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Comment by Baeocystin | Hacker News Reader

The 80-90% numbers are for symptomatic Covid. The protection against hospitalization/death seems to be close to 100%, which is fantastic news.

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CDC study from this week showed 90% effectiveness when doing proactive weekly testing regardless of if presenting symptoms. That is the best data I’ve seen as evidence it prevents even a symptomatic cases as a very high efficacy. Israel data claimed it was highly effective on a symptomatic but their methodology was off (for how they defined a symptomatic)

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm...

Yeah, people are reading the effective number wrong. It is very close to 100% in protecting against hospitalization/death, which is what we really care about. If we could vaccinate 100% (perhaps at some time interval), this would be over.

I think it's likely that the real-world protection against death is actually lower than 100%- immune compromised people exist, and are liable to be comparatively poorly protected. And they're not part of the big efficacy trials.

Ideally you can protect them by suppressing the virus by herd immunity, which I think is actually a viable prospect with these vaccines.

Yes, this was seen in the Israel Pfizer data that death protection was around 93%. There are a number of public data points from Israel with sample sizes that dwarf anything done in trials. Shame it’s not mentioned more as it’s incredibly robust (positive) evidence

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