Originally Posted by ZapBrannigan

In many locations it isn't the physical ability to build more ICU beds or rooms. Heck here in Dallas they took a giant convention center downtown and converted it. It's the lack of ICU doctors and nurses to serve that surge capacity. You can't just grab a random MD or nurse and say "you're a Covid ICU person now". These are specialized positions that require training and experience. Furthermore many COVID ICU patients linger for weeks in the ICU, taking up resources that might have otherwise been used to help patients recovering from heart surgery, or car accidents, or who knows what else?

So if you say that vaccines aren't the only way out of the pandemic, then what is?

Natural immunity may work... or it may be like the cold or flu that you get every year as it continues to mutate. Furthermore because this is still a novel virus, we have no idea what the impact to the body are. We've been so busy trying to treat Covid pneumonia and keep people from dying that very little research has gone into what these long covid symptoms really mean in the body. What is physically happening that is causing alteration of taste and smell months after recovery? Long term fatigue? Brain fog? Blood clots (according to Sanje Gupta on the Joe Rogan podcast 60 times more likely to get blood clots from the Covid19 virus than from any of the vaccines)

If the answer is therapeutics, we may get there but we aren't there yet. Monoclonal antibodies, aside from being WAY more expensive than a vaccine dose are great, but they are temporary, don't teach the body how to fight Covid next time it sees it, and is issued under an emergency use authorization same as most of the vaccines - meaning many of the arguments against vaccination are the same arguments being ignored to get the monoclonals to try and stay out of the hospital. ("My body is a temple and I don't know what's in it")

Antivirals are on the horizon. Hopefully they'll be efficacious and have few side effects. But it could be months or years before they're available from your CVS pharmacy. So what we have now are three highly efficacious vaccines - that may or may not require a 3rd dose- that have been injected 6 billion times around the globe for over a year, with few side effects that are typically milder than the virus itself.

When Trump announced that he had cut the red tape and allowed these things to be fast tracked last year, I was sure that we were months away from this whole thing being behind us. And he we are almost a year later still fighting it. Not so much in everyday life because most everything is open again, even if sometimes you have to wear a mask. But as an airline we NEED corporations to feel comfortable staffing their offices again, allowing people to travel and attend trade shows again. Our industry can't survive unless business gets back to some semblance of pre-Covid normal.

So if vaccination isn't the cornerstone upon which companies feel comfortable doing that... then what is?