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Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

sciencemag.org

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Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#221

Post by tinus_hn »

dragonwriter wrote: post #154
tinus_hn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid has a below 1% case fatality rate. It is not going to ‘kill several million Americans’.

> Covid has a below 1% case fatality rate. The US has 622K fatalities on 37M cases, which is a 1.68% CFR (and is an undercount, because some current cases that will be fatalities aren't yet.) Of course, CFR isn't a constant, it varies with current healthcare overload and the lethality of different strains, among other factors.

I love how now the fatalities are an undercount and the number of cases is a certainty so it fits this shoehorned argument.

In reality the fatalities are ‘people who died within a certain period after being tested positive’ and an enormous amount of cases without any symptoms go undetected.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#222

Post by gilbetron »

hknapp wrote: post #207
gilbetron wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a small chance of getting rid of covid if we had gotten nearly everyone, 90%+, vaccinated. That didn't happen, the politicization of the vaccine was insane, and so now we are stuck with covid. What does this mean? It means we are all going to get covid. Repeatedly. It is a new seasonal illness that will be with us, absent some magical technology. It is (or will be) endemic. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/fe…

> We had a small chance of getting rid of covid if we had gotten nearly everyone, 90%+, vaccinated. By small chance, you mean 0% chance, right? Variants were already spreading by the time any vaccines were available. There are also billions of people who will likely not be vaccinated within the next couple years or so.

We had a non-zero chance of stopping covid, even considering vaccines would take a couple of years to get to everyone, it didn't matter (much) if variants happened. The chance of zero covid comes from vaccines coming out fast enough to drop the R value below 1.0 for a significant amount of time for the virus to go away.

However, in hindsight, with animal populations being able to get infected, I think it probably was zero, although that gets well beyond my armchair "skills" ;)

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#223

Post by hedgedoops2 »

oliv__ wrote: post #84

What I'm curious about is: what happens now? When everyone starts realizing that vaccines and masks can't fully contain a spread, what's the next logical step to take? Are people going to insist that you keep wearing your mask, take booster shots and live in fear for the next 50 years or are we going to collectively change our mindset from "Zero COVID" to accepting that COVID is just another risk factor in the world…

If our mindset had been "zero covid", we'd not have gotten the mutants and the v1 vaccine would have driven it extinct.

Please dont abuse the name of a strategy that was never implemented.

What governments did was 'keep incidence below X by means of lockdowns', and 'relax restrictions if incidence is below X'.

This is a simple control system that keeps the incidence at X. Not below X.

Unfortunately X was chosen via hospital bed capacity, so it was quite high, about 500 cases / 100k per week. High enough to generate mutants. With X=5, the same lockdown measures would have been in effect for much the same time (they'd have been started a few weeks earlier). Also, for very low values of X, you might have been able to get away with just contact tracing or travel controls instead of lockdowns, so the average lockdown intensity over time, under zero covid, could have been lower than what we had. The point of zero covid is to have less lockdown!

Anyway, the idea was to buy time until you get the vaccine. Zero covid was never intended to be an indefinite duration program.

This is what zero covid really means (low X). I agree with everything else you said.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#224

Post by dragonwriter »

tinus_hn wrote: post #221
dragonwriter wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid has a below 1% case fatality rate. The US has 622K fatalities on 37M cases, which is a 1.68% CFR (and is an undercount, because some current cases that will be fatalities aren't yet.) Of course, CFR isn't a constant, it varies with current healthcare overload and the lethality of different strains, among other factors.

I love how now the fatalities are an undercount and the number of cases is a certainty so it fits this shoehorned argument. In reality the fatalities are ‘people who died within a certain period after being tested positive’ and an enormous amount of cases without any symptoms go undetected.

> I love how now the fatalities are an undercount and the number of cases is a certainty so it fits this shoehorned argument.

Cases are a certainty basically by definition (now, if you want to do the usual thing and argue that we should look at IFR and not CFR, that’s a different story, but I’m not the one who introduced a false claim about CFR.)

> an enormous amount of cases without any symptoms go undetected.

By definition, if an infection goes undetected, its not a case.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#225

Post by dillondoyle »

tguvot wrote: post #79
dillondoyle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I'm understanding you: I am planning on taking my Governor's cheekily endorsed thumbs up to get a 3rd shot. I'm going to get JJ because it's not the same RNA spike target. That's probably better than a 3rd RNA shot (no reformulated)?

moderna and pfizer are different. different enough for moderna to be more efficient with delta and pfizer more efficient with alfa

thanks!

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#226

Post by tunesmith »

addicted wrote: post #43
jdhn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair critique. I feel like I've heard concerns about the potential for the virus to mutate because of the high level of vaccinations, but like you, I don't know how significant of an issue that is.

The virus will not mutate because of the high level of vaccinations. The virus will mutate because of the high level of unvaccinated people. The risk is when the high level of unvaccinated are in the same population with a high level of vaccinated, of the many mutations in the unvaccinated there is a greater chance that a mutation that randomly has greater tolerance to the vaccines will be naturally selected and flou…

I haven't been able to get a straight answer to this even from scientists on science threads...

Given the following:

1. Virus mutations do not directly react to the vaccine. These are simply random mutations.

2. If a mutation occurs that has a higher probability of escaping an existing vaccine, then in one unvaccinated person, that mutation has an identical chance of occurring whether that person is part of a 0% vaccinated community, a 50% vaccinated community, or a 99% vaccinated community.

3. Natural selection just means its ability to reproduce. Let's say that the mutation can escape the vaccine at 100% probability.

Then:

Can that virus spread equally regardless of whether it's a 0% vaccinated community, a 50% vaccinated community, or a 99% vaccinated community?

Because it sure sounds like people are saying that in that scenario, the mutation spreads less in a 0% community, and more in a 50% community.

Are they saying that in a "mostly unvaccinated" community, the other variants (that the vaccine protects against) that are more prevalent somehow serve to "crowd out" the mutation?

Because I don't know if that's true - at least, I've seen reports that suggest that people can catch more than one variant at one time.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#227

Post by justwanttolearn »

packetlost wrote: post #204
minikites wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not to mention the psychological harm of (mass) mask wearing. What is the mechanism for this harm?

Mostly feelings of isolation and depression. For some, seeing faces (in person, not over video call) is super important for socialization. Basically, if you "get" people watching, you probably understand what I'm talking about. There's no studies as far as I know, but I imagine there's certain developmental aspects of interpreting facial expressions that young children are also missing out on to some extent. For me p…

"The main insight of the present research is that face masks’ use influences emotion inference from faces for all ages and especially for toddlers."

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6694...

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#228

Post by justwanttolearn »

deadbolt wrote: post #219
lamontcg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals are collapsing again, we can't ignore it. Get people vaccinated. Or else we're going to wind up "flattening the curve" again until we finally burn through enough dead people that everyone is effectively either recovered or immunized and then the endemic burden should be an order of magnitude lower. And hospitals only have so much throughput going through the ICU and into the morgue that they can sustain, wh…

I feel at this point hospitals should just triage the willfully unvaccinated covid patients behind all other emergencies. Possibly set aside X number of beds for covid patients, the rest of the ICU beds are for everything else. Out of covid beds? Well you've gotta wait for someone to die and then they'll see you. They chose to "not live in fear", they can live - and possibly die - with the consequences.

I don't think it's that simple. Could we also triage patients that have an unhealthy lifestyle as recommended against by doctors for a long time? We know eating well works to build and maintain a healthy immune system, and that heart disease and obesity is one major factor to covid hospitalization and death. Could we put put the ones that have decided to stuff their faces with fast and processed foods in the back of the line with all other emergencies?

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#229

Post by bsaul »

smt88 wrote: post #156
bsaul wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when planning on injecting a new type of product to 100% of a (healthy) population you better be sure about what you're doing... Biology "certitude" is far from being as strong as a mathematical proof. Humans are different, and the complexity of interaction inside a single body are horribly complex. I'm very surprised decades of science fiction litterature isn't enough to make people think twice.

They only need to be certain that the risk of the vaccine for the individual is lower than the risk of Covid for that same person. In what way do you think millions of doctors, disease experts, and drug researchers have gotten that wrong? They have evidence that Covid is worse, but where is evidence to the contrary? > I'm very surprised decades of science fiction litterature isn't enough to make people think twice. I…

i don't know a lot of doctor that advocate for the benefit of a covid vaccine for young kids. when they do it's usually in the hope of herd immunity, which seems disproved by the variants cases in countries with hugh vaccination rate.

in general i would also be very skeptical of "scientific consensus" related by the media when you see how much bad press some doctor got for criticising public health politics (even when proved right later on).

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#230

Post by lamontcg »

grepfru_it wrote: post #180
lamontcg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where's my cherry flavored Covidquil? Where's my portable cold fusion generator? Vaccines just fucking work right now. Much like wind and solar. Effective antivirals are like thorium nukes and carbon capture. Very hard problems that nobody can adequately solve.

https://sanotize.com/

Snake oil.
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