Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> The science is murky on whether being vaccinated prevents being infectious. Others have pointed it out and are being flagged.

It’s because they’re being disingenuous.

Vaccination reduces infection severity and length. Reduced infection severity reduces coughing, which reduces spread. Reduced infection length gives less time for transmissibility.

So even if you can still transmit the virus while vaccinated, there is value in reducing the amount of time you’re infectious and the amount of viral load you’re spreading into the air.

It’s not a binary thing, despite what some are trying to suggest.

View on HN

I hear you but I would need to see that studied to believe it.

Possibly vaxxed people are more likely to be asymptomatic and more likely to go out to lunch or something and spread it. Hard to say right?

In life there are no guarantees. It reduces transmissibility by shortening the symptoms length and decreasing the viral load. There are studies that indicate exactly what you're looking for. Go find them.

> Vaccination reduces infection severity and length. Reduced infection severity reduces coughing, which reduces spread.

In practice this shouldn't make a difference, because anyone with a cough should stay home, but it's be a problem in the US where you're not guaranteed paid sick days. In Europe not so much, although there are currently problems with a lot of people not working due to being at home with Omicron, but that's temporary.

All in all it's an excellent situation. The hospitals are a bit under pressure now due to everyone running for tests, but it'll subside - after January things should be more or less back to normal (relatively speaking), if people want it to be (which I doubt).

And since kids have never played any significant part in this, mandating vaccines for them just seems like an act of foolish desperation.

Give boosters to those who need them. Even the WHO said it's stupid to waste them on kids.

> Vaccination reduces infection severity and length. Reduced infection severity reduces coughing, which reduces spread. Reduced infection length gives less time for transmissibility.

At the same time, less severe cases would make ideal spreaders: you're not aware you're infectious and you're not hindered from going out by being sick. I don't think that's a compelling reason for "vaccination reduces spread". Portugal's also doesn't suggest that, currently peaking despite 88% with two vaccinations and 26% with three.

The issue here is not with the vaccine. We need better and cheaper test kits. I live in the USA and frankly the response has been a joke. If we had billions of these test kits that were effective and cheap, we would be able to reduce the spread with the latest developments.

The vaccine is tool. We need to pick the best tool for the job. Vaccines reduce severity and risk. Talking about Nations peaking, and only talking about the vaccine is like trying to build a house using nails and your bare hands. There is another tool that we need to be effective. It's called testing and I haven't seen 1 Western Country executes successfully on this.

I agree. It feels like bureaucrats and accountants focusing on the wrong issue at times. Germany had free tests, then stopped offering them for free for the unvaccinated (while the vaccinated no longer needed tests to go to restaurants etc ... which, yeah, let's not talk about it), citing costs (but probably mostly to increase the pressure to get vaccinated). Apparently it might have cost "up to 700mm Euro per month" (including significant sums being redirected via fraud). Germany's regular federal budget is ~550bn Euro per year. Paying for temporary leave of employees costs around 20bn per year. So they're saving 700mm per month (well... they did, for something like six weeks, they're back to free testing again), prolonging the time where they pay around 1500mm per month for furloughed employees and the economy suffers. But hey, costs for testing are down!

I agree with almost everything you say, but calling people disingenuous is lame.

If it's your kid, you hug them, they touch everything, they drool on everything. It doesn't matter if they're slightly contagious or heavily contagious, you're going to get saturated by them regardless.

So without any "disingenousness", I claim vaccinations help slow the spread for normal interactions, but it probably doesn't help much to stop kids spreading it to their parents.

It's interesting that for almost two years now I've seen the same "common knowledge" repeated over and over. "Kids are germ factories" and variations on that theme. But watching the pandemic and how its effected children has actually made me reconsider that notion. With the caveat that Omicron data may change this, we have tons of data that clearly shows that small children spread COVID19 significantly less than teenagers and adults. It's hard to know if this is something specific to COVID or if other respiratory viruses are also spread less efficiently (but still spread) by kids than your co-workers, spouse, etc.

To speak specifically to your point, the data I've seen indicates that vaccinations are much more effective in preventing infection (and therefore spread) in younger people. That likely compounds with an adults vaccination, so a vaccinated kid is likely significantly less likely to bring an infection home and infect an adult.

I think it’s because kids are notorious flu spreaders. They pass it much easier than adults.

Heh, I guess all of reality has two sides nowadays. For every person who notices how parents of small children seem to show up to the office with pink eye and catch many more colds, there's a parent who's certain their little angels are germ-free.

I'm not sure "common knowledge" has meaning any more considering that every topic is now polarizing. Anyone will argue anything and then refer to some unspecified "data" they've seen. Moreover, I doubt parents can be objective about this considering there's an evolutionary advantage to not being repulsed by their offspring's illnesses.

> the data I've seen indicates that vaccinations are much more effective in preventing infection (and therefore spread)

I don't even disagree with that. All I'm saying is that parents have a much higher level of exposure to their own children than pretty much anyone else in the world. You could reduce transmission of children by 90%, but that doesn't mean much to the parents who have 100X the exposure to them. We can talk viral load all you want, but at some point they'll cough in your face and the virus is going to start replicating inside of you.

What are your thoughts on the new data released by Ontario[1]?

[1]https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data?fbclid=IwAR2pRUq9GN9EEoDTm0... (see graph 3 in particular)

(2nd attempt, realized the outlier spike is in "unvaccinated and 80+" category). Utter garbage data. Using the breakdown by age we note a huge outlier spike in unvaccinated cases in the 80+ age group, 800/100k vs. 5-10/100k. All other age groups show a decline in case rates for both vaccinated and unvaccinated, with a vaccinated case rate << unvaccinated case rate (5x-10x). I see no way to add up the breakdown by age case rate numbers into total case rate numbers showing vaccinated case rate taking over unvaccinated case rate.

Couple of related notes:

* Covid statistics without a breakdown by age / date / vaccination status are garbage. Possibly BMI and/or immunosuppressed status should also be added to the mix. The authorities failure to publish this data breakdown 2 years into the pandemic is going beyond incompetence.

* Focusing on "cases" beyond a coarse "going up or going down" is largely useless. Observed "cases" are more likely to indicate test penetration than actual case numbers, and test penetration may significantly vary between age groups, institutionalization settings, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com