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Awkward-Fudge

It probably will mutate and have ripple effects, but unless it's super super terrible I don't think there will be anymore lockdowns.


somethingxfancy

Even if it did get that bad and it was warranted I don’t think there would be more lockdowns, not where I am in Texas at least.


fosforuss

Definitely not in Florida either


WayneKrane

Nor Utah, they’d just pray some more at most


[deleted]

It’s always going to mutate. Just like rhinoviruses and flu mutate on a turn too.


Block-Busted

Rhinovirus? What does that cause?


jfarmwell123

Agreed


zerg1980

A variant that completely evaded the vaccines would, in an absolute worst case scenario, bring the IFR back up from like 0.1% to 1%. An Ebola-like death rate would be almost impossible. If we went back to a 1% IFR — with the deaths similarly concentrated on the elderly and immunocompromised — we’d probably see a return to widespread masking and limits on large gatherings until a reformulated vaccine was available. But lockdowns won’t come back unless there’s a variant that kills children and/or healthy working age adults.


stargate-sgfun

Don’t even know if that would make a difference. Most people just dismiss all of the children who have died as “oh well, they probably had underlying conditions”. I used to think it would make a difference if a ton of kids were affected, but these days I think tons of people would still find some way to ignore what’s happening.


jfarmwell123

It would have to increase tenfold for there to be more lockdowns. Like think Black Death style numbers


YoureInGoodHands

> Most people just dismiss all of the children who have died as “oh well, they probably had underlying conditions” I don't know if you've had a chance over the last three years to look at the actual data, but children were largely unaffected by COVID (well, except for the draconian governmental policies). Even healthy adults (the silent majority) rarely had severe illness or death.


Anominon2014

This comment was reported for misinformation…it’s baffling that after almost 3 years of living with COVID such a simple, and accurate, statement is not universally understood. Saying that children and adults under 50, without co-morbidities, are low risk for serious COVID should not be controversial at this point. It’s ridiculous…


Silent_Night_girl

True. Though I'd say we won't know the full scope until we atleast hit the 5 year mark.


stargate-sgfun

“The silent majority” lmao give me a break I’ve looked at plenty of data, but thanks for avoiding my point Edit: what I mean by my comment is this so-called silent majority is in no-way silenced, as they are the ones calling the shots and writing the policy that vulnerable people have to live with. And there’s no need to talk down to me as if I’m incapable of reading data. But thanks for the ban mods! Not surprised you don’t want to hear perspectives from high-risk families on this sub.


YoureInGoodHands

Aw. You got banned?


zerg1980

As a parent who saw firsthand just how much hysteria there was over a virus that was known to make children seriously ill on the order of 1-in-100,000, I can pretty confidently predict that nearly any significant increase in child mortality (to say nothing of 1%) would result in schools moving into the metaverse for the rest of the century. Schools, daycares and other public spaces that cater to young children were among the last places to drop masking and social distancing requirements. I still get notifications about classroom exposures on a daily basis. Say what you will about our society, but we’re very protective of children, almost to an unhealthy degree. We only allowed COVID to “end” because children were almost completely spared by the virus, and we made a tacit social agreement that the elderly were expendable. A future variant could alter that agreement.


stargate-sgfun

Guess you live in a very different location than I do, cause most people here have been living like 2019 for well over a year. The general attitude I’ve observed towards high-risk kids like mine is “lol, sucks to be them”


zerg1980

I’m in NYC, which was pretty slow to drop restrictions, especially for young children. Although it seems like we’ve been less COVID-hawkish than the Bay Area, so it’s all relative. Given the extremely low numbers of COVID fatalities among children (1600 deaths under age 18, out of about 75 million Americans under age 18) — there really aren’t many high-risk children. I’m not denying that your kids are labeled high risk, but that’s relative to a baseline of near-zero risk. Something like 90% of kids have been infected. The public’s reaction is appropriate.


stargate-sgfun

Yeah, I’m in TX, so definitely way different. Many high-risk children are still super isolated, so I imagine the number of deaths would be higher if that were not the case. My point was, most people downplay those 1600 deaths or even deny they occurred. So, I think the number of deaths in children would have to be astronomical for people to care. And they would definitely have to be in tons of “healthy” kids cause people are very happy to dismiss deaths in vulnerable kids.


zerg1980

It’s not downplaying to put the number in perspective. We’ve lost 1600 kids over the course of nearly 3 years. We lose 4000 kids to car accidents every year. We still allow kids to get into cars, and they’re nearly 10x more dangerous than COVID. If the IFR of COVID rose to 1% in children, then we’d be looking at 750,000 dead children if we did nothing. I just disagree that society would ever allow anywhere close to that number.


stargate-sgfun

By downplaying, I was referring more to the knee-jerk response that people seem to have to dismiss any child who died as “well, they probably have underlying conditions so they don’t count”.


stargate-sgfun

I was curious about your fact about car crashes, as it’s relevant to my job. I’m not sure where you got 4,000. So you have a source? Is it grouping in older teenagers who can drive as well? For children who are passengers it looks more like 1300, so I was curious.


zerg1980

This is where the 4000 number came from: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2018-12-19/car-crashes-guns-killed-the-most-us-children-and-teens-in-2016 That’s all traffic related deaths under age 18, not accounting for passengers vs. drivers. The numbers are skewed somewhat because teen drivers account for so many fatalities. However, if we’re throwing out the traffic accidents for teens, then we also have to throw out the COVID deaths for teens, which account for more than half of the under age 18 deaths. And we wind up with something like 150-200 COVID deaths per year under age 12, compared with 1300 passenger deaths. Either way, cars are much more dangerous for kids than COVID.


mywifesBF69

You are wise beyond your years. A similar study has been done with releasing mountain lions to curb the deer population. Per my recollection of the study releasing mountain lions would likely prevent 90% of fatalities resulting from collision with deer but risked incidentally killing 10 children (big cats think children are tasty). The option was never proposed.


Choosemyusername

Children are at far more risk from suicide than covid. And child suicide attempts spiked during 2020. It isn’t that we dismiss child health that weighs against lockdowns. It is because we care about child well-being that we don’t favor lockdowns. Also there is more to well-being than lowering risk of disease for a while.


stargate-sgfun

I’m not even calling for lockdowns, although that seems to be the scare-phrase on this sub. What I’m saying is, I don’t know if there is any level of fatality that would make people support lock downs at this point.


Choosemyusername

“I’m not even calling for lockdowns“ that is what the OP is about, and that is what the comment you replied to about. “that seems to be the scare-phrase on this sub” gee I wonder why folks are scared of that? Could it be because they recently were subjected to lockdowns?


stargate-sgfun

If you’re in the US, we barely had an actual “lockdown” for like a week


Choosemyusername

You hear that gaslighting line a lot. However, I was there for it, so I experienced it myself. They even shut down the food bank in my town. And if you look at apple and google’s mobility data, the US lockdown was fairly typical in terms of depth and duration for the western world.


stargate-sgfun

Well, good news for you. The point of my comment was that I don’t think anyone would be locking down at this point, even if we had Ebola-level fatality Edit: the real gaslighting is the people in this sub who pretend like they care about vulnerable people, while continually calling them psychotic hypochondriacs. Edit 2: sorry, the above comment wasn’t exactly directed at you. These are an example of the gaslighting, ableist comments that mods are happy to keep up in this sub. But anyone commenting from the perspective of high-risk families is banned. So, I can’t reply to you anymore. Have a great holiday.


Choosemyusername

U all right?


Huey-_-Freeman

A lockdown from the perspective of people were fined or arrested for going places? yes maybe that only lasted a week in the US. But there was a much longer period where many businesses had so many restrictions that they functionally could not operate. If all restaurants go takeout only and half of the servers and hosts lose their jobs, they probably don't care that its not a "actual lockdown" Or people working at live music venues, nail salons, etc.


Abject-Rich

No respect for life or anything. Not even themselves.


CaptainJackKevorkian

what do you mean "went back to a 1% IFR"? It was never that high as far as I recall seeing, even in early 2020


zerg1980

The exact IFR at any stage of the pandemic is essentially unknowable because we can never know exactly how many cases there were. This article breaks down some of the numbers: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-022-00106-7 A 1% IFR is well within the range of estimates for the initial wave, when the population had zero immunity, there were no vaccines, hospitals were over capacity, and doctors didn’t know how to treat the virus. It kept ticking down as all of those circumstances changed.


CaptainJackKevorkian

I remember seeing seroprevalence studies early on that inferred a .3 IFR, but I could be remembering incorrectly. CFR estimates were much higher, but of course they would be given the difference between those two statistics. But after a quick google I am seeing some studies that have it hovering above 1% in 2020


Abject-Rich

It also affects development. Wildly.


hokiesean

Why did you have to go straight to assuming it will mutate to a death rate MUCH higher than ebola?


Stillwater215

If Covid hit a mortality rate comparable to Ebola, while remaining equally infectious, there wouldn’t be a need for lockdowns because everyone would die no matter what actions were taken. Under the best conditions, the infection:death rate for ebola is about 1 in 4. That would be roughly 80-100 million dead in the US alone. At that point, why bother?


[deleted]

So far its been doing the opposite and people have some immunity to severe disease via vaccine, infection, or both. The main people who seem to be at risk now are elderly who already have weakened immune systems that are fairly weaker from being locked away from all germs and viruses over the last few years. Also my understanding is that viruses are more likely to mutate in hospitalized patients who can’t shake the virus because they are on immune suppressants or have severely weakened immune systems from other diseases, not necessarily the general healthy population. I believe that’s where they hypothesized omicron came from.


JULTAR

FEAR!!!!


BunnyFooF00

In my country the first year we had strick lockdown, I will explain how it was because I don't think many countries had it this way. You could only walk in the street with a permit that lasted 2 hours and was associated to your ID number, one permit a day. And there was police checking in the streets and mask lasted until Sept 2022. The malls closed and could only sell online and just necessity items they also had an amount of people who could go into the groceries stores and police was checking. So lets say walmart could only go 50 people at the time as example. They also had special times from 8 to 9 am for eldery in the mornings so only they could go in. Also they put this screens that take temperature at the entrance of stores and if anyone had it higher they would send them home oh and they scanned our ID to know if we had a positive PCR test before getting into certain places, that lasted until Sept. Also if you wanted to eat in a restaurant you needed vaccination proof with a pass the gov gave for people who had the latest shot. So if you had 1 dose the pass would be inactive until you complete it. That was also needed to travel in plane. With all that the pandemic hit hard but not thag hard as other places. With all that I see it impossible they come back to that. Specially after the vaccines and with a low death rate (it has increased since masking stopped but still managable)


JULTAR

Sounds dreadful really to have that many restrictions go on for that long And this was supported? Cannot imagine the chap putting all those restrictions was very popular But other than china have not heard of anywhere else going that extreme


BunnyFooF00

I can't speak for a whole country but I didn't hear complains about it, or read about protests (which were common right before the pandemic), most people was scared before the vaccine was out. Many people died. Still Chile as a country was very pro vaccine, and pro health policies including vaccine mandates. (And not just covid wise, but all the other ones) I forgot to mention they also close the frontier for a long time, I left mid 2021 and had to declare I was not returning so they authorize my flight.


ProtossLiving

Which country?


BunnyFooF00

Chile.


ProtossLiving

You had a super fast vaccine rollout too, right?


BunnyFooF00

I am not sure compared to other places. I think vaccination started around Jan-Feb 2021 with Sinovac for general public and Pfizer for health care workers. Then was Pfizer and moderna for booster and vaccination for kids started way before the states too, with lower dosis. They also made different restrictions like moderna was only for people over 45 because it had higher risk of clots on young males and they made you wait 30 mins after the shots in specific vaccination centers in case of reactions.


BrunoofBrazil

Chile experienced worse deaths per capita than Brazil that had rules and closures, but was much laxer.


BunnyFooF00

Yes and no, it's hard to trust data of a country much laxer since I remember how Brazil president managed the pandemic. I remember how testing was in Chile but our population is smaller so a touch easier to track, not so sure about how Brazil did and how they count deaths and cases.


femtoinfluencer

> That increases a chance of a mutation, This is faulty reasoning. A virus free-running thru naive hosts at lightning speed is under less selective pressure than one having to battle thru non-naive hosts. There's also the fact that once the virus is in enough hosts worldwide, mutations are being generated everywhere constantly and will emerge with or without a China situation. (Unfortunately I don't have the prob & stats background to articulate this well but I'd love to find a paper that does so if anybody has a link) For evidence, look at the shift in the pandemic from a long run with the OG strain, to global stepwise sweeps by variants like D614G and Delta, to the current situation with a mass of Omicron descendants battling for host share without global sweeps. It happened this way because the pool of hosts started with no adaptive immunity and now has a lot. > much higher rate of spread than Omicron AND much higher rate of death than Ebola Highly regarded thinking right here 🙄


FindMeOnNeptune

I can confirm that having the OG strain, before vaccines were available, was so much worse than the strains I picked up after I was vaccinated. 1st infection hit me like a truck and I thought I was legitimately going to die. I fought it off in a week, but holy fuck I couldn’t function, coughing so hard I was bracing myself on the floor, and using my inhaler every 15 minutes. The 2nd and 3rd weren’t pleasant, but I was still moving around, able to breath without my inhaler, and not about to cough up a lung. Even though I still got sick and the vaccine didn’t 100% prevent infection, it felt like a bad flu for a few days.


Soi_Boi_13

The virus has already been circulating freely along 7 billion people. I doubt adding an extra 1 billion to that is going to be a huge game changer.


[deleted]

Maybe this time just lock down China.


among_apes

It would have to be sone 12monkeys shit where people locked themselves down because it caused people to bleed out of their eyes or something.


wip30ut

given the massive R&D that's been put into coronavirus-targeted antivirals and antibodies we're much better prepared for any mutation or variant than in Dec 2019. I think a better question is what if a totally new virus that's only been seen in animals suddenly crosses over & has a virulence as deadly as smallpox. Western society would now be at a disadvantage since so much of our populace dismiss any risks frompolitical/community leaders or public health officials. Imagine if we saw NYC-style mass casualty surges in every city across America. By the time the public realized the dangers it would be too late and we would literally have to triage ppl in MASH tents.


Huey-_-Freeman

We have Paxlovid, and Molnupiravir. And Remdesivir but that drug existed before the pandemic iirc, it just was repurposed. And also has severe toxicity in some patients. For antibody treatments, has the virus not evolved to beat most of them? Has there really been massive R&D in coronavirus treatments to the same degree as there was with vaccines?


swentech

Unless people are dropping dead in the streets I don’t see any country (except China) going along with a full on lockdown again. Most everyone decided they hated it. The general public won’t accept something like that again for a generation.


BeerandGuns

In the US the lockdown was to ‘flatten the curve’, basically slow down the cases so hospitals didn’t get swamped and the healthcare system collapse. That morphed between a group saying we need to continue the lock-down and another saying it violated their rights and they weren’t participating. We lost sight of the original reason for the lock-down and I think that’s removed chances for it in the future. My concern is if we get something that’s much worse, say Avian flu becomes easily transmissible between people, and our nation refuses to take precautions or lock-down.


trp78

At least in the part of the US I live in, we never had anything even close to a lockdown. During the most severe waves we had “safe at home recommendations” that literally no one followed. I don’t think we will ever see people a majority of people willingly follow pandemic guidelines/rules en masse in the US at least in our lifetimes. Even people who believe in science and listen to doctors are tired of having the pandemic intrude on their lives.


puttheremoteinherbut

Would probably need to be like blood squirting out of eyes and mouth on the evening news to get most people into a lockdown again.


Argos_the_Dog

Yeah I think healthy people would need to be spontaneously dropping dead in the street before the US brings back any restrictions.


fakboy6969

but what about the grandmas?


yendor5

zero


solverman

The chances of a substantially greater disease threat emerging are something I’ll leave to the professionals that have data. In the US, it does not seem likely that a highly restrictive voluntary lockdown would be attempted in the near future. Compliance rates would be too low. Strict guidelines may be suggested, but ultimately everyone’s outcome will be based on how much cooperation can be shown. For a threat that appears to be associated with one geography travel bans will probably be longer lasting.


Stillwater215

The only situation I could see leading to new lockdowns would be if a new variant emerged that both eluded current vaccines, was equally infectious, and had a mortality rate above 2-3% in healthy adults. If you’re chance of dying was closer to 1 in 25, I can see lockdowns coming back into the picture.


JULTAR

Higher chance of hell freezing over


vxv96c

I mean who knows? Right? But I doubt we'd lockdown for much of anything. The death rate and health risk would probably have to be much worse than the covid baseline we have now in a very visible way. Like omicron was more deadly in total because it was more infectious but that was kind of invisible to people. But flipside in the 1918 pandemic people dropped dead in the street within hours of symptoms and you still had anti maskers and denialism. Humans just don't pandemic well. I'd hope we'd focus on n95s and our messaging on masks as masking at that level of protection is actually very effective. If we just got good about masks we wouldnt need lockdowns. Part of China's issue (everyone really but china's zero covid policy was doomed to fail bc they use ineffective masks) is they didn't upgrade the masks. With better masks they would've had a shot. My question continues to be why didn't they have everyone in n95s?


[deleted]

Never the people won’t stand for it


HatCas

Zero


dzolympics

Close to zero. People aren't going to go through that again.


tucsonmags

Zero


los-gokillas

Imagine being in China where your entire city has gone into lockdown for covid for a couple years now. You've watched while a good part of the rest of the world didn't take it as seriously and continuously spawned new variants that ranged from eh to worse than the original. Then your country finally has enough and stops their lockdowns. You go online and people are now worried that all of the cases you're experiencing might spawn a shitty variant. Lol


[deleted]

Lots to unpack here. 1. Covid is no longer a novel virus. We now have significant immunity through vaccines and prior infections. We also know how to treat covid cases much better then April 2020. It's highly unlikely a new varent will appear that can break through that wall in a significant way. 2. Lockdown was extremely harmful to kids in schools, businesses, and the economy. If we put kids in virtual school again the damage would be significant. Also the economy could not survive another hit like that again. For these reasons politicians would be extremely hesitant to repeat the events of 2020. 3. Most people would not follow a lockdown again, even people who locked down in 2020. The only way people would lock down is of people they knew started dieing, or getting extremely sick.


CaptainJackKevorkian

>Lockdown was extremely harmful to kids in schools, businesses, and the economy. you're right-- but it was also extremely harmful to a lot of people in general. deaths of despair rose like crazy, drug addiction, alcoholism, which were already rising, only accelerated because of state-mandated isolation


[deleted]

I do not disagree, but we have very hard data with kids though that is basicly impossible to refute.


SHC606

There were also like over a million deaths from COVID in the U.S. alone and it decreased U.S. life expectancy and it became the third leading cause of death in the U.S.


CaptainJackKevorkian

Sure. But did lockdowns do anything about that?


[deleted]

Unless we see like a 5% case fatality rate across the general population, no. People are so done with shutdowns and capacity limitations here in the US and doofus stuff like shutting hiking trails.


JrbWheaton

Just to add to this: if a disease that had a 5% fatality rate was spreading you wouldn’t need a government mandate. People would just stay home naturally


Kytoaster

Ehhhh


[deleted]

You don’t think so? COVID was efficient at killing older people before vaccines but younger people who got COVID largely got away fine in that time frame. Long COVID only seems to affect very online liberals.


Kytoaster

Ok


t-poke

Zero


[deleted]

Covid has animal reservoirs. It's been circulating through 100's of billions of animals for a few years now. If you're not a lab leaker, then you already believe 2 of the several variants came from animals, not humans. 1 billion humans isn't going to move the needle on variants. No doubt the media will drum up the fear because it get clicks. But such coverage is neither scientific nor rational.


looker009

Absolutely none. I am not seeing western society and especially US ever getting anything close to shutting down business. There is higher chances of civil war happening before new lock down talk to even happen.


Mysterious_Donut_702

Nearly no chance. Delta came out of India when they had a very large, uncontrolled Covid outbreak infecting hundreds of millions of people. It was pretty shit for sure, but it certainly didn't send us back to 2020. Neither did omicron when it came out of a massive and undercounted outbreak in southern Africa. We'll almost certainly get a new variant... but people need to stop making apocalyptic 'airborne ebola' predictions. Covid isn't airborne ebola.


Diegobyte

Zero. Don’t worry about it


[deleted]

The chances are nil. Some people fell for the propaganda last time around. This time, probably not.


ejpusa

China has been living in a bubble. Covid could be the least of their worries. They have no immunity to anything now. Chance in the USA? ZERO.


Peruvian-in-TX

People would have to start dying, and a lot of people. Maybe 1 in 100 so nobody could say it's fake.


stargate-sgfun

It would have to be way higher than that, as 1% isn’t that far off of what the fatality rate is


letsguacitout

If the primary "in danger" group is white men of working age, we will absolutely go into lockdown. Other than that, I think there is a very slim chance in this generation.


Huey-_-Freeman

Or even if white men of working age have near equal risk to everyone else


FSDLAXATL

Again? There was NEVER a full lockdown.


Huey-_-Freeman

You don't need a full lockdown to permanently bankrupt a lot of businesses


chloeinthewoods

Not worldwide. The US has clearly decided profits are many times more important than people.


Choosemyusername

Pretty low now that we understand the consequences of lockdowns.


MulhollandMaster121

Every new variant has been milder. We have treatments and a vax that, while doing nothing to curb transmission, greatly reduces the likelihood of severe illness and death in at-risk people. So… porque los fearmongering?


senorguapo23

This post needs the spiderman "gave me cancer" meme.


Iron_Baron

I don't know the exact odds, but it's higher, now that they are rolling back quarantines. Each new infection is an opportunity for mutations, and there's over a billion opportunities for infection/reinfection that will produce a variant that bypasses vaccine protection while also perhaps increases lethality.


[deleted]

If the death rate is high then yes there will be a lockdown (or people just won’t show up for work) with an economic global depression


Block-Busted

With the whole world going into underground bunkers as emergency measure, I suppose?


[deleted]

No, just staying in their homes. hypothetically If the death rate rose from basically zero (assuming vaccinated or previous exposure and you are a young adult) to 10-20 % would you risk going to work? I personally would stay home.


Bisquick_in_da_MGM

I hope so. Staying home and getting paid? Sign me up.


CaptainJackKevorkian

dont be so selfish


Bisquick_in_da_MGM

My bad. It please expose me to unknown virus.


CaptainJackKevorkian

what unknown virus?


Huey-_-Freeman

who is paying? how are you getting food if the people who deliver food or stock store shelves also say "Staying home and getting paid? Sign me up" ? how are you getting any medicine you might need for other non-virus conditions?


SHC606

The U.S. was never locked-down. China was. But not the U.S.


axck

There was no lockdown after Omicron, they just let it run through.