Covid vaccine aftermath

 We're only beginning to see the vaccine rollout in the UK, but we can begin to think about what may happen as time goes on.

In the near term, I expect many those who have been vaccinated will feel like they don't need to follow precautions anymore. What they don't consider is that they may still be responsible for transmission of Covid from one person to another. Perhaps like Trump, the attitude will be "that's their problem."

The other thing I haven't heard addressed yet is that there isn't necessarily a reason to believe this will be a one-time thing. In other words, those who have been vaccinated, and even those who have had Covid, are likely to need to get vaccinated in the future, since the immunity will last only so long, and this virus acts like it will be around for awhile, especially considering its worldwide distribution.

George Bancroft

I'm currently slowly working my way through the Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, which was published in the very late 19th century. This series eventually consisted of 45 volumes, although so far Project Gutenberg only has 1 through 16 (excepting 10). As a whole it's interesting, but some authors are more prosaic in their writings than current modern taste would appreciate. An example is George Bancroft from volume 4, and American, who wrote a HIstory of the United States. In one excerpt from a chapter on Lexington (as in the first shots fired of the American Revolution), he gets quite carried away with himself as he describes the first martyrs at Lexington:

"They fulfilled their duty not from the accidental impulse of the moment; their action was the slowly ripened fruit of Providence and of time. The light that led them on was combined of rays from the whole history of the race; from the traditions of the Hebrews in the gray of the world's morning; from the heroes and sages of republican Greece and Rome; from the example of Him who died on the cross for the life of humanity; from the religious creed which proclaimed the divine presence in man, and on this truth, as in a life-boat, floated the liberties of nations over the dark flood of the Middle Ages; from the customs of the Germans transmitted out of their forests to the councils of Saxon England; from the burning faith and courage of Martin Luther; from trust in the inevitable universality of God's sovereignty as taught by Paul of Tarsus and Augustine, through Calvin and the divines of New England; from the avenging fierceness of the Puritans, who dashed the mitre on the ruins of the throne; from the bold dissent and creative self-assertion of the earliest emigrants to Massachusetts; from the statesmen who made, and the philosophers who expounded, the revolution of England; from the liberal spirit and analyzing inquisitiveness of the eighteenth century; from the cloud of witnesses of all the ages to the reality and the rightfulness of human freedom."

Fortunately, one can easily skim such interludes and authors.

The dark side of this virus

With all the hanging of crepe about this virus, that it won't have a "season" like the flu, that it's likely to rebound this fall and/or later, one has to wonder if there is an even darker reality that we face.

Maybe the virus just isn't going to stop until we've reached some kind of herd immunity. And I wouldn't count on a vaccine to make that happen. I don't think we can keep up the austerity we're currently undergoing indefinitely. So at some point, we'll relax social rules, the virus will increase, at least some measures will be reinstituted, virus will go down, rules will be relaxed, virus will increase...and so on. Eventually we'll reach some point where some significant percentage of the population has had the virus and most of them are not shedding it anymore.

One might wonder if this implies that all these contact rules are worth it. What they're worth at this stage is in keeping the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.

Perhaps the reality is that this virus is going to win, one way or the other, either on a fast or slow timeline.

Oddities about COVID-19

One of the characteristics of this virus is its extreme variability in causing evidence of itself. This is highlighted by recent information from prisons. Testing for the virus in a prison in Ohio showed that most prisoners tested positive for the virus, even though 90+% were symptom-free. So what if most of the population already has the virus?
Another bit of strange information is that even after those infected with the virus recovered, had an immune response, some could still get the virus again. Surely this should damper the optimism that a vaccine is going to make some difference -- if the immune response to the real virus isn't so protective, why should the vaccine be any better?
I'm not one of those who thinks we should abruptly discontinue all protective measures, but this should begin to seep into the decision-making about this. At some point we will need to hand back the decisions about risk-taking to individuals instead of relying on governmental restrictions.

6 feet away

We're seeing this more and more. What strikes me about it is that although this is a recommendation by the CDC, it seems to have become something of a rule. I look at it more of a show of "following the rules" than anything.
For most places I shop, there isn't any way to maintain 6 ft from people. Typical supermarket aisles are lucky if they're 6 ft wide, so to try to be literal about 6 ft, you would end up playing some sort of chess game, waiting for someone else to move. Then everyone's shopping takes longer, the store fills up, then they're likely to invoke some control on the number of people in the store. So your shopping lasts longer, which translates into longer potential exposure to whatever is floating around out there.
I think there is reason to believe there is at best quasi-science which led to this 6 ft suggestion. Presumably it's based on studies showing how far particles can travel when someone coughs or sneezes, and then someone at CDC threw a dart and came up with this 6 ft recommendation. My experience since this whole distancing began is that I have yet to see anyone sneeze or cough while I was shopping. If I did go into some store faced with such behavior, I would probably turn around and leave.
As far as I can tell, there isn't going to be any way to assess all of these precautions we're taking after the fact. What we're likely to be left with is someone's assessment that "obviously, we needed to do all these things." And so next time we go through the same arbitrary rules. Curiously, we put up with flu every year with only some general suggestions about how to avoid it, then leave up the decisions to us individuals.

A new normalcy

Some years ago, as I mused on the development of "universal precautions" in hospitals that came about largely from the increasing HIV prevalence, it occurred to me that it would be useful and instructional if restaurants, like hospitals, made touchless dispensers of sanitizer available in a number of locations on their premises, i.e., not just in the restrooms.
The idea would be to encourage the employees and patrons to use them, the former on some fairly frequent basis, the latter at least once on entering the restaurant. These dispensers should be easily visible so that people can see they're being used, and so that managers could see that the employees were using them too.
There is also no reason not to have a hand sanitizer at the entrance to all groceries.
Right now, with the vast shortage of sanitizers, this is hardly feasible, but once we're out of this, I think this idea should be promoted. Even without COVID-19, we can expect our usual seasonal flu every year.
We run the risk that once all the current measures are no longer felt necessary, people will fall back into complacence about infections. Until the next one comes along.

Aftermath of the virus

A dilemma that we will face after the virus subsides is an analysis of what worked and what didn't. As far as I can tell, there is very little science on which measures are worth doing to fight the spread of viruses.
On a practical level, various cities, states, and countries have done various things, gradually tending toward more austere acts like stay-at-home orders. Even if we did nothing, there will be an increase to a certain point, a leveling off, then a decline and disappearance of the infections.
Things are compounded by the range of illness that victims express, death at one end, but apparently little or no symptoms on the mild end.
Even now, the estimated number of cases is a fuzzy number, the only question being how many times that number is the real number of infections. We can presume that the number of deaths is more accurate, and there might even be some tendency to overestimate death strictly due to the virus versus it just being a coincidence along with the real cause of death.
After the fact, there will be hardening of opinions, so that many will say, "we needed to do everything we did for as long as we did in order to conquer this virus". But I can't imagine there being any way of proving or disproving this contention.
About the only hard science will be with the statisticians who can easily say, "here is the point where the R value began declining, and here is where it became less that one." The R value is in index of how many others an infected person transmits the virus to.
On the plus side, observation suggests that we getting past the panic buying mode, since various items are at least temporarily reappearing on grocers' shelves.
At the same time, there remains extreme uncertainty on how long the current measures will last. It isn't helped by Dr. Fauci and Trump talking about 100,000 deaths in the US -- if we only have 8,500 so far, how long will it take to reach 100,000? Does that mean we're in for this for a year? Looking at some detail, there were 92 more deaths today compared with yesterday. A month of days like that is 2,760. Divide that into 91,500 (the remaining number to reach 100,000), and you get 33 -- that's approaching 3 years!

Correction: One always has to understand the data you're looking at. I was watching the daily counts of infections and deaths on The Guardian website, and only later realized that, rather than showing counts from the day before, the counts were for that day, and since I look at the site early in the day, that's why the counts were so low.