Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
I'll be shocked if we actually shift into a long-term endemic phase, but I'll be very pleasantly surprised if we do. I think a lot of the stability we're seeing right now is because of recent vaccinations, and people are definitely not going to keep getting vaccinated at the rates we've seen.
It'll really come down to how quickly protection against severe disease wanes and/or what new variants we see. If the vulnerable can consistently and repeatedly get vaccinated, that would go a long way to mitigating the impact. But if 60+ year olds and medically vulnerable people get complacent, we could certainly have issues again.
I'm also concerned about the long-term health impacts of people repeatedly being infected. I just read about a study that looked at ~150K people who tested positive for COVID and survived it, and compared them to ~5M people in the same time period who didn't have COVID and also compared them to ~5M people from medical records from 2017 (i.e. pre-COVID). The increase in cardiovascular disorders in the COVID positive group compared to the control groups is pretty startling; for every 100K people at the 12-month mark after an infection, the COVID positive group saw an additional:
-2,350 cases of major cardiovascular events (stroke, heart attack, cardiovascular related death)
-1,200 cases of heart failure
-400 strokes
-4,500 overall incidents of cardiovascular disorders
And those are additional cases over what you'd normally expect, not total. There are a few caveats; the sample was mostly older people, so those numbers aren't going to scale to the whole population, and there was a correlation between severity and the increased 12-month risk (so vaccines should mitigate that somewhat). But even in non-hospitalized cases, there was a marked increase (something like 30-40% higher) in the 12-month risk of cardiovascular disorders after infection.
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In general, there is clearly a risk for people that are older, or have other health conditions as we move forward. I'm always concerned when statistics like these are being presented; in this case you're being transparent that the sample is mostly older people. At the end of the day, we need to understand the risk to the majority of the population to adapt our public policies. And i would hope people at risk are taking vaccines or whatever else that is available. At this point though it has to be about people making their own decisions. The evidence is pretty clear regarding who is most at risk and if you're in that category and refuse to take a vaccine that will very likely reduce your risk I don't know what to say.
Don't force the vaccines on healthy people that likely don't need it and let them make the choice for themselves. Our healthcare system will not be impacted based on healthy people choosing not to be vaccinated, or boosted, etc.