Quote:
Originally Posted by mswlogo
Masks stop the spread TWO ways. . . . More importantly they reduce how much an infected person spews out.
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This is true and I should have mentioned this in my original post. You wear a mask to protect yourself AND other people.
At this point 60% of Americans are vaccinated and that number doesn't seem to want to budge. This means that we won't reach herd immunity and this virus and its variants could be with us for a long time. I'm no longer waiting for the pandemic to end. I'm assuming that this is normal life for the next long stretch.
Over the last 5 years or so we saw the rift in this country get deeper and wider. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of talk now about how to bring Americans back together, the way we were during World War II, for example. At this point in the U.S., the pandemic is no longer a problem of medicine or technology, since we have the medical solution to it and an abundant supply of vaccines. It's primarily a problem of human behavior. The behavior won't change until enough people agree on the common goal of ending the pandemic. That's not the case right now---40% of people have some other priority besides ending the pandemic---so there's not much hope of ending it in the coming years.
Assuming that we need a yearly vaccination, we will be fighting the same battle every year, trying to convince people to get vaccinated. They're not going to do that until there's a big shift in the underlying causes of the social rift, which are very deep. Vaccination resistance is only the tip of the iceberg of deeply held beliefs and feelings. The ideological rift is probably going to make stopping the climate crisis impossible also, because the problem of human behavior went way beyond the ability of science and technology to stop climate change. I hope I'm wrong, but I feel pessimistic about our ability to solve these major threats to our existence.