Expect life to return to normal in 3 stages — not all at once.
Sigal Samuel at Vox:
Now that the vaccines are arriving, people are starting to dream.
They say things like, “The second everyone in my family is vaccinated, we’re going on a big trip to Asia!” or “As soon as my five closest friends and I get the shot, I’m spending a weekend at a cabin with them. No masks, no social distancing.”
While many of us are thinking about the Covid-19 pandemic in binary terms — there’s “life before I get the shot” and “life after I get the shot” — experts are cautioning us to think more gradually. Not everything will change the second that syringe enters your arm.
“Realistically, it’s definitely not going to be an on/off switch on normal,” said Eleanor Murray, a Boston University epidemiologist.
The best way to set realistic expectations around what life will look like in 2021 is to think of it in three stages. Stage 1 is what you can safely do once you and your close friends or family are vaccinated. Stage 2 is what you can safely do once your city or state has reached herd immunity, where enough people are protected against infection that the virus can’t easily spark new outbreaks. Stage 3 is what you can do once herd immunity is reached internationally. (Note that there’s a good chance we won’t reach that last stage in 2021.)
A lot will depend on the answer to a crucial open question: Are the vaccines only good at preventing symptomatic disease, or are they also good at preventing infection and transmission?
“One can imagine a scenario where you are vaccinated and you develop a protective immune response. You will not get sick, you will not die, but the virus will still be able to grow in your nose and transmit to other people,” said Barry Bloom, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard.
Bloom and other experts are optimistic that the vaccines help reduce infection and transmission, but nobody knows by how much. “We just need more data on transmission,” he said. “Hopefully it will come out of the trials in a couple of months.”
In the meantime, even vaccinated people have to assume they can still become infected and pass along the virus. That means they need to keep wearing masks and social distancing whenever they’re around unvaccinated people.
But as more and more people get vaccinated, the question will arise: What about when you’re among people who’ve all been vaccinated? That brings us to stage 1.
Stage 1: You and your close friends or family are vaccinated
Let’s say you and your five closest friends have been vaccinated. Can you all rent a cabin in the woods and spend a weekend together, without masks or social distancing?
The answer is: It’s likely to be fine — with some caveats.
For one thing, vaccines don’t work instantly. “You need to wait at minimum two weeks after the first shot to see any kind of protection, but really you need to wait at least a week after the second shot,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist affiliated with Georgetown University.
Then there’s the fact that the vaccine may not work equally well in everyone. Some people may have health issues that keep their bodies from mounting quite as successful an immune response. “The fact is, I’m not absolutely sure that everybody who receives the vaccine develops a protective response,” Bloom said.
The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines showed 95 percent efficacy at preventing symptomatic disease in trials after two doses. But they’re not 100 percent. There’s still a chance you could pick up the virus from one of your vaccinated friends and develop symptoms. Although the vaccines are very good at preventing the severe symptoms that land people in the hospital, experts can’t rule out the possibility that you’ll develop milder symptoms, which could conceivably turn chronic or “long-haul.”
[…]
Stage 2: Your city or state has reached herd immunity
In public settings, Americans should continue with masking and social distancing until 75 to 85 percent of the population is vaccinated, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He estimates that around that stage — which could come in mid-fall — the US will reach herd immunity. (This is just an estimate, though, and it’s liable to change depending on Covid-19 variants, vaccine uptake rates, and other factors.)
Rather than achieving national immunity all at once, we’re likely to see regions within the US passing the immunity threshold at different times. As each city or state announces that it’s past the threshold, it’ll probably start rolling back requirements gradually. We might see restaurants open up for indoor dining, but with servers continuing to wear masks.
“I think probably masks will be one of the last things to roll back,” Murray said, “because masks don’t have a commercial cost to them. They’re something that’s helpful and doesn’t necessarily cost the economy anything.” Given that there’s a lot of travel between jurisdictions, masks may not be rolled back until the whole country reaches herd immunity.
Once a jurisdiction reaches immunity, people there will be able to safely return to venues like schools, movie theaters, and indoor dining at restaurants (though of course state and local governments have been making these decisions all throughout the pandemic, weighing the indispensability and risks of different venues). The idea is that if, say, 80 percent of people are vaccinated, that creates an “umbrella” of immunity, as Fauci put it, that “would be able to protect even the vulnerables who have not been vaccinated, or those in which the vaccine has not been effective.”
[…]
Stage 2, for that reason, is not the time for international travel to countries that have not yet achieved herd immunity or that have little health care infrastructure.
If a large region in your country passes the immunity threshold, domestic travel — say, to see vaccinated family members a couple of states over — may be fine. But for your safety and for the sake of people abroad, it’s best to hold off on big international trips.
Stage 3: Herd immunity is reached internationally
Let’s manage expectations right off the bat. There’s a good chance we won’t reach this stage until 2022 or later. That’s because access to the vaccines is far from equal around the world.
[…]
In that scenario, we may have to wait until 2022 or later for travel to some countries to resume.
For now, remember that keeping up with the measures we know curb the spread of the virus — like masking and social distancing — is the best way to ensure we can all get back to normal faster. Yes, we are all sick of them. But the more we stick to them over the next few months, the sooner we can abandon them for good.
Even if you have gotten one or both doses of the COVID vaccine, it is NOT time to ditch your masks or abandon social distancing.
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I once thought I was asexual and it turned out I actually wasn’t ready to have sex before I had transitioned to a point where I was more comfortable with my body.
And in that time, the asexual community welcomed me, supported me, helped me feel good about who I was, protected me from the harm I would have done to myself if I had pushed myself to have sex. That made a huge difference.
If I see an opportunity to support asexual organizations, I do so not just because it’s good but also because they were there for me in a difficult part of my life without judgement. I owe them for that.
If you at one point identified as transgender or questioned your gender identity, maybe you too sought a home in the wrong place because you were struggling with something else. And it is very likely that the people in that home, the transgender community, believed you and welcomed you and listened to you.
And then when it turns out that you were searching for the wrong thing, you don’t just leave that community behind but you turn around and shit on them? Shame on you. What a shitty thing to do.
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Most corporate social media accounts use memes to try and appear hip with the kids so they’ll buy their product but the Sparknotes twitter account is clearly just run by a literature geek who was told they could make memes about old books and is having the time of their life doing just that
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