[Pete F.]

Originally Posted by scottw

CNBC
HEALTH AND SCIENCE
‘Zero Covid’ strategies are being abandoned as the highly infectious delta variant dominates
PUBLISHED TUE, OCT 5 2021

New Zealand has been notoriously strict in its tackling of Covid; Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern put the entire country under a strict lockdown in August after a single suspected case of Covid caused by the delta variant — at that time the country’s first coronavirus case in six months — was reported in Auckland.
It’s the first time that New Zealand has publicly signaled a shift away from a zero Covid strategy, coming after its neighbor Australia also abandoned its zero tolerance, or “Covid zero” approach in early September, saying it had shifted to a position of “learning to live with” the virus.

Similarly to in New Zealand, Australia’s decision to abandon the strategy came after a strict lockdown in Melbourne failed to quell an outbreak there.

At the time, Victoria state’s Premier Daniel Andrews noted that “we have thrown everything at this, but it is now clear to us that we are not going to drive these numbers down, they are instead going to increase.”

Experts are not surprised by the shift in strategy, noting that the spread of the delta variant makes such approaches futile.

“It’s no surprise that New Zealand has abandoned its ‘zero covid’ strategy – the highly transmissible delta variant has changed the game and means that an elimination strategy is no longer viable,” Lawrence Young, a virologist and professor of molecular oncology at the University of Warwick, told CNBC Monday.

What does that have to do with vaccination?

In Vermont, 100% of the COVID patients in the ICU are unvaccinated.

Unlike some states, because of the high vaccination rate, Vermont’s medical system is not overloaded.
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