Ban ‘idiot’ anti-vaxxers from flying, says Ryanair boss | Hacker News Reader

Ban ‘idiot’ anti-vaxxers from flying, says Ryanair boss

telegraph.co.uk

19 pointsingve18 comments

I would agree, if vaccinations helped more to stop people from becoming infectious. Although they shorten the period in which the vaccinated or recovered are spreading the virus, it's still enough to cause the current omicron outbreak, as far as I understand it. If correct, that means the unvaccinated are not that much more contagious and even a plane full of vaccinated people will transmit the virus because chances are zero every single one of them didn't encounter the new variant in the past three days or so.

According to my back of the napkin math that is not true.

Plane size: 150

Change that any random person has covid 7.5

Change that any random person has omicron 1.1

Chance that "someone" on the plane has covid: 0.99999

Chance that "someone" on the plane has omicron: 0.7785

So, you can expect someone on your plane to have covid, but 23% of the time no one has omicron.

Fly once and not vaccinated, you get covid

If you are vaccinated you get covid only 18% of the time.

But this is not just about your chances of getting covid, I think the point is more that people who are not taking precautions are much more likely to come onto the plane as a spreader in the first place.

I really have never understood the ability of people to divorce themselves from the notion that they can also be responsible for spreading covid, not just protecting themselves from getting it.

Vaccines change the reproduction rate. Do you know how much? No? I thought so!

It would be best if we stopped all airtravel for a while, vaccinated or not. The rate at which we are shipping mutations around the world far exceeds our ability to vaccinate against.

Probably a better idea to stop all air travel for people over 60 until they find a vaccine that actually meets the original definition of a vaccine.

What is the original definition of a vaccine according to you?

We need an awesome-vaxxers repo to keep a list of companies that required injections for their customers or employees. Because I'd like to avoid them going forward.

Omicron sounds like a winner for natural immunity. Probably a good time to catch it.

That doesn't seem like a good idea. We won't have any solid data for a while, but it's likely that the immune escape works both ways. Just as immunity due to vaccination against/infection by other variants gives only limited protection against omicron, infection by omicron is likely to give only limited protection against delta etc. So if you get infected by omicron now, you'll still be at risk of getting hit by delta (or some derivative).

I don’t understand what you’re saying- infection from omicron probably only provided limited protection from other variants (we agree so far) - isn’t that protection valuable in and of itself? You’re saying that we should forfeit partial protection because it’s not complete protection? To my thinking, if the partial protection you get from omicron is greater than the damage caused by omicron, that protection is valuable.

Why do you expect the partial protection from omicron to be greater than the damage caused by omicron? While it's looking significantly less dangerous than delta (though even that isn't completely certain), that doesn't mean it's anything like safe.

And even if omicron is drastically less severe than delta, its going to have a hard time being less dangerous or more effective vs delta than vaccination.

Because omicron has resulted in much less severe symptoms than Delta, and much less hospitalization/death- so far only one American death, compared to Delta which is much more lethal. If the incidences of long covid from omicron are correlated with it’s lethality, it’d only have to confer modest protection against delta to be a net benefit.

I’m not comparing it against the efficacy of vaccines, I’m saying that if you wanted the most protection against extreme covid outcomes (death/long covid), you’d want all the antibodies you can - so vaccination + omicron antibodies.

This is double speak , '... immunity due to vaccination against/infection by other variants gives only limited protection ...'.

In the real world, it can not provide both immunity and limited protection. Those at risk may want to consider if they can reduce their risk profile by maybe losing weight or increasing their cardiovascular ability.

We still lack data on unvaccinated naive (if SA >70% seroprevalence are true), so at least omicron would serve as booster dose for vaccinated and recovered.

Omicron might have lighter symptoms than say the delta variant, but still carries the risk of long covid.

As someone who has long covid, please believe me when I say you don't want it.

Your death rate is doubled in the year after covid recovery from hospitalization!

The idea that getting infected gives you immunity from getting infected is an interesting one: but the goal was not to get infected in the first place. Besides that, natural immunity as the result of an infection also doesn't last forever.

Aren't the HVAC systems in planes pretty much better than any other indoor hvac systems? If you are going to ban anti-vaxxers, planes seem like the last place you should.

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