Germany has reached a plateau basically. Good news is, that it is on pretty low numbers, but that may change as Delta becomes the dominant variant. We'll see I guess.

39% of the population had gotten both vaccine doses, 56% got at least one. So vaccination does progress. I personally got my first with Comirnaty (Pfizer/Biontech) and I am scheduled for the second jab on 2021-08-06. Hopefully the progressing vaccination stops the spread of Delta.

Still a lot of adults left to vaccinate then. It seems even red states with low vaccination rates have much less cases nowadays, so they are content.

Same in the UK.

~15% or so, were fully vaccinated, when they got infected and sick.
If you count the ones that only had like 1 jab as well, its probably like 30-40% of the new infections, are people vaccinated.

Makes you wonder if even had you reached 100% vaccinated rates, would the virus still go away? or would it just stay around forever?

I am more interested in long Covid. If our lungs still get destroyed even while vaccinated... oh boy. A proper quarantine would be in order.

Long covid is like 3-5% or something? of all new infections.
So if you get 1million new infections, your gonna end up with 300,000-500,000 people with bad lungs after.

Im not sure if the vaccines actually protect, against that.
I know less people get really sick (less people hospitalised + incubated), when vaccinated, and less people go on to die.
However I dont think it actually protects against "long lasting covid" effects, like bad lungs afterwards.

You can be fully vaccinated, and still get screwed over by covid.

In denmark we did the same.
No more masks.

Im actually abit worried about it.
Seeing the UK have almost 28,000 new infections today.... and its only gonna get worse, and more and more people stop wearing masks ect.

Long Covid is a wide range of symptoms with a very likely wide range of causes, a lot of them having nothing to do with lung scarring:

1. Post-intensive care syndrome (well known and reported after pneumonia);

2. Damage to the body due to the strong inflammatory immune response (probably exclusive to Covid);

3. Post-traumatic stress disorder (well known and reported after a wide range of severe disases);

4. Viral fatigue syndrome (a very murky area of medical research, but some people were known to be infected with obscure opportunistic diseases after past pandemics, perhaps due to a weakened immune system);

Etc.

Most of which very likely can be prevented through vaccination, though no efficacy studies were made yet AFAIK, perhaps because it's very hard to define long Covid and get a true random sample.

Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten has one of his deep data dives into lockdown effectiveness against COVID-19. It is a long read, with a lot data to parse, but it might be worth it:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more

Interesting read, but it ultimately comes down to the cooperation of the population. In China it worked very well as the people don't have a choice but to 'cooperate'. Lock downs are not only effective in controlling the pandemic, they also prevent more viral mutations by keeping the active cases low. More active cases, more chances of a successful mutation creating more virulent strains.

This focus at only looking at deaths and hospitalizations conveniently ignores the risk of creating worse strains. Meanwhile pointing fingers at careless lab workers that might have started the pandemic. The entire world is a breeding ground / test lab atm. 11,727,029 infected humans walking around atm in which the virus duplicates constantly.

And there's always desensitization at work. At first 3,000 deaths were bad, now we're used to seeing double to triple that number daily as a baseline in between waves. Lock downs get less effective over time as less and less people think it necessary.

Covid is here to stay like the flu. Yearly Covid booster shot will become a thing. At least less deadly strains should win out over those that kill their host or make them too ill to spread the disease on. Yet long covid could very well become a big drain on society.

Too bad we don't have the precise data from the 1889 pandemic. It would be great to know what caused each wave in what was likely the last coronavirus introduction to humans before SARS-CoV-2.

We know it had a huge first wave with subsequent smaller recurrences in the following years - most of them not actually during winter. Were these due to "variants of concern"? More transmissible lineages infecting those who escaped the first time, plus perhaps some immune escape?

It would make sense for a virus that just crossed the species barrier to be somewhat unstable at first, after all.