Ranger222 said:
beerad12man said:
Vaccination now unfortunately won't help this current wave. By the time it takes affect, it will be over.
It might help the future fall/winter wave, though. So it's still a good idea for more to get vaccinated, and I hope they do. Fortunately, I think this one is about peaked, will plummet soon, and be the last big hurrah. I'm still pretty shocked with over 50% vaccinated and likely 35-40% with some layer of natural immunity we are still having these issues. Surprises me, as mathematically I would think that would put us over 70% immunity(at least some degree, enough to prevent hospitalizations). But we may very well need about 85-90% to prevent any future hospital crowding.
Hopefully we can get to about 60+% vaccinated in Texas, along with 50+% naturally immune, which would put us over 80% by the winter wave.
Unfortunately those numbers aren't close to the real situation. Let's do some quick math.
The population of the US is 328 million.
Currently we are looking at 205 million Americans with some level of immunity (168 million vaccinated + 37 m COVID cases). That only equals 205 million Americans, or 62.5% of the US population.
That leaves 120 million Americans with no level of immunity. That's greater than the entire US population in 1918, which sustained a pandemic.
The idea that the virus is quickly running out of hosts to continue this is just unfortunately not true. We will continue to see waves and surges into the fall and winter until a larger percentage of the US population is vaccinated. It's not going away until we put in greater effort to end it.
How are they "not close"? If 35-40% have had it, and 50% are vaccinated, that's 67.5 to 70% immunity. Which is what I said. I really hope we can get to about 60% vaccination by the winter wave. That could give us approaching 80% overall immunity levels, and even higher in the higher risk to be hospitalized crowd.
Also, with the bolded part, are you implying that percentages aren't what mean anything? I highly disagree. If we have 1 billion people, but 90% immunity, that means 100,000,000 hosts. Sounds like a lot, but it still will have a harder time spreading tan if you had 100,000 population with zero immunity. Those 100,000,000 are more in contact with one another, than the 100,000,000 in a population of 900,000,000 immune people
It's still about percentage of people in a population. Not total hosts. It still has to travel from person to person, and the more gaps you have in that non-immune population, the harder it gets for it to spread.