100% agree. Still I am talking about the overall current New Cases situation. Dramatically dropping all the while these variants are out there. Something doesn't compute.
vaccine rollout, new variant spread not high enough to go exponential? I dunno, haven't given it much thought to care.
Time for a dose of reality... Dr Fauci says US response to coronavirus among the worst in the world https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...r-fauci-us-response-coronavirus-b1805892.html Dr Anthony Fauci said the US's response to the coronavirus was among the worst on the planet. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease spoke with ABC News about the US's failure to contain and suppress the virus. "We've done worse than most any other country," Dr Fauci said. "And we're a highly-developed rich country." He said that early predictions of 250,000 deaths were written off as "hyperbolic," and said "now here we are with a half a million deaths." (More at above url)
Fauci admitted the shut down he engineered failed to to do its job. He should be looking in the mirror. He confused the terminology. He confused the mask situation... No masks then masks etc. He was even against closing the borders... if I recall..
As I stated earlier... the months of March to May in the U.S. are basically a race between vaccinations and new variants of COVID. If people follow health guidelines for masks, distancing, washing hands, etc. to reduce the spread then the increasing vaccination level may win this "race". Another Covid-19 surge hangs in the balance. This is how experts say we keep it from becoming reality https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/26/health/us-coronavirus-friday/index.html
WOW! I could see GWB high-fivin her right theya. This is what love looks like for him. I am pretty sure that the "south african variant" of more than one type of virus can be found on her thong, so that is potential downside. South African woman whips off her THONG and uses it as a make-shift mask after being warned about having no face covering by supermarket staff https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...man-whips-underwear-uses-make-shift-mask.html
Not to worry everyone. Apple, google, and the world health organization are talking about how they can "help" with vaccine passports if the EU fails to do it. What could go wrong there? Google acknowledges that it offered, I believe. Apple did too but denies it publicly. I am pretty sure that China has also offered to do it for the EU too. Little joke there - OR NOT. World Health Organization denies vaccine passport talks with Apple https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...tion-denies-vaccine-passport-talks-with-apple
The barriers to vaccine passports https://www.axios.com/barriers-coro...ort-ee5ae689-c9e2-4306-9671-0af28bf21445.html Vaccine passports could become available soon to help people resume their lives — but theyface numerous scientific, social and political barriers to being accepted. The big picture: Reliable and accessible proof of vaccine-induced protection from the novel coronavirus could speed international travel and economic reopening, but obstacles to its wide-scale adoption are so great it may never fully arrive. Driving the news: The secure digital identity app CLEAR and CommonPass, a health app that lets users access vaccination records and COVID-19 test results, will be working together to offer a vaccine passport service, my Axios colleague Erica Pandey reports. The news comes as a growing number of countries and companies are talking up plans to introduce similar vaccine passports that could help the protected return to normal life and travel as soon as possible. "To restart the economy, to save certain industries, I think you need a solution like this," Eric Piscini, a vice president at IBM who oversaw the development of the company's new health passport app, told the New York Times. Yes, but: There are numerous health, ethical and operational questions that need to be resolved before vaccine passports could become an effective part of daily life. Health: Medical experts still don't fully know how effective vaccinations — or exposure to the virus — are at preventing onward transmission of COVID-19. While the CDC is set to soon release new guidance around social activity for fully vaccinated people, current recommendations still call for them to keep wearing masks and practicing social distancing. Until it's clear that vaccination effectively prevents transmission, there's a limit to how useful any vaccine passport can be for public health — especially if emerging variants render some vaccines less protective. “The utility of a vaccine passport is only as good as the evidence of how long the immunity lasts,” David Salisbury, an associate fellow at think tank Chatham House, told Bloomberg. “You could find yourself with a stamp in your passport that lasts longer than the antibodies in your blood.” Ethical: The most obvious use case for vaccine passports is for international travel, which has been crippled by onerous quarantine restrictions. But such a system risks locking out billions of people who are unable or unwilling to get the vaccine. The EU has been discussing the creation of a vaccine passport, with tourism-dependent countries like Greece leading the charge. But Germany and France — where the vaccine rollout has been low and hesitancy is high — have reservations, and any such system looks to be months away. A bigger ethical concern is the many people in developing countries who may not get access to vaccines of any sort for months or even years while rich nations hoard supplies. And if vaccine passports are used not just for international travel but to allow people to work and engage in social life domestically, they could create cripplingly unequal barriers that might paradoxically reinforce vaccine hesitancy. Operational: Passports for international travel are regulated by governments and have decades of history behind them, but there's no such unified system for vaccine passports, which are being introduced by governments and businesses with different standards, making them a target for fraud. The U.S. in particular has a decentralized medical system that can make it difficult for people to easily access their health care records, especially if they lack digital literacy. "I can pretty much 100% guarantee that fraud is going to occur," says Jane Lee, a trust and safety architect at the cybersecurity company Sift. "We will have a lot of bad actors where they pretend to offer a service that will provide some sort of vaccination passport, but it's really a phishing campaign." Be smart: None of these obstacles are insurmountable on their own. But as we saw with the failures of digital contact tracing, just because a technological solution exists doesn't mean it will be effective or adopted by the public. "There's a huge motivation to make this work socially," says Kevin Trilli, chief product officer at Onfido, an identification verification company. "But there's a lot of governmental issues that are going to really make the system difficult to implement." There's a time pressure at work here as well, especially in the U.S, where vaccination rates have picked up. The more people who are vaccinated, the less value there will be in creating a complex system to sift the protected from the unprotected. The bottom line: Some form of vaccine visas will likely be introduced for international travel, but it seems unlikely they'll become a passport to resuming normal life.
Coronavirus 'vaccine passports' offer 'freedom,' 'mobility,' access to 'certain jobs' — and are inevitable, NYU medical ethics prof tells CNN https://www.theblaze.com/news/coronavirus-vaccine-passports-freedom-mobility Coronavirus "vaccine passports" are coming to America, a New York University medical ethics professor told CNN Sunday. But not to worry: Arthur Caplan told Fareed Zakaria that bearers of such documents will "gain freedom," "gain mobility," and will have access to "certain jobs." May I see your papers? As if to prime the pump, Zakaria's segment began with the notorious "May I see your papers?" scene from "Casablanca": The host even narrated over the clip, saying the "demand to produce personal documents can be uncomfortable, but post-pandemic it's something we'll all likely have to get more and more comfortable with. We could be asked to show proof we've had the shots in order to get on an airplane, go to a concert, or go back to work." With that, Zakaria asked Caplan why vaccine passports are "the future and we should be comfortable with it?" What did Caplan have to say? The professor replied that he's "sure that the future holds vaccine passports for us, partly to protect against the spread of COVID and it rebounding." As for concerns about privacy of health data, Caplan said that "with a COVID certification, you're going to gain freedom, you're going to gain mobility, and I'm going to suggest that you're probably going to be able to get certain jobs," especially within close-quartered environments such as cruise ships. He added that often the release of health information "threatens to harm you; in this case being vaccinated threatens to benefit you. It goes in the other direction." After Zakaria brought up the "inevitable inequality" with respect to vaccine access and the reluctance of some people and communities to get vaccinated, Caplan had the following to say: Vaccine passports or even vaccine requirements do depend on access. It's hard to impose anything unless you are pretty sure that somebody can get a vaccine. So I think it'll be a little while before we see this, let's say within the U.S. But there [are] going to be communities and areas of the country where it starts to make sense due to high availability of the vaccine to say, "You wanna come back to work in person? Gotta show me a vaccine certificate. You wanna go in a bar, a restaurant? Gotta show me a vaccine certificate." I think there will be some inequality in the U.S., but hopefully it will wash out quickly as the supplies increase very rapidly, and I think they're going to. It also gives you an incentive to overcome vaccine hesitancy. ... if you promise them more mobility, more ability to get a job, more ability to get travel, that's a very powerful incentive to actually achieve fuller vaccination. Here's the interview: (Video at above url)
Well so much for equity in vaccine distribution... Alabama: We're not distributing vaccines to majority-black communities because of vaccine hesitancy. Jefferson County: We have a waiting list of 125,000 black people people ready right now. https://www.npr.org/sections/corona...-how-can-this-disparity-exist-in-this-country