So with the thought of the slippery slope, I wonder if there should be a difference in determining whether there should be a mandate when comparing the R0 value and Case Mortality rates between Smallpox and COVID-19?
What other viruses out there have R0 and case mortality rates similar to SARS-CoV2 that don’t have employer mandates?
And why only mandate it on employers with 100 or more employees? That is only going to be 2/3rd of the workforce. Seems like even that won’t be enough to get us anywhere near any possible number for herd immunity to start kicking in. But if the SCOTUS ok’s it based on the Smallpox precident then [r]I guess that is AOK.[/r]
Differentiating it based on R0 and CFR might be reasonable but where the lines are drawn and who supplies the official metrics is bound to be an awful mess for viruses that barely do or barely don’t meet the threshold.
You can’t look at R0 and CFR in a vaccuum. The most important number is how prevalent the disease is in the population. That’s why we no longer recommend the smallpox vaccine.
And that’s why I was upset with the CDC’s “take off your mask” guidance. It was probably decent advice in lots of places, but it should have been “if cases/100K are less than X, then vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks unless they live with a highly vulnerable person”. Or something like that.
Although I would argue that the R0 is closely linked to the cases per capita so the oversight is pretty dang minor.
If R0 is high and per capita cases are low, it’s only a matter of time before they’re high. If we’d had a vaccine back in February 2020 we could have saved a lot of lives by vaccinating when R0 was high and case counts were low.
Ebola is apparently ~40%, SARS I think ~10%, MERS ~30%.
SARS and MERS usually don’t transmit that well. Even Ebola transmission seems pretty low if you get rid of the body quickly instead of having the whole village handle it.
Nipah virus is one that’s concerning if it mutates to transmit better.
Also, 2/3 isn’t right since only 62% of adults are even in the workforce and some of them work for small employers. I’m guessing that’s the large/small employer breakdown along employees. And then there’s kids, who I don’t think are even in the workforce participation rate.
So let’s assume that maybe 35% of the population works for a large employer and 65% either doesn’t work at all or works for a small employer. Further assume that medical exemptions are 1%.
.99 * .35 + .5 * .65 = 67.15%
That’s not enough for herd immunity.
Now if schools from daycare/pre-K through graduate school and retirement/nursing homes also require vaccination then the rate goes way way up.
It’s not a fixed value since it’s dependent on things like weather and mask mandates and social distancing and adherence to those measures. And the value varies by location.
But I think it’s as objective as any of the other metrics we have.
Are you counting children in that 50%? I think you have to exclude them for now until they are all eligible. Also, arent many of those people out of the workforce retirees? The vaccination rate among retirees is higher than others.
Among 18 plus, I’m pretty sure it is higher than 50%.
So, was dragging people out of their homes in handcuffs to force vaccination warranted? If not, what was? Does the “slippery slope” argument not apply in the case of smallpox?
I have nothing but my gut to go on but I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of the 1/3rd remaining are employed by small employers or are even entrepreneurs themselves (the deplorables). So I would suspect that the 20-30% of adults who are resisting the vaccine are probably not uniformly distributed among >100 and <100 employers.
No, unlike smallpox, it has animal reservoirs. Also, immunity to covid probably wanes somewhat quickly, unlike immunity to smallpox, which usually lasts for many years. Ignoring the civil liberty question, rounding up everyone once to forcibly vaccinate them is a lot more practical than doing it every couple of years.
So there’s no chance of eradication.
But we have some very effective vaccines. So we could reduce it to something like whooping cough that only kills a handful of people each year, and that most of us never think about, except when the doctor says, “you should get this booster shot”. I’m somewhat hopeful that that will happen in the northeast, where vaccination rates have been high, if/when a vaccine is approved for school kids.
I’m very sad that the civic fabric of our nation is so broken that a large number of people think it’s a point of pride to avoid taking any steps to avoid covid, or to avoid spreading it. That’s going to put us in a much worse place than we otherwise could be. I wish I had some idea of how to ameliorate this, but I don’t.