There’s no concentration camps for Covid, you can stay home.
You don’t catch hiv by walking by someone positive with it, and if you did like you do with Covid and it caused the same level of casualties then yes I would be all for the measures as we are using against covid
I happen to agree with that logic. Corporations have too much power. What I don't agree with is limiting regulation to a few companies based on the current situation.
When Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission got decided on narrow technical grounds this is the kind of thing my political ideology warned about. We gave far too much power to corporations to decide who they do business with. The laws around that sort of power were decided long before everyone could find out some of the most intimate aspects of your life in a few google searches.
The only reason I am against the anti vaxxers/anti covid measure people trying to take down the faang companies ability to stop their speech right now is because they only want to limit corporate power and private property as it extends to themselves.
Look at the florida law for instance that tried to damage social media companies that blocked people based on their political speech unless they owned a theme park, which was an explicit carve out for Disney.
I can get behind a movement that wants to prevent corporations from having enough power to limit individual rights. I cannot get behind a movement that only wants to prevent corporations from limiting rights on a group of people that I believe are hurting me, but will not limit corporations from limiting rights on everyone else.
Either the logic applies to all, or people are lying about caring about rights and just want to be the people on top.
> If vaccinations encourage new variants is a total different question. It is very possible. Evolutionary pressure is a bitch.
Fewer infected people means fewer mutations. As to whether those fewer mutations spread better (thanks to selective pressure)? It's a legitimate question, but thankfully the answer appears to be the no, the opposite, thanks to the neutralising antibody response. See https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/142544990582960128...
You can walk yourself through the reasons why with simple math, really.
Every disease has an estimated R0. The number of people an infected person will infect. You probably have heard of this.
Delta, last I checked, has an estimated R0 of between 5 and 9.5.
Vaccination levels reduce that. And it's a simple equation. All you need to know is the vaccination rate for your population, and an estimated efficacy rate of the vaccine.
And from that, you can figure the new adjusted Rt:
rt = r0 * (1 - (vacRate * eff))
And that's it. And no matter what efficacy rate you pick (infection efficacy estimates for mRNA against Delta vary widely), the resultant rt will be less than the initial r0.
And if it's less, then that effectively means that the disease is less contagious for that population, compared to how contagious it was pre-vaccination.
And less contagious is better than more contagious.
So now I am legitimately curious. What part of the above reasoning do you actually disagree with?
(Incidentally, vaccination also improves your chances of avoiding future infection, even if you've already been infected.)
What is the efficiency against transmission of the latest mutations? AFAIK there is a great efficiency against bad symptoms, but much lower efficiency against transmitting the disease to others, but I don't know the latest numbers.
Last I heard, the CDC gave a 95% CI of the mRNA vaccines being 26% - 84% against infection (from Delta), and there's an additional 40% - 60% protection against infecting others (I've seen that estimate in multiple places but I don't know the source). If that's true, it suggests an overall range of 55.6 - 93.6 effectiveness against infecting others.
Over the summer Florida has been in the news because of an ongoing epidemic spike. Using hospitalization rates, the spike started sometime in early July. By late Sept it is almost gone. The fully vaccinated rate increased from 48% to 59% during the same time period. Is the receding fully explainable by the increase in vaccination rate, or can we consider other forces at play, for example forces of outside human control that have been at play in every single epidemic
before the vaccines era?
Edit: I plotted Rt as a function of eff, assuming r0=7 and vacRate=1. Rt goes below 1 only for values of eff > 0.85, which means that given the numbers for eff you gave in a different post "overall range of 55.6 - 93.6 effectiveness against infecting others", there are plenty of scenarios where vaccines by themselves cannot stop an infection wave even if the population is 100% vaccinated.
Edit2. For a 0.59 vacRate, there are some solutions for R0 * (1 - 0.59 * eff) < 1 with eff in [0, 1] and R0 in [0, 9], specifically there are solutions for R0 < 2.x Not going to cut it for 0.59 vaxx rate and delta, no matter how effective the vaccines are.
Natural immunity as a direct effect of an infection wave is my first guess. In some circles 'natural immunity' has become a dirty word :/
The assumptions between the equation rt = r0 * (1 - (vacRate * eff)) are too simplistic and unable to explain Florida infection wave behavior. There are more variables that we ignore when focusing only on Rt and vaccines.
The silver lining: At some point the whole population would have been exposed to covid, either through vaccines, infection or both. At that point the whole vaccination rate / effectiveness discussion becomes moot. Perhaps I wish the public discourse would keep an eye on 'estimated population fraction exposed to covid' that includes all plausible factors.
Yes, I brought up that equation merely to illustrate how vaccination alone can impact Rt downward - for a while it was unclear to me exactly how "partial vaccination" (before herd immunity) was a benefit; that helped me see that it really just mean it slows down the doubling rate until you get to Rt=1. But overall, Rt is impacted by all forms of mitigation including natural immunity.
The way I actually use that equation in my personal dashboards is to estimate what Rt "would" be, at today's mitigation levels, if no one had gotten vaccinated. So for instance, Portland's Rt is currently 0.92 (according to one model). By plugging in Portland's vaccination rate and efficacy estimates, you can estimate that Portland's Rt would be around 2 today if not for the vaccinations, if all other mitigation were the same.
On the one hand, 2 is a lot better than those estimates of 5 to 9.5, which means that we're impacted a lot by current mitigation practices (masks, distancing) and natural immunity. On the other hand, 2 is huge! Given estimates on infectious periods, that means that currently our cases halve every 90 days or so, but 2 would mean cases would be doubling every week or so. Gargantuan difference. So just an illustration that vaccination has a big impact and matters a lot.
This is missing the last step of calculations as any degree of lower r0 doesn’t necessarily prevent endemic disease. My understanding is that at this point, vaccines are about keeping symptoms mild and ICUs at low capacity through reduced spread and more effective immune responses. This seems compatible with the view that we will have to live with this disease for a long time.
I mostly agree with you but "And less contagious is better than more contagious." is a giant hand wave in a logical argument. You should explain what specific outcome in the longer term improved by this and justify that.
I don't know what pro-vax people are saying "get vaccinated and your old life comes back", that seems a mischaracterization to me. The reason to get vaccinated is to protect yourself and others from the disease.
Take the vaccine (Moderna if you can pick), significantly reduce the health risk of covid on you. Also, helps to dampen the overall rate in the county and reduces the risk new mutations that may create more breakthroughs.
If you're complaining about the withdraw of mitigations, that's because people and states have refused to participate in the mitigations as a whole.
If they were compliant, we'd be in a situation like Australia or Taiwan. Masks optional, nearly normal (they have restrictive borders), open concerts, and lockdowns only when a couple of cases pop up.
Australia has been on significant lockdown for long stretches at a time, I am not sure I'd consider that "nearly normal" since they have to keep locking down every time Covid is reintroduced somehow.
They are keeping Covid rather low, though I would not trivialize the cost of doing so.
> "and reduces the risk new mutations" likely the opposite is true. It is called evolutionary pressure.
Chicken and egg problem: You can't have evolutionary pressure without an environment to operate in. Vaccines reduce the space in which they can attempt to successfully mutate.
That environment of evolutionary pressure is exactly what is being created. An environment where strains with higher fitness for immune escape are more able to spread, in a compounding manner. Particularly with leaky vaccines as we're using for c19 that do not prevent contraction with high efficacy.
or read how antibiotic resistance comes about, which seems to be less contentious / politicly affected... But the same evolutionary mechanism is at work.
That's not how evolutionary pressure works. If fewer people are infected, the virus has fewer opportunities to mutate. Among those people, any surviving mutation has (by definition) a greater ability to escape the vaccine, but that's not the same thing as saying that the vaccine increases the chance of a new mutation.
There's a missing part to this by the way: you need a reservoir for new mutations to replicate in, and they have to be mutations which become dominant in the reservoir.
Since the vaccines reduced R(eff), generally below 1 (so far observed), any chain of infection through vaccinated people tends to terminate - not continue. Which means however vaccine evading that virus is, all of it dies.
This all changes if you have a large group of unvaccinated people presenting no challenge to it. Freely spreading for a whole lot of cycles through that population means more vaccine-resistant copies are now out there, with more opportunity to challenge vaccine resistant individuals they come into contact with (since R(eff) in the unvaccinated is ~8).
R(eff) lowers the higher the vaccination rate. There are some pretty obvious % targets depending on your R(eff) initial. For the initial population number it's ~90%.[1]
"no reliable evidence" - of course vaccination helps bring R(eff) lower. That's just the way the math works. If R(eff) is already low enough due to other mitigation, then additional vaccination helps bring it below 1. We see that all over the nation now, R(eff) rates dipping below 1 as vaccination rates increase.
I have trouble visualizing that, but if that's true it's just more reason to do whatever we can to get local Rt < 1. Vaccines get us partway there, other mitigation efforts like mask use, distancing (and natural immunity) get us partway there as well.
I'm personally vaccinated and not very worried about getting the disease if I have to be out and about. I feel my personal risk is low. But in terms of societal/community risk to others, that's why I have a personal policy of limiting myself socially so I don't contribute to spread.
The local metrics I personally follow are:
1) Is Rt above 1?
2) Are cases/100k above 10?
3) Is test positivity above 5%?
4) Is ICU usage above 85%
If any of those are on the wrong side, I'm limiting my social gatherings.
Let's be clear, mitigations were being removed when vaccination rates were increasing and hospital rates were decreasing. It's only because a significant enough portion of the country has decided that not getting vaccinated is more important to them and have caused our medical system to be put back under strain have the mitigations been put back in place.
80% of people 12 and up have received two doses of Pfizer or Moderna in Canada. COVID is still a major factor here (worse than ever in some regions with lower rates ~75%).
And how many of the people effected by that are unvaccinated? You are simply re-stating what I said, as vaccines rates went up AND hospitalizations went down, mitigations were removed. Then the Delta variant hit and has been an absolute disaster for those who have refused to get vaccinated and our medical care system. 20% is a significant amount of people, and hospitalizations have gone up and therefore mitigations have been put back in place.
I would love to get back to (semi-)normal, I'm sick of this shit. But I've done, and continue to do the things that are helping make things less worst, I wear a mask, I socially distance, I have my vaccine. If a new version of the vaccine came out that targeted the Delta version of Covid, I would get that too.
And I don't believe that Covid is going to be eradicated by everyone getting vaccinated. In fact, I don't know anyone that believes that. What I and others believe is that if we get very close to 100% vaccination, we can lift many of the mitigations being put in place.
Yes, people will still get Covid, but they will be less likely to get it, less likely to get sick if the do, less likely to have severe symptoms, less likely to go to the hospital, and less likely to die. And our hospitals won't be over run.
The main purpose of my comment was to add some clarity to the discussion with concrete numbers and references. Terms like significant, insignificant, less, more, etc, should be quantified with references in my opinion where possible.
To answer your question, the unvaccinated represent 75% of hospitalizations in one region that publishes raw data (https://bit.ly/3oriNqS).
It's that and that the more spreadable Indian/Delta Variant developed and took hold in April. (Variant name there for news references) Took the US 2 months to announce it was a concern.
You should still get vaccinated. Post-infection immunity is very heterogeneous, with respect to what level of protection you'll have, and how long it will last. You might have great protection for a bit, or you might get reinfected just like the first time, like many have.
The combined protection of natural with vaccination will be better than just one or the other. I hope you stay safe.
> Yes, you should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19 because:
> Research has not yet shown how long you are protected from getting COVID-19 again after you recover from COVID-19.
> Vaccination helps protect you even if you’ve already had COVID-19.
an Israeli paper[2] (probably the one you're thinking of) also mentions that yes - your immunity from having the disease is better than a vaccine but getting both still provides a much better outcome. Please note that this study is very recent and may be overturned in review.
> This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.
So maybe you'll end up super-immune! Congratulations! (now go get vaccinated)
It's been recently published and the warning on it is:
This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
It's not something that can be held up as evidence in any direction at the moment.
FWIW, an anti-vax cousin of mine has had covid three different times. Each time he recovered, but each time he kept spreading it. So don't count having had covid once as a blanket "I don't need the vax" card.
I could not get vaccinated in Germany. Every illegal immigrant could get vaccinated but I as a German citizen, since I was not registered with the police, (some countries have this, for a US citizen this sounds weird) could not.
Ok, caught corona in south America in the Andes mountains and had serious breathing problems but survived.
I have a biotech background and I am sorry to break the news to you. Vaccinations won't make corona go away. I fact it may force it to adapt faster.
So why should I get vaccinated now? I dislike all the government pressure that is put on citizens in this regard.
An the parties in Sao Paulo are back on. No masks. Germany is not considering Brazil even as a high risk country anymore.
So why the force for vaccinations? Freedom won't come back except if the Citizens demand it.
So you're not a virologist or epidemiologist then? Got it.
> and I am sorry to break the news to you. Vaccinations won't make corona go away. I fact it may force it to adapt faster.
The virus spreads more rapidly among and lives for longer inside the unvaccinated, as a result getting much more exposure to human immune systems, and thus giving it more opportunity to evolve.
Just fyi. This project may have even gotten canceled. But it shows the future and china is very afraid of it. I also know German companies trying to bring asian footwear production back right now.
As a native speaker, the article might occasionally betray its origins as something translated from another language, but tbh I was too busy enjoying the level of detail the author went into to pick at quirks of phrasing :)
In my personal experience (some of it on the receiving end), the "accusations" of "preteciousness" usually say more about the accuser (and their set of life experiences), than the accused.
The only person who could objectively make that claim is someone who is very-well-versed and up-to-date with the in the targeted writer's writing and/or speaking style.
That is to say - I perceive preteciousness to be something an author or orator purposefully and/or intentionally does for the specific occasion and/or audience, this being "unlike themself" for potentially spurious or considered-bad-by-the-accuser reasons. If that is the "natural" way the person in question communicates, I'd consider the claim false.
[As mentioned, from personal experience, the "new" people ("barely-an-acquitances") often mark or accuse me of it, on account of my (unintentional) code-switching and/or quite consistent mixing of my native language and English, especially when it comes to writing. Meanwhile, people who have known me for years know it to be just one of my (many) idiosyncrasies.]
