picard102
Senior Member
It feels like whole organisations and governments and nations now have to pick a side now. I see three options emerging, and ideology will play a big part in where everyone falls in line.
These three options seem to be emerging as the debate of 2022. The Olympics in China will be the big test. I see the chances of it being at least postponed a year to have gone from 5% to 25% in the past two weeks.
- Hard Zero COVID: examples are China, Australia and New Zealand. Still doing everything to proactively stop any foothold in their countries of the virus, and using extreme isolation measures to get even suspected exposure cases into mandatory police-patrolled quarantines.
- Soft Zero COVID: examples are most of Canada, the UK (maybe?), and most of the EU: a mostly reactive policy that relies on public education, working from home, and high vaccination rates to have a mostly reactive COVID response that ramps up and down as needed, though it always trails actual infection rates by one or two weeks, meaning it only ever gets close to zero COVID, but never actually at zero.
- Live with COVID: the US is the example, where Omicron is sweeping through the population, but there's little appetite to take any measures because of all of moderately good vaccination rates, ideology, and in some cases the economic imperative of workers who if they are forced out of employment have little or zero government assistance to fall back on.
Option 3 please. The only restrictions should be on the unvaccinated at this point. Either the vaccines work and we should move on with our lives, or they don't and we'll never get out of this loop.