Vaccines, Infrastructure, and Kids In Cages: US Politics April 2021

I know vaccinated people that have already traveled overseas

sigh

Ayo, if you would like a real-world example of the "vaccine passport" idea to discuss, New York state is testing one right now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/08/vaccine-passport-new-york-excelsior-pass/

Just the idea of vaccine passports is controversial — Florida’s governor issued an executive order banning them — so it’s important to be clear about how New York is and isn’t using Excelsior Pass. The state’s guidelines require theaters, major stadiums and arenas, wedding receptions and catered events to screen customers for the coronavirus. Businesses can do that by confirming either your vaccination status or that you’ve had a coronavirus test in the past 72 hours.

When you show up at one of these businesses, you can bring your physical vaccination card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or a copy of a recent test result — or flash the Excelsior Pass that replaces both of those. The high-tech approach is voluntary, but providing proof of your coronavirus status to these kinds of businesses is not.

It's worth reading the whole piece if you're interested in stuff like privacy considerations, accessibility issues, scamming, and effectiveness.

this is the one a performance partner of mine is exploring
https://www.clearme.com/healthpass

I have to say, Excelsior looks less invasive to me than that, but I'm v strongly against mainstreaming biometric tech, not that there's much info on the site about how it works, where the images are stored, etc. I'm also suspicious of this:

"A CLEAR kiosk at the venue takes touchless temperature, integrating the result into the Health Pass. It’s the perfect add-on to enhance safety and streamline operations

Temp screening is totally worthless health-security-theater afaict and that's putting aside the effectiveness of touchless temp reading in the first place.

xpost If you are vaccinated, and you adhere to all guidelines and requirements (masks, tests, etc.), and the destination country has no problem with you arriving, should you not travel?

I feel like a negative test in the past 4 days or something is a much more useful barometer to fly than a vaccination card. You can be vaxxed and still theoretically contagious, or at least it's possible.

I mean, I have no plans to travel out of the country in the next few years, but uh... good luck getting vaccinated Americans not to travel.

also very curious about the reasons not to travel once fully vaxxed, as we're starting to plan a possible trip this summer.

The only trip we are planning is to rent a cabin in the UP for a week at the end of the summer, but that's pending where numbers are by then since our son is below the 12-15 range and is very unlikely to be vaccinated by that point.

I feel like a negative test in the past 4 days or something is a much more useful barometer to fly than a vaccination card. You can be vaxxed and still theoretically contagious, or at least it's possible.

I'd say you have a substantially higher likelihood of being contagious with a 4-day-old negative test than you do if you're vaccinated.

If you are vaccinated, and you adhere to all guidelines and requirements (masks, tests, etc.), and the destination country has no problem with you arriving, should you not travel?

tbc I'm just annoyed and jealous as I'm probably still months out from even booking shot the first

Heh, it annoyed/annoys me, too! We're not flying anywhere before December, but I really don't see why I wouldn't before then. If not now (full vaxxed) then when?

The only trip we are planning is to rent a cabin in the UP for a week at the end of the summer, but that's pending where numbers are by then since our son is below the 12-15 range and is very unlikely to be vaccinated by that point.

― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Monday, April 19, 2021 12:59 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just a heads up, you're likely going to find that mask compliance in the UP is somewhat less than what you've experienced in Chicago. Maybe this is obvious, I dunno, but I'm from up there and my parents still live there, so I hear stories and read news, etc. Depending on where you go you may be the only person masked up.

@ Simon H. --- fair!! i totally can appreciate that sentiment. fingers crossed for you.

Just a heads up, you're likely going to find that mask compliance in the UP is somewhat less than what you've experienced in Chicago. Maybe this is obvious, I dunno, but I'm from up there and my parents still live there, so I hear stories and read news, etc. Depending on where you go you may be the only person masked up.

I mean, nothing is set in stone at all yet. We're just all desperately in need of a trip to look forward to and a cabin within (longish) driving distance seems reasonable to plan four or five months out. Obviously if shit looks dire, we'll cancel. I mean, we wouldn't dare head up there right now with the numbers as they sit, but I'm hoping for a turnaround by then.

I was in marquette and houghton in the UP in the past month and it seemed like everyone in the former was wearing a mask while nobody in the latter was.

If you are vaccinated, and you adhere to all guidelines and requirements (masks, tests, etc.), and the destination country has no problem with you arriving, should you not travel?

Just using the US as an example, we only just hit 25% of the population fully vaccinated. That isn't even close to what we need for herd immunity, so unnecessary air travel is a terrible idea right now. The new case rate needs to be near zero before people start flying everywhere.

Maybe you're vaccinated, but A. new variants are popping up that you might either not be protected against or you can carry asymptomatically and B. the vaccines aren't 100%... they're awesome in terms of protecting you from hospitalization and mean we can hit herd immunity faster than we would with vaccines only 50-60% effective, but we need to see that herd immunity in full effect before going back to normal, and we just haven't got there yet.

I dunno, if the goal is herd immunity and zero cases, I imagine that rules out travel for ... a couple more years? Which seems pretty untenable.

I saw this Nature article on why herd immunity is likely impossible at this point:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2

I mean, we probably are never hitting her immunity at this point, so I guess travel is just over forever if that's our benchmark.

"herd immunity"

we still need to know more about the risks that vaccinated people pose to the greater population, but it seems like an odd thing to fret over when a large portion of the country plans to remain unvaccinated and refuses to observe any semblance of masking or distancing whatsoever.

I dunno, if the goal is herd immunity and zero cases, I imagine that rules out travel for ... a couple more years? Which seems pretty untenable.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, April 19, 2021 2:36 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the UK had one (1) death yesterday. it doesn't need to take two years.

f. hazel said we need herd immunity and

the new case rate needs to be near zero before people start flying everywhere.

2,963 new cases and 4 new deaths in the United Kingdom

And keep in mind, that's the UK, where you currently cannot travel to without a lengthy quarantine. How enforced it is, I dunno, but I think we're operating under the idea of "travel" as "travel that does not require a week+ in a hotel at your own expense."

the UK is planning to lift domestic restrictions pretty soon IIUC. not sure about inbound travel given the situation in the ROW. my point is more that you can set a pretty strict requirement to lift a given restriction and it's not impossible to reach it. (well, it might be in a country in which 25% of adults plan to refuse vaccination.)

I mean, we probably are never hitting herd immunity at this point, so I guess travel is just over forever if that's our benchmark.

Should we travel now? No, we should not. Is herd immunity a pipe dream at this point which will lead to all airplanes being grounded forever? I think that's pretty obviously a different question and involves a lot more conjecture. But this summer, vacations shouldn't involve flights.

xpost I didn't say impossible, I said years, if the standard is no new cases and herd immunity.

i understand. i'm saying that a rich country with access to vaccines could set an aggressive target for lifting all domestic restrictions (probably not zero, but small, like 5 per million or something) and that wouldn't be synonymous with "never lift this restriction" or "years" because they could reach it in the next few weeks.

the UK and israel (both now in the low tens per million) have in fact done this, and are going to succeed.

exponential growth goes both ways (or it does when there is effective healthcare and public health systems and hasn't been epistimic collapse).

Hope you are right! What remains to be seen is how successful these countries remain once they totally open up their borders again, considering tight restrictions on travel, and quarantines and whatnot, are some of the best ways of maintaining that success.

i would imagine the UK, a bastion of civil liberties and famously pro-immigrant island, is going to have a pretty strong stomach for requiring proof of vaccination to enter.

requiring proof of vaccination at the border would be a tough sell in the US because 25% of US adults will never get vaccinated (that number will be more like 10% in the UK, maybe even less). also the UK doesn't have land borders and is already committing unrelated international trade suicide, so there's less to lose by shutting people out.

well they do have that one land border...

new variants are popping up that you might either not be protected against or you can carry asymptomatically

i’d be worried about this if there were a shred of evidence for it. my parents are vaccinated, my wife and i will have had both doses by july, i haven’t seen them in a year and a half, and we’re going to travel to go see them. my dad’s in his eighties, i don’t know how many chances we have left. is this “necessary”? “unnecessary”?

I'm not waiting another year to hug my kids.

well they do have that one land border...

― Piven After Midnight (The Yellow Kid), Monday, April 19, 2021 3:48 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

haha i literally forgot it, which i assume is what the UK government is doing too.

Not to say anyone itt is doing this (I do totally understand what f. hazel is saying, believe me, I'm not planning to leave the country for quite some time yet), but it is frustrating to feel like the goalposts are being shifted wrt what fully vaxxed people can and can't do. I can absolutely see why people are frustrated to have been told to be patient until vaccinations are here, only to get vaccinated and then be shamed for doing things like traveling to see family they haven't seen for over a year.

Maybe you're vaccinated, but A. new variants are popping up that you might either not be protected against or you can carry asymptomatically and B. the vaccines aren't 100%... they're awesome in terms of protecting you from hospitalization

tracer otm. there's no substantial evidence for A.

B omits that they are also awesome at protecting you from _any_ kind of infectionr: https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/29/real-world-study-by-cdc-shows-pfizer-and-moderna-vaccines-were-90-effective/

Participants were tested weekly to look for all cases of Covid infection, even asymptomatic ones. There were 161 Covid infections in the unvaccinated workers, compared with 16 in workers who had received only one dose by the time of their infection and only three infections in people who had received both doses and were two weeks out from their second dose.

there's no equivalent study that I know of for J&J or AZ, but moderna and pfizer appear to be almost perfect vaccines with they make you 90%+ less likely to get covid with or without symptoms (which means they also make you 90%+ likely to give it to someone else). this is based on real world studies with the variants that are circulating now, now whatever was around last summer when the original trials for those vaccines were running.

*not whatever was around last summer

moderna and pfizer appear to be almost perfect vaccines with they make you 90%+ less likely to get covid with or without symptoms (which means they also make you 90%+ likely to give it to someone else).

sorry, I'm just over here enjoying the typo

"I'm not waiting another year to hug my kids." don''t you ... live with your kids? Do you mean you have not been touching them for the past year?

I am divorced. My ex has my kids in TN. I live in MA.

We have joint custody but that's meaningless when you aren't actually allowed to travel

oh shit, I did not know that happened, I'm sorry. I'll PM ya.

anyway IMO if you are fully vaxxed, there is no reason not to travel, particularly for reasons like this (to see family). is there some small chance that vaxxed people can still catch and spread covid? the evidence seems inconclusive at best, and if it were a clear and present danger I think we would not see these declining cases that we've seen in Israel and, in fact, parts of the US where vaccinations are happening at a large scale.

sorry, I'm just over here enjoying the typo

yeah sorry i've had four hours sleep every night for the past year. every comment i post has them these days.

On Friday I went to happy hour with two fully vaccinated coworkers at a brewery with a formidable outdoor seating section. A couple of us teared up. It felt good. Baby steps, man.

Congrats! At this point I'm just looking forward to booking a haircut (cannot wait until I can get my beard professional trimmed again tho) in mid-May.

we're gonna be travelling to Boston with the kids to meet my nephew who is going to be 1. I'm worried about the kids but the evidence seems to be that even if they get it, it won't be a big deal - afaik most people whose kids caught it didn't even know they had it