Israeli Study: Natural Immunity Is 13x Stronger Than Pfizer Covid Shots

I'm not in one of those countries. I'm in Canada and the medium-sized city I live in has a dozen cases a day, which is an increase over the last few months. The large majority have not contracted it here yet. We continue to use mass testing and partial restrictions to control the rates, along with vaccination. I have no idea if this is a winning proposition in the long run especially with the new contagious variants. But it does seem to work in terms of case numbers so far.

It is not controversial. It is what data strongly indicates, and should be the top comment. As a parent of school age children and with impending school reopening I have recently participated in Covid discussions on this forum to learn more (thanks to people posting and engaging in polite conversation). I had some idea that Covid was less dangerous for kids, but had no idea how much less. I am shocked by the disconnect between data and the public health discourse in this country (USA) pertaining to Covid and kids. On the bright side, I am heartened that the risks for kids are minimal and entirely acceptable, with or without masks, vaccines, lockdowns, school closures, covid passports and whatnot. Though please stay at home if you have symptoms, this is not the time for foolish Covid parties.

Bottom line: Life involves risk, and kids are too subject to some small, but not zero risk. The Covid fatality rate for children is 1/1000 the fatality rate for old people, in line with other risks kids face daily in their lives. For all intents and purposes there are 2 different pandemics: mostly normal for kids and 0.2-1.0% IFR for adults. As an adult, take the vaccine ASAP (I did). But please stop assuming that kids share the same risk profile. They are emphatically LESS likely to develop complications. After infection, they are likely to buildup strong natural immunity against future strains (see OP article). Caveat: the virus mutates and/or CDC estimates may be wrong, so the situation may deteriorate in the future.

* For 0-17s, total 'deaths involving covid' as of 08/25 is actually a bit smaller: 385. For comparison, 'deaths involving influenza' are 188, in influenza-suppressed season. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm.

* CDC estimates that a full 26M kids were infected by Covid, for a fatality rate of 14/M. Total number of kids is 78M, so even the absolute numbers won't get catastrophically worse as long as the virulence of the virus stays the same. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

* The total number of school age children fatalities from all cases in US is 5,497, for a 134/M fatality rate. Covid is 10 times less dangerous than just living as a kid. Just the drowning fatality rate is 10/M, same ballpark as Covid. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/child-health.htm

* Unfortunately, not all kids are equally healthy. In the first year of the pandemic, 25 kids died in UK. 'around 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities'. '6 had no underlying conditions'. No CDC data. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717

* Whenever you hear 'the hospitals are filling up', do they specifically provide Covid numbers, or are leaving you to fill in the blanks and guess 'Covid'. Tennessee Health Commissioner: 'Children’s hospitals here are on pace to be completely full by the end of next week. Which ones? “All of them,” she said'. Reality: As of 07/31, 41 with enterovirus, 22 with RSV, 10 with Covid, 8 with adenovirus, plus some small tail. No CDC data. https://twitter.com/ifihadastick/status/1423326573185454080

* The CDC director, Rochelle P Walensky, is a co-author of the infamous John Snow Memo, claiming 'Furthermore, there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection, and the endemic transmission that would be the consequence of waning immunity would present a risk to vulnerable populations for the indefinite future.'. This has been a cornerstone for draconic Covid policies, and has been recently debunked by a number of studies, including the OP article. Shame. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Those populations may not be comparable, the headline numbers are from people who were PCR tested to be positive, the population-wide studies are based on seropositivity and modelling. The Israeli study explicitly calls out that it may be undersampling asymptomatic infections.

The flip side is that delta is very likely optimally transmissible/virulent.

Once immunity is built up to delta, then it'll be forced to evolve to achieve immune escape and that'll make it mutate much more than it has and pick immune escape mutations that will make it "worse" in the immune naive population. Immune escape will come at a cost.

And the scientific evidence of "waning immunity" in the headlines these days is likely wrong and a gigantic lesson in confounding factors. The HCoV-229E common cold coronavirus evolves to escape immunity, and this one probably will as well:

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

So our immune systems will evolve and take the edge off of all future coronavirus infections, but the virus will also have to evolve and be forced to make tradeoffs and will become less virulent in the process.

So if you caught one of the common cold coronaviruses right now and had zero inherited immunity to it, then it would probably still be somewhat mild since it would have been evolving for hundreds of years to be more stealthy than virulent. If you caught the original pandemic version though it would probably suck about as hard as SARS-CoV-2 right now.

So what is the public policy value of this study? We all should try to get Covid to get immunity to Covid? This is nonsense.

This other study add some value: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm

It says that if you already got covid, the possibility of reinfection is 2.4 times lower if you also get the vaccine than if you don't get it. Now I guess that you multiply that natural immunity from 13x to 31x. Isn't cool?