The solution to that is to make conditional predictions.

Yeah, the WHO story seems very light on explanations. The Economist produced some estimates with a lot more details on where the numbers come from:
There have been 7m-13m excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
How we estimated the true death toll of the pandemic

Personally, I feel that's a waste of time

Yes we can create very good statistics, prognostics, death toll numbers - so what? That's not the point. People are dying.

Edit: I think we agree that vaccines are only temporary protection. Still there is no good treatment for those with heavy complications. Now is this fungus in India. All this together shows that situation is very serious. Why there is still no proposal of international cooperation? WHO is just terrible. It is time to acknowledge the fact that program of mass vaccination failed. Accept this and let us move on. Look for another solutions.

The point is that if you make somewhat reliable predictions conditional on government decisions, that provides a useful to choose between those decisions. Otherwise the decisions are basically random.

See the only way that decision would make sense is if you predict that, conditional on continuing to pursue vaccination, infections and deaths will not go down. Or at least, that you predict looking for another solution will make infections and deaths go down more.

Most governments all the time seems surprised when number of infections grows rapidly.

We have to start to look for another solutions. This is not about replacement of vaccination. Vaccines remain - there will be improved. But no matter the goal say 70% of populace to be vaccinated is not possible to reach. So we can't go this way. I am not here to offer solution. But we need to start to look for solutions. All over the world. This is global problem. Not per state only. One country will develop super vaccine while another will develop super-strain.

Seems to me that far too many here in the U.S. are ignorant of this fact, or turn a blind eye to it.

Global problems need global solutions …

/Gags himself

It's been over 70 years since the Polio Vaccine was created and first tested. Polio is exceedingly rare since then because of that vaccine. Despite rather primitive knowledge and methods by 2021 standards, that 1950 vaccine is a huge success story... so much so that comedians joke about Big Pharma facepalming themselves for not figuring out a way to "just live with it" taking a dose of something once or twice a day in perpetuity.

If your government is not getting good vaccines or lacks solid distribution. I suggest complaining to representatives about health care and protection rather than faulting the entire concept of vaccination. It provably works.

You don't get it, don't you? I posted it is global problem cause virus does not need visas/passports. If you leave other countries alone - they develop strain deadly enough also for your own country. And this strain some day will knock, knock to your door. And this time there maybe no easy to find vaccine. Again I emphasize: all comparisons with already existed viruses are unjustified. It is conditional thinking. If covid is as other viruses, then ... But if is not, then .. yeah. All these option have to be taken into consideration. We can do that. There is great potential. But just let us do that.

Okay, so that's a prediction then. But what if we only reach about 50% vaccinated. Add another 20% from the unvaccinated who already got infected and we have about 70% herd immunity...

Why do you think we're not looking for solutions? Here's a recent article from the site that teckk linked: A novel defense mechanism for SARS-CoV-2 discovered

Not advised in China

Herd immunity is a myth forget this. Vaccine is aimed at personal protection. Not herd protection. Protection lasts only for period of time. In future you will have take another shot. New strains, new vaccines. Understand you can't buy discovery. People do research - but it is more or less blind shot. You need a lot of people working on this in hope one of them - by blind luck will find solution. For this is needed openness of research - eg. no patent protection. Just general ownership - to allow people all other the world to collaborate, to create medicine without restriction. If someone thinks covid is business - graveyard is also a business at some point. Dead people don't need money. Don't count income. In my opinion danger related to covid is far, far underestimated. Due to thinking that covid is like viruses we know already. Billions of people can die in future because of this - if we won't act enough fast. What is now is only a glimpse of what it will be. I am old enough to die silently - but there are so many people not ready for this - think about them. We have to do something. We don't have to learn on our mistakes.

Edit: here in Poland during last surge of infections we reached limits of our health care system.

No it isn't. Herd immunity breaks the chain of infection transmission and thereby protects those that can not be vaccinated. Epidemiologists can estimate the threshold of what it takes to get to herd immunity but unless enough people get COVID vaccinations it will hard to break the chain. The US has reached herd immunity with a number of diseases like Polio and Smallpox. There have be no cases of Polio in the US since 1979 and 99.9% reduction of wild cases world wide since.

Herd immunity relies on the virus not mutating significantly, which it appears to do. All bets are off then, surely?

And on links to interesting and novel treatments for Covid, here's another - with a paper behind it if you check the links https://science.slashdot.org/story/2...is-has-emerged

Right, the question is how long that period is. Months? Years? Decades?

(actually, I think we can pretty much rule out months by now)

Afaik, none of the mutations have escaped immunity. Bets are still on. IMO, we'll have to wait until next winter to see how vaccination shakes out.

I don't know. Some vaccines are still effective with the different variants and there is evidence that COVID vaccines do reduce transmission.

In most US states the number of cases has significantly decreased since the beginning of the year with almost 50% vaccinated. With most restrictions being eliminated there must be a reduction in transmission rate.