I see a substantial possibility of near-eradication. Not like we eradicated smallpox, but maybe almost as well as we’ve done with measles? It’s not clear yet what percentage immunity we need need to achieve herd immunity. But given the figures from the past month or so, there’s a decent chance we’re heading in that direction. Even if we can achieve herd immunity, that may not be a good enough argument to ban superspreader events for now—we would achieve herd immunity regardless when we get R<1 with respect to normal activity. But there’s the further factor that by continuing to reduce transmission while more people are vaccinated, we reduce the chance of variants.
There’s also the possibility that we can eventually achieve near-eradication through a combination of immunity and good contact tracing, but we may only have few enough cases to do the contact tracing if we can get the case count down to a manageable level through continued social distancing for a while first.
Do those scenarios seem plausible to you? Why do you believe that the options are almost binary?
I think I see a larger possible downside than you do regarding variants. It seems possible that we could get a variant against which our current vaccines are less than 50% effective, and if we can reduce the chance of that happening through continued restrictions, I think it’s worthwhile.
Distributing more vaccines to the rest of the world would be a bigger intervention in that regard, but perhaps through continued travel restrictions combined with some vaccine protection, we can prevent especially bad variants from spreading worldwide the way the original pandemic did.
I see a substantial possibility of near-eradication. Not like we eradicated smallpox, but maybe almost as well as we’ve done with measles? It’s not clear yet what percentage immunity we need need to achieve herd immunity. But given the figures from the past month or so, there’s a decent chance we’re heading in that direction. Even if we can achieve herd immunity, that may not be a good enough argument to ban superspreader events for now—we would achieve herd immunity regardless when we get R<1 with respect to normal activity. But there’s the further factor that by continuing to reduce transmission while more people are vaccinated, we reduce the chance of variants.
There’s also the possibility that we can eventually achieve near-eradication through a combination of immunity and good contact tracing, but we may only have few enough cases to do the contact tracing if we can get the case count down to a manageable level through continued social distancing for a while first.
Do those scenarios seem plausible to you? Why do you believe that the options are almost binary?
I think I see a larger possible downside than you do regarding variants. It seems possible that we could get a variant against which our current vaccines are less than 50% effective, and if we can reduce the chance of that happening through continued restrictions, I think it’s worthwhile.
Distributing more vaccines to the rest of the world would be a bigger intervention in that regard, but perhaps through continued travel restrictions combined with some vaccine protection, we can prevent especially bad variants from spreading worldwide the way the original pandemic did.