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Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 (nCoV-2019)

p_xavier said:
Herd immunity treshold is supposedly in about a week (80% single, 75% double vaccinated). I understand that going with a vaccine passport would be a pain in the ass to administer for businesses. Many provinces are fully open already.
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Sounds like the bar for herd immunity is rising with more infectious variants. Delta is remarkably transmissible. It sounds like some of the rules from earlier variants such as outdoors being protective and extended contact being require are not as applicable.
 
B.C. is re-implementing restrictions in one region in response to a surge from the Delta-variant

British Columbia's provincial health officer is reintroducing health restrictions in the central Okanagan region amid a spike in COVID-19 cases.
Dr. Bonnie Henry says the Delta variant is driving the rapid transmission of COVID-19 in those who aren't vaccinated or who have only had one shot and are between the ages of 20 and 40.
Outdoor gatherings are limited again to 50 people and indoor events have been reduced to five extra people, plus those in the household.
Nightclubs and bars are closed and liquor cut-off is at 10 p.m. at restaurants.
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I expect some regional outbreaks here could have a similar targeted response.
 

How will the pandemic end? The science of past outbreaks offers clues.​

The answer depends on many factors, perhaps the most critical being the global nature of the crisis.

From link.

After months of encouraging trendlines, July’s dramatic spike in global COVID-19 infections has dimmed the proverbial light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.

In May, coronavirus cases were declining across the U.S., parts of Europe, and the Middle East as vaccination rates rose, spurring an easing of social and travel restrictions and a wave of business reopenings. But in the U.S., at least, any celebration was short-lived. By July, vaccination rates flatlined and highly transmissible coronavirus variants swept the nation, forcing health officials to reimpose masking recommendations and call for increased inoculations.

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. After 17 grueling and chaotic months, weary people are wondering: When will the pandemic finally end?

“Even among the scientific community, you would get really different answers,” says Rachael Piltch-Loeb, a researcher and fellow with the Emergency Preparedness Research, Evaluation & Practice Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “There is no one definition of what the end of a pandemic means.”

A pandemic is by definition a global crisis. Lifting some U.S. public health measures and interventions “gave people a sense that the panic was waning,” Piltch-Loeb says. That euphoria blinded many to the worldwide reality, which remains bleak.

“Until this [virus] is controlled or more limited globally, it’s not going away,” Piltch-Loeb says. That means declaring the pandemic’s “end” may be a distant goal, requiring different conditions depending on who’s asked.
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Where do diseases go?​

When the worldwide spread of a disease is brought under control in a localized area, it’s no longer a pandemic but an epidemic, according to the WHO. If COVID-19 persists globally at what the WHO judges to be “expected or normal levels,” the organization will then re-designate the disease “endemic.”

At that stage, SARS-CoV-2 will become a circulating virus that’s “less consequential as we build immunity,” says Saad Omer, an epidemiologist and director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. (Read more about how we’ll live with COVID-19 as an endemic disease.)

Only two diseases in recorded history that affect humans or other animals have ever been eradicated: smallpox, a life-threatening disease for people that covers bodies in painful blisters, and rinderpest, a viral malady that infected and killed cattle. In both instances, intensive global vaccination campaigns brought new infections to a halt. The last confirmed case of rinderpest was detected in Kenya in 2001, while the last known smallpox case occurred in the U.K. in 1978.

Joshua Epstein, professor of epidemiology in the New York University School of Global Public Health and founding director of its Agent-Based Modeling Laboratory, argues that eradication is so rare that the word should be wiped from our disease vocabulary. Diseases “retreat to their animal reservoirs, or they mutate at low levels,” he says. “But they don’t typically literally disappear from the global biome.”
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Most causes of past pandemics are still with us today. More than 3,000 people caught the bacteria that cause both bubonic and pneumonic plague between 2010 and 2015, according to the WHO. And the virus behind the 1918 flu pandemic that ravaged the globe, killing at least 50 million people, ultimately morphed into less lethal variants, with its descendants becoming strains of the seasonal flu.

As with the 1918 flu, it’s likely the SARS-CoV-2 virus will continue to mutate, and the human immune system would eventually adapt to fend it off without shots—but not before many people fell ill and died. “Developing immunity the hard way is not a solution that we should be aspiring to,” Omer says.

Finding ways to slow the spread of a disease and manage its effects is by far the safer path, experts say. Today, for instance, pest control and advanced hygiene keep the plague at bay, while any new cases can be treated with antibiotics.

For other diseases, such as the flu, vaccines can also make a difference. The available COVID-19 vaccines are highly safe and effective, which means getting enough people vaccinated can end this pandemic faster and with lower mortality than natural infections alone.
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Why we need vaccines for all​

WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week reinstated a goal of vaccinating at least 10 percent of every nation’s population by September, with the loftier goal of reaching 40 percent global inoculation by year’s end and 70 percent by mid-2022.

To date, though, just 28 percent of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. And vaccine distribution remains wildly lopsided. The European Union has nearly three-fourths of its eligible population at least partially inoculated; the U.S. has vaccinated 68 percent of people 12 and older.

But other nations that have lost many people to COVID-19—including Indonesia, India, and many of the countries in Africa—are working at a much slower pace. That’s in part because Covax, the United-Nations-backed program to vaccinate the world, has struggled to acquire and deliver vaccines for the world’s poorest countries. This week, the WHO issued a plea for wealthy countries to donate vaccine doses to poorer nations before offering booster shots to their own populations.

Even in countries with sufficient supply, the pace of vaccinations is influenced by hesitancy and misinformation. In the U.S., the daily rate of new vaccinations has plateaued, slowing to an average of 615,000 injections a day, or an 82 percent decline from the peak of vaccine uptake on April 13. U.S. hospitals are filling up with patients as caseloads increase in unvaccinated areas.

With more opportunities to spread and mutate, the virus has developed new variants that are not only more contagious, but more evasive. Delta is the most contagious one detected so far. The variant was first detected in India, where it helped drive one of the world’s worst surges in April. More recently, Delta contributed to a dramatic outbreak in Indonesia; antibody data suggest that more than half the population in the capital city of Jakarta have been infected. Initial research also shows the Lambda variant may be resistant to some vaccines.

The complexity of fighting a rapidly mutating virus “means that sometimes we take two steps forward and one step back,” says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
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Who gets to say it’s over?​

There is another option, scientists and historians say: People will decide the pandemic is over, long before any governing body declares it so.

It’s happened in the past: The 1918 flu hit in the throes of World War I, and as the fighting ended, there was a “feeling of wanting to put that whole decade to bed, and to embrace a new future,” says Naomi Rogers, professor of the history of medicine and of history at Yale University. The public entered the “Roaring Twenties” despite the flu virus still circulating throughout the U.S. population.

If society attempts to declare an end to the pandemic before science does, we’d be accepting its severe outcomes—including death. That’s often been the case with past pandemics. The flu is no longer considered a pandemic and is now an endemic disease; between 12,000 and 61,000 people in the U.S. still die from the flu each year, based on CDC estimates.

“If we can bring the death count down to a certain level and resume our lives normally, one could say the pandemic has ‘ended’,” says Jagpreet Chhatwal, a decision scientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Technology Assessment in Boston. Again, vaccines make a difference. COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have been tamped down in highly-vaccinated areas.

Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will likely provide guidance on when the pandemic has reached endemic status in the U.S., says Piltch-Loeb. That in turn will offer a path back to some version of normal life, regardless of global declarations.

“We want to go back to what it was like before COVID,” says Andrew Azman, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s not going to take the WHO saying the pandemic is over for people to do that.”
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afransen said:
I had one greet me on my doorstep as I was leaving the house the other night. Sheer terror.
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Raccoons used to come out in the early morning on the Esplanade, not so much now, first the hostel and it's clients threw the street into chaos now all the construction all the time has meant they just don't bother. Skunks have terrible eye sight, poor blighters, but they have always been around. Even this morning befrore dawn you could hear one of Novotel's visitors carrying on like bloody murder. Notice Novotel has removed all it's signage. The rhythm of the city has changed.
 
The Economist has this on 'vaccine passports':

"French law will require a “health pass” be shown for access to most public spaces from August 9th. China has a QR-code system on an app which categorises people according to their health, and a new digital certificate that stores vaccination records. America’s federal government says it has no plans to introduce a covid app, and anyway the country lacks a national health registry to support one. New York City plans to introduce a requirement for vaccines in many indoor venues—including bars, restaurants, gyms and Broadway theatres—in August and will start enforcing those rules in September. Locals could use New York state’s Excelsior pass as digital proof of a vaccination, one of four state initiatives launched so far. But at least 19 other states have passed laws banning covid passports. England intends to require visitors to high-risk venues, such as nightclubs, to show their NHS COVID Pass from late September, by which time all adults will have been offered a jab. Doing so before this has happened, say critics, would create discrimination. And making their use obligatory is ethically questionable, especially for as long as vaccines have been authorised only for emergency use. Countries are finding that they want covid passports even after many people have been vaccinated. Israel’s Green Pass was introduced in February 2021, phased out in June as cases fell, then reinstated in late July for large events. That was prompted by the spread of the Delta variant, even though nearly all adults had been vaccinated.

and

"But a lack of standardisation makes proving your status complicated. The EU’s Digital Covid Certificate, or EUDCC, should ease travel for 446m people within the bloc. But travellers from outside must hope that their own digital passports or paper certificates will be accepted. Britons will find their apps accepted in some, but not all, EU countries. And Britain has yet to approve the EU’s version. Governments cannot even agree on which vaccines are effective enough for international travel. Concerns about the efficacy of Chinese-, Indian- and Russian-made vaccines mean they may not open all border gates. IATA, an airline association, is one of a handful of non-governmental organisations to have created passes it hopes will be used worldwide. Fraud is also an issue: many countries have a black market for false certificates. Covid passports, like regular ones, must be trusted and readable anywhere. Until a single system can be agreed on their use will remain limited."

As the info on who is vaccinated here resides with the Provinces, it is hard to see how the Federal government can be expected to operate a "Canadian V-P" but they could, and probably should, be involved in setting standards that all provinces ought to follow.
 
I don't know that it is important whether those testing positive were vaccinated or not, it's how ill they are that matters.
 
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