The discussion we were having was about vaccines reducing cases (but you argue not by as much as I think because you think there are a lot of vaccinated asymptomatic cases that aren’t being tested because of no symptoms) and spread, and you claimed that the contagious window is not dependent on symptomatic expression. That only can be true if never-symptomatic people are as contagious as people who became symptomatic. That isn’t obvious, I hadn’t seen any study that showed that, and I didn’t think you had, either. That’s not a charge to send you to find a crappy study you’ve never seen before. It’s either an invitation to share what you based your claim on (presumably something you’d be able to find easily again), or a charge that you’re just making something up. What you presented was not a paper that supported your claim that contagiousness was independent of being symptomatic, and wasn’t an especially informative study on its own. Instead, it and its citations generally supported my positions that never-symptomatic cases are a minority of all cases, and that while the data are pretty weak and could use some better backing, it seems to be more likely than not that never-symptomatic cases are less contagious than ones that would present symptoms.
What is your definition of “often” here? Because I think that the vaccines reduce both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases to be non-cases who were never able to spread, that asymptomatic cases of both the vaccinated and unvaccinated are less contagious overall (granted, this is more of a hypothesis because of what data are out there), that cases in the vaccinated are contagious for less time than in the unvaccinated (as has been previously cited in an old covid thread showing faster viral falloff in the vaccinated), and that of the vaccinated people who do get sick, a majority are people who eventually become symptomatic (shown here, for one: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00460-6/fulltext).
This is all true! It’s why I’m talking so much about people who are never-symptomatic, because you keep trying to conjure up a huge number of vaccinated people who get infected and become contagious but without being counted in the vaccine effectiveness numbers. Someone who’s contagious before symptoms is someone who, by definition, eventually had symptoms and therefore would have been counted as a symptomatic case. We just aren’t seeing large numbers of never-symptomatic people out there who are spreading the disease.
I’m grunching and this may have been covered by earlier posts but how would we see this if it was happening? My biggest fear during the pandemic has been getting an asymptomatic infection and unknowingly passing it on to older/younger relatives or immunocompromised friends. I’d assume this would get missed in contact tracing because theoretically by the time someone you infected became symptomatic you’d be testing negative but I could easily be wrong about that.
Yeah I saw the mixed messaging too. Maybe they just meant they woudl have it ready for trials by March? Then 5 months of trials / ramped up manufacturing before release?
This is better evidence than has ever been cited for this assertion, but on the other hand, we also have ample evidence posted here of people being qRT-PCR positive but non-contagious well after symptomatic expression has peaked and is waning, and it goes against the studies cited in the modeling paper you linked that shows some effect when actually measuring person-to-person transmission.
As far as this:
My counter is also very simple: if never-symptomatic cases are a minority of unvaxxed cases (and everything seems to indicate that they are), and never-symptomatic cases are a minority of vaxxed cases (and all studies shown inidcate that they are), and if vaccines are knocking down symptomatic cases by 75-97% (depending on which stage of the pandemic we’re in and what sort of vaccination), then vaccines also have to be knocking down never symptomatic cases by approximately as much. If they were not successful in this, and you were correct that asymptomatic cases were a big issue, then they would represent a majority of cases when measured, and we’re just not seeing that. They’re still a minority of cases, which means the vaccines are effective against asymptomatic cases. Again, if you have data contrary to this, feel free to post it.
What I cited, which is what you cited, show that the majority of cases are symptomatic. If you are counting deaths not specifically attributed to covid but above background as asymptomatic cases, for one, those are much less than the number of cases, and two, a death is a symptomatic case. Death is a symptom.
Also, symptomatic kids are hardly uncommon. They may not wind up in the hospital all that often, but they get coughs and sore throats. Just look in the main covid thread! It’s not like people here who get pozzed and have kids have their kids not noticeably affected most of the time. Most people see symptoms in their kids when they’ve gotten sick themselves.
“ After two doses effectiveness was 9% and 13% respectively for BA.1 and BA.2, after 25+ weeks ,” the UKHSA said. “This increased to 63% for BA.1 and 70% for BA.2 from two weeks following a booster vaccine.”
