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Originally Posted by Harry Lime
Is there an actual point to maintaining mandates anymore? Maybe for travel, but I still see it on sites for employment.
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For employment, it's probably one of three things: employers not bothering to adjust their policy, employers not understanding the long-term effectiveness of COVID vaccines without boosters, or they're keeping the requirement as a sort of screening tool to eliminate antivaxxers from the pool of applicants. And I actually think the latter is defensible even looking strictly in terms of health and the potential for spread in the workplace. Someone who hasn't gotten vaccinated yet likely never will, whereas if there are future disruptive variants that can be fixed by another vaccine dose, then someone who has already been vaccinated is likely to do it again. And that doesn't even get into the likely correlation between being an antivaxxer and lacking the traits/abilities that employers would be looking for (e.g. reason, logic, making smart evidence-based decisions, etc.).
That said, I do think people are probably getting a bit ahead of themselves. We are currently experiencing a very high level of recent immunity due to extremely high vaccination rates and infections from a relatively mild variant. But there isn't a whole lot of reason to expect that that'll necessarily continue going forward. Immunity against coronaviruses wanes, even against severe disease. And if vaccine uptake among the older population continues to drop with each subsequent dose (which it already is), then we're going to be pretty susceptible to high hospitalization rates, particularly if future variants aren't as mild.
Younger people should be fine regardless. But I think there's a real potential for danger if the older population treats COVID like it's over. That's not necessarily something that mandates are going to fix (I don't see age-based mandates ever happening), but it's still a risk and if hospitals fill up, we all suffer. As much as we'd like to think that it's all personal responsibility now (i.e. if you're at risk, take measures to protect yourself), we all rely on a functioning medical system.