Google will soon fire all unvaccinated employees | Hacker News Reader

Google will soon fire all unvaccinated employees

theverge.com

7 pointshdjjhhvvhga5 comments

I’d not want to work next to someone who’s unvaccinated, as even when I am vaccinated, I can still catch it from someone, so sounds like a good move to me.

Vaccines decrease the probability of severe illness and death from COVID-19 but are not correlated with transmission rates. Some researchers go as far as saying it's worse with vaccinated people as they feel more protected and engage in more risky behavior, not avoiding gatherings of people etc.

Initial studies looking at infections and vaccinations in large populations didn't find correlation. A couple of aater studies that looked at infections in single households did. That is, they looked at the question "when a single member of a household is infected, how large is the chance that others in that household are infected?" and the answer to that is that the vaccines do indeed dampen transmission by quite a bit. Very roughly half.

I guess the difference is that the people in a city, say, may change their behaviour as the vaccination rates change, but the people in a household don't start/stop eating dinner together.

That's interesting, I understood the opposite is happening[0]:

> High COVID-19 vaccination rates were expected to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in populations by reducing the number of possible sources for transmission and thereby to reduce the burden of COVID-19 disease. Recent data, however, indicate that the epidemiological relevance of COVID-19 vaccinated individuals is increasing. In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated). 12 of 31 infections in fully vaccinated household contacts (39%) arose from fully vaccinated epidemiologically linked index cases.

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

High vaccination rates were supposed to do that, but compared to what?

If you do an interim thing to reduce the transmission rate (and it works) and then you do something permanent (and it works too, compared to the initial state) and stop doing the first, the transition might not be an improvement compared to the interim.

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