I am a science guy and I’m worried. I saw viral evolution up close and personal in some very large fermentors. I believe.
Do you see that chart that you just posted that says “Share of Population Fully Vaccinated against COVID-19?” Look at where Israel is and then look at where the UK is and tell me which is higher.
Edit: I see you’ve ninja-edited your post to remove Israel so I guess we’re in agreement?
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We’re having a surge because of government decided to let the delta variant run wild before taking the drastic action of doing nothing until the 19th of July where it was announced yesterday that we will not ask the public to wear masks and fully open up for our freedom day the 19th July, Oh and we didn’t stop air travel or bother to ask the travellers or ViPs to isolate & the school age children have been running wild around the shops etc without vaccination and no-one here is really bothered now with masks except in some stores, og and we had some massive outdoor events without masks that has contributed to the surge.
Basically the opposite of what your meant to do wrt pandemics…
https://mobile.twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1412310646704816130
https://mobile.twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1412314108767182851
Basically this is our new Health secretary and he along with our PM is trying to divert the blame of the next surge on the general public when it happens later in the year…
https://mobile.twitter.com/ImIncorrigible/status/1412338782934814724
We have to learn to live with Covid-19 now according to our PM as said in the public daily briefing.
Oh… Most EU and some others have banned us from travelling there anytime in the near future, welcome to plague Island.
We are in agreement that single vaxxed people are not the cause of increased infections in the UK.
They are not, the rise is in 20-29 year olds and school aged teenagers and these people are the worst for not wearing masks that I’ve seen and about maybe 5% of this age group around here have masks on.
This is the opposite of what Wookie and I said, please stop lying.
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It’s an open question imo what’s going on in areas with rising cases. Churchill treats these subtleties with his usual care itt.
Wasn’t vaccine efficacy measured at a time when mitigation measures were more strictly practiced, and doesn’t it therefore stand to reason that efficacy will be lower when everybody’s on that YOLO?
I don’t think there’s any reason to expect that efficacy will be lower when average behavior is less cautious. That is, if a vaccinated individual is 95% less likely to become infected than an otherwise-identical unvaccinated individual, it’s not obvious that would change.
However, if everyone is jacking up their risk from X to Y, then the number of vaccinated individuals becoming infected would increase from (1-.95)X to (1-.95)Y.
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There’s a jillion differences between the US and the UK. Possibly, America’s YOLO stance toward lockdowns means lots of people got natural immunity from exposure to COVID.
Even with this delta variant, it’s pretty clear that this will stop spreading if we can get to 70-80% of the people fully vaccinated. Looks like that’s never happening in USA#1.
I don’t think that matters, or at least I don’t see how people wearing masks helps or hurts your body’s response to the vaccine.
Uh-oh. Pfizer might not be that good after all
64% protection against symptomatic covid. 93% against cases serious enough to warrant hospitalization
Never read articles about this related to Moderna though
How about you ask me how many people in the US are either unvaccinated or with a single dose?
I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that the probability that a vaccinated person gets infected is partly a function of the size of the innoculum they encounter, and that when everyone is masking, the average innoculum that people encounter will be smaller. It’s supported by the idea that cloth masks, despite being not totally effective at blocking aerosolized viruses are really good at preventing the spread of covid. Tough to test this directly, though, and it’s even tough to come up with a proxy.
Sure, but isn’t the same true for the probability that an unvaccinated person gets infected?
The latter statement is trivially true, but it’s definitely possible that NPIs could change measured efficacy. Recall that vaccine efficacy is basically the percentage of infected, unvaccinated people in an experiment who would not have been infected if they were vaccinated instead. (Obviously you can’t observe a counterfactual, so you use an experimental group and a control, but that’s what you’re trying to measure.) So, if you run an experiment with 10,000 people in each group, and 100 of the unvaxed get sick and only 5 of the vaxed do, efficacy is 95%. All basic stuff.
The key statistical point, though, is that you’re only observing and measuring efficacy over a portion of the universe of possible infection-causing events–the events that are actually occurring in the world over the course of the experiment. If those patterns change, then your prior measurement of efficacy could no longer be correct. For example, imagine you were testing the efficacy of seatbelts in preventing car-related fatalities. You run a test in the present day and discover that seatbelts have very high efficacy, because they keep people from being thrown out of cars. Now imagine that 10 years from now, Tesla has introduced perfect self-driving cars that never crash, but sometimes their batteries overheat and the cars are engulfed in flames. If you rerun the experiment, you might find that the efficacy of seatbelts is negative. The thing they’re good for, crashes, never happens any more, and the real problem is escaping the inferno when your car erupts in flames, and being buckled in is bad for that.
One could purely wild-ass speculate that a vaccinated immune system might be able to fight off a moderate exposure to COVID without developing a detectable illness, but still be vulnerable to a higher dose. If that speculation is true and if the distribution of possibly-infective events the average person encounters shifts towards higher doses due to larger crowds, less masking, etc., then it’s possible that the efficacy goes down. The biology of each individual situation is unchanged, but the composition of events that go into the current efficacy of the vaccine is changed.
Of course, it could work the other way too–maybe the average unvaxxed immune system has some chance of fighting off a mild exposure but that natural resistance drops off faster at higher exposures than it does for vaxxed folks. In that case, observed efficacy would go up if people stop wearing masks (even though more vaccinated people would be getting sick than in the masked situation.)
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The hypothesis would rely on the idea that the probability of infection flips pretty rapidly from 0 to 1 at at or around some threshold number of viral particles, rather than being a smooth increase for all doses. The threshold is pretty low for the unvaccinated and much higher for the vaccinated, so for the unvaccinated, either they’re avoiding the virus entirely or getting sick, while for the vaccinated, they were being protected against low levels for the most part, but if that starts increasing then their threshold gets crossed more.
That’s what I was getting at, thank you for stating it smarterer.
I don’t mean to suggest this isn’t possible. I just don’t think we know yet whether/how the efficacy of the vaccines vary as a function of background prevalence and individual behavior. There seems to be a general belief (both online and with people I talk to in person) that it’s obvious the efficacy will decline as restrictions drop. I don’t think it’s obvious, that’s all.
The majority of the UK is AZ and not mRNA which apparently isn’t very effective at all vs Delta. They’ve dropped all measures of safety as well and they had a vaccine shortage so the 18-25 group is still having a tough time getting vaccinated.
Source: Sister who lives there.
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