We'll start out with this assessment of herd immunity, suggesting that the end might actually be in sight. That's not from some agenda-driven crank, the guy behind it is legit. The upshot is the expectation is that herd immunity will likely be achieved by July/August. There are, of course, wild cards: his herd immunity target of 75% may be low, and there are new strains of the virus which may react differently to vaccines and such, but I'm comfortable with this as my working expectation.
More concerning to me is the abysmal process of getting vaccines and treatments approved and distributed. From the get-go our inability to alter our rigid thinking or resist our entrenched bureaucracy has cost way more lives than any lockdowns have saved. Compared to the finger-pointing and righteous screeching about masks that I have seen all over social media, there seems to be little concern about this among everyday people. Now I shall get oblique.
I am fond of saying the world has gotten better in my lifetime and likely continues to do so, but it is a painful, chaotic process of ten steps forward and nine steps back. Also, it's non-linear, non-sequential. There is no one series of steps of which on average 10 are forward and 9 are back. There are steps happening all the time, everywhere, often unseen. This means the progress is happening in a world of constant upheaval. Furthermore, if your mental time frame or event set happens to contain more steps back than steps forward, you can easily fall into the belief that the world is degrading. Once you have adopted a belief, as we all know, our cognitive biases burst into action to prevent it from changing at all costs.
Over the course of my lifetime, and probably starting well before, the world has gotten safer. I'm not speaking of crime, but speaking of overall safety -- accident prevention, health concerns, etc. We have built up a huge set of guidelines and processes, often with the force of law, to do this. This includes consumer goods having an enormous number of safety tests to pass; drugs have gotten special scrutiny and control. Behavioral guidelines have been installed and are increasingly enforced by technological innovation--the primary focus here being auto traffic. And when there isn't an institution to enforce a specific rule, liability and tort law has bent all our activities to be biased toward caution. These things can spiral into absurdity and accusations of nanny-statism and fear-mongering follow on, often well-founded, but on balance, I am going to say this is a step forward. As a rule of thumb, not being in peril is better than being in peril, especially mortal peril.
But then there's the step back. When a situation came along and the very institutions and laws that we built to protect started working against us, we didn't know what to do. Put it this way, can you imagine someone in 1918, with the flu epidemic raging, being told that there are great treatments and vaccines available that seem to work really well and that other countries have implemented them with good results, but we are going to have to wait months (or years) to try them because we can't change the rules, and even if they were available we still have to make sure that certain groups of people get them in a certain order, even if that means throwing some away? 1918-guy may have been a barbarian who kicked his children out the door in the morning to fend for themselves until dinner time, but I doubt he would have stood for that. In fact, it would be so unimaginable to his time and place that it never would have happened to begin with.
We've gained a safer, more secure, less traumatic day-to-day life through lots of adaptation and innovation and struggle over the past decades, but this is what we've lost. We are facing a horrible situation that 1918-guy couldn't even conceive of, and we just shrug at the blank-faced bureaucracy that's empowering it. Thousands continue to die, while we are content to pat ourselves on the back for shaming a small percentage of people not wearing masks.
This is one of those data sets where the steps back outweigh the steps forward. Be careful of the beliefs it spawns.
Important Note: I am in the Phase III trial for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. I have received my vaccination, which is 66.67% likely to be a vaccine and 33.33% likely to be a placebo. This vaccine has been approved for use in the UK, the EU, and India. There is a factory in Baltimore that is cranked up and ready to produce this vaccine at a prodigious rate. Yet as near as I can tell we are still weeks away from approval here. With millions of people getting the vaccine across the world, it's a pretty safe bet that nothing terrible is going to happen. This is the perfect example of what I am talking about above. We cannot seem to set aside our dedication to bureaucratic processes even though people are dying by the thousands every day.
