One in four vaccinated people in households with a Covid-19 case become infected | Hacker News Reader

One in four vaccinated people in households with a Covid-19 case become infected

bmj.com

27 pointscurmudgeon2232 comments

This confirms Andrew Pollard's statement that there will be no significant herd immunity effect.

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

Honestly of it keeps people out of hospitals, that’s good enough for me. Overwhelming the healthcare system seems like the worst case scenario.

It doesn't. Consider a household with less than five members (index case + less than four others). "One in four" means that less than one additional household member will get infected on average, i.e. herd immunity at the household level is achievable. Whether that translates into herd immunity at the population level is a different question that requires information about transmission between households.

No that's not how it works. The virus is endemic now so it's not a one time event. Eventually another household member will get infected and bring it back in.

And?

Your body is built around instructions.

Bad instructions, eg. viruses, will be read even if you have an immune system prepared by prior exposure or, to a sometimes lesser extent, most current vaccines.

A single read/write of a single virion can be measure as an infection with sufficient pcr cycles (may take 60…).

Everyone will eventually get this endemic virus, but many will never notice, even those who are vaccinated.

I got it. Vaccinated double Moderna. My whole family and entire friend group got it at the same time. I didn’t go to the hospital but I was damn sick. But none of my friends went to the hospital and many were not vaccinated. All in all, there was no difference between those of us who were vaccinated and those who were not. Take that anecdote for exactly what it is.

Unfortunately vaccine efficacy is calculated on the population level and Delta is a bitch. I feel sorry for you but as much I know, you need incredible luck to get infected again.

It’s statistics. You have constant infection attempts over time, especially indoors, so you have to keep factoring and multiplying the likelihood you won’t get infected to get a better sense.

E.g consider the likelihood you flip five heads in a row as analogous to how likely you wont get infected after five separate extended exposure events (eg hour in doors with no air filtration).

Both my wife and I are vaccinated. She caught COVID about 3 weeks ago. I had quite a few reasons to assume I'd catch it as well, but I never did (tested twice during the course of her infection)

Did your wife get severely sick or were her symptoms mild?

Super mild. Light sniffles, some headache, etc. She learned of it when she was having an outpatient test for something unrelated.

Could this be because the existing vaccines were developed to generate immunity against the original strain of Covid? In other words would a new vaccine based on delta produce better results?

No. The difference is mostly in viral load. Delta can seriously ramp up its production and make an infected person infectious in 1-2 days. Only neutralizing antibodies can counter this so fast and 2 dose regimen dose to build level high enough often enough. Increase from booster is 5 fold compared to the level from 2nd dos and is even higher for seniors. Levels of neutralizing antibodies that work against Wuhan variant and Delta variant are about the same.

Anecdotally, out of my gang of 6 who went to a concert a couple of weeks ago, 4 of us got sick. I genuinely don’t know how I didn’t, considering everything.

All of us were vaccinated of course.

No judgment, part curiosity and part how to relate to risk management decision making — what was the thinking about going to the concert beforehand?

We’re vaccinated, in a very low risk population, and have multiple homes to quarantine in. The net risk to mental health of not partying and going out is way higher than the low risk of falling ill.

Things that we didn’t account for:

- some of us had to miss Halloween, should account for social event temporal proximity

- we were able to quarantine together and spend time in each other’s company, so getting sick at the same time is the best

If vaccination doesn’t stop transmission, could you say it provides a breeding ground for more resillient/contagious strains of the virus?

What does you mean by resilient? That's not really a specific term in virology.

The current thinking is that new variants are most likely to evolve in immunocompromised patients who suffer from persistent infections.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...

No, the vaccine does not 'provide a breeding ground' for the virus. Quite the opposite, the vaccine reduces the potential pool of individuals it can infect. Baseline here is an unvaccinated population, not an idealized scenario with zero transmission among the vaccinated.

The reason I ask is because I think of how superbugs have come about and wonder if we’re not doing the same thing with COVID-19.

There's growing evidence that this is occurring; I'm not going to bother gathering links to articles/videos, the ideological mob toeing the mainstream narrative on HN is strong.

There are plenty of us who are interested so long as it’s not garbage like Twitter or Breitbart. The worst that can happen is your karma takes a hit.

Would be useful to have a list of the sites we currently consider garbage.

I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this commenting space is too narrow to contain.

We need the Sir Andy Wiles of HN to fill in the details! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27...

Personally, I'd love to see the links and have a look. No downvote on my part. Quite the contrary for posts that try to sincerely substantiate a contrarian argument. And agreed, there's lots of nearly hysterical ideological thinking on this site, by people who seem to justify just about any policy proposal so long as it claims to "stop the spread", and discount as "misinformation" even valid, reasoned criticisms of contentious mainstream policies.

From lioeters comment, supporting the argument:

> "They might serve as sort of a breeding ground for the virus to acquire new mutations."

Vaccines Could Drive The Evolution Of More COVID-19 Mutants - https://text.npr.org/965703047

This comment is pretty disingenuous, it's like you already know maybe your evidence is just some bullshit blogs and crackpots on YouTube, so you think: why post them and have your meaningless HN score go down?

Not at all. I've posted in the paste and the ideological mob who's already made up their mind to "trust the science" - toeing the mainstream narrative that "the science is decided" - assuming that there's consensus when there isn't - just brigade, and then most comments get hidden. It's tiring, and a flaw of most online forum structures have, allowing ideological individuals who don't actually care about the scientific process or finding the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

> "They might serve as sort of a breeding ground for the virus to acquire new mutations."

Vaccines Could Drive The Evolution Of More COVID-19 Mutants - https://text.npr.org/965703047

Important factor is number of mutations. If vaccines cut the number of infections in half, it would be twice less mutations so two times less to generate a beneficial mutation. More we are able to cut down transmission, less possibility there is for mutations to occur.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com