3 ms·

Why not a policy of “vaccinated or recovered”? The data is pretty clear that the latter have ~~10x better immunity against reinfection. They also arguably provi

by breck 5y ago

Why not a policy of “vaccinated or recovered”? The data is pretty clear that the latter have ~~10x better immunity against reinfection. They also arguably provide better protection for the rest of us, since their natural immunity is less a monoculture.

runawaybottle 5y ago
That is my thought as well. If you had Covid, isn’t that the best vaccine you can get?
- scott_s 5y ago
  No. https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/why-covid-19-vaccines-offer-better-protection-than-infection.html https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/why-covid-19-vaccine...
  - throwaway3neu94 5y ago
    In addition to all the points that article makes, two more: 1. There are a lot of people that believe they already had Covid, but actually didn't. 2. A "vaccinated or recovered" policy is even harder to enforce, as there are vaccination certificates but no recovery certificates. (Yes, vaccination certificates can be faked, but it seems likely to me that a significant part of the population would be willing to lie but not falsify documents.)
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      There are tests for both presence of antibodies (quick and cheap, you can get one at many pharmacies or quick-care clinics) and T-cell immununity (IDK the cost or availabilty of those).
  - breck 5y ago
    She's lying. Notice how she links to no actual datasets. On the contrary, all the big datasets show clearly a long lasting, low risk of reinfection for the recovered. Here, I include an actual dataset (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...) unlike "Virologist Sabra Klein".
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      Yeah, I personally just don’t get it. Your whole life you are told once you get the chicken pox, you won’t get it again. Once you get this year’s flu variant, you won’t get it again. What is different about Coronavirus?
      - anyfoo 5y ago
        That sounds a bit simplistic. The common cold is also a viral disease, and people get it relatively frequently. AIDS is a viral disease with famously peculiar properties, constantly mutating and masquerading. Not all viral diseases are the same.
        runawaybottle 5y ago
        So, again, theme of the day, have we not figured out the difference between aids, the flu, the cold, and the coronavirus? It feels like everyone is running from the truth here.
        anyfoo 5y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean. Biology is incredibly complex. It would be hard/impossible to compress the "differences" into simple statements, I imagine.
        runawaybottle 5y ago
        Is that true? We’ve classified a lot of things in life. The entire taxonomy of animals for example. No, I’m sorry, this is not beyond us. Where does Coronavirus fall? It’s not HIV, that’s for sure. Is it closer to the flu, or not? I think we’re done playing this game as a society.
        anyfoo 5y ago
        Coronavirus is a kind of virus. Some of the many strains of the common cold are coronaviruses, so are COVID-19 and MERS. Flus are their own kind of virus, “influenza viruses”, but I only know what I know from quick conversations with actual biologists, so take it with a grain of salt. I don’t know whether taxonomy is necessarily helpful here. Some frogs are poisonous, some are delicacies, and they come in all sorts of colors, abilities, and sizes.
Kaze404 5y ago
What data?
- breck 5y ago
  All the data. Dataset after dataset. For example, 150K patients tracked by Israel: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...
  - Kaze404 5y ago
    > This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
    - anonygler 5y ago
      You people are exhausting. Look here idiots! A tiktok of Bill Nye failing to blow out a candle with a mask on! Definitive proof that masks work! [Comprehensive data that challenges my beliefs] But this hasn't been peer reviewed!
wombat-man 5y ago
Antibodies from the vaccine are a lot more numerous and longer lasting in one's body. Apparently having had it only gives you a shorter duration of immunity.
- breck 5y ago
  This is false. Data out of Israel now is that vaccine is ~40% effective (https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-is-less-effective-against-delta-infections-but-still-prevents-serious-illness-israel-study-shows-11627059395 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-is-less...), while recovery is 99.9% effective (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...).
  - Imnimo 5y ago
    These are not comparable quantities. The 99.9% is simply not an effectiveness rate, it's simply a raw calculation of how many recovered people were not reinfected over a time period. To convert that to an effectiveness rate, you would have to compare it to infection rate among unvaccinated & previously-uninfected people. This is what's being done in the 40% calculation. Trying to compare these numbers is flat-out misinformation.
    - breck 5y ago
      The ballparks are indeed comparable, though I agree that I could have used numbers of a closer type. A good back of the envelope guess is that if you've recovered from COVID odds are ~99.9% you won't get it again (for at least a year according to the data, more according to what we know about the immune system). If you haven't had it but gotten the vaccine, odds are [infectionRate]*.6[andRising] that you will get it. Or to put it another way, more vaccinated people in Israel tested positive for COVID just yesterday than all of the reinfections combined (~2K versus ~700). I still think the vaccine is a good bet if you are over ~20 and haven't had COVID, but from the data I see natural immunity is going to be the main thing that gets us out of this pandemic, with vaccine the secondary factor.

by breck 5y ago

runawaybottle 5y ago

That is my thought as well. If you had Covid, isn’t that the best vaccine you can get?

scott_s 5y ago
No. https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/why-covid-19-vaccines-offer-better-protection-than-infection.html https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/why-covid-19-vaccine...
- throwaway3neu94 5y ago
  In addition to all the points that article makes, two more: 1. There are a lot of people that believe they already had Covid, but actually didn't. 2. A "vaccinated or recovered" policy is even harder to enforce, as there are vaccination certificates but no recovery certificates. (Yes, vaccination certificates can be faked, but it seems likely to me that a significant part of the population would be willing to lie but not falsify documents.)
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    There are tests for both presence of antibodies (quick and cheap, you can get one at many pharmacies or quick-care clinics) and T-cell immununity (IDK the cost or availabilty of those).
- breck 5y ago
  She's lying. Notice how she links to no actual datasets. On the contrary, all the big datasets show clearly a long lasting, low risk of reinfection for the recovered. Here, I include an actual dataset (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...) unlike "Virologist Sabra Klein".
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    Yeah, I personally just don’t get it. Your whole life you are told once you get the chicken pox, you won’t get it again. Once you get this year’s flu variant, you won’t get it again. What is different about Coronavirus?
    - anyfoo 5y ago
      That sounds a bit simplistic. The common cold is also a viral disease, and people get it relatively frequently. AIDS is a viral disease with famously peculiar properties, constantly mutating and masquerading. Not all viral diseases are the same.
      - runawaybottle 5y ago
        So, again, theme of the day, have we not figured out the difference between aids, the flu, the cold, and the coronavirus? It feels like everyone is running from the truth here.
        anyfoo 5y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean. Biology is incredibly complex. It would be hard/impossible to compress the "differences" into simple statements, I imagine.
        runawaybottle 5y ago
        Is that true? We’ve classified a lot of things in life. The entire taxonomy of animals for example. No, I’m sorry, this is not beyond us. Where does Coronavirus fall? It’s not HIV, that’s for sure. Is it closer to the flu, or not? I think we’re done playing this game as a society.
        anyfoo 5y ago
        Coronavirus is a kind of virus. Some of the many strains of the common cold are coronaviruses, so are COVID-19 and MERS. Flus are their own kind of virus, “influenza viruses”, but I only know what I know from quick conversations with actual biologists, so take it with a grain of salt. I don’t know whether taxonomy is necessarily helpful here. Some frogs are poisonous, some are delicacies, and they come in all sorts of colors, abilities, and sizes.

Kaze404 5y ago

What data?

breck 5y ago
All the data. Dataset after dataset. For example, 150K patients tracked by Israel: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...
- Kaze404 5y ago
  > This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
  - anonygler 5y ago
    You people are exhausting. Look here idiots! A tiktok of Bill Nye failing to blow out a candle with a mask on! Definitive proof that masks work! [Comprehensive data that challenges my beliefs] But this hasn't been peer reviewed!

wombat-man 5y ago

Antibodies from the vaccine are a lot more numerous and longer lasting in one's body. Apparently having had it only gives you a shorter duration of immunity.

breck 5y ago
This is false. Data out of Israel now is that vaccine is ~40% effective (https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-is-less-effective-against-delta-infections-but-still-prevents-serious-illness-israel-study-shows-11627059395 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-is-less...), while recovery is 99.9% effective (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...).
- Imnimo 5y ago
  These are not comparable quantities. The 99.9% is simply not an effectiveness rate, it's simply a raw calculation of how many recovered people were not reinfected over a time period. To convert that to an effectiveness rate, you would have to compare it to infection rate among unvaccinated & previously-uninfected people. This is what's being done in the 40% calculation. Trying to compare these numbers is flat-out misinformation.
  - breck 5y ago
    The ballparks are indeed comparable, though I agree that I could have used numbers of a closer type. A good back of the envelope guess is that if you've recovered from COVID odds are ~99.9% you won't get it again (for at least a year according to the data, more according to what we know about the immune system). If you haven't had it but gotten the vaccine, odds are [infectionRate]*.6[andRising] that you will get it. Or to put it another way, more vaccinated people in Israel tested positive for COVID just yesterday than all of the reinfections combined (~2K versus ~700). I still think the vaccine is a good bet if you are over ~20 and haven't had COVID, but from the data I see natural immunity is going to be the main thing that gets us out of this pandemic, with vaccine the secondary factor.