Combined with our massive testing effort (both on an individual case-by-case basis and waste water testing etc) we believe it's time to lift the restrictions.
It is of course a risky move, and personally I am curious if we gonna hit the brake hard again in 10 days..
But anyways, lock-downs hurt both the people and the community around the world, so I am sure a lot of eyes are on us and everyone else doing something "aggressive"...
Fingers crossed
If you consider the UK as a sort of upper-bound[0] on how many people can die if you just relax all restrictions in a vaccinated population, it works out to an average of 250 deaths per week.
That is, as a worst-case scenario, probably manageable.
On the other hand, I know many doctors and nurses hate this kind of thinking, because they view a high coronavirus incidence as a driver of a degradation of general standards of care, so consequently, a driver of excess deaths.
Spain did the same and they seem fine.
If we look at population level like government does, it might be better to go through this step now compared to few months or a year in the future when vaccines loose even more efficency. They probabably take into account that additional booster doses on every few months are a tough sell and won't get support original vaccination got. This might be hard thing to say publicly since people will die, but might still be the best strategy to save lives in the long run.
So in my opinion it's not about whether it's great time to do it now, but whether it will be worse in the future.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v...
"The effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against long-term symptoms of COVID-19 is not well understood. We determined whether vaccination was associated with the incidence of reporting long-term symptoms […] Vaccination with at least two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was associated with a substantial decrease in reporting the most common post-acute COVID-19 symptoms, bringing it back to baseline. Our results suggest that, in addition to reducing the risk of acute illness, COVID-19 vaccination may have a protective effect against long COVID."
Because we are almost all vaccinated (95% of eligible adults) there haven't been so many deaths compared to other countries, but still more than Australia has seen so far.
80% is vaxxed.
What more can we do?
The reason why I am asking is that the percentage of people ever infected in the US hovers around 80% (see https://covidestim.org/ and click on a few random states). So either 80% is wrong, 20% is wrong, or there is something really interesting going on.
Note. These are confirmed infections, through PCR tests. They do some 200k test/day, so if sick you can get tested. But yes, it might be an underestimate.