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Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

Makes sense. Packages dont host, provide a breeding ground for, and spread extremely contagious viruses.

People are refuting it now but China thought that mail was dangerous around 9 days ago:

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/coronavirus-china-disinfects...

Also packages contain cardboard which is often host to roaches and other plague spreaders, but we both know you were referring to a specific virus.

Fomite spread has definitely been confirmed. It's a low-probability scenario but not impossible--worth paying attention to if you have done a lot about the airborne vector, not worth looking at if you're not.

It doesn't last very long out in the open--but it can last longer sealed up and longer still on cold products.

Doesn't make sense, because the vaccine does not prevent infection. Meaning the vaccinated are getting infected at same or higher rates than unvaccinated, and spreading it just the same. Current data for Ontario. 3rd graph. Case rate per 100k.

https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data?fbclid=1

Ontario is 89% fully vaccinated by your own link. In order to assess whether vaccinated are getting infected at same or higher rates (certainly untrue, but that is what you assert), you have to adjust for the fact that there are vastly more vaccinated in Ontario. A quick and dirty (but still pretty good) method is to simply multiply the "unvaccinated" numbers in "3rd graph. Case rate per 100k" by 10. If you make that adjustment it is quite clear that the unvaccinated are getting decimated by infection as compared to the vaccinated. This holds for graph 1 (in ICU) and graph 2 (in hospital) as well.

From the link: "Rate of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 is calculated by dividing the number of cases for a vaccination status, by the total number of people with the same vaccination status, and then multiplying by 100,000."

I'm as surprised as you are, but those particular graphs do indeed support GP's statement about vaccinated having higher case rates. (Doesn't mean the risk is the same: are the vaccinated more likely to have parties?) But GP has no evidence for the vaccinated "spreading it just the same".

That makes zero sense what you wrote. You're proposing to adjust the numbers twice.

3rd graph.

January 5th (peak):

78 cases per 100k people in the unvaccinated group.

102 cases per 100k people who were double vaccinated

January 26th:

35 cases per 100k people in the unvaccinated group.

37 cases per 100k people in the double vaccinated group.

My claim stands that the vaccinated have the same or higher chance of being infected based on this data.

There's something weird going on in that graph.

If you click through each age group individually, they all show the unvaccinated rate per 100k as much higher than vaccinated. Yet, the "All ages" group has the opposite.

That doesn't seem like it should be possible. The age ranges supposedly cover every age (0 to 80+ seems like all ages to me), and within each sub-group, unvaccinated case rates are larger... it doesn't seem possible for the all-ages graph to show the opposite.

Do you have any insight into that discrepancy?

Possibly not what's happening, but this is a well-known occurrence in comparing subsets to an overall set. It's called Simpson's Paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

Yes, they stopped tracking by age, I believe October 24th. So when you switch the graph to view by age group you're seeing the graph upto October 24th. It shows you data before Omicron. There's a disclaimer on top of the page explaining this.

A package has more right to travel than a human. Period.

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