Quote:
Originally Posted by cdjim
Optimistic much!!
I would be very surprised if things were almost entirely back to normal by the end of April 2022, you are dreaming if you think anything resembling 'normality' resumes in just a few weeks time? Things are improving, yes - but vaccines only make a difference when a large enough percentage of the population have had them. Vaccines are not a magic bullet, they are not 100% effective and we still do not know their effectiveness against some of the virus variants that already exist.
By the summer, things will have improved dramatically, especially across the majority of the richer, western countries - but the idea that 'normality' immediately returns is overly optimistic and quite simply, wrong.
They could run the WSOP in its usual May/June slot but they would be looking at about 30-35% of normal attendance at most. Push it to the fall and they could easily be looking at double that number. It's not hard to do the math as to which option makes the most sense financially, morally and responsibly
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