5 ms·

People should obviously get vaccinated, yes. It does suggest that the vaccines could be improved to be even more effective. It’s also interesting that the peo

People should obviously get vaccinated, yes. It does suggest that the vaccines could be improved to be even more effective. It’s also interesting that the people most resistant to delta are people that were both infected and vaccinated.

lottin 5y ago
I seem to recall someone suggested that since a large percentage of the population is vaccinated and are therefore protected against severe covid, we should now actually try to catch it to develop a natural immunity to the virus.
- _Microft 5y ago
  I had skimmed and summarized such an article (submitted by someone else) a few weeks ago. I'm not sure that I would actually agree with it though. You can find it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28109055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28109055
- throwawaycities 5y ago
  The “problem” is that vaccinated people with the virus but experiencing no symptoms is that they still spread it to both unvaccinated and vaccinated alike. While many might not feel sympathy for the unvaccinated, a small % can’t get the vaccination, and there will still be that % of vaccinated people that do have a bad health outcome.
  - nradov 5y ago
    At this point the Delta variant is so contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect to protect unvaccinated individuals. They're going to get exposed and infected eventually no matter what we do. https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immunity-not-possible-astrazeneca-developer-2021-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mlyle 5y ago
      Maybe. I quibble with "no significant herd immunity." I'm in an area with a very high vaccination rate (>87% of those over age 12 having had at least one dose, >80% fully vaccinated). Our case counts are a fraction of the rest of the country. The country's rates would be expected to be 3x lower if we could simply extrapolate my locale's rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated people to those fractions of the population in the rest of the country. This seems to hold up in other high-vaccination regions, though obviously there are confounds. The phase delay and greatly decreased count even makes me speculate that my locale (which is still using some mitigations) may be operating in a regime of Rt < 1.0 right now, and all case chains (slowly) geometrically decay from outside introductions from travel, etc. And we expect immunity to improve further, from kids being vaccinated and from more unvaccinated people getting infected. Maybe this isn't true. But we seem, at the least, to be experiencing some benefit beyond the direct benefits for vaccinated individuals.
      - nradov 5y ago
        Case counts are meaningless as they largely reflect the level of testing. In most places there's not enough random population testing going on to get accurate infection counts. In the US the CDC estimates that infections are about 4× officially counted "cases".
        mlyle 5y ago
        My locale also has the highest reported rates of testing that you'll find. Indeed, if you discount case counts and choose objective measures of increases in hospitalization (small to moderate) or increases in deaths (not detectable yet), the picture is even more tilted in the direction I describe. That is, it seems we undercount less here, so the difference in true rates is even greater than I claim above. Unfortunately, hospitalization and death rates are not broken out by vaccination status, and are low enough that they'd be mostly noise even if they were. This precludes doing the same kinds of analysis with death or hospitalization data. And, of course, the fact that my locale takes things more seriously on the whole is its own confound. That is, vaccination rates are not an independent variable.
- pengaru 5y ago
  It's not a hare brained idea, and it's been presented in the msm recently like @ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58270098 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58270098
- foogazi 5y ago
  > we should now actually try to catch it to develop a natural immunity to the virus. We should catch it to get immunity so we don’t catch it ? I don’t get your thinking here

lottin 5y ago

I seem to recall someone suggested that since a large percentage of the population is vaccinated and are therefore protected against severe covid, we should now actually try to catch it to develop a natural immunity to the virus.

_Microft 5y ago
I had skimmed and summarized such an article (submitted by someone else) a few weeks ago. I'm not sure that I would actually agree with it though. You can find it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28109055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28109055
throwawaycities 5y ago
The “problem” is that vaccinated people with the virus but experiencing no symptoms is that they still spread it to both unvaccinated and vaccinated alike. While many might not feel sympathy for the unvaccinated, a small % can’t get the vaccination, and there will still be that % of vaccinated people that do have a bad health outcome.
- nradov 5y ago
  At this point the Delta variant is so contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect to protect unvaccinated individuals. They're going to get exposed and infected eventually no matter what we do. https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immunity-not-possible-astrazeneca-developer-2021-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mlyle 5y ago
    Maybe. I quibble with "no significant herd immunity." I'm in an area with a very high vaccination rate (>87% of those over age 12 having had at least one dose, >80% fully vaccinated). Our case counts are a fraction of the rest of the country. The country's rates would be expected to be 3x lower if we could simply extrapolate my locale's rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated people to those fractions of the population in the rest of the country. This seems to hold up in other high-vaccination regions, though obviously there are confounds. The phase delay and greatly decreased count even makes me speculate that my locale (which is still using some mitigations) may be operating in a regime of Rt < 1.0 right now, and all case chains (slowly) geometrically decay from outside introductions from travel, etc. And we expect immunity to improve further, from kids being vaccinated and from more unvaccinated people getting infected. Maybe this isn't true. But we seem, at the least, to be experiencing some benefit beyond the direct benefits for vaccinated individuals.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Case counts are meaningless as they largely reflect the level of testing. In most places there's not enough random population testing going on to get accurate infection counts. In the US the CDC estimates that infections are about 4× officially counted "cases".
      - mlyle 5y ago
        My locale also has the highest reported rates of testing that you'll find. Indeed, if you discount case counts and choose objective measures of increases in hospitalization (small to moderate) or increases in deaths (not detectable yet), the picture is even more tilted in the direction I describe. That is, it seems we undercount less here, so the difference in true rates is even greater than I claim above. Unfortunately, hospitalization and death rates are not broken out by vaccination status, and are low enough that they'd be mostly noise even if they were. This precludes doing the same kinds of analysis with death or hospitalization data. And, of course, the fact that my locale takes things more seriously on the whole is its own confound. That is, vaccination rates are not an independent variable.
pengaru 5y ago
It's not a hare brained idea, and it's been presented in the msm recently like @ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58270098 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58270098
foogazi 5y ago
> we should now actually try to catch it to develop a natural immunity to the virus. We should catch it to get immunity so we don’t catch it ? I don’t get your thinking here