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Comment by Jimmc414 | Hacker News Reader

It seems that many are missing the point that vaccines do not appear to mitigate transmissibility of covid, only severity.

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Reducing length of infection (via vaccination) reduces the amount of time someone is contagious. This reduces the number of people they infect.

Initial viral load of exposure is a variable in infection severity, though, so it’s not without value.

These things can’t be reduced to binary answers.

Then why are vaccination rates correlated only to a reduction in COVID deaths and not a reduction in cases?

Almost all cases now are a wildly more infectious variant than before. The virus isn’t a static target.

Because an increase in total number of vaccinations have coincided with an increase in transmissibility of the virus due to emerging variants.

Do you see evidence that cases are increasing in the unvaccinated much faster than in vaccinated? I'm not finding anything that supports that assertion. If you can point me in the right direction, I will look with an open mind.

Yes just take New York as one example: https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-breakthrough-data

That's not at all what I just wrote. Read it again.

My point was, if transmissibility has increased to a degree that cases are increasing vaccinated populations, isn't it logical to conclude that cases in the unvaccinated would have increased to a much greater degree?

Symptoms for vaccinated are less severe and possibly even asymptomatic, so vaccinated are less likely to quarantine when they contract Covid. This could infect more people not less.

Also, vaccinated are supposed to wait longer before testing for covid after exposure since they are more susceptible to false negative results. This also could infect more people and have a counter result.

If vaccinated people are highly infections for 15 minutes less than unvaccinated, that's mitigation. Your statement is extreme (of course my example is silly, but your statement is almost certainly wrong in a meaningful way).

What is extreme about my statement? If you see evidence to the contrary, please share it.

There's blatant evidence all over the place. Vaccinated people are sick for less time, that provides mitigation of transmission.

Many studies have shown that the vaccines reduce infection and transmission. Less so for Omicron but it does reduce it.

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