at least with the technology we have today. Who knows......next year at this time, they may be telling us what a waste of time and money it was for us to wear a mask. We simply don't know.
We may not have all the details of a virus but we know a lot about epidemics and how to control them. For example any airborne virus or a virus whose most common transmission is through the air, the key to stopping transmission is preventing the virus from reaching a host. Masks, plastic shields, staying away from the source of virus, staying at home, etc prevents the spread, a really easy to understand concept but pretty hard to implement in a large population.
We also know a lot about a virus based on the characteristics of the family. There are 6 types of coronavirus that can infect humans which includes Mers and SARS. They have many of the same characteristic but there are some differences. It's really fortunate that there was work done developing the SARS vaccine because this gave researchers a starting point in developing the vaccine for this member of the family. Making changes to the vaccine can be very simple. However, every time you change the vaccine you start over in testing. This is why it takes so long to develop a vaccine. The fact that we are willing to accept a vaccine which has is not very effective, 40% makes it more likely we will get one sooner rather later.
It's wishful thinking, but there certainly is no guarantee a vaccine can be developed. We still don't have vaccines for HIV, flu, even the common cold.
If a new vaccine came out and was approved by September, many Americans would be hesitant to take it including myself. It reminds me of when I bought my first computer and read up on it. It was a Dummy's book. The author warned his readers to never buy software 2.0. 2.0 software is the original version. When thousands of people use it problem free in trials, it's different than when you start passing it out to millions of people. That's when they discover the hidden flaws and imperfections. It's why you always wait until version 2.2. or 2.3 to come out. Those are the versions where the flaws have been corrected.
It's the same with new medications. Yes, it undergoes intense testing, but we won't know the results or drawbacks until it's been used on tens of millions of people. Even then, it could take years to find out if it has any long-term negative effects.
Before I take it, I would need 100% guarantee from my doctor that it won't have any harmful effects on me, corroborated by my cousin, who is a retired research doctor that supervised the laboratory where she worked. Until I get that, I may wait for a while if and when a vaccine comes out.
We do have a vaccine for the flu. I get one every year. A vaccine to prevent the common cold has been difficult to make, primarily because there are more than 200 different varieties of viruses that can cause colds. Also, if there were such a vaccine, you would have to get a new one every year like the flu vaccine, plus it would probably be not very effective due to the rate these viruses mutate.
The HIV is nothing like the coronations family of viruses. The problem developing a vaccine for HIV lies in genetic makeup of the virus. Unlike coronavirus, HIV has an incredibly fast replication cycle, less than 24 hour. However, the real show stopper is that HIV is prone to frequent replication errors, churning out mutated copies of itself which recombine into new strains as the virus is passed from person to person.
This coronavirus is very similar to SARS which we have developed a vaccine. Also most of the organizations developing vaccines have already proved in the lab that their vaccine kills the virus and is so far harmless to humans. The big question market is how effective the vaccine will be. Typically vaccines like these are 40% to 70% effective. The CDC has implied that a 40% effective vaccine would be acceptable. Think about what this really means. If we are able to produce enough of the vaccine to make it available like the flu vaccine at every primary care doctors office, every pharmacy, hospital, and public health clinic, we might be able to get the same inoculation numbers as the flu vaccine which is 45% of the population by the end of next year. So we might just have have 148 million vaccinated with 40% less chance of getting the virus and the remainder no protection since they were not vaccinated. After a year or so we get more effective vaccines and thus more protection. My guess is we will reach herd immunity about the time of 2024 election.
I don't think we're going see an unemployment rate of less than 5% for at least a year or so and people will dying from coronavirus for many years, hopefully at a greatly reduced rate.
BTW You will never get a 100% guarantee that a vaccine will not harm you. Deaths caused by vaccines are less than 2 per million and in almost all of those cases the person had a compromised immune system or had other conditions. You're probably more likely to get killed by a lightening strike than a vaccine.
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