Comment by fileeditview | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fileeditview | Hacker News Reader

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The argument always is that there are not enough beds for non-corona patients. More beds would certainly help.

It is nonsense to vaccinate young and very healthy people, especially kids. Their risk from COVID is minimal to non-existent.

Also the spread is not stopped by vaccinating. Vaccinated still spread the virus. If it is reduced is still unclear. There was a study in GB that showed the incidence numbers in vaccinated was just as high or higher than in unvaccinated. The sample sizes of vaccinated and unvaccinated were equal as they should be. Reports in Germany about these numbers forget to mention that vaccinated people are basically not tested.

> The vaccines work well and are safe.

They do not work well enough. First of all people still transmit the virus after only about 2 months after the vaccination. Then the protection goes down extremely between 2-6 months after the vaccination (that is why we need boosters all the time). It is still unclear if we continue to need boosters after the third shot.

Vaccines do reduce spread.

While vaccinated people who get infected still spread the virus, they’re less likely to get infected in the first place, which is a necessary precursor to spreading.

Not necessarily true with the new variants, and it won’t be true for future variants either. The virus jumped to wild animals so it’s freely mutating in unvaccinated hosts outside of the human population.

IIRC the effectiveness is reduced for delta, certainly, but not to zero.

But yes, we’ll probably need updated vaccines, similarly to how we update the flu shot every year.

> The argument always is that there are not enough beds for non-corona patients. More beds would certainly help.

"beds" is a proxy for "health workers", if you put a bad covid case in a "bed" they just die, they need constant attention

>...fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts. Host–virus interactions early in infection may shape the entire viral trajectory.

Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Vaccinated people don’t transmit as much, nor are they as likely to contract the virus. Current estimates are 85-90% of transmission in Germany involves someone unvaccinated

https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/

* Chance of catching it?

* Peak viral load, GIVEN catching it?

* Duration of peak viral load, GIVEN catching it?

* Severe disease, GIVEN catching it?

* Hospital stay, GIVEN catching it?

* Death, GIVEN catching it?

There are many relevant parameters that the vaccines might affect. And the vaccinated people have a few parameters: number of shots, time since last shot, age, etc. People seem to focus on one or two of these questions at a time.

From your link, actually, related to duration:

"Fully vaccinated individuals with delta variant infection had a faster (posterior probability >0·84) mean rate of viral load decline (0·95 log10 copies per mL per day) than did unvaccinated individuals with pre-alpha (0·69), alpha (0·82), or delta (0·79) variant infections."

Clearly it's not going to stop transmission, but it could slow it down. People on both sides of this issue seem to undervalue partial measures and tradeoffs.

> There was a study in GB that showed the incidence numbers in vaccinated was just as high or higher than in unvaccinated

I would like to see the source for that if you have the link?

A bit late reply but I was asleep. You can find the report here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

There is a lot to digest and probably it's easy to come to the wrong conclusions from this. I was referring to Figure 2.(a)

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