You live in CA. So do I. My expectations of vaccination for herd immunity is nil. A friend lives in a county north of Sacramento & has an appointment scheduled.
I don’t know of a single person around here, that has been vaccinated. I called my doctors office & was told they don’t have any new information. Nurse said, “just keep calling”.
Come on Biden, get this ball rolling. “Go with the flow”. 
COVID-19 symptom checker . . . a few of the lesser known symptoms . .
SYMPTOM CHECKER The least common symptoms of coronavirus you might not know
25M positive test results (some of which could be for the same people) is only ~7% of the population who know they had it. This research expects 20-25% of the population have already had it, so if that’s correct, 65-72% of the people who had it don’t have a test result to prove it.
Right. Fingers crossed. But that’s not exactly “herd immunity”.
No covid plan all by Trump.
Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy," CNN reports. As one source put it, “There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch.”
Well that’s just blatantly false. People have been and are being vaccinated.
What they’re calling “no strategy” is actually leaving the details up to the individual states. That in itself is a strategy, and is the exact opposite of having no strategy. You can not like the plan, but dont call it not having a plan. Especially since we all know that about 3 seconds after Trump announced a mandate of who would be vaccinated and when, governors like Cuomo would’ve been raising hell about how outrageous it was that Trump dare tell him how to vaccinate his residents.
Amazon charitably offers to help with vaccination efforts, an offer oddly missing in the last several months.
Of course they’d rather have some good PR in now and hope to stave off any antitrust actions from the new administration.
"The United States has recorded just over 1,000 cases of the flu since September 2020, which is unusually low, Sara Kiley Watson reports for Popular Science .
During the same time period last winter, the country recorded over 65,000 cases of the flu. But in the last year, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed a lot about the way that people act to prevent the spread of disease. Precautions like wearing masks, taking extra care when washing hands, and keeping activities outdoors and at a distance from others have all been implemented to slow the spread of Covid-19. The same measures may have stymied the spread of influenza and other seasonal viruses."
My only question is, why does this need to come from Smithsonian Magazine quoting Popular Science? Shouldnt this have been one of the easier projections for all those ‘experts’ to make last summer?
The beginning of the end, Israel edition. Models and data shows that lagged deaths are no longer tracking new cases (fewer deaths now), likely due to the vaccination of the most vulnerable, and we should expect that trend to accelerate as more people are vaccinated and get better immunity from the second shot.
From 1 to 16 January, Covid-19 cases recorded in Israel increased from 550 to around 950 per million people. (Not dissimilar to the UK). That is a greater than 70% increase in the period, or 3.5% per day.
All else equal, you’d expect the 10 to 14-day post-infection death rate to eventually go up by a similar amount. A proportion of those infected in early January would succumb to the virus. The 7-day deaths per million in Israel would be expected to rise about 30%.
Yet in realty it declined, by 1%, in the seven days to 15 January… Israel’s trailing 7-day increase in deaths has not kept up with the 10 to 14-day prior increase in cases. Over the past couple of days, for the first time it has declined. Something seems to be working and that is very good news indeed.
The analysis above suggests that vaccinating even a small percentage of the population that are very vulnerable has a disproportional impact on the number of deaths and severe non-death cases. That will result in reduced pressure on the hospital systems.
Guess what’s no longer available on the State Dept site, under our new, China-friendly administration? The recently declassified report about suspicious illnesses among scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology back before the pandemic “began” in Nov/Dec that I posted previously.
And for all their good work over the last year, we re-joined the WHO too 
Some cause for caution about the existing vaccines vs the S. Africa strain of the Wuhan Flu
Things change from administration to administration. This happens every single time an administration changes.
As for WHO, one has more influence and benefits more from being a member than not a member. At the very least, the US should remain a member for all the decades of positive work that has been done.
This kind of post belongs on a political discussion board.
When your whole job is pandemic preparedness, I’ve got to say they got pretty much everything wrong. Look at Taiwan - one of the best outcomes by not listening to them and banning travel early (which our racism-conscious Democrats opposed back in Jan/Feb).
I could see the US rejoining them with conditions, like firing some of the top people who allowed fairly serious errors under their watch and being replaced with acceptable and not-obviously-in-China’s-pocket alternatives, but to immediately do it unconditionally smacks of reflexive “anything Trump did, we must oppose”. Worse, it gives up any diplomatic leverage we had in improving them.
Aa a technicality, there is no “rejoining”, we never left as a member of the WHO.
There was an intent to withdraw, which has been withdrawn.
The US has been a member of WHO since 1948. The anomaly was withdrawing without any discussion, negotiation or even suggesting improvements. There is zero “leverage” if you’re not a member.
WHO has played a key role in many global health achievements (the eradication of smallpox, for example). Diseases don’t stop at borders; if one doesn’t cooperate worldwide, then diseases will not be stopped no matter how much one country chooses to isolate itself.
Last, but not least, WHO has done a more honest and credible job combating Covid than Trump who kept saying it’s a hoax and take no preventive measures and is directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Only if you keep them open!
It doesn’t matter if you try to close them. North Korea has a covid problem like everyone else.
Closing borders would shut down most of the world’s economy as well. And without actually combating the virus, if closing the border worked then it would have to be closed totally forever.
The US-Canadian and US-Mexico borders remain closed at this time to non-essential travel. These closures are attributable strictly to the COVID-19 pandemic. So it appears the “powers that be” believe such closures will assist with control of the virus.
In addition, while the aforementioned border closures were negotiated by President Trump’s administration, I am unaware of any reports saying President Biden is seeking to alter the existing status.