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Way more contagious variant that spreads rapidly among people w/o prior immunity? At least that's what is being theorized based on what happened in the UK (very sharp rise in cases, followed by pretty sharp drop-off, although that seemed to stabilize now).

As for the effectiveness of vaccinations, I'm optimistic based on the data from King County, WA: https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/vaccinatio...



Switch to proportion on the graph. And the number of cases of the fully vaccinated is now around 30%.

Still trying to figure out how the unvaccinated can give covid to the vaccinated, if the vaccine is working.


> Still trying to figure out how the unvaccinated can give covid to the vaccinated, if the vaccine is working.

Not trying very hard, by the looks of it. Since you're lazy: vaccines aren't perfect.


That’s the wrong framing.

Vaccines have several effects. Frequently they prevent you from getting serious symptoms (or any symptoms at all) after contact with the virus. Often they reduce the time span during which you are infectious, sometimes they mean you aren’t infectious at all after contact with the virus. Sometimes (very rarely) they have no effect at all.

Only that last point can reasonably be framed as the vaccine not being perfect.

Other than that the vaccines work astonishingly well, even with delta. Them still making it possible for you to be infectious after contact with the virus doesn’t really change that.


Switching to proportion is actually the wrong thing to do. If you look at the data from a place with high vaccination rates (such as King County), even low probability of a break through case among the vaccinated will translate to high proportion.

Edge case that demonstrates the fallacy of looking at the proportion is: let's say you have 100 people, 90 of them vaccinated, 10 not vaccinated. Let's then say that vaccinated have 10% of getting infected, and the unvaccinated have 50% of getting infected. You'll then get 9 vaccinated people that got sick, + 5 unvaccinated people that got sick, for an almost 66% proportion! But that doesn't change the fact that as a vaccinated person, your chances of getting infected are 5x smaller compared to the unvaccinated.




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