That is and never was
your only point! You may have already forgotten what you wrote
very recently:
"IT HAD NO (!!!) EFFECT ON OMICRON in Hong Kong, and had not stopped the outbreak in any way, shape or form"
If it has now become your only point, I'm glad to see the learning curve.
1. You are doing what I watched Anders Tegnell, the dumbest epidemiologist ever, do from the very beginning of the pandemic: argue against any and all kinds of mitigations because, on their own, one at a time, they don't stop the pandemic. Of course, in Tegnell's case, it was because he didn't
want to put an end to or even a damper on the spread of the virus because it would have ruined his attempts to achieve herd immunity by infection. So he argued that masking up would not only not stop the pandemic. It would even make people sick: masking up was outright
dangerous. It never seemed to occur to him that his proposed 6 feet of social distancing also wouldn't put an end to the pandemic, but that was probably because it never was supposed to do so.
2. The same thing goes for all the other preventive measures: One (or two or three) at a time, they aren't very effective against a virus that's as transmissible as SARS-CoV-2 has evolved to be at this point. It's the same with the vaccines, unfortunately. Much like face masks, they don't put a
stop to the virus. They 'just'
slow down the spread and let people get away easier when infected: fewer die, fewer are hospitalized, and fewer get sequelae. But they actually
do do that!
3. This is why everybody in the know always point to the
Swiss Cheese model, combining elements such as vaccinations, boosters, masks/respirators, indoor air filtration, social distancing, WFH, TeTrIs. (Sometimes hand-washing and cleaning of surfaces are still mentioned; for old times' sake, I guess.) If it all fails, lockdowns are extremely effective. I'll get back to that in another post.
4. You seem to be unwilling to give up the hyperbole:
"universal", "entire", "all the time", "the rest of your life". Nobody, and let me repeat that:
NOBODY has proposed this. It's a strawman.
5. What populations do or don't do depend on what they are told by (health) authorities: In my country, when we were told to mask up we masked up in indoor public places for a couple of weeks and/or an month or two. But in the winter of 2021-22, people were told that there was no longer any reason to mask up so they stopped doing it - and, as I've mentioned recently, the C19 death toll doubled in just four months even though the population was thoroughly vaccinated as well as boosted. Old people in Hong Kong appear to be smarter (or better informed) than old Danes: 10% in Hong Kong, if your observation is correct. 0.01‰ in Denmark, if mine is.
The fact that people are doing something has very little to do with
why people are doing it. People used to brush their teeth with
radioactive toothpaste. Some people still think that horse dewormer cures Covid-19.
As for the very effective vaccines, which unfortunately aren't sterilizing (to the anti-vaxxers! Please look up the meaning of the term
sterilizing immunity!), some of the people who have hyped vaccines had a vested interest in doing so. The alleged
'super (hybrid) immunity' was a lie, and even at the time it was a very obvious lie, and yet certain researchers kept repeating the lie and were
rewarded for doing so.
Overhyping Vaccines Wasn’t Pro-Vaccine. It Was Pro-Stop-Worrying-About-COVID. (Science-Based Medicine, Oct 1, 2023)
Vaccines and Variants: What Went Wrong in 2021? (We Want Them Infected podcast, May 28, 2024 - 53 min.)
ETA: From your other post:
I repeat myself, but no, what's
clear is that mandatory masking
wasn't enough to prevent the spread of Omicron. You confuse this with mandatory masking having
no effect.
