Seems to be some confusion between “asymptomatic” and “asymptomatic and never test positive.”
It is maddening that journalists will take these quotes from scientists and never bother linking to the actual study or data. The only Siskone trial of J&J vaccine effectiveness manuscript I can find is this one:
It has absolutely nothing on asymptomatic infection in either vaccinated or unvaccinated individuals. If you have a link, I’d appreciate it.
Regardless, the existence of vaccinated asymptomatic spreaders is not evidence against vaccines reducing infection or spread in a vacuum. The relevant metric is all spreaders, symptomatic and asymptomatic, in vaxxed vs. unvaxxed, and you haven’t shown that.
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Anecdotally, I assumed that asymptomatic people were spreading Omicron plenty. But now that you mention it, most/all the people I had mentally categorized as “asymptomatic” are actually “I have had sniffles all winter from shit my kid brings home, it’s not COVID…. oh shit, it was actually COVID this time.”
Given breakthroughs, presymptomatic spread, community prevalence, and what appears to be rapid incubation period, I dont even think we need to get into the asymptomatic spread level debate to say that vaxxed and unvaxxed should currently take the exact same precautions to reduce spread.
We are a least starting to see a few localities mandate N95/KN95 for all while supplying people with masks. A good start as Id argue N95 for all more useful than vax mandates currently in terms of spread reduction (not saying dont mandate vaxxes), although probably kinda late for this wave. Ideally we’d have N95 mandates that spring on based on community metrics going forward.
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Apologies in advance if some posts that weren’t related to this separate topic were accidentally moved here.
No, I’m not going around maskless, but I actually do disagree with him. I think that if I were exposed to covid, whether masked or for some reason maskless, I’d be ~75% less likely to bring it home compared to an identically masked or unmasked unvaccinated person thanks to being boosted. That’s not 100% “safe,” but it’s a meaningful reduction.
It’s so there’s somewhere for the discussion to happen without complaints that it’s somehow “ruining” the main COVID thread.
The point is that this discussion, which gets rehashed every single day, is not actually about COVID, it’s about meta shit like whether someone said that Johnny said that someone else said that boosters mean we can all spit in each other’s mouths or whatever the fuck.
Johnny thinks that vaccine protection against transmission is currently so minimal that vaccinated and unvaccinated people should be taking more or less exactly the same precautions. I am crystal fucking clear on this and so is everyone else, yet for some reason the same circular discussion takes up 50 posts per day. I am scrolling through the thread ignoring every Johnny post and every post replying to him or which seems to be about the same subject, and I don’t want to be doing that because I want to actually read posts from all those posters which are not this same interminable discussion.
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[quote=“LetsGambool2, post:96, topic:7197”]I dont even think we need to get into the asymptomatic spread level debate to say that vaxxed and unvaxxed should currently take the exact same precautions to reduce spread.
[/quote]
My on what people here are saying is that people on both sides of the table agree on this point.
What is your percentage?
It’s a 75% reduction in any symptomatic infection, including mild.
This is not necessarily true.
On average, yes. But you don’t just take rate symptomatic cases and convert some of them them into asymptomatic cases, and add those to the rate of unvaxxed symptomatic cases. Unvaxxed asymptomatic cases turn into non-cases.
We don’t have good data on the rate of asymptomatic but detectable infection in vaxxed vs. unvaxxed. That’s what I’ve been saying. It’s not at all obvious that it should be that much higher in vaccinated people.
No like, I think you are correct that 75% is substantially too high and also that effectiveness is likely lower vs asymptomatic infections. I also don’t think you can prove your case on any of this, the data are just not good enough. And what distinguishes this for me from earlier endless discussions is that the answer doesn’t matter. You’ve already said downthread that 75% vs 25% effectiveness isn’t changing your decisions. The caseload in the US right now is such that even 75% effectiveness probably means a higher chance of contracting it on a trip out of the house than 0% effectiveness did a couple months ago. By the time this is no longer true, we will have better data and everyone’s boosters will have worn off anyway. There are no broader policy implications because there basically is no policy on preventing spread at this point other than quarantining known cases. So it just seems like pure “someone is wrong on the internet”. If you convinced Wookie of everything you’re saying, would anything change on a prescriptive level?
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Transmission still seems kind of important given hospitals aren’t able to function properly.
Omicron is almost certainly not comparable to a cold on a societal level.
Yeah, probably, or at least if there is a measurable difference in the asymptomatic case rate, the rate of asymptomatic cases in both the vaxxed and unvaxxed populations are going to be small compared with the symptomatic cases.
I think much less, because, when considering all symptomatic cases, they’re down 75%, and as we have seen, the majority of cases are symptomatic, including in the data you showed recently that had a 2-16% asymptomatic case rate. If you hypothesize that most or all of that reduction in symptomatic cases no real reduction in total cases but instead there is just shifting cases from being symptomatic to asymptomatic, you have a lot of work to show, because there is nothing shown along those lines so far, and that would be a pretty big thing to miss. If you don’t think that, then yes, of course vaccines substantially reduce cases.
Not sure your personal state of health is relevant to policy, transmission dynamics, or severity tbh.
Edit: idk maybe we are talking past each other. Glad you aren’t very ill.
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Wookie, would your 75% reduction be per interaction or overall. Like let’s say, #s purely out of the air, that an unvaccinated person is 80% to get Omicron from one exposure of X minutes, but 100% to get it eventually from constant exposure every day.
Would the similarly situated but vaccinated person’s overall chances of getting it be:
a) 25% or
b) (80% x 25%) + (80% x 25%) + (80% x 25%)…… = really good chance of getting it overall
It seems to me that the persistent disagreement is over phrasing and characterization.
Boosters show 70-75% efficacy vs. Omicron. That’s substantial protection.
We’re currently in an environment where Omicron is widely circulating, and as such, even a 75% reduction in risk leaves you pretty exposed to catching a case due to frequency of exposure, if you take no other precautions. If Omicron is in every store you enter, every office building, every school, etc, then you’re just spinning that wheel and testing that efficacy too many times.
That said, the vaccine and booster still offers very good protection against severe outcomes, so plenty of people feel safe rolling those dice - but probably not a ton of people here fall into that category.
The rest of it seems to just be re-airing old grievances about takes from months ago.
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