Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
The point of reducing spread post-vaccine wasn't to keep vaccinated people from getting exposed and infected; it was to prevent the morons who willingly had zero immunity from filling up our hospitals all at once and breaking the medical system. If everyone got vaccinated, there would have been no need for rules post-summer 2021. But the fact is, even having 10% of the 40+ population remain unvaccinated meant that the medical system was still under significant threat until they got their immunity the hard way.
And it was a real risk. I remember doing the math for Alberta in the summer of 2021, and just taking the unvaccinated population, age-adjusting their hospitalization risk, and then reducing it by 50-75% (to account for a potential overestimation of hospitalization risk), and you'd end up with about 15-20K hospitalizations in the 40+ group. For context, 1.5 years into the pandemic, there had only been 9K hospitalizations total. So if even half those people got infected over a several month period, the system would have been crushed. And that started to happen during the "best summer ever" with the ICU hitting its pandemic peak in September 2021, so they were forced to introduce mitigation measures again to save people from themselves.
Only when basically everyone without pre-existing immunity got infected after Omicron did we finally come out of the emergency phase and life could return to normal with no real risk to the medical system. But that could have also happened with a high enough vaccination rate.
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The point was that the government wasn't actually putting restrictions in place that prevented spread. They would allow family meetups during the holidays but then randomly close golf clubs in the summer.
It also became abundantly clear very early on that vaccines would not prevent spread. They did, however, vastly reduce serious infection. So vaccinated and relatively young people weren't an especially high risk to end up in the ICU...yet young people aged 18-40 seemed to be the most targeted by restrictions. The things they do were deemed least valuable.
People vaccinated under the age of 50 were in no way filling up hospitals.