The idiocy of the anti-vax movement is well on display at sites like SorryAntiVaxxer. The two pronged assault of idiocy runs along the axis of 1) TYRANNY! and 2) Covid is just the flu. The "Microchips in the injection" or "the vaccine alters your DNA" are less examples of idiocy than the outright delusions characteristic of the conspiracy minded.
The "getting a shot is the end of liberty" is a weird sort of projection from people who cheered on efforts to end democracy and carry long guns to Chipotle as form of performative penis extensions. The stupidest defense, though, has to be "It's not that bad a disease."
This comes back, once again, to American innumeracy. They hear 2% mortality rate (it's a bit higher than that) and compare it to the flu. Now, the flu is unusually deadly for the elderly, like Covid. However, before the vaccine, we had terrible results for Covid. In the 2018-19 flu season, 21,261 people over the age of 65 died of the flu or flu complications. That's not a number we talk about, because it's simply the nature of being old. However, in 2021 - even after the availability of the vaccine and its widespread use among the elderly - roughly 264,000 people over the age of 65 will have died of Covid. That number needs to be added to the 311,000 who died in 2020, before the vaccines became available.
As Paul Campos notes, more Americans will have died from Covid in 2021 than in 2020, even though the vaccine became widely available last spring and early summer. We know that vaccines drastically reduce both cases and especially deaths, so the fact that more Americans have died of Covid while unrolling a life-saving vaccine is just a staggering display of idiocy. On thing I found striking was that deaths under the age of 60 have roughly doubled from 2020 to 2021. These are the people who decided that Covid was "just the flu" and that, while they might get sick, they wouldn't die. They don't let the flu determine what they can do, why should Covid do that?
I'm not a fan of the CovidActNow webpage, because their metrics are pretty strict. Here in Connecticut, they list as being at High Risk, because we have a rising number of cases and our infection rate is a little high. But 82% of Connecticut residents are at least partially vaccinated. Some of those positive cases are simply people who test positive or have a mild, vaccine-blunted case. Compare that to, say, Montana with its 58% vaccination rate. Somehow their "infection rate" is measured lower than Connecticut's despite having three times the cases. Their ICUs are 76% of capacity while Connecticut's is 17%. Eleven people a day are dying in Montana, despite having significantly fewer people, whereas only three people a day are dying on average in Connecticut.
People have been referring to the fall as the "pandemic of the unvaccinated." I think that covers the whole of the Delta Surge this summer, too. I was quite sick, but my life was not in jeopardy. The states with high vaccination rates are going to see Covid cases lingering around, but they aren't going to see ICUs maxxed out and refrigerator trucks used as morgues.
What is clear and becoming clearer is that Covid was a demographic event of enormous significance. We are still losing a 9/11's worth of people every three days. That also does not capture the "deaths of despair" including drug overdoses that have claimed even more lives. When I went looking for a good graph or chart on excess deaths, most of what I saw was crap or inaccessible to laypersons. However, ballpark estimates are roughly an additional 200,000 to 400,000 deaths.
While these deaths fell - as they ordinarily do - heaviest among the elderly, I don't think we've completely assimilated the disruption to the demographics of our world.
UPDATE; Josh Marshall points out the good news in anti-viral therapies that should change our thinking a great deal about Covid. There is no longer much reason for Covid to be any worse than the flu, though I would argue that insufficient testing is still a bit of a glitch.
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