Guess you never heard of Travel Passports or ICVP yellow vaccine cards either..... both have been used for many decades.
They are items that people who don't leave their momma's basement never need to use. Enjoy your fantasy about a new world order.
If you have ever traveled to Africa and many other places --- you probably required one of these... A digital vaccination certificate is just an electronic version of this applicable to COVID and will be needed for all international border crossings.
Here's a quick question -- in a country that has a proper public health policy to address COVID --- When contact tracing an outbreak what is the threshold for how many people who you fail to properly contact within 48 hours trigger a lockdown for an entire region. The correct answer is ONE.... but in this case there were many linked to the outbreak from the Melbourne’s Holiday Inn quarantine hotel. Sydney residents to be locked down after concerns raised about Victorian tracing efforts https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...ictorian-tracing-efforts-20210212-p571zu.html Sydney residents returning from Melbourne will be forced into a five-day lockdown after Victorian health officials privately conceded to other states that contact tracers took too long to get in touch with people exposed in Melbourne’s new coronavirus outbreak. NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard on Friday evening issued a health directive ordering anyone returning from Victoria after 11.59pm on Friday to stay at home until 11.59pm on Wednesday. The NSW government had initially indicated it would require anyone returning from Victoria since January 29 to isolate for five days but revised that date following advice from the state’s chief health officer. NSW Health was also urgently contacting about 7000 people from NSW who had attended venues of concern in Melbourne – including Melbourne Airport – in light of a growing coronavirus cluster in the city. The outbreak of the highly contagious variant that leaked out of Melbourne’s Holiday Inn quarantine hotel grew to 13 on Friday, triggering a five-day Victoria-wide lockdown from Friday night. During two meetings of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC), Victoria’s Chief Health Officer came under pressure to explain why almost half of the close contacts from the cluster linked to the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn were not contacted within the benchmark 48-hour period on Tuesday. The AHPPC consisting of chief health officers from each state and territory and chaired by the Australian Chief Medical Officer, met late on Thursday night and again on Friday morning to discuss Melbourne’s latest outbreak. According to three sources familiar with the meeting, Victorian health officials were challenged on contact tracing data that showed 8.9 per cent of close contacts were not contacted within 48 hours on Monday and, by Tuesday, that number had risen to 43.7 per cent before dramatically falling later in the week. One meeting participant told the Herald that, while Victoria had “vastly improved its contact tracing”, some jurisdictions had expressed concerns about keeping the borders open, given the delay in reaching close contacts. NSW on Friday night remained the only state or territory not to impose border restrictions on Victoria, with Premier Gladys Berejiklian saying the state would screen all passengers returning from Victoria at Sydney Airport. Anyone arriving by road or rail would be required to complete a declaration form. “The border between NSW and Victoria will remain open,” Ms Berejiklian said in a statement. “NSW Health continues to monitor the situation closely.” People who crossed into NSW from Victoria after midnight Friday are only permitted to leave their homes to shop for essential items, medical and other care and caregiving, exercise, and essential work. The NSW government has strongly advised against all non-essential travel to Victoria. Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews described the British variant as “hyper infectious”, moving at “hyper-speed”. “This thing is not the 2020 virus ... it is moving at a velocity that has not been seen anywhere in our country over the course of these last 12 months,” he said. The Australian Open tennis tournament will continue despite the lockdown, though crowds will be banned from Saturday. Any NSW resident in Victoria should not enter NSW unless they have permission to do so and anyone from NSW who had been in Victoria since midnight Friday must abide by Victoria’s snap lockdown measures and self-isolate for the next five days under the new Public Health Order. NSW recorded its 26th consecutive day of zero new locally acquired cases from 14,518 tests reported during the 24 hours to 8pm on Thursday, compared with the previous day’s total of 16,397. NSW government sources said the Victorian government’s virus rhetoric on Friday reflected a level of alarm that was not shared in NSW. “Dan Andrews is jumping at shadows,” a NSW minister, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. “He knows in his heart he can’t trust his own system.” Ms Berejiklian was “instinctively cautious” and the most conservative voice in managing the pandemic in the NSW cabinet, a minister said. “That’s why you have the approach that we have.” Victorian health officials were concerned about exposure to the virus by people who had visited the Brunetti cafe at Melbourne Airport Terminal 4, where one of the newly identified COVID-19 cases worked. The terminal is largely used for Jetstar flights, including those to Sydney. Between 4000 and 5000 people are believed to have passed through the terminal during the exposure period. Anyone in NSW who was at any terminal of Melbourne Airport on Sunday or Monday has been directed to come forward for testing and self-isolate until they receive a negative result. Anyone who was at Terminal 4 between 4.45am and 2pm on Tuesday is being urged to get tested immediately and self-isolate for 14 days, regardless of the test result. Household contacts of people who were at Terminal 4 at this time were also asked to self-isolate until the person received a negative test result.
At this point it is a race between how quickly new infectious variants spread in the U.S. against how quickly vaccinations are rolled out. The months from March to May will be dominated by this situation. If states implement and follow proper public health protocols for a few more months we can minimize the impact until the U.S. approaches herd immunity and the spread greatly slows. 'It's like we're trying our best to help the virus': A fourth wave is looming if US fails to contain COVID-19 variants, experts say https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...-fourth-wave-variants-coronavirus/4460958001/ COVID-19 infection and hospitalization rates are falling nationwide, but experts talk in dire terms about what will happen if variants of the virus are allowed to surge this spring. "I'm very worried we're letting our foot off the brakes," said Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The U.S. saw a spike in cases last spring, mainly in the Northeast, last summer in the South, and November through January pretty much everywhere. As the nation's death toll from COVID-19 approaches half a million people, public health experts said they dread the possibility of a fourth wave. "We are done with it, but it is not done with us," added Dr. Luciana Borio, former acting chief scientist of the Food and Drug Administration. Three state legislatures lifted mask mandates in recent days, and New York and Massachusetts eased restrictions on restaurant seating in time for Valentine's Day. "It's like we're trying our best to help the virus rather than stopping it," said Theodora Hatziioannou, a virologist and research associate professor at the Rockefeller University in New York City. More contagious variants of the virus have raced across Europe, South Africa and Latin America. They have all arrived in the U.S., and one first identified in the United Kingdom is likely to be dominant here by the end of next month, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said that if the infectiousness and case fatality rate for the variant known as B.1.1.7, turns out to be the same in the U.S. as it is in the U.K., "I worry we could reach a staggering death toll by the summer and fall." Another variant, which originated in Southern California, has been spreading rapidly across the U.S., according to a study, although it's not clear whether it's more contagious or more dangerous. Many more may be here, too, according to one early review, though again, the significance of all these variants isn't clear. The two vaccines available, one by Pfizer-BioNTech and the other by Moderna, appear to be effective against these variants, said Hatziioannou, who published a study on the subject. But these variants are likely to make targeted drugs such as monoclonal antibodies less effective. They will continue to change and eventually will evade vaccines and diagnostic tests if they keep spreading, she said. Now is the time, she and others said, to double-down on precautions, to avoid a deadly fourth wave and finally bring the virus under control. "The best way to mitigate the threat of the strains is to control the virus," Borio said. And the best way to control the virus is through the public health tools we have," like mask-wearing, hand-washing, avoiding crowds, and vaccination. Next few months a 'very murky picture' It's difficult to predict what the virus will do over the next few months, said Samuel Scarpino, who conducts infectious disease forecasting at Northeastern University in Boston. The variants make estimates more difficult, he said, as do the rising rate of vaccination, the relaxation of some COVID-19 public health measures, the lack of demographic information on who's getting vaccinated and the limited genetic surveillance, which makes it harder to know exactly what the variants are doing. "All those meet together to make it a very murky picture over the next few months," he said. Under the Biden administration, officials are increasing gene sequencing of virus samples tenfold, hoping to better track the variants. In the short term, this awareness is likely to increase anxiety, prompting endless discussions about increases in variants and worries about what effect the changes might have. More extensive sequencing should give the United States a better sense of where the variants are, how fast they spread and what to do about them, said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Viruses mutate as they reproduce within a person. Some mutations do nothing for the virus, and others lead to its demise. A few improve the virus's ability to reproduce and get rapidly passed through a population. "This is what viruses do," said Gronvall, an immunologist. Public health officials predicted that but haven't been able to convince leaders or the public to change the trajectory of the pandemic. "It is so disappointing because it didn't have to be this way," she said. She and others said that if people give the virus an opportunity, it will take it. Double-down on stopping spread Legislatures in North Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin rolled back mask requirements. (Wisconsin's governor reinstated them, but the legislature promised to remove them again when it meets next week.) Gawande said people should wear medical-grade masks instead of often-ill-fitting homemade ones, and he criticized decisions by state legislators to lift requirements. "The mask mandate is the last thing you remove, not the first when your hospitalizations go down," he said. Other states eased restrictions. "It's just ridiculous," Hatziioannou said about allowing restaurants to open for Valentine's Day. COVID-19 cases spiked after every major holiday over the past year. Why would Valentine's Day be any different, she asked. Lifting the restrictions sends the signal that if it's OK to eat at a restaurant, it must be OK to eat at grandma's house, she said, but neither is safe. Slightly easing regulations – allowing restaurants to be 40% full instead of 25% – won't change the nation's quality of life, Scarpino said. A fourth wave would be far less likely, he said, if people get vaccinated when they become eligible and carefully follow public health measures such as mask-wearing and avoiding crowds. What are all the new COVID-19 variants and how dangerous are they? Here's everything you need to know. "Then," he said, "we can imagine a scenario in which this is all behind us." There's a chance to end the outbreak in the U.S., Scarpino said, if people double-down. If restrictions are lifted too early, the virus will bounce back. Vaccines offer a way out of that scenario but only if people take them and can get them in time to prevent a fourth wave, Scarpino and others said. Thomas Balcezak, chief medical officer of Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, views the virus like a forest fire and every tree/person as potential fuel for the flames. "Every time you vaccinate someone, you remove that potential fuel," he said. "If you vaccinate enough people, you can create a fire break, where there just isn't any more fuel for that fire." The faster the population is vaccinated, "the faster we can reduce the possibility of new strains emerging," he said. "This has been a marathon, and now it's kind of a race to the finish." Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, said coping with the variants could be the last major challenge of the pandemic. "If we get through this intact, we're looking good, unless a new freak of nature comes up," he said. "We've got this if we can get through this potential onslaught. But (the virus) needs to be fully respected." Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.
I am in no way a denier - Covid 19 is real. Covid 19 is deadly real for some. But all this variant talk is going against the trend that new cases are dropping dramatically. So if/until that trend changes the rest is all for the scientific community to discuss/pontificate/analyze among themselves.
well, if you got a vaccine that works against these variants but people in certain regions refuse to take the vaccine or worse yet dismiss hygiene instructions with a more virulent & deadly strain on the loose, it's worth informing the public.