Well step one is figure out whether the numbers are talking about infection or death. Being vaccinated doesn’t mean you don’t catch the disease, it just means it almost certainly won’t kill you and whatever symptoms you might have are likely to be minor. If you’re vaccinated and you catch COVID you might not even notice or you might have mild symptoms. All these studies that fly around popular media are using different criteria, and that’s part of the problem. You might catch COVID and test positive for it but have no idea. Other studies are reporting hospitalization rates or symptomatic rates.
The reason nobody is walking around testing positive for polio is because we’ve had herd immunity long enough to almost eliminate it from nature entirely. In the early years of vaccination programs though, plenty of people were still carrying it around.
That’s a very good point. Once the world isn’t a wash in COVID-19 varieties the vaccine will seem more effective. I do wonder if we’ll be able to get there with so much going around and the drastic reduction in safety protocols in public places like schools. It’s nice to know the vaccine is very effective at protecting against death, but the chronic long term effects have me even more concerned. As someone with an autoimmune disease I wouldn’t wish long covid on anyone.
well if everyone (say) in new zealand is vaccinated and someone there travels to the us and gets a breakthrough infection, then fox news might say: “look 100% of new zealand infections are of vaccinated people, and no unvaccinated new zealanders have covid, therefore: the vaccines to blame.”
but clearly that’s wrong because there are no unvaccinated new zealanders ( in this what-if )
that’s actually happening with israel because so many people are vaccinated there ( almost 80% ) - so nearly anyone who gets infected is going to be vaccinated. ( throw a dart and you’re most likely to hit the thing there’s a lot of )
people often mislead with rates in other ways as well. saying “hey we doubled our vaccinations” is great, but if only 2 people were vaccinated and now there are 4… then it’s not stellar. ( a better question is maybe “how long till everyone is vaccinated.” )
tldr. percentages are a portion of something. and sometimes the something is very important to know.
