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The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

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Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#421

Post by aristophenes »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #184
aristophenes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without time for a study, wouldn’t it make sense to assume the most common thing, that a natural infection provides more immunity than the vaccine? Taking the line of reasoning where we assume the worst case scenario until proven otherwise, would it be reasonable to assume long term medical issues from the vaccinations?

> Without time for a study, wouldn’t it make sense to assume the most common thing, that a natural infection provides more immunity than the vaccine? No, actually; the actual infection sometimes misfires, leaving dud spike proteins outside the cells. If the immune system finds those first, it'll attack the dud spike proteins instead of the still-functional spike proteins, attacking all the viruses that failed to get…

I don't understand your first point, what does that have to do with the immune system getting geared up for an infection months or years later?

The second point, your worst case scenario doesn't even address the worst concerns of people who don't want to take the vaccine. They don't trust that spike proteins are the only things in the vaccine. The worst case scenario is not that the vaccine acts like the virus but that it acts different than the virus. And then you get conspiracy stuff like new world order types deliberately introducing things to the vaccine that will make it harder to have kids or stuff. And unfortunately our trusted organizations telling white lies to the public to elicit the behavior they want hasn't helped this trust issue.

But this is all moot for two reasons. First, because someone actually did a study and found that the immune response from infection was ~10 times stronger than from the vaccines[0]. Second, because we've already selected for a virus that is highly contagious and can infect vaccinated people, and will thus continue to be selected to specifically infect vaccinated people since most potential hosts are vaccinated at this point.

In summary, we might have to all be infected, nearly all at once, for this to be over, or just get lucky and the dominant strains will be attenuated to the point where they aren't a major problem.

[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.29.454333v1

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#422

Post by aristophenes »

outworlder wrote: post #298
mrhands69 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming the worst-case scenario until proven otherwise doesn't work like that. You have to look at the entire range of uncertainty, and choose the worst-case scenario for each question. It seems to me the worst case scenario is always applied when looking at things like natural immunity from prior infection, long covid, etc If you model Sars-Cov-2 after Sars-Cov-1 or MERS then you would be lead to believe natural…

We have to err on the side of saving lives, not speculation. Over 2 billion humans have been vaccinated so far, and rising. What's the worst case scenario here?

That by not focusing on vaccinating only the most vulnerable, we are just selecting for strains that the vaccines are not effective against.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#423

Post by [deleted] »

neilsense wrote: post #412
brianmcc wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long Covid. It's not just death and hospitalisations. From The Lancet: "Patients with Long COVID report prolonged, multisystem involvement and significant disability. By seven months, many patients have not yet recovered (mainly from systemic and neurological/cognitive symptoms), have not returned to previous levels of work, and continue to experience significant symptom burden." https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ec…

I don't think "from The Lancet" has the same weight as it used to.

[deleted]

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#424

Post by jinpa_zangpo »

brianmcc wrote: post #414
nostromo wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccinated people don’t get “long covid” in appreciable numbers.

In the UK we're not vaccinating under 18s in volume - not yet anyway. I really don't want my kids to take part in the Great Adolescent Long Covid Experiment.

Long Covid is not a problem in children according to this study:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782164

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#425

Post by wizzwizz4 »

aristophenes wrote: post #422
outworlder wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to err on the side of saving lives, not speculation. Over 2 billion humans have been vaccinated so far, and rising. What's the worst case scenario here?

That by not focusing on vaccinating only the most vulnerable, we are just selecting for strains that the vaccines are not effective against.

And selection is useless if the “gene pool” is small enough that the selection pressure just eradicates the disease entirely. If we get the R number to something like ⅒ and hold it there for a few months? Disease eradicated, job done, everybody goes home.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#426

Post by wizzwizz4 »

manwe150 wrote: post #390
AndrewBissell wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a worst-case scenario if people do get vaccinated: everyone is vaccinated, COVID-19 starts going away How do you figure that last part? If we're talking worst-case scenarios from mass vaccination I would think you would need to put Marek's or ADE type outcomes on the table.

Those are already the complications associated with not vaccinating, so putting them on the table again would double-count them. Not sure I agree with their ‘hundreds of millions (per year)’ figure. That seems like unnecessary fear-mongering. But maybe ‘hundreds of thousands’ or ‘millions’, which is still not great.

I'm not fear-mongering; I'm just a pessimist. My scenarios are “unbelievably unrealistic” and “apocalyptic sci-fi”, respectively, but I wanted to make sure I got an upper bound on the worst-case. I don't know much about the topic, so I had to go into “I know this is unrealistic” territory for that.

See also: https://xkcd.com/2261/ and https://xkcd.com/883/.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#427

Post by brianmcc »

jinpa_zangpo wrote: post #424
brianmcc wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK we're not vaccinating under 18s in volume - not yet anyway. I really don't want my kids to take part in the Great Adolescent Long Covid Experiment.

Long Covid is not a problem in children according to this study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782164

Hopefully! Although I think "no clear evidence yet" isn't the same as "no problem". From the article itself there is a lack of clarity/conclusiveness:

"Children can experience SARS-CoV-2 postviral syndromes, but it is unclear to what extent these individuals are affected by long COVID"

We've been learning new stuff about COVID for 18 months now. I suspect we'll continue learning more about it for a long time to come. And I'm not keen to bet my kids' wellbeing on "it'll be fine" if I can avoid it (and they may yet catch it anyway - one can't wrap them in cotton wool).

Just saying - I prefer caution over complacency really.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#428

Post by ericb »

timr wrote: post #350
ericb wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I provided source evidence documenting an example of the mechanism and result of what I'm saying. Get back to me when you can provide a source example case of a virus evolving legs and doing a little dance and then we can consider the probabilities equivalent. Until then, we both know they're not.

You provided a source showing that a chicken virus escaped selective pressure, in chickens, grown in a lab. Let's not overstate the relevance of your "evidence" to SARS-CoV2 amongst the human population. But as I said, there's nothing terribly surprising about the idea that pathogens mutate to escape selective pressure. It's right out of biology 101. It would be tremendously surprising if those pathogens became more…

"So let's be clear: the claim is that the virus can mutate, therefore, any particular outcome is equally likely?"

That's where you set up the silly straw man you've been battling.

> be tremendously surprising if those pathogens became more virulent

[citation needed]

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#429

Post by wizzwizz4 »

aristophenes wrote: post #421
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without time for a study, wouldn’t it make sense to assume the most common thing, that a natural infection provides more immunity than the vaccine? No, actually; the actual infection sometimes misfires, leaving dud spike proteins outside the cells. If the immune system finds those first, it'll attack the dud spike proteins instead of the still-functional spike proteins, attacking all the viruses that failed to get…

I don't understand your first point, what does that have to do with the immune system getting geared up for an infection months or years later? The second point, your worst case scenario doesn't even address the worst concerns of people who don't want to take the vaccine. They don't trust that spike proteins are the only things in the vaccine. The worst case scenario is not that the vaccine acts like the virus but th…

> The worst case scenario is not that the vaccine acts like the virus but that it acts different than the virus.

Worst-case scenarios should be constrained by your knowledge. I know what's in the Pfizer vaccine, so my worst-case scenarios have to be constrained by that. But sure:

“Worst-case”, somebody's poisoning the vaccines. This leads to severe side-effects from some batches, which the statisticians take entire weeks to notice because they're all asleep on the job. Vaccine roll-out stops pretty-much everywhere, but nobody's able to trace down the saboteur. A dozen new, highly-transmissible and virulent variants emerge, with different antigens to each other and to the vaccines, so vaccinating the populace becomes intractable.

You see that this scenario is incompatible with “everyone gets vaccinated”. The bad stuff largely comes from “people don't get vaccinated”; the only way everyone*'s going to get vaccinated is if the vaccines don't suddenly get poisoned or otherwise become dangerous.

* except the immunocompromised, and others who don't get vaccines for health reasons.

I can't do a “worst-case scenario” where the vaccines are already poisoned, because they're not. It'd be bloody obvious if they were, given how big a sample size the statisticians have to work with. That would be even more blatantly fictional than my “tens of millions die every year” scenario.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#430

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

difosfor wrote: post #308

I thought it was pretty obvious that the reason why our last wave here in the Netherlands has dropped as quickly as it rose is that we first let go of too many restrictions too fast and then immediately reinstated the biggest ones. Basically all the kids were going to festivals for a week or two before the government finally realized that was a bad idea until we've vaccinated them as well and we should still apply so…

Yeah, I find the inclusion of the Netherlands in this article pretty weird, as they did re-introduce restrictions.

In contrast, the UK thing is much stranger (at least for now).

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