9 ms·

This measure can't be a way to create "zero covid spaces" because people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus (even though less than unvaccinated peo

by polote 5y ago

This measure can't be a way to create "zero covid spaces" because people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus (even though less than unvaccinated people, but it doesnt seem to be a 90% reduction either). So the goal here is to increase the vaccination rate. It seems pretty weird to ask the indoor business owners to be the ones who are in charge of controlling that the vaccination rate is increasing and to be the one who are punished because the vaccination rate is not high enough.

chadash 5y ago
Alternatively, I'd be much more comfortable going out if I knew everyone around me would be vaccinated.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  But a lot of them can still be positive (i think 30% with AZ vaccine), and somehow noone tests the vaccinated ones, so you'd never know, and most of them are asymptomatic, so they don't even know it. I got my vaccine early on, and haven't been tested since.
  - chadash 5y ago
    Still a lot of unknowns, but seems pretty clear that vaccinated people are less likely to contract and spread. So I like my odds better among a vaccinated crowd.
    - IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
      User timr was presenting a study upthread that the odds of contagion are , as of right now, basically equal between vax and no vax. This was based on the fact the same level of virus load was found in both populations that were infected.
      - chadash 5y ago
        > that were infected These are the key words. But the odds of being infected in the first place are lower if you are vaccinated. So given a choice to spend time with a vaccinated stranger or an unvaccinated one, you should prefer the former if you want to avoid getting sick.
- anthonypasq 5y ago
  why?
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
But we're okay requiring masks, and we're okay putting the onus on businesses to enforce that. I'd much rather enforce vaccinations than masks.
- polote 5y ago
  It more or less made sense to require masks when people where unvaccinated. But now there is no reason to be OK to require masks either unless you are for mask wearing mandate for everything, everywhere, all the time
  - giantg2 5y ago
    "It more or less made sense to require masks when people where unvaccinated. But now there is no reason to be OK to require masks either unless you are for mask wearing mandate for everything, everywhere, all the time" Well, CDC is saying even vaccinated people should be masking. So it seems we are moving to a public-space mask everywhere all the time.
    - coccinelle 5y ago
      I think CDC is saying vaccinated people should be masking, because they may still transmit the virus to all the unvacinated out there that have a much higher likelihood of ending up at the hospital should they get infected. If all were vaccinated, transmission would be much less of a problem (since risk of acute symptoms would be way lowered) and I'm not sure the CDC would mandate masks.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        If that's true though, then the argument frequently given about requiring vaccinations to prevent mutation is not very strong if vaccinated people are still infectious hosts. So it seems the need to masks even with vaccination exists.
        asdff 5y ago
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> the goal here is to increase the vaccination rate The goal is to avoid overloading the hospital system. Vaccinated people spreading the Delta variant amongst each other is not going to do that. Unvaccinated people getting sick will.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  > The goal is to avoid overloading the hospital system. This is clearly not the goal -- there have been no additions to hospital capacity since the pandemic started in earnest 17 months ago.
  - Daishiman 5y ago
    This is definitely not the case where I live. Existing units were shifted, capacity was reserved, some makeshift isolation units built on containers were purchased. At any rate, that is a substantial cost to build out and maintain.
  - wtfzse 5y ago
    Remember the hospital ship and the stadium hospital and all those hospitals they stood up and had to take down because no one was using them? Remember the goddamn tiktok nurses? Seriously the level of propaganda warfare being waged on the American populace is entirely INSANE.
- rajin444 5y ago
  > The goal is to avoid overloading the hospital system If that's the goal we need to decide what things are ok to go to the hospital for and what aren't. A lot of hospital visits could be prevented if we took the obesity epidemic seriously - I imagine the CFR of covid would be way down if America was not so obese. And if we're ok with mandating vaccines, we should definitely be ok with mandating a healthy bodyfat %. The health gains from the latter would dwarf that of the former.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    "A lot of hospital visits could be prevented if we took the obesity epidemic seriously:" That's a lovely multi-generational idea and we should work towards it in the coming decades. Meanwhile, as 400 Americans die of a preventable illness every single day, we should prioritize reducing the hospitalization rate. Florida became the most recent state to halt surgeries at some hospitals... again.
vkou 5y ago
Vaccinated people produce a much lower viral load. The lower the viral load that your body takes in, when you get infected, the less serious your symptoms/the lower your risk of hospitalization and death.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Researchers found that vaccinated people can produce the same viral load as one exhibiting symptoms (and unvaccinated).
  - vkou 5y ago
    Can, or do? How frequently? How much lower is their viral load, on average, than an unvaccinated person's? You are either making a truly extraordinary claim, or are supporting my point. If vaccination significantly reduces viral load in 95% of cases, it's true that it might not reduce it for everyone. But it makes a huge difference, in terms of public health. Both epidemics, and viral infections are a numbers game. Reduce the denominator in an exponent, or a constant multiplier, and you get the difference between life and death.
    - thisiscorrect 5y ago
      "do" [1] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210803/Unvaccinated-and-vaccinated-have-similar-viral-load-in-communities-high-in-SARS-CoV-2-delta.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210803/Unvaccinated-and-... [2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v...
      - vkou 5y ago
        Can. They sampled people who were getting tested for COVID, and divided the samples into vaccinated-with-breakthrough-cases-who-got-tested and unvaccinated-and-sick-who-got-tested. This completely fails to account for people who are vaccinated, and don't have breakthrough cases, which is the overwhelming majority of vaccinated individuals. Because of the incredible sampling bias in the study [1], the conclusions that it makes are significantly less extraordinary than your claims. Just because someone somewhere runs a study that compares 50 dead-in-car-crash people who were wearing seat belts, and 50 dead people who weren't wearing seat belts, you can't conclude that wearing a seatbelt does not reduce your risk of death or injury.
trutannus 5y ago
> It seems pretty weird to ask the indoor business owners to be the ones who are in charge of controlling that the vaccination rate is increasing and to be the one who are punished because the vaccination rate is not high enough. So far the data coming out of the EU has indicated that when passports and certificates were introduced, there was an uptick in vaccination the day the measure was introduced. Estonia, for instance, has seen this happen.
- schrijver 5y ago
  The Netherlands has seen willingness to vaccinate rise from around 60% at the start of the crisis to 87% right now, and part of this success is attributed to the fact that the government always made it clear that vaccination was not going to be mandatory, and testing would be an alternative.
Alex3917 5y ago
> It seems pretty weird to ask the indoor business owners to be the ones who are in charge of controlling that the vaccination rate is increasing and to be the one who are punished because the vaccination rate is not high enough. If their businesses are spreading the disease then it seems entirely reasonable.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Pretty much this. Businesses that are known to be problematic, like restaurants and bars, should expect that their choice to stay open and continue serving people comes with responsibilities. They don't operate free of consequences, and they shouldn't expect to externalize those consequences. However, it really sucks that the people who mostly end up trying to enforce the mandate are the staff who already have, in most countries, jobs that most of us would not consider fun. The people most likely to insist on going out to eat and entertain are, generally, the sorts of unpleasant folk that already treat waitstaff poorly.
  - chrismcb 5y ago
    Are restaurants and bars known to be problematic?
    - mbg721 5y ago
      They might be in the space of restauruncles.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  With vaccinated people acting as asymptomatic spreaders - this is impossible to know.
cratermoon 5y ago
> people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus Just FYI, a vaccinated person, like anyone else, can only transmit the virus if they have a symptomatic breakthrough case.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  So you're saying there's no such thing as asymptomatic spread of COVID-19? Isn't asymptomatic spread a primary reason for the unprecedented restrictions and mass testing? Edit: Down voters, I would appreciate an explanation for the down votes. Am I missing something simple or is OP mistaken?
  - standardUser 5y ago
    You are (mostly) correct. It is pre-symptomatic transmission that has driven most of the spread. By comparison, asymptomatic carriers have been shown in studies to spread the virus much less effectively. People can still get infected after being vaccinated (or having recovered naturally), but they are far more likely to have a truly asymptomatic case and therefore less likely to spread the virus.
    - chitowneats 5y ago
      That's an interesting distinction I will look into more. Thank you for the reply. If this is the case, I stand by my questioning of OP's statement: "a vaccinated person, like anyone else, can only transmit the virus if they have a symptomatic breakthrough case." This seems an oversimplification.
    - isolli 5y ago
      Would you have a reference? I have been speculating the same for a while, but by now I wish we had some proof rather than speculation.
      - standardUser 5y ago
        Here is one... https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/4/20-4576_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/4/20-4576_article This one is great because it really brings to light the issue with deciphering the data... "Since asymptomatic infections represent a large fraction of the infected population, they contribute substantially to community transmission in the aggregate together with presymptomatic cases, even when they individually transmit at a low per capita rate." https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2019716118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2019716118
paganel 5y ago
> "zero covid spaces" As a tangent, I wish we would get rid of this "zero covid spaces" mania, makes having a reasonable discussion between those who want to continue our lives as normal as possible given the circumstances (I am one of them) and those who want to get back to an illusory "pre-covid normal" basically impossible. One of my grand-mothers died of tuberculosis about 10 years ago. Imo it's as nasty a death as death by covid is. A quick web search tells me 1.4 million people die of TB each year, I suppose an average of 1.4 million (give or take a few hundred-thousands) have died of TB each year for the last half-century at least. Nobody ever talked about us disrupting our daily lives in order to bring TB cases to zero.
- starlust2 5y ago
  The U.S. only has around 600 deaths from TB per year. Covid was 100x more deaths with lockdowns and other restrictions factored in. Not even remotely the same thing.
  - paganel 5y ago
    Sorry that I wasn't clear, I'm not from the US, I know this is an US-article but I see that push to get to zero covid cases in many places, no matter the continent. Probably covid deaths will trickle down to 500-600 per year in places like the US in a few years, a combination of higher access to vaccines and better health facilities, and the number will remain high in places like India/SE Asia, just like it now happens with TB.
    - starlust2 5y ago
      The US numbers still show that TB can be mitigated without intrusive widespread restrictions. The majority of deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and SE Asia. That leads me to believe that the differentiator is access to medical care, primarily access to life saving drugs.
  - jb775 5y ago
    Your covid numbers are 100x skewed and essentially fake.
standardUser 5y ago
"...people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus " Well, yes, In the same way an infant may fight Muhammad Ali. Futurama references aside, the vast majority of data shows that vaccinated people are far less likely to spread the virus.

by polote 5y ago

chadash 5y ago

Alternatively, I'd be much more comfortable going out if I knew everyone around me would be vaccinated.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
But a lot of them can still be positive (i think 30% with AZ vaccine), and somehow noone tests the vaccinated ones, so you'd never know, and most of them are asymptomatic, so they don't even know it. I got my vaccine early on, and haven't been tested since.
- chadash 5y ago
  Still a lot of unknowns, but seems pretty clear that vaccinated people are less likely to contract and spread. So I like my odds better among a vaccinated crowd.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
    User timr was presenting a study upthread that the odds of contagion are , as of right now, basically equal between vax and no vax. This was based on the fact the same level of virus load was found in both populations that were infected.
    - chadash 5y ago
      > that were infected These are the key words. But the odds of being infected in the first place are lower if you are vaccinated. So given a choice to spend time with a vaccinated stranger or an unvaccinated one, you should prefer the former if you want to avoid getting sick.
anthonypasq 5y ago
why?

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

But we're okay requiring masks, and we're okay putting the onus on businesses to enforce that. I'd much rather enforce vaccinations than masks.

polote 5y ago
It more or less made sense to require masks when people where unvaccinated. But now there is no reason to be OK to require masks either unless you are for mask wearing mandate for everything, everywhere, all the time
- giantg2 5y ago
  "It more or less made sense to require masks when people where unvaccinated. But now there is no reason to be OK to require masks either unless you are for mask wearing mandate for everything, everywhere, all the time" Well, CDC is saying even vaccinated people should be masking. So it seems we are moving to a public-space mask everywhere all the time.
  - coccinelle 5y ago
    I think CDC is saying vaccinated people should be masking, because they may still transmit the virus to all the unvacinated out there that have a much higher likelihood of ending up at the hospital should they get infected. If all were vaccinated, transmission would be much less of a problem (since risk of acute symptoms would be way lowered) and I'm not sure the CDC would mandate masks.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      If that's true though, then the argument frequently given about requiring vaccinations to prevent mutation is not very strong if vaccinated people are still infectious hosts. So it seems the need to masks even with vaccination exists.
      - asdff 5y ago

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> the goal here is to increase the vaccination rate The goal is to avoid overloading the hospital system. Vaccinated people spreading the Delta variant amongst each other is not going to do that. Unvaccinated people getting sick will.

AndrewBissell 5y ago
> The goal is to avoid overloading the hospital system. This is clearly not the goal -- there have been no additions to hospital capacity since the pandemic started in earnest 17 months ago.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  This is definitely not the case where I live. Existing units were shifted, capacity was reserved, some makeshift isolation units built on containers were purchased. At any rate, that is a substantial cost to build out and maintain.
- wtfzse 5y ago
  Remember the hospital ship and the stadium hospital and all those hospitals they stood up and had to take down because no one was using them? Remember the goddamn tiktok nurses? Seriously the level of propaganda warfare being waged on the American populace is entirely INSANE.
rajin444 5y ago
> The goal is to avoid overloading the hospital system If that's the goal we need to decide what things are ok to go to the hospital for and what aren't. A lot of hospital visits could be prevented if we took the obesity epidemic seriously - I imagine the CFR of covid would be way down if America was not so obese. And if we're ok with mandating vaccines, we should definitely be ok with mandating a healthy bodyfat %. The health gains from the latter would dwarf that of the former.
- standardUser 5y ago
  "A lot of hospital visits could be prevented if we took the obesity epidemic seriously:" That's a lovely multi-generational idea and we should work towards it in the coming decades. Meanwhile, as 400 Americans die of a preventable illness every single day, we should prioritize reducing the hospitalization rate. Florida became the most recent state to halt surgeries at some hospitals... again.

vkou 5y ago

Vaccinated people produce a much lower viral load. The lower the viral load that your body takes in, when you get infected, the less serious your symptoms/the lower your risk of hospitalization and death.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
Researchers found that vaccinated people can produce the same viral load as one exhibiting symptoms (and unvaccinated).
- vkou 5y ago
  Can, or do? How frequently? How much lower is their viral load, on average, than an unvaccinated person's? You are either making a truly extraordinary claim, or are supporting my point. If vaccination significantly reduces viral load in 95% of cases, it's true that it might not reduce it for everyone. But it makes a huge difference, in terms of public health. Both epidemics, and viral infections are a numbers game. Reduce the denominator in an exponent, or a constant multiplier, and you get the difference between life and death.
  - thisiscorrect 5y ago
    "do" [1] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210803/Unvaccinated-and-vaccinated-have-similar-viral-load-in-communities-high-in-SARS-CoV-2-delta.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210803/Unvaccinated-and-... [2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v...
    - vkou 5y ago
      Can. They sampled people who were getting tested for COVID, and divided the samples into vaccinated-with-breakthrough-cases-who-got-tested and unvaccinated-and-sick-who-got-tested. This completely fails to account for people who are vaccinated, and don't have breakthrough cases, which is the overwhelming majority of vaccinated individuals. Because of the incredible sampling bias in the study [1], the conclusions that it makes are significantly less extraordinary than your claims. Just because someone somewhere runs a study that compares 50 dead-in-car-crash people who were wearing seat belts, and 50 dead people who weren't wearing seat belts, you can't conclude that wearing a seatbelt does not reduce your risk of death or injury.

trutannus 5y ago

> It seems pretty weird to ask the indoor business owners to be the ones who are in charge of controlling that the vaccination rate is increasing and to be the one who are punished because the vaccination rate is not high enough. So far the data coming out of the EU has indicated that when passports and certificates were introduced, there was an uptick in vaccination the day the measure was introduced. Estonia, for instance, has seen this happen.

schrijver 5y ago
The Netherlands has seen willingness to vaccinate rise from around 60% at the start of the crisis to 87% right now, and part of this success is attributed to the fact that the government always made it clear that vaccination was not going to be mandatory, and testing would be an alternative.

Alex3917 5y ago

cratermoon 5y ago
Pretty much this. Businesses that are known to be problematic, like restaurants and bars, should expect that their choice to stay open and continue serving people comes with responsibilities. They don't operate free of consequences, and they shouldn't expect to externalize those consequences. However, it really sucks that the people who mostly end up trying to enforce the mandate are the staff who already have, in most countries, jobs that most of us would not consider fun. The people most likely to insist on going out to eat and entertain are, generally, the sorts of unpleasant folk that already treat waitstaff poorly.
- chrismcb 5y ago
  Are restaurants and bars known to be problematic?
  - mbg721 5y ago
    They might be in the space of restauruncles.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
With vaccinated people acting as asymptomatic spreaders - this is impossible to know.

cratermoon 5y ago

> people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus Just FYI, a vaccinated person, like anyone else, can only transmit the virus if they have a symptomatic breakthrough case.

chitowneats 5y ago
So you're saying there's no such thing as asymptomatic spread of COVID-19? Isn't asymptomatic spread a primary reason for the unprecedented restrictions and mass testing? Edit: Down voters, I would appreciate an explanation for the down votes. Am I missing something simple or is OP mistaken?
- standardUser 5y ago
  You are (mostly) correct. It is pre-symptomatic transmission that has driven most of the spread. By comparison, asymptomatic carriers have been shown in studies to spread the virus much less effectively. People can still get infected after being vaccinated (or having recovered naturally), but they are far more likely to have a truly asymptomatic case and therefore less likely to spread the virus.
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    That's an interesting distinction I will look into more. Thank you for the reply. If this is the case, I stand by my questioning of OP's statement: "a vaccinated person, like anyone else, can only transmit the virus if they have a symptomatic breakthrough case." This seems an oversimplification.
  - isolli 5y ago
    Would you have a reference? I have been speculating the same for a while, but by now I wish we had some proof rather than speculation.
    - standardUser 5y ago
      Here is one... https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/4/20-4576_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/4/20-4576_article This one is great because it really brings to light the issue with deciphering the data... "Since asymptomatic infections represent a large fraction of the infected population, they contribute substantially to community transmission in the aggregate together with presymptomatic cases, even when they individually transmit at a low per capita rate." https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2019716118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2019716118

paganel 5y ago

> "zero covid spaces" As a tangent, I wish we would get rid of this "zero covid spaces" mania, makes having a reasonable discussion between those who want to continue our lives as normal as possible given the circumstances (I am one of them) and those who want to get back to an illusory "pre-covid normal" basically impossible. One of my grand-mothers died of tuberculosis about 10 years ago. Imo it's as nasty a death as death by covid is. A quick web search tells me 1.4 million people die of TB each year, I suppose an average of 1.4 million (give or take a few hundred-thousands) have died of TB each year for the last half-century at least. Nobody ever talked about us disrupting our daily lives in order to bring TB cases to zero.

starlust2 5y ago
The U.S. only has around 600 deaths from TB per year. Covid was 100x more deaths with lockdowns and other restrictions factored in. Not even remotely the same thing.
- paganel 5y ago
  Sorry that I wasn't clear, I'm not from the US, I know this is an US-article but I see that push to get to zero covid cases in many places, no matter the continent. Probably covid deaths will trickle down to 500-600 per year in places like the US in a few years, a combination of higher access to vaccines and better health facilities, and the number will remain high in places like India/SE Asia, just like it now happens with TB.
  - starlust2 5y ago
    The US numbers still show that TB can be mitigated without intrusive widespread restrictions. The majority of deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and SE Asia. That leads me to believe that the differentiator is access to medical care, primarily access to life saving drugs.
- jb775 5y ago
  Your covid numbers are 100x skewed and essentially fake.

standardUser 5y ago

"...people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus " Well, yes, In the same way an infant may fight Muhammad Ali. Futurama references aside, the vast majority of data shows that vaccinated people are far less likely to spread the virus.