Thanks.
And hmmm. See my earlier reply to Lion, a couple of posts above.
And…
1 Like
Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote on Friday, "The messaging over the last month in the U.S. has basically served to terrify the vaccinated
Is that really true for most of the vaccinated? While I have been keeping my mask on and avoiding crowds, it’s not because I have been terrified. Give us some respect, Gandhi. It’s just pretty damn easy to take a few precautions to avoid getting and spreading sickness and I don’t mind doing it.
7 Likes
The vaccine does provide a significant reduction that you’ll develop an infection. If you do develop an infection, it provides a significant reduction in the duration you’ll be able to spread that on to someone else and in how large your ability is to spread it on. It also provides a significant reduction in the impacts of the worst effects. It provides and even more significant reduction that those effects lead to hospitalization or death.
It’s not a force field that stops virus particles from entering your system.
It’s not an absolute either, while it reduces those items statistically across all the people vaccinated, it’s a statistical reduction. There will be unlucky people who breakthrough that and are the other side of it not being 100% perfect.
So, some (but very very few statistically) may end up in the hospital or die.
Slightly more will end up with symptoms and very unpleasant impacts.
Slightly more will end up with symptoms and slight impcats.
Slightly more will be able to spread the virus on to others for some duration.
Slightly more will be able to spread the virus on to others for a shorter duration.
Many many many more will not do any of those things.
Keep your number and severity of exposure events small enough, and “slight” isn’t likely to matter.
Order up rounds of shot glasses full of COVID and toss them back, and “slightly” or “small percentage” start to become meaningful raw numbers because the starting spot is so large.
A vaccinated person in the exact same environment with the exact same exposure as an unvaccinated person has significantly reduced risk.
17 Likes
I honestly think a little fear is warranted here at this point.
We’re spreading more viruses, at a faster rate, in every community in the US. Deaths are reaching higher than during the lockdown periods. Hospital systems HAVE fully collapsed. If you get into a car accident in Hawaii and need ICU treatment you’re going to get flown to California. The vaccines are minimizing the effect dramatically on vaccinated people, but it’s still an ever increasing number of vaccinated people entering the hospitals that are overwhelmed by unvaccinated people.
So, I would think some fear is definitely warranted.
16 Likes
There’s another UCSF doctor, Peter Chin-Hong, who has been a frequent guest on my local NPR station to discuss Covid issues. For months he repeatedly made incredibly inaccurate statements like this one, which drove me nuts:
That statement about the relative risk compared to death by meteor (which was repeated many times as FACT, including in writing on his website) was obviously never true, even before the rise of Delta. I understand he was trying to encourage vaccinations but that kind of straight-up lying to the public about risk assessment is the kind of thing that leads to irresponsible behavior and then breeds mistrust when people learn that the experts haven’t been straight with them.
10 Likes
The lightning strike odds really upset me. There are an estimated 200,000 lightning strike incidents every year world wide. That results in odds of one in 38,370. Of getting killed by a meteor? That may not have ever happened in history, so…
1 Like
“Active” means currently illin.
An active case would be one counted from diagnosis to 10 days post diagnosis, or from symptom onset to 10 days post symptom onset. So it doesn’t mean the guy that got covid in January and is fine (or dead). But it does mean the lady who got a fever last night and tested positive. Even though some people are sick for longer than 10 days, and some less, that’s the generally accepted mean.
There are far more people covid positive and feeling sick than there are people hospitalized for covid, so the idea of tracking ‘current total caseload’ (active cases) would give you a total population currently sick (symptomatic and asymptomatic). Even within a hospital, there are known positive cases and People Under Investigation (PUI). Since the tests aren’t instantaneous, and the tests aren’t perfect, people who appear to have covid19 but test negative (or are test-result pending) are considered PUI. For instance, a patient with fever, couch, and the covid-typical CT scan and blood tests, but a negative swab would be a PUI.
It is hard to track asymptomatic cases who don’t get tested, and there’s so much politics about getting tracked/traced and getting tested and and and that it monkey wrenches the data and requires some guesswork.
8 Likes
The other important thing in the article about breakthrough infections is:
It’s not clear how much we should be worrying about them. For the vaccinated, Covid resembles the flu and usually a mild one. Society does not grind to a halt over the flu.
Sure, for some people the flu really is dangerous and I would think the same thing is true for COVID. But, for the majority of people it is not.
The biggest beneficiaries of all of our current restrictions are the people choosing to remain unvaccinated.
3 Likes
I live out here in the SF East Bay (Contra Costa) and, in particular, the second town in the county to hit 90%+ fully vaccinated (we were there by mid-June IIRC). It’s hard to imagine a higher vaccination rate than this (although it’s weird, since my town had consistently one of the shittiest childhood vaccination rates in California, with medical exceptions all over the place). This is one of the most vaccinated jurisdictions on the planet.
That said, my wife got it in late July and it lingered most of August – nothing too bad, but a sort of progressive party of symptoms – headache for a few days, chills for a few days, something akin to bad allergies for a few days – sort of rolled through stuff for about four weeks. PulseOx was never below 98%.
Anecdotally, I had a strong reaction to dose No. 2, my wife had nothing.
It sucked, but more from the length of it than the depth of any particular symptom.
5 Likes
It does, though. Massively reduced for the initial strains it was developed for, and still about 5 to 8x reduced chance for the delta variant based on current data.
8 Likes
If you’re vaccinated and reasonably healthy, your risk of death or serious complications if you do get a breakthrough are on the order or 0.01-0.1%. Out of curiosity, do you avoid all 1 in 10,000,000 risks of death? I don’t say it to be snarky, but because I think we’d do well, as individuals and collectively, to be more consistent in how we think about and manage risks. Not doing that is how we get all kinds of crazy behavior that gets lots of people unnecessarily killed, and lots of money and time wasted for no or negative benefit.
Also, on the original post: why is everyone pretending this is based on new data? It’s the same statistics as ever, just viewed through a different lens. More data points, since there’s always more data points becoming available, but nothing new in terms of the underlying trends.
1 Like
Also, breakthrough infections last several times shorter duration and have lower peak viral loads, with much lower risk of hospitalization or death.
2 Likes
Seems to me that you’ve got a few too many zeros there.
4 Likes
I do not. The post I replied to said a 1 in 10k risk of infection is too high for them. 1 in 10k risk of infection times 0.1% risk of death conditional on infection if vaccinated while otherwise healthy and not elderly yields 1 in 10M risk of death. And that’s a high estimate, actual risk if death if infected can be much lower if you’re younger, for example.
Yes, I realize the 1 in 5k number was per day and therefore somewhat misleading. I was not replying to that either.
2 Likes
Caveat: I haven’t read the article. I certainly haven’t picked it apart in detail. I’m on a deadline right now, and I don’t need the rabbit-hole. BB is procrastination enough. Having said that…
I suspect we’re seeing something that often happens when statistical language is used carelessly in everyday conversation. The classic example is the birthday problem: how many people need to be polled before you have a greater than 50% chance of two of them having the same birthday? The answer is “about 20”, which is surprising when you remember that there are 365 days in a year. A 50% chance should be more like 180-ish people, shouldn’t it? It stops being surprising when you remember that we’re not talking about your birthday, but any two people out of the group.
w.r.t. your numbers, some quirks of numbers leap to mind.
- 1 in 5000 chance per person per day in a town of 50,000 people means an average of 10 people infected per day, which sounds like a hell of a lot for a small chance in a small town. It jars with our intuition, given the 1/5000 long-odds announcement.
- [ETA]: A 1/5000 chance per day means everybody has a 7% chance in a year, on average. “A 7% chance this year” sounds kinda unlikely, but not farfetched; it could definitely happen. “A 1 in 5000 chance today” sounds very unlikely, maybe even farfetched. But they’re the same odds.
- It’s not a dice-roll style independent event that randomly happens or doesn’t. Getting infected happens in clusters; it’s happening to people who are breathing the same air for a while. You expect clumps. If you don’t have them, it means you have undiagnosed cases out there somewhere.
It’s entirely possible to see numbers like yours, and have 1:5000 odds. Counter-intuitive, yes. Stats are really hard; even professional statisticians think so. Which is why I believe that headlines like this one are unhelpful. When the headline clashes with our intuition, it mostly just leaves doubt. A more helpful headline is the one we had here last week about how infection is about 4.5 times less likely in the fully-vaxxed, and death 15 times less likely.
5 Likes
I dislike putting personal info on the net but this seems important:
My family got the Pfizer vaccine back in April/May. My wife got covid a couple weeks ago despite always being masked when going out. The rest of us came down with it a couple days later. 4 out of 4. Of all of us, she was hit the hardest and is still recovering. It was much milder for everyone else. My wife and I have several additional risk factors so I hate to think what it might have done if we weren’t already vaccinated.
20 Likes
Very disappointing to see this headline within the context of the data pooled. I do not think the sample size and basis used to make this estimation is generalizable in anyway. I would predict it is much higher odds as delta progresses/active cases increase. Case in point, in my office of ~60 people (all vaccinated) we have had 8 confirmed breakthrough cases (one ended up in the ICU) in last 4 weeks from what appears to be 3 different sources. Now I can right a headline based on this sample that your odds are ~1 in 8. We all want to move on, but this type of reporting creates a false sense of security that could be costly.
3 Likes
Surely each day is independent of previous days, like a roulette spin. It’s not cumulative, it’s the same 1 in 5000 chance each day.
1 Like
It’s likely cumulative. That’s how they derived the stat in the first place, by dividing the risk over time into days to get a misleading daily stat.
2 Likes
