Vaccinated Are Not ‘Just as Likely’ to Spread the Virus as Unvaccinated People | Hacker News Reader

Vaccinated Are Not ‘Just as Likely’ to Spread the Virus as Unvaccinated People

theatlantic.com

18 pointsBrajeshwar16 comments

This is not related to the submitted article, but I am curious and it is related.

> 4. Israel's high vaccination rate isn't high enough.

> Unvaccinated people helped fuel the rapid spread of the virus while the country remained open for business in recent months with few serious restrictions.

> "That will lead to mass infection, which is exactly what we are seeing now," said Segal.

From https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628....

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Okay, how does this happen if vaccinated people are much less likely to become infected or symptomatic? They have a high vaccination rate, so why are their numbers are worse than before? How come that small % of vaccinated people are the problem in a population that is almost completely vaccinated?

What is high enough, are we going to keep changing till it is 100%? What happens if the results are still bad after that? At >80% you would expect the numbers to be better, even if just so slightly, not WAY WORSE. Right? How can there be a mass infection if >80% of the population is fully vaccinated?

There are many questions that are not being answered. It is not enough to regurgitate the same things about the vaccine that do not seem to hold true when it comes to countries with high vaccination rate.

In any case, I expected countries with high vaccination rate to do better, not worse than they have done before.

If you expected that, then you probably assumed that other factors remained the same? That isn't the case.

First, countries with high vaccination rates have lightened other restrictions.

Second, countries with high vaccination rates may have many infected people, but few hospitalisations. Where I live, the share of infections that require hospitalisation has dropped by ~80% since the vaccinations started. (The number of infections as a share of population has gone up and down, the share of infections that require hospitalisation has shrunk steadily.)

Norway reclassifies Covid-19: No more dangerous than ordinary flu

https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/23/norway-reclassifies-cov...

Exactly. That's the kind of thing that makes sense when your vaccination map looks becomes as boringly monotonous as this: https://arnt.gulbrandsen.priv.no/tmp/vaksinerte.png

(From https://www.fhi.no/sv/vaksine/koronavaksinasjonsprogrammet/k... but there you have to read Norwegian and click a little bit.)

Some stats from India:

  State       | Pop [1]     | Act Cases[2] (%) | Part Vacc (%)      | Fully Vacc (%)     | Total Doses[3] (%)

  Maharashtra | 112,374,333 |  43,544 (0.0387) | 54,361,465 (48.38) | 21,803,462 (19.40) | 76,164,927  (67.78)

  West Bengal |  91,276,115 |   7,724 (0.0085) | 38,095,804 (41.74) | 15,458,360 (16.94) | 53,554,164  (58.67)

  Tamil Nadu  |  72,147,030 |  17,027 (0.0236) | 34,015,521 (47.15) |  9,492,744 (13.16) | 43,508,265  (60.30)

  Rajasthan   |  68,548,437 |      98 (0.0001) | 39,525,987 (57.66) | 14,485,390 (21.13) | 54,011,377  (78.79)

  Kerala      |  33,406,061 | 161,596 (0.4837) | 24,235,033 (72.55) | 10,198,187 (30.53) | 34,433,220 (103.07)

  Punjab      |  27,743,338 |     324 (0.0012) | 13,570,662 (48.92) |  4,496,921 (16.21) | 18,067,583  (65.12)

These are all states with non-BJP governments.

I don't know why the two states with the highest vaccination rates have completely different infection profiles but it is something to think about.

[1] 2011 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_terri...)

[2] https://www.mohfw.gov.in/

[3] https://www.mohfw.gov.in/pdf/CummulativeCovidVaccinationRepo...

It’s an interesting thought I haven’t thought about. Does an unvaccinated and vaccinated person spread the same viral load? The evidence suggests so. But is the amount of people “getting” Covid lower in vaccinated lower overall period? Yes as well. It’s a very Bayesian thing with the prior favoring the vaccinated but humans are terrible in terms of Bayesian thinking usually because of cognitive dissonance (not bias).

Curiously, once again, today's update to the page where CDC lists numbers of hospitalizations/deaths from COVID19 among those fully vaccinated against COVID19 has not occurred yet[1].

Maybe it will come, maybe it won't. Back in August, they postponed the update to occur after the approval of Pfizer's vaccine was announced. Today, the head of CDC overruled the advisory panel to recommend boosters[3].

I did teach "Economics of Regulation" for a bunch of semesters, and, this is a textbook example of regulatory capture.

If you are curious, currently, the rate of known cases of hospitalization _from_ COVID19 among the fully vaccinated stands at 5.1/100,000, seemingly headed for the neighborhood of 1/10,000.

Imagine a world in which 1/20,000 people fully vaccinated against measles could expect to be hospitalized with measles or 1/100,000 could expect to die.

In 2018, there were a total of 337 _cases_ (no breakdown of deaths/hospitalizations in the reference source) of measles in among U.S. residents. Only 42 of them were vaccinated.[4,5]

In 2019, there were only 121 measles cases among the vaccinated population.

No deaths from measles as far as I can see. Now, that's a vaccine that protects you and others. Please do not skip MMR.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210924162349/https://www.cdc.g...

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre...

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/world/covid-boosters-vacc...

[4]: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatssli...

[5]: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html

https://archive.is/HiUiR

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