No, I'm pretty sure we got to 90% vaccination because of mandates. People want things to go back to normal, and most people don't care one way or the other about getting a shot. Giving them a little incentive helps.
Mandates make the remaining crazy people look more visibly crazy, but they were going to be there either way.
$100 is "a little incentive". Firing people from their jobs, threatening their livelihood, making them unable to put food on their table or a roof over their heads, and ostracizing them from society is brutal coercion, no matter how nicely you dress it up. Getting people vaccinated that way is not informed consent in any way, shape or form.
> People want things to go back to normal
The biggest problem is that people who defend the coercion believe that a higher vaccination rate will somehow end the pandemic. In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
It's the vaccinated who are driving the pandemic, and have been driving it the past few months. But all the blame is being heaped on the unvaccinated.
The Omicron wave will burn out, as waves do. The pandemic will end, as pandemics do. And the vaccination rate won't make one iota of difference in the long run.
To preface this, I am not bought in on the way the mandates have been done. I think there's huge room for improvement, and it feels a bit ham-fisted rather than well thought through. That said...
> In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
Looking at https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations right now, the population of the ICU is 117 unvaccinated, 15 partially vaccinated, 150 fully vaccinated. Over 90% of Ontarians age 12+ are vaccinated. This says to me that the unvaccinated 10% of the population is making up over 40% of the ICU cases. While what you've said may be technically accurate, I think it's basically saying "most people are vaccinated" and the numbers suggest unvaccinated people are hugely more likely to end up in the ICU.
Am I misunderstanding the numbers? Or are we working off different numbers?
Yes, that's the source I was using as well. And yes, your conclusion is correct, you are more likely to end up in the ICU if you are unvaccinated. Both these things are true at the same time: The vaccines work, and the majority of cases and hospitalizations are among the vaccinated.
But the strain on the healthcare system and the pandemic as a whole is driven by total numbers, not relative numbers. The majority of cases are among the vaccinated, therefore vaccine mandates won't end the pandemic. But people who argue for the mandates argue as if it was a "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and that's simply not true.
Ah - I think I see what you're saying. At the same time, I don't think I agree with your premise. The numbers in front of us seem to indicate it's not just slightly different, it's dramatically more likely to end up in the ICU as an unvaccinated person. With that in mind, one of the cheapest/lowest impact avenues to reduce ICU bed usage is via vaccinations (acknowledging that's brushing aside the issue of forcing vaccines).
Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates? If so, do you think the moment it passed 50/50 in terms of ICU beds (or other similar stat) was the appropriate time to repeal them? Or what should the "trigger" have been?
Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area. This still seems like "too many unvaccinated people in the ICU" to me, even though they're not the majority. I can definitely empathize with it becoming a judgement call now though, and on that I agree. At some point someone is making a decision about the magic number, and I'm not sold on the current government's strategy there.
> one of the cheapest/lowest impact avenues to reduce ICU bed usage is via vaccinations
Only if it's targeted. The people ending up at the ICU skew older and many of them are probably retired. But the issue that spawned the trucker protest is vaccine mandates for the truckers, who as a group are probably a lot younger than the people who are currently occupying ICUs in Canada due to covid.
Age is the single most important factor when it comes to determining the personal risk of covid. A healthy unvaccinated child is ~1000x less likely to have a bad outcome compared to a vaccinated 80-year-old. But this is completely ignored when it comes to the mandates, the mandates are the same whether you're a 20-year-old trucker or a 60-year-old trucker, even though forcing 20-year-olds to get vaccinated is completely useless from a public health standpoint.
The second most important factor is natural immunity, because it is stronger and longer-lasting than vaccinated immunity. Again, completely ignored. Forcing people with natural immunity to get vaccinated makes zero sense.
> Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates?
No, never.
If the vaccines had been more effective and actually stopped transmission, we wouldn't be having this Omicron wave, so we wouldn't have lots of people in the ICUs in the first place, which is the current reason for the mandates. The main reason so many people are still unvaccinated is because they've made their own risk assessment and decided they're fine with not getting vaccinated.
If the virus had been deadlier, vaccination rates would have been higher anyway, because fewer people would have decided to take the risk to stay unvaccinated. If the virus had been less deadly, we would have had a lower vaccination rate, but also even less people in the ICUs.
No matter which parameter you hypothetically imagine to be different, we would probably have landed in a collective societal risk assessment that would have produced the same results anyway.
> Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area.
Right now that page shows ~78% total utilization, and a ~20% covid utilization. So one in four ICU patients are covid patients, which sounds like a lot. But if you could magically force-vaccinate everyone, and assuming there's a 50/50 split among vaccinated/unvaccinated in the US as well, that means you would reduce total utilization from ~78% to ~68%.
How the hell does it make sense to violate people's bodily autonomy, to force them or coerce them to get vaccinated, to increase people's distrust of government and public health, in order to have ~30% free ICU capacity instead of ~20%?
What the fuck? How about increasing ICU and hospital capacity instead?!? How about looking at the 3/4 of ICU patients that are there for something other than covid and see if there's any low-hanging fruit we can take care of there in order to reduce that number instead? Why would we curb people's freedoms and rights for a slight increase in potential ICU capacity? Why should ICU capacity decide whether or not people can go to a restaurant or not? That's a micro-managed technocratic bio-fascist dystopia! The healthcare system should serve the people, not the other way around!
Mandates make the remaining crazy people look more visibly crazy, but they were going to be there either way.