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Comment by throwaway189262 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. That's initial doses for 1/30 people already, a few weeks after approval. And there's still more vaccines yet to be approved and distributed.

If the Defence Production Act really ends up being used we could see the US hit herd immunity in 3 months.

Since we're distributing to old and vulnerable first, I speculate we'll see fataility rate plunge in as little as 3 weeks. Maybe enough to take the whole US out of lockdown

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I wish I was this optimistic.

You should really put your normal account against interesting - and rather bold - predictions like this. Other than getting it wrong, I can't imagine what reason you might have to throwaway on this subject? HN is a largely good faith audience.

The risk of getting cancelled is too high, so it’s best to always use a throwaway.

Sorry, but you piqued my interest. What does “getting canceled” mean here? You made some projections which may or may not be correct... but do you think people would remember who you are and hold it against you in the future if you made that comment with your main account? I apologize if that isn’t what you meant, I’m just trying to understand your thinking.

I'm guessing they mean in general. HN crowd doesn't cancel people, but HN is also a public board with a somewhat peculiar fan following on Twitter...

What's an example of a person being "canceled" by leaving a good faith Hacker News comment?

Canceling can be something that hasn't happened yet. All that we write online is forever.

Exactly

Social media searches are common on candidate screening nowadays. Say you left a conservative-sounding comment (like noting that the fast vaccine deployment is due in part to Trump's Warp Speed program) here on HN.

This would be a huge red flag against you when seeking a job at Silicon Valley companies - which are notoriously liberal leaning. "Cultural fit" is what they are looking for, not diversity (of opinions).

Care to elaborate? I haven't encountered cancel culture at HN nor do I understand which risk you see should it occur.

If they're like me it's more a long-term risk of having all your social media accounts tied together into some creepy profile. By somebody buying ISP DNS data (already happens), marketing data (same), or ML writing analysis.

Until there's privacy laws preventing such things it's better to be anonymous

The issue is not cancel culture on HN itself, but out in the real world, where saying anything that can be interpreted as "wrong" under your real name can have real consequences.

I've seen junior programmers advised on Twitter by seniors to take care what (and whose) tweets they "heart", or those tweets could weigh heavily against them at future job interviews.

Don't see why that wouldn't hold here on HN as well.

Expressing political opinions these days is a dangerous game. And more and more things are becoming politicized. Remember Coinbase? They were crucified for declaring that they just want to work.

Really? Who is doing this kind of research into candidates? When I interview people I don't have time to check out their entire social media history. There are also plenty of people that complain that their interviewers don't take the time to check out relevant things like github so I don't think I'm alone in this. If your interviewer has the time to waste checking out your entire Twitter feed then that sounds like a possible sign of a dysfunctional workplace.

There's automated platforms to find candidates social media profiles. It's pretty standard these days.

Finding social media profiles is easy. Reading the content takes time. I'd guess places that go through your social media are probably just doing quick searches for terms like the company name or the n word. I also doubt its standard practice at most companies I'd be interested in working for to go through social media for roles that aren't public facing.

There's danger in speaking your mind on the internet when it's tied to your name. I dont want my employer and whoever to know my opinions on everything. I don't see why anyone would want that.

I'm not worried about HN, it's who else finds my HN account. It may be possible to identify you through your writing soon enough. And there's not so many software engineers in the US. Not worth the risk.

I don't see why making wild predictions is a problem?

I don't have any static social media accounts besides placeholders I use for work related stuff. Every 3 months or so I clear my history and start fresh. Paranoid? Probably. But I don't like the idea of leaving a digital record of so much of my life

> If the Defence Production Act really ends up being used we could see the US hit herd immunity in 3 months.

We've had so much time to ramp up production that using the defense production act would just confuse things. We were actually producing vaccines before they were approved in order to rush this out.

Vaccines are traditionally not very profitable. Companies don't have an incentive to ramp up production ASAP because they know as soon as everybody is vaccinated demand will tank. There's plenty more profitable things to spend their time and resources on.

However, for everyone besides the drug companies it's advantageous to manufacture doses as quickly as possible.

It's the same reason DPA is used in wars. It would be vastly more profitable to produce scarce luxury items but not in the best interest of society.

The interests of drug companies and society are not completely aligned here and DPA would force them to apply all their resources to the problem, rather than maximum profitability.

It'll be closer to 6-8 weeks since these early vaccines require two doses.

Substantial resistance is built up after 8 days from the stuff I've read. Yeah immunity level is not great, but look at mortality in the studies.

AFAIK nobody that got even a single dose ended up in the hospital. That's huge if true. That means hospitizations will plummet well before everyone is through their second dose.

It’s 12 days

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577

Do you have a citation for this claim? I heard or read similar but then couldn’t find the source.

I dug deep for this lol... It looks like somebody ballparked it from a graph, I read it in a news story I can't find. It looks like COVID incidence among study participants comes to a screeching halt somewhere around 8-12 days after first dose

Page 30 of https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download

See this graph > Cumulative Incidence Curves for the First COVID-19 Occurrence After Dose 1, Dose 1 All-Available Efficacy Population

Also keep in mind this graph is probably based on COVID diagnosis date. Since it's unrealistic to test positive the day you contract COVID, I think it's reasonable to say it might even be effective from day 3-5 on

Amazing! Thank you for digging!

This is the most common question that I am asked at work.

They allegedly have partial immunity after the first dose (how partial i have no idea, and it might fade really quickly if you don't get the second), but its possible its enough to have some effect if enough of the right populations have the first dose.

The production of those doses started long time before the approval. I've heard that we can count ourselves lucky, if we reach sufficient vaccination rate before winter.

One thing to keep in mind, obesity is a risk factor.

> Since we're distributing to old and vulnerable first, I speculate we'll see fataility rate plunge in as little as 3 weeks.

As others have said, there's more lag than you think, so it'll be more like 6-9 weeks, especially with a Christmas surge. The other thing to remember is that we have a poor understanding of how it spreads. I don't mean that it's airborne, but that there isn't much evidence to suggest vaccinating the elderly and first responders is the best way to stop the spread. It's not an unreasonable choice, but there's a lot we failed to understand going into the winter.

Right, I think parent isn’t talking about slowing the spread, but fatality rate in isolation. Since the deaths are highly concentrated in older people, once they’re all vaccinated then COVID will, on average, be much less lethal and there will be much less pressure on ICU beds.

Yes I was probably too handwavey about it but that's exactly what I meant.

Once the vulnerable are vaccinated, hospitalization and fatality rates will plummet rapidly. Even if infection rates get far worse hardly anyone (relatively) will die. It will be COVID lite, more like a bad flu season

> > I speculate we'll see fataility rate plunge in as little as 3 weeks.

> The other thing to remember is that we have a poor understanding of how it spreads. I don't mean that it's airborne, but that there isn't much evidence to suggest vaccinating the elderly and first responders is the best way to stop the spread.

Fatalities, not infections. Average age of death is in the high 70s or 80s, so vaccinating the elderly is definitely the best way to drop that particular metric.

That's true, it's just a prediction. The first doses are going to care homes which have a wildly disproportionate number of COVID cases that end up in hospitalization. I think it's around 30%. And these people can also stay in the hospital longer, trying up beds.

Vaccinating these retirement homes, even with a single dose, should rapidly decrease the load on hospitals.

That's why I think people aren't being optimistic enough about recovery times. When 40% of the hospitalized cases are gone we can handle even a huge surge without overloading health systems. Since most lockdown metrics are based on hospital load, this means taking the country out of lockdown

I’ve always thought that vaccinating elderly and first responders was less about stopping spread and more about reducing fatalities among the most vulnerable. After all it is the least vulnerable who are most likely to be the main spreaders, and until a reasonable portion of <65 year olds are vaccinated, the spread is likely to continue and probably even flatten before that point.

However since most countries in the world are in the middle of a 2nd/3rd wave, it makes absolute sense to vaccinate the vulnerable first rather than try race against the curve with a vaccination programme. Especially when the vaccination lag is longer than the spread.

> less about stopping spread and more about reducing fatalities among the most vulnerable

This is a reasonable strategy, but I disagree with it.

> the least vulnerable who are most likely to be the main spreaders

[citation needed]. To my main point, we just don't understand how it spreads well enough to really say.

The people going out, being social and contributing to case counts are mostly younger healthy people. Which are among the last to get vaccinated. There was a fascinating article here a while ago claiming that if we vaccinated those people first, we actually would stop the spread far quicker.

Young people have far lower fatality and hospitalization rates though. If COVID only infected people under 40 it would be equivalent to a bad flu season.

A lot of reason for mask wearing and social distancing is to protect the vulnerable

yeah, i mean that’s why we are vaccinating the most vulnerable first and i agree that’s the ethically right thing to do. but doing it the other way around would probably stop it quicker.

Has the vaccine been shown to prevent transmission?

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