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Originally Posted by NickMPK
I might very well make sense for the WSOP to delay until the fall for the benefit of international players.
Big conventions and other mass attendance events that have to plan months in advance will be the last piece of society to come back. But in terms of day to day life (restaurants, regular social gatherings, schools, etc.), I do believe that things will be more or less back to normal in the US around the end of April.
We should be able to have around 150 million people vaccinated by then, and this would seem to be around the threshold necessary for herd immunity when you combine it with the ~30% of the population that has already been infected. Many places in the US are already pretty much back to normal right now!
With respect to the variants, there has been pretty convincing evidence that the mRNA vaccines are every bit as effective against the UK variant as the against the original strain. And there was just a paper published earlier this week in Nature (link below) finding that the Pfizer vaccine is almost as effective in producing antibodies at least against the South African strain as against other strains.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01270-4
I guess it all comes down to what you consider 'normal' to be. The idea that on some day in the future any leader is going to tell their people that we have now vaccinated the right percentage of our population so throw away your facemasks, plexiglass and hand sanitizer is for the birds.
Now, I fully expect there to be a gradual relaxation of restrictions, but preventative measures are going to be with us for a significant time to come. Covid will be with us indefinitely, restrictions will only be relaxed once the threat of healthcare systems becoming overwhelmed has been eliminated. In many parts of Asia the wearing of facemasks when ill has been commonplace for a very long time.
As for herd immunity, the threshold for Covid is likely higher than you think - around 75%. This is complicated by the fact that as a new virus, we do not know how long immunity lasts, whether from exposure or from vaccine. 150 million vaccinations by the end of April does not equate to 150 million people vacccinated, rather it is more like 75 million people having had their 2 doses. You also do not account for crossover between the vaccinated population and those who have immunity of some kind through exposure.
As far as the mutations and variants go, the vaccines do seem to offer at least some level of protection against those that we are already aware of. However, there likely already exist variants that we have not yet identified and the longer it takes to vaccinate the whole world, the more variants will evolve and potentially be resistant to vaccines.
As has been the case from the beginning of this pandemic, there is still so much that we do not yet know about the virus and how it behaves. The nature of the WSOP could make it a ground zero for a huge outbreak, that could easily be traced back to and blamed on the organizers. Having seen the disastrous PR that the Cruise industry went through in the early stages of the pandemic, and with the risk of blame and liability as well as reputational damage, the risks of holding such a large scale event too early far outweigh the benefits. It is worth noting that the Cruise industry is in no hurry to resume operations, despite burning through huge amounts of cash, knowing that another outbreak on a ship would likely be fatal for that brand.