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NEWS: Seattle's Sakura-Con 2021 Canceled

August cons might happen if we truly do get 100mln vaccinated in 100 days.

August cons might happen if we truly do get 100mln vaccinated in 100 days.

Яeverse wrote:

August cons might happen if we truly do get 100mln vaccinated in 100 days.

That’s less than a third of the US population… I had read we need 60-70% coverage for herd immunity to kick in and really stop the virus from spreading. Plus, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines need two doses. At the current rate of 1 million doses/day, and needing 600 million doses (300 million people x 2 doses) to get sufficient coverage, that works out to like a year and half.

You don't really need to vaccinate everyone, as 97% of deaths are among people over 60, just vaccinate those, who are 20% of the population, and you reduce Covid mortality to flu-like levels.

Also, lots of people acquired natural immunity already, given that on average 150 people acquire natural immunity for each covid death, the US already has 65 million people who are immune. In less than 100 days the US will have 650k covid deaths so 100 million people should be naturally immune.

So, natural immunity + shoots on people over 60 should mostly stop the pandemic, then a few tens of millions of people under 60 vaccinated should achieve full herd immunity and stamp out the virus. US is vacinnating over 1 million people a day already, in 100 days there will be 200 million shoots given.

Overall, it appears that in 100 days (so, by early may) the pandemic will be basically over.

Overall, it appears that in 100 days (so, by early may) the pandemic will be basically over.

COVID-19 absolutely does not have a flu-like mortality rate for people under 60.

More importantly, you assume that the only significant effect is death - that if you get it, you either die or end up fine. This isn't true at all: many people have suffered lasting effects, whether as mild as a loss of their senses of taste and smell, to severe issues with breathing 10+ months after infection (https://twitter.com/FilmCritHULK/status/1348927191174705152), or "heart problems, diabetes and chronic liver and kidney conditions" that will land about 1/3 of folks with severe COVID back in the hospital within 5 months, with about 1/8 ending up dead (https://news.yahoo.com/almost-third-recovered-covid-patients-180255388.html).

Incidentally, we have no idea how long immunity to COVID lasts, whether from prior infection or from vaccination. Going back to the flu - it's not like you catch it one year and never catch it again. There's even more uncertainty around the matter with new mutations showing up because nations didn't take controlling the disease seriously enough in the first place.

Your vaccination projections are also off: we are vaccination "almost 900,000 people" per day rather than over a million. Even if we do vaccinate at your overestimated rate, we don't know if the vaccine reduces transmission or merely mitigates infection in the vaccinated person (that is, it might make the vaccinated person much less likely to have a severe or even moderate infection, but they may still remain contagious enough to keep community transmission up).

Honestly, the one thing we as a species should have learned in the last year it's to not be pollyannish about the fight against COVID, because every optimistic projection has turned out wrong. Your timetable is just one more of those.

This pandemic is lasting this long because we didn't allow it to naturally go over it's course, which is the course of previous pandemics: it infects a large fraction of the population until herd immunity kicks in and then it burns out. In the US allowing the virus to spread would have resulted in over 2 million deaths from March to September 2020 as the medical system would collapse, and the pandemic would be over by September.

I do hope this is not the start of a lot of anime cons being cancelled...I can't wait until 2022 to thrive in a convention!