900-person delta cluster in Mass. has CDC freaked out–74% are vaccinated | Hacker News Reader

900-person delta cluster in Mass. has CDC freaked out–74% are vaccinated

arstechnica.com

43 pointsthrowawaysea21 comments

Why do I keep reading about people who get COVID while being vaccinated like it was not supposed to happen? It was always known that you can get Covid while vaccinated. But you have a low chance of getting in a serious condition. It’s like the journalists writing these things were never aware. News like these are what the unvaccinated people hold on to choose not to get them.

Now the title should be out of these 73% how many have gotten serious effects?

The pandemic has shown the raw incompetence most journalists have when writing about even moderately technical topics. Either that, or their willful mischaracterization of information into the complete opposite of reasonable interpretations by experts.

Because the miseducated or misled or only-reads-clickbait-titles sees vaccines as 100%, never failing, complete infection preventers.

Which to be honest, if a vaccine truly defended me with zero breakthroughs and zero exceptions for life, I would not care about the vaccination status of anyone else afterward.

It sounds like the area had a number of large summer events -- sounds like stuff like a county fair and large concerts? If vaccination offers 95% protection in the course of typical daily life, it's not that surprising that one in twenty people will get infected after a series of large public gatherings. It's like everyone looked at that 95% effectiveness number and decided that it's 100% bulletproof protection. The fact that so few were hospitalized (and only one of those hospitalized was vaccinated) is a positive sign.

"There were five hospitalizations in the subset: one in an unvaccinated person with underlying medical conditions and four in fully vaccinated people"

I think you have vaccination status backwards among the hospitalized.

Some more detail on the hospitalized people below:

"One vaccinated, hospitalized COVID-19 patient had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and three had received the Janssen vaccine."

"Four additional, fully vaccinated patients aged 20–70 years were also hospitalized, two of whom had underlying medical conditions."

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm

As a vaccinated person I feel the only course forward here is for me to mask up.

Depends how much you want to avoid a couple days of cold-like symptoms. Vaccines were never a silver bullet. They just tilt the odds overwhelmingly in favor of your immune system.

This is poor reporting, because they don't say what the vaccinated vs unvaccinated ratio is in the exposed crowd. You can't tell anything about the underlying vaccine effectiveness without that information.

I don’t see how they would get that information.

The CDC article says that the city has a 69%ish vaccination rate. Which is probably the best estimate to this question.

Also, when they do mention vaccination, they don't specify whether the person was fully vaccinated, or only partly (one shot, versus two).

It feels like this particular incidence is the source of so much panic and misinformation. Is there news here? Yes, it appears as though we now know that vaccinated individuals can spread COVID if they get infected. But the CDC still maintains that infections in the vaccinated are rare, and if it does happen, the effects are mild. Provincetown proves all of this out. It feels like the media is using this as an opportunity to paint the worst possible picture - an uncontrollable outbreak which scares the cautious, and a snap back to mid 2020 restrictions which scares everyone else.

The town manager of Provincetown put it well when he essentially said that breakthrough cases were expected on some level, that this whole incident is proof that vaccines work, and that vaccines are our only way out of this.

I also can’t help but feel like Provincetown is getting a lot of attention because it’s a hedonistic LGBTQ destination that’s easy for people to turn their nose up at.

I know the conversation is now (IMO deliberately) about how the mask mandates need to come back, but can we take a moment to address the rhetoric of the past few weeks around vaccines? I have been in quite a few discussions on this site and elsewhere where people were getting abused for claiming that a vaccinated host reservoir is nothing more than a selective pressure in an endemic illness, that vaccines are necessary even for low risk individuals because they slow the spread to unvaccinated individuals, that the hospitalization rate will go down if only we are all forced to vaccinate, etc. When will those of you talking like this finally admit you were wrong and that many of those you were arguing with know more about this stuff than you do?

For what it's worth I was with you up until your last sentence - I found the tone unnecessarily condescending.

We don't need people to admit they were wrong - we need people to keep an open mind and understand that top researchers and institutions in the world are finding evidence that mRNA vaccines in their current form may be subtly working against us in complex ways [1]. I'm talking about second and third order evolutionary dynamics that are not explainable in terms of simple rhetoric.

To support my statements, see these relevant peer-reviewed publications:

[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (April 2021) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

[2] Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not? (2017) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016...

[3] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens (2015) https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

[4] The adaptive evolution of virulence: a review of theoretical predictions and empirical tests (2015) https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

[5] The phylogenomics of evolving virus virulence (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-018-0055-5

[6] Monitor for COVID-19 vaccine resistance evolution during clinical trials (Nov 2020) https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

I don't think it was unnecessary at all. If you got into a conversation about vaccines or covid anywhere on this site in the last few weeks you were talked down to, brigaded, bullshitted and dogpiled. Those people absolutely need to admit they were wrong, at least to themselves, otherwise they're going to be the next group of irrational voices shilling irrational things against people who are trying to deduce facts using reason.

The problem is you can't deduce things just using reason because immunology and epidemiology are branches of science that take a huge amount of dedication to understanding before you can make useful, falsifiable assertions that don't fall into begginer's errors due to ignorance.

I am absolutely tired of armchair epidemiologists who think their opinion even counts.

No, I don't care about your "reasoning", because if you're not a specialist in the topic you are missing out on such a gigantic set of knowledge on the subject that I need to have any interesting hypothesis checked out by a subject matter expert.

You can deduce a lot from reasoning. For example, you can deduce that in an endemic disease, a vaccine without close to 100% efficacy and deployed in close to 100% of the population, all it will serve to do is exert selective pressure on the virus to avoid immune response. This deduction doesn't take an epidemiology specialist to come up with, was thoroughly mocked for the past few months and, now, with the delta variant, appears to be occurring. Looks like the "armchair epidemiologists" were right sticking to their reason against a wave of social pressure.

You can use reason to deduce that cloth masks on the wall at the checkout line at the liquor store are mostly useless. You don't need to be an epidemiologist to understand the basic mechanisms by which pathogens spread and have a basic idea of how natural selection works. You dismissing everyone that disagrees with you on a topic is ego protection and nothing more, and, as we see with the delta variant, people like you are, to quote you guys the last few months, spreading misinformation that is costing lives.

> You can deduce a lot from reasoning. For example, you can deduce that in an endemic disease, a vaccine without close to 100% efficacy and deployed in close to 100% of the population, all it will serve to do is exert selective pressure on the virus to avoid immune response.

"All it will do" BS. It will save and continue to save lives into the millions, if the fatality rates in India are anything to go by, while allowing for some semblance of normality for people who are not afraid of a risk profile similar to that of the flu when vaccinated.

"It will exert selective pressure", yeah, no shit. You know what also exerts selective pressure? Washing your hands and having a functional immune system. Everything induces selective pressure because that's how evolution works. Since when has that been an argument against vaccination?

> You can use reason to deduce that cloth masks on the wall at the checkout line at the liquor store are mostly useless. You don't need to be an epidemiologist to understand the basic mechanisms by which pathogens spread and have a basic idea of how natural selection works.

This is absolute delirium. Mask wearing works (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.16.21258817v...), (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6549/1439), quoted as being "particularly effective", with several explanatory hypotheses as to why (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777695).

So, yeah, if you're going to claim that the armchair epidemiologists were right, you better show some damn validation instead of making up your own numbers.

Tired of this bullshit.

You can be tired of it all you want, or you can do what we do and stop getting emotional over what everyone else does and respect their right to make their own decisions. One thing to keep in mind, getting emotional is a sign that one is not thinking critically.

perhaps its that they just asked for how they feel and not any records

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