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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> our on-campus vaccination rate of 94% is higher than those other instances.

My work just had a "breakthrough" case. We are 100% vaccinated (military, no holdouts) but a fully vaccinated and healthy person nevertheless got symptoms and tested positive. They were better in a couple days but the incident is making us all think about any return to "normal" work. We may be safe, but none of us want to become a Delta carrier. (Funny story, their post-vaccine symptoms felt worse than their later experience with having actual covid.)

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We'll probably all become Delta carriers eventually. It's highly contagious enough that any infection control steps you take are likely just delaying the inevitable. At some point we'll have to accept that reality and go back to normal, just like the human race has done with every previous pandemic for thousands of years. Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing bad outcomes.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

i agree with this, but delaying enough may get us to a vaccine for delta without having to get delta. i wish more vaccinated people would get tested and participate in studies so we had a better idea of what the risk level is for long term organ damage. i'm assuming it's significantly lower, but i dont have anything to back that up with.

There will always be another variant. Most regular people aren't willing to put their normal lives on hold indefinitely in the hope that better vaccines might be available at some unknown point in the future. That's just human nature.

Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing bad outcomes.

The probability of getting post-Covid syndrome even after a mild case is ~ 20 %. Immunity against coronaviruses seems to last about a year. So in the present regime there's a 1-in-5 chance every year of having to deal with Covid sequelae, incidence rising, presumably, with age.

That's not acceptable. We need other interventions, like better ventilation, smaller gatherings & so on.

I agree and I feel like they are assuming that vaccination grants 100% protection against Covid-19.

It depends on the definition of protection. I think vaccination does give 100% protection from an individual being killed by covid. But there are people who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons and nobody wants to be the person who spreads it to them.

The number of vaccine breakthrough cases leading to deaths is rather low, but not zero. There have been hundreds of them in the US:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-brea...

In the real world, 99.99% protection from a risk is 100%. This is medicine, not particle physics.

Saying 100% is a bad idea, because an endless stream of people are going to tell you it's not 100%.

Look back at previous HN conversations about anyone claiming their software is 100% fault tolerant, or that their datacenter has 100% uptime.

Saying anything about covid seems bad on HN. Just look at all the perfectly reasonable discussions that have been downvoted into grey status. Something organized must be happening.

Well, you could do your part by stopping saying 100%.

In the real world, the vaccines don't provide anywhere near 99.99% protection. There are some misleading stats which claim 99.9% protection, but the trouble is that they do stuff like including a whole bunch of deaths from the winter wave which ended before vaccines were generally available and ending before the recent Delta wave. Realistically you might be able to expect somewhere around 90% reduction in the risk of death which isn't nothing but also isn't close to 100%.

Vaccines may not provide a good protection against getting and transmitting the virus, but if they provide a very good protection against any complication (which we know they do - even against known variants), why can't we return to normal? If it is downgraded to effectively a minor cold, why can't we live with it?

Let's say you have a child under 12 and an elderly immune-suppressed person in your house, the first of which can't be vaccinated and the second doesn't have much of a reaction to the vaccine. You, vaccinated, return to normal, and catch Delta. You are asymptomatic. You go home, and infect the child and the elderly person.

You can say that of any other disease.

During a pandemic [of that disease]? You bet you can!

[Edit: added a clause]

But it's only dangerous to be a carrier when you are amongst the unvaccinated, and those people have now made a conscious choice to expose themselves to the virus. At what point do we stop being responsible for other peoples' choices?

The exception is obviously the immunocompromised, but hopefully the booster shots will help to provide that group with some lasting immunity.

>>amongst the unvaccinated, and those people have now made a conscious choice to expose themselves to the virus.

What about those with immunological disorders that cannot handle any vaccination? What about the children?

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