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Delta Variant

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Re: Delta Variant

#241

Post by addicted »

timr wrote: post #238
addicted wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except everywhere I see the media is reporting that 99% of infections are amongst the unvaccinated. So they are all clearly reporting this. And the reality is that there are tens of millions of people who are not vaccinated who are extremely susceptible to the Delta variant. It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t being ma…

> Except everywhere I see the media is reporting that 99% of infections are amongst the unvaccinated. Maybe they do this five paragraphs down. I almost never see this mentioned within the same paragraph as the "highly infectious" claim, which is always at the very top of the story. > It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t…

I linked and quoted the top “Latest Updates” article in the NYTimes under their Coronavirus section.

What you say you’ve never seen is literally what they’ve done.

Re: Delta Variant

#242

Post by specialp »

bamboozled wrote: post #165

As a reader of HN for several years now, it blows my mind how polarized we all are on this issue. Something smells here, you're not allowed to question anything without being down voted to oblivion, one way or another. Why?

It is tribalism at work. Like if one takes a nuanced opinion and says "Maybe if loads of people are not dying and there's going to be no end to COVID, we should not lockdown again and again forever" You are then "them". The irrational COVID is a hoax, anti-vaxers, and get downvoted.

Unfortunately well educated knowledgeable people are falling prey to this tribalism as well. I don't view a pandemic as at all political. There's a balance as to what amount of financial, social, and loss of liberty pain we should take versus the harm COVID 19 causes. And there should be a healthy debate about that, and opinions should change with statistics coming out and changing conditions. Meaning hardline anti-vaxers should probably soften up a bit as the vaccines have been shown to be extremely effective and safe and hardline lock down the world adherents should look at the dramatic drop in deaths and hospitalizations, and compare the risk of COVID with other risks we take in our life like driving.

Re: Delta Variant

#243

Post by effie »

skadamou wrote: post #218

Without debating the whole article, I found this one excerpt to be somewhat indicative of his writing more broadly: "Unfortunately, I turned out to be right. The short explanation is that the viruses that tend to win do so because they reproduce faster. Such a virus will grow faster inside a person, and will make that person more infectious, faster. It will also kill that person faster." This is a fairly vague statem…

Indeed. The very distinct feature of initial SARS-COV-2 was that people had extremely large viral load, yet little symptoms (when compared to other regular viruses). Even if the virus evolves towards larger viral load, this does not mean that it will be more lethal.

Re: Delta Variant

#244

Post by simonh »

addicted wrote: post #228
timr wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latest data is even more dramatic: across the UK, the IFR for Delta is ~1/10th that of Alpha, and the "infectiousness" is about the same. https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1413537810296950786 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... It is quite clear that for a vaccinated population, it isn't a threat. These are facts that simply aren't being reported by the news media. It's unfortunatel…

Except everywhere I see the media is reporting that 99% of infections are amongst the unvaccinated. So they are all clearly reporting this. And the reality is that there are tens of millions of people who are not vaccinated who are extremely susceptible to the Delta variant. It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t being ma…

In the UK there are some communities with relatively low vaccination rates and it's shooting through them like wildfire. It's not a huge number of people in absolute numbers, but pretty rough on those communities.

Hospital admissions are also skewing a lot younger. Fortunately even if they do get hospitalised younger people are still less likely to die.

Still, deaths are happening. My wife is in health care and she hears stories of people swearing blind Coronavirus doesn't exist and that vaccines are a conspiracy, while dying of it.

Re: Delta Variant

#245

Post by bamboozled »

OzyM wrote: post #224
bamboozled wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, so if everyone else takes it, I won't really need to and I'll likely be safe? Everyone seems absolutely hell bent on taking it immediately, so if that's the case, it's pretty good news for those who'd like some more time to evaluate.

You're right, if everyone around you is vaccinated to the point of virtual herd immunity (afaik not currently true anywhere, but perhaps given more time / incentives / information that may change), you being the only unvaccinated person wouldn't be a major concern (except insofar as it indicates less concern for other people in other contexts). The main issue is that there are still plenty of people with your same mi…

I've had many vaccines before, I'm not opposed to vaccines. I'm opposed to this particular vaccines because:

* There are reports of dangerous side effects after taking it.

* It's a new vaccine and the effects of the spike proteins it forces your body to produce have been found in places we were told they wouldn't be found.

* No long term studies have been done, even though lipids from the vaccine have been found in reproductive tissues (we don't know what this means yet).

* The vaccine is still only under emergency use authorization.

* I'm not in a high risk category, high risk people should be vaccinated if they're the ones primarily at risk?

* People are being pressured and coerced into taking it even though they are scared to do so. This is wrong, people should feel comfortable to take it, not as if it's their duty to mankind to protect elderly people (who could just take the vaccine).

Re: Delta Variant

#246

Post by omegaworks »

bamboozled wrote: post #172
aeternum wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many reasons people choose not to get the vaccine. What evidence do you have that the main issue is a distrust of authority? The main authority on this, the FDA has not even officially approved the vaccine and likely won't for quite awhile. For some people it is logical to ask why other vaccines require 10year+ trials and for this a few months was sufficient. While personally, I think the risk of the virus…

Thanks for writing this, I'm still on the fence about taking it for this reason, it was rushed and the longer term implications are certainly still not fully understood. Edit: Again with the downvotes, it's a fact . No one has had this vaccine for 3,5 or 10 years. The long term effects cannot be fully understood until such time has lapsed and studies have been completed. Here, the creator of mRNA vaccines discusses t…

The vaccine is new, but the mRNA delivery system has been in the pipeline for decades, with other treatments actively undergoing the normal, slow FDA process[1].

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-...

Re: Delta Variant

#247

Post by thamer »

babyblueblanket wrote: post #102
davnn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> full of "compatibility bugs" that barely achieves R0>1 Did I miss something? COVID-19 was highly contagious from the beginning, thus the drastic measures, or not?

It is highly contagious. But not as much as say, the measles.

Is there a human pathogen more contagious than measles? I remember reading this scenario that really gave me a sense of how contagious it is:

> The virus can linger in the air for about two hours after a person with measles has left the room. It can infect those who enter the room if they are unimmunized.

From: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

Re: Delta Variant

#248

Post by timr »

addicted wrote: post #241
timr wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except everywhere I see the media is reporting that 99% of infections are amongst the unvaccinated. Maybe they do this five paragraphs down. I almost never see this mentioned within the same paragraph as the "highly infectious" claim, which is always at the very top of the story. > It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t…

I linked and quoted the top “Latest Updates” article in the NYTimes under their Coronavirus section. What you say you’ve never seen is literally what they’ve done.

...ok? So what's the problem here? We agree that what I'm saying is true, and you've found a news source that reported it to your satisfaction.

I haven't found that latter part to be true in general. We can disagree on that.

Re: Delta Variant

#249

Post by tomp »

skadamou wrote: post #218

Without debating the whole article, I found this one excerpt to be somewhat indicative of his writing more broadly: "Unfortunately, I turned out to be right. The short explanation is that the viruses that tend to win do so because they reproduce faster. Such a virus will grow faster inside a person, and will make that person more infectious, faster. It will also kill that person faster." This is a fairly vague statem…

This is also in contrast to what I learned about illnesses - basically that the more “evolutionary successful” ones are the ones that are less dangerous, and kill the victim slower - think HIV or herpes.

Which, even logically, makes sense - it turns out that a mildly infectious alive person walking around is a better reproduction vector for the virus than a highly infectious dead person.

Re: Delta Variant

#250

Post by standardUser »

davnn wrote: post #99
usrusr wrote: post #32

Is seems kind of logical in hindsight: the first mutation of the predecessor bat/pangolin/whatever virus genome to cross over to humans is an MVP full of "compatibility bugs" that barely achieves R0>1. A few billion dicerolls later many of those "compatibility bugs" have found fixes. Remember the hand washing phase of the pandemic? Aerosol transmission was basically ruled out because it was assumed that spread would…

> full of "compatibility bugs" that barely achieves R0>1 Did I miss something? COVID-19 was highly contagious from the beginning, thus the drastic measures, or not?

It's the asymptomatic spread that has caused a lot of the problems and concern. People with ebola for example rarely spread it because they become so quickly and acutely ill. But with COVID, you're going about your normal life for days while spreading it unknowingly before symptoms hit (if they even hit at all).
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