Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Irish Government has used the excuse of “emphasising personal responsibility” to avoid taking any responsibility themselves for managing our way back to normality.
The near absence of effective treatments for covid is among the biggest oversights amidst this.
If the new Merck and Pfizer pills work as claimed then there's no reason for the health service need be overwhelmed by Covid in future.
Of course when we talk about endemicity we are usually talking in the context of viruses that we don't mass vaccinate against during a pandemic.
The open question is if the mass vaccination campaign is generating immune/vaccine escape variants [of which there is theoretical justification and empirical data on], or if the vaccination campaign will gradually move the virus towards less dangerous strains.
Hard to say definitely at the moment, but the correlation of higher case loads with higher vaccination rates is evident.
The near absence of effective treatments for covid is among the biggest oversights amidst this.
If the new Merck and Pfizer pills work as claimed then there's no reason for the health service need be overwhelmed by Covid in future.
Of course when we talk about endemicity we are usually talking in the context of viruses that we don't mass vaccinate against during a pandemic.
The open question is if the mass vaccination campaign is generating immune/vaccine escape variants [of which there is theoretical justification and empirical data on], or if the vaccination campaign will gradually move the virus towards less dangerous strains.
Hard to say definitely at the moment, but the correlation of higher case loads with higher vaccination rates is evident.