44 ms·

I Got a 'Mild' Breakthrough Case

155 points by dsr12 5y ago

ttul 5y ago
NB: The plural of anecdote is not “data”.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  I like that haha. Will use.
  - ColinWright 5y ago
    You are one of today's ten thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- ColinWright 5y ago
  While what you say is true, I'm surprised that you think it is the most relevant and useful thing to say given the content. I've read the article and it has lots of useful things to say. It may have been written because they themselves caught the virus, but the article is not just their story.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  The plural of anecdote is data, though. That’s the original expression [1]; unclear why it became popular to flip it around. [1] http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/ http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-i...
  - dnautics 5y ago
    This article is fantastic, I love the quote about no data having a virgin birth.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Well, the correct puralization would "biased data". With data, the method of collection matters a great deal in determining the amount of bias inherent in your dataset. The implication of flipping the expression around is that poorly collected data isn't really data (which is silly). That is a bit silly, but so is the implication of the original expression which implies that simply having more anecdotes resolves issues of data bias.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- dnautics 5y ago
  Actually the original quote is "the plural of anecdote is data". As a scientist, I support the original. All scientific observations start as anecdote.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    All scientific observations may start as an anecdote, but hopefully they continue with a sampling methodology that minimizes bias in your data.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      It's impossible to eliminate bias. Whenever you report a measurement, the answer to "why did you choose to measure that particular thing to represent the phenomena" implicitly encodes a set of biases, and a tower of biases that a lot of other accessory things are built on (why did you use that instrument? Why does that instrument use mechanism X and not mechanism Y? Why do you use filter Z when processing your data? Why did you use exposure time T for the imaging, why did you pick that particular P-value threshold, etc.) these are all at some point, subjective judgements. Biases are not a priori bad
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        Bias is unavoidable, but definitely reducable. Biases are the least harmful when they are well understood. The problem with just haphazardly collecting anecdotes is that the biases tend to be poorly understood becuase the collection protocol is inconsistent and poorly documented.
- dilap 5y ago
  I'll disagree with you on this. A collection of anecdotes absolutely is data. It may have more (and unknown) sample bias than you'd like, but it is real data. Just because something happens outside the context of a formal study does not mean it's not data, nor that it can be safely disregarded.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
People get sick. It happens. I am well-aware that by resuming my pre-pandemic lifestyle, and only wearing a mask in the spaces where they're mandatory, I am increasing my risk of getting ill. But I'm not going to change my behavior, because I'd rather be sick for a week than sit at home 24/7 for the next year, or wear a mask every time I step outside, and constantly monitor my physical distance from other people. My life is passing me by right now, and I want to enjoy it while I can.
- Jabbles 5y ago
  - sit at home 24/7 - wear a mask These 2 things seem rather different in magnitude.
  - quantified 5y ago
    Especially because a lot of outside doesn’t need a mask. If you live in a dense urban core, it might. If you live in light urban, or suburban/rural, you can mask when stepping into the store or whatever. Don’t forget that masks are to protect others at least as much as yourself.
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      And wearing a mask is not just direct individual risk reduction either. Preventing spread reduces opportunities for the virus to mutate, which reduces the larger systemic risk that a new mutation is created that is even more adapted to bypassing vaccines and masks.
    - akira2501 5y ago
      > Don’t forget that masks are to protect others at least as much as yourself. That seems to depend on the mask itself, some masks explicitly state that they offer no protection to the wearer and only serve to provide protection to others _from_ the wearer. This article, for me, highlights one of the major problems of this entire response. Various establishments keep trying to present a rather black-and-white binary view on these subjects. They're doing a particularly poor job of explaining the spectrum of risks and protections that are available and how to apply that knowledge to your own individual circumstances.
ColinWright 5y ago
Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/1036356773 https://text.npr.org/1036356773
- blub 5y ago
  Thanks. NPR used to have a pop-up asking if one wants to be tracked or go to the text-only version. Now they only offer getting tracked or some convoluted guide on “other options”.
transfire 5y ago
If you feel like you might be getting it, boils some water and breath the hot steam through your nose for at least 30 minutes -- longer the better. The infection generally starts in the nasal cavities, so if you catch it early you have a good chance of stopping it.
- jpxw 5y ago
  Is there any study to back this up?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - VRay 5y ago
    What, you think the risk of inhaling scalding steam is worse than the possibility that it helps in some way?
wyager 5y ago
> Where did I get it? Who knows. Like so many Americans, I had loosened up with wearing masks and social distancing, after getting fully vaccinated I’m not a fan of this vaguely hamartiological style of reasoning. The narrative structure is like a biblical cautionary tale. The author had something bad happen to him, and so he’s searching for a transgression he committed that he can use to construct a punishment narrative.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  Never heard the word hamartiological before but it's perfect here and describes exactly how I've felt too.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  risk analysis != hamartiology I don't see any punishment narrative. I think you a reading into the article to support your own narrative. Indeed, the entire article is about adjusting how one sees the related risks given the information that has emerged around the vaccines and the delta varriant.
  - wyager 5y ago
    This article is not risk analysis. It’s just a bunch of narrative stories.
notanzaiiswear 5y ago
Unfortunately the vaccination can also have side effects, but data seems to be hard to come by. When I read "unvaccinated people have ten times higher odds of being hospitalised because of covid", apart from wondering about the absolute odds which are notably missing from the article (ten times more than one in a hundred is different from ten times more than one in a million), I wonder how many become hospitalized because of vaccines. It may well be that the number is low and vaccinated still comes out ahead, but it would be nice to know. (Also have to factor in the risk of getting Covid to begin with - while they say everybody will get it eventually, will that eventually be in time to be a variant the vaccine still works against? And why bother with masks if everybody will get it anyway?).
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > Unfortunately the vaccination can also have side effects, but data seems to be hard to come by. Data is not hard to come by. It is being closely monitored, leading to short pauses in administration of the J&J and Astrazeneca vaccines while small clusters of rare side effects were investigated. We can very comfortably say it's nothing like the 600k Americans dead of COVID, despite more Americans getting vaccinated than have gotten COVID.
  - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
    I think deaths are counted differently, though - everybody who dies within one month after testing positive is counted for Covid (afaik - at least in some places). For vaccines, I am not aware of such rules. So the numbers can not easily be compared. That is the problem. As I said, I am ready to believe that Covid kills more. But what if you factor in the odds of infection, and also individual odds (age, no co-morbidities, that sort of thing)? The odds are very different for somebody in their twenties and somebody in their eighties. "Closely Monitored" - OK so where exactly is the data? "Closely Monitored" is just a call to "trust the institutions".
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > "Closely Monitored" - OK so where exactly is the data? "Closely Monitored" is just a call to "trust the institutions". Submitted to the FDA, first for the EUAs, then for the full approvals, and still on an ongoing basis for longer term monitoring. They're so careful about reporting everything that they submitted a lightning strike as a potential adverse event. https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struck-by-lightning-after-moderna-injection-13774498/ https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struc... > I think deaths are counted differently, though - everybody who dies within one month after testing positive is counted for Covid (afaik - at least in some places). For vaccines, I am not aware of such rules. So the numbers can not easily be compared. That is the problem. Again, easily addressed. Look at total deaths, for the entire country, regardless of cause. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm If vaccines were killing anything like the numbers COVID did, you'd see it. Instead, you can see in March 2021 the excess deaths largely go away (after being elevated for more than a year) for a couple months, as vulnerable populations got protected. It doesn't tick back up until Delta hits, and even then, the spike is much smaller than previous ones.
aml702 5y ago
Imagine getting your news from NPR.
birdyrooster 5y ago
> I had loosened up with wearing masks and social distancing Moron > We had flown across the country, seen friends [without masks], stayed at a hotel, eaten indoors [without masks] Moron People don’t think N95s and social distancing are worth the effort and then they act like other people’s shitty behavior excuses them. They knew all of this but want to feign ignorance now because of consequences. I’m glad they got sick because they can evangelize the correct behavior but they knew all along. What a stupid fucking idiot. Please flag and downvote me Floridamen, you only further prove the point.
systemvoltage 5y ago
"Next, a headache clamped down on the back of my skull. Then my eyeballs started to ache. " Why do I feel like this was written in an alarmist tone with some kind of an agenda?
- quantified 5y ago
  Probably because anyone who got a solid case of COVID will raise the alarm for others and have an agenda of preventing it. The 24 hours of reaction I got from shot #2 convinced me that I really wanted to avoid a full case.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- nvr219 5y ago
  The agenda of reducing the spread of covid? Yes that's the agenda... It's a good one!
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    You snark, but the agenda of a new source such as NPR should be to objectively inform the public. That means, highlighting the risks of a breakthrough case such as the one in the article with the addition of probability of getting such a case, using data as a means of supporting their arguments about risks post-vaccination, etc. The entire article is written in a spooky manner, indirectly extrapolating a single anecdotal experience written in alarmist tone.
- ketzo 5y ago
  Have you had COVID? It fucking sucks. This vivid description is pretty accurate to my experience. Is it an alarmist tone or an accurate expression of symptoms? Why do you immediately take it for an agenda? Sometimes, if you feel scared while reading something, it doesn't mean that the author is trying to make you scared for no reason; it might mean that they are just describing something that is a little scary.
readflaggedcomm 5y ago
No mention of testing for flu, only multiple negative tests for covid. There is more than one disease.
- waiseristy 5y ago
  He did a PCR that returned positive
  - htlkjlrh 5y ago
    Oh yeh, PCR tests are so reliable aren't they. Fuck off commie.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  Multiple negative rapid tests for covid followed by a positive PCR lab test, which is known to be more accurate. I'm curious why you didn't mention the positive covid test?
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    What if he had gotten a PCR test for other diseases? If you deny science enough, all you see if what you want to see.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Everyone I know that suspected they had covid, when they went to doctor/hospital/urgent care, they got tested for Covid and for the flu. It's pretty standard.
whiddershins 5y ago
There’s a lot of conflicting data about the vaccine effectiveness against reducing symptoms of breakthrough infections. It’s interesting though, that the author’s symptoms sound about average for someone of their age group if unvaccinated, which is around the same or slightly worse than what all of the people under 50 I know who got Covid reported, whether vaccinated or not.
- TravelPiglet 5y ago
  I know quite a few people 35-55 who went to hospital with severe symptoms and a few with breakthroughs this fall. None of the breakthrough cases required more than perhaps a day or two of rest.
marricks 5y ago
It’s depressing how all these stories just reinforce the idea that the US could never suffer another lockdown. We have exploding cases and even a brief lockdown would greatly decrease them, but the political will to try and stop it has completely dried up, likely from business interests.
- hrfbi 5y ago
  I don't have a business and I don't want to be shut in home. If you want to then lock yourself down, thanks.
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    No one wants to do chemotherapy or have tumor excisions, but you need to or you suffer a worse fate.
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      Chemotherapy is actually an excellent analogy. We don't give chemotherapy to everyone just because a few people might have undetected cancer.
      - infinityplus1 5y ago
        Cancer does not spread rapidly through air. Also, chemotherapy is done after you get cancer. It is not a preventative measure.
        birdyrooster 5y ago
        It is preventative though, it prevents the cancer from progressing and metastasizing.
        infinityplus1 5y ago
        It is not preventative in the sense that you can't ask millions of people to get chemotherapy just in case.
jessriedel 5y ago
> The vaccines aren't a forcefield that ward off all things COVID. They were given the greenlight because they greatly lower your chance of getting seriously ill or dying. > ... there were reassuring findings earlier this year that the vaccine was remarkably good at stopping any infection, even mild ones. This was a kind of bonus, we were told. Isnt this false? If I recall, there was not enough data in early clinical trials to tell how effective the vaccines were at preventing severe illness and death, and the vaccines were largely approved based on reducing the risk ratio of infection EDIT: pretty sure I'm right. See data below.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  Willful ignorance, confirmation bias, etc. Unthinking people are the bedrock of this world and they will twist themselves into knots to assuage their guilt.
- alexpw 5y ago
  It is true/correct. It's much easier to measure hospitalizations rather than infection, and the #s in the real world confirmed the advertised effectiveness from the trial, for Alpha.
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    I think you're wrong. For instance, this website about the emergency use authorization for the Moderna vaccine says, for equal sized vaccinated and control groups, that > Vaccine efficacy against hospitalization due to COVID-19 was 89% (95% CI: 13%, 89%). Deaths were also uncommon, 6 in the vaccine group and 7 in the placebo group. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/recs/grade/covid-19-moderna-etr.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/recs/grade/covid-19-modern... In other words, there was not nearly enough data to tell whether it was effective at reducing deaths, and only weak data on hospitalizations. Do you have a cite that describes it otherwise? If not, please edit your comment.
ummonk 5y ago
“ To sum it up, I'd put my breakthrough case of COVID-19 right up there with my worst bouts of flu.” Exactly. I see no reason why I’d take strong measures to avoid getting exposed to it (now that I and 90% of adults around me are fully vaccinated) when I never did the same for the flu. Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost sight of what constitutes a normal disease burden.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Perhaps we were too lackadaisical about flu. I've certainly enjoyed not getting the usual bouts of cold and flu my kids would bring home from school every winter. I hope at least one lesson we take from COVID is "people should be able to take sick days rather than coming to work/school sick".
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    It’s perfectly fine for that to be ones risk tolerance and to take mitigation steps. It’s not to mandate them by government fiat.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      We've been quite comfortable with vaccine mandates for decades. My kids needed proof of MMR, DTaP, and several others to be able to attend school. Colleges have similar requirements. Hand washing is mandated "by government fiat" in many scenarios, as are quite a few other OHSA or public health scenarios - try working on a construction site without a hard hat, for example.
      - josephcsible 5y ago
        In 2019 or earlier, when have you had to show an ID and proof of vaccination to enter any building other than your own house? And for schools, didn't you used to have private schools or homeschooling as an option to avoid these kind of mandates? And hard hats aren't really comparable, since you can take them back off at the end of the workday.
andrewclunn 5y ago
The recognition that the medical establishment is still unsure of many things regarding a still developing situation is a good first step. The next is to realize that the misinterpretations of their knowledge and understanding are the direct result of misrepresentation of events and facts by media outlets.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
So did I a few weeks ago. I was vaxxed in April. And then caught it in early August. Three days of sweating and chills, a week of coughing and loopy-head. Positive PCR test. 3 weeks later and I still have a chest-cough I can't shake. Of course, if I didn't have the vaccine, I probably would be in an overflowing hospital close to death.
- ralusek 5y ago
  Assuming that you're between 18-49 years old, the CDC puts the infection fatality rate for that age group at 0.15%. So, unvaccinated, you would have a 99.85% chance of not dying. Being vaccinated, of course, further improves your odds. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... The younger you are within that bracket, your odds improve even more. If you have no comorbidities, even better. Basically, I wouldn't be worrying about death as any given young individual, but at a population scale, COVID is quite deadly. I'm personally much more worried about the other reported effects and lasting tissue damage.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    > Assuming that you're between 18-49 years old That is a huge range of ages and varying risk levels - in effect, you are over-averaging. **************** For a 45 year old caucasian male with no comorbidities non-smoker 0.16 (95% CI: 0.14 - 0.17 ) times the risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to the average risk for the US population absolute rate of mortality of 1.3 (95% CI: 0.6 - 2.8 ) per 100000 individuals in subgroups of the population with a similar risk profile to yours during the period of 09/11/2021 - 10/01/2021. This estimate is calculated based on the CDC's Ensemble mortality forecast data.. 95% CI: Error bounds with 95% confidence. **************** For an 18 year old caucasian male with no comorbidities non-smoker 0.02 (95% CI: 0.02 - 0.02 ) times the risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to the average risk for the US population. absolute rate of mortality of 1.3 (95% CI: 0.6 - 2.8 ) per 100000 individuals in subgroups of the population with a similar risk profile to yours during the period of 09/11/2021 - 10/01/2021. This estimate is calculated based on the CDC's Ensemble mortality forecast data.. 95% CI: Error bounds with 95% confidence. **************** Calculated using JHU's COVID-19 Mortality Risk Calculation https://covid19risktools.com:8443/riskcalculator https://covid19risktools.com:8443/riskcalculator
hvocode 5y ago
I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick. The whole point was to prime the immune system so that when exposed, the likelihood of extreme effects would be drastically reduced. That’s it. (E: I don’t get why people downvote this - all of the benefits of vaccination are precisely due to what I describe. Lower likelihood of individual bad outcomes, which reduces burdens on healthcare, and ideally, reduces community spread by reducing the amount of virus that replicates in an individual and can be passed on. This is why I was one of the first in line when I could get the vaccine. Perhaps daring to critique people with unrealistic vaccine expectations is unacceptable?)
- ianai 5y ago
  Right. It’s like a hardware update for an immune system.
- TobTobXX 5y ago
  But all the regulations around us create this covid-proof impression. Eg. where I live, hospitals consider introducing vaccination requirements for visitors. But that somehow defies logic. The vaccine only reduces symptoms (and might thus save yourself, or others, when extended with the hospital-bed-limit-thought), but it wouldn't stop you from transmitting the disease if you are infected (and vaccinated) but you aren't aware. So I don't even blame the public, but rather the regulators. They ought to know better. Edit: I might need to support this claim. The most trustworthy source I found was this article by the JHU [1] (2021-08-02). While there are many that claim different numbers (ranging from stopping roughly 60% to 0%), for transmission, no one claimed that virus infection is influenced. [1]: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-transmission-by-vaccinated-individuals https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-trans...
  - thephyber 5y ago
    The vaccine does a reasonable job at reducing transmission in the aggregate. It lessens the average viral load, shortens the average time a person is infectious, etc. Treating transmission as a boolean ignores the large-but-not-100-percent improvement. Better to treat it as a distribution. I don’t see what you are blaming regulators for.
whb07 5y ago
Here’s an interesting calculator from Oxford using Britain’s data from COVID: https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation My wife is a nurse and doesn’t follow up the data and she was in disbelief that her “risk” of serious/death was around 0.00005% or somewhere near that.
- nkozyra 5y ago
  As a nurse, what's her risk of spreading it to someone with a much, much greater risk of death?
  - rogerkirkness 5y ago
    If we're going to run society this way, we're going to need much more difficult driving tests.
    - nkozyra 5y ago
      Unless bad driving is an infectious airborne pathogen, I'm not following this analogy.
      - dgfitz 5y ago
        Sure seems to be in the mid Atlantic region of the US. Also, I’m sure you get the point they were making, why be unreasonable about it?
        Igelau 5y ago
        Is there a better name for the "playing dumb" style of argument?
      - Smaug123 5y ago
        Come on - obviously bad driving is not primarily an infectious airborne pathogen. Bad driving is something you can unilaterally inflict on other people to permanently ruin their lives, as is an infectious airborne pathogen.
mlac 5y ago
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but the pharma companies burying some side effects doesn’t help anything. Here is one example in Pittsburgh with severe side effects [1] (temporary paralysis, loss of fine motor control and a continuously flapping hand). The news did one story and both the person impacted and news station were contacted and told to not run a follow up story or they would have “problems” (this is second-hand info, but I have no reason to distrust the source). I think transparency is key in a situation like this. Yes we will have side effects, but if we are ever going to get past it, our only hope is very high vaccine compliance. The unvaccinated are causing a drag on the economy, the healthcare system, and the country. We don’t know if the vaccine side effects impact the same people who are most likely to die from COVID or not, so it’s definitely a decision under uncertainty. [1] https://www.wpxi.com/news/top-stories/bethel-park-woman-paralyzed-12-hours-after-getting-first-dose-pfizer-vaccine-doctors-searching-answers/ZSYTEX4H4FHKDFVSPGS3ILJZUI/ https://www.wpxi.com/news/top-stories/bethel-park-woman-para...
- laurent92 5y ago
  I don’t know why you’re downvoted. The French president clearly decided to manage this crisis by lying a lot, to the point that he says the opposite every two months: - “Masks are absolutely useless for the general population” in April 2020 => Mandatory in September. - “There will be no vaccine passport” in May 2021 => Vaccine passport enforced in bars on 01/08/2021. And so on. Now they want us to take the vaccine, but gave pharma and ministers exemption of responsibility on it. Also, the French govt injected AIDS to 10,000 patients in 1985 and spent 6 years to admit it. And that was when the press was free!
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    Science is not static.
    - jhawk28 5y ago
      The issue is that they are changing things without the data changing so it feels like it is more politics driven than science driven.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
htlkjlrh 5y ago
"muh breakthrough case"
htlkjlrh 5y ago
I really wish covid related articles would be banned from HN. This has nothing to do with startups. This has nothing to do with hacking. Covid is pure democratic/liberal/commie propaganda. FUCK RIGHT OFF!
Vecr 5y ago
I searched for "monoclonal" and "respirator" in the article and found nothing. If you want go avoid getting infected, wear a correctly fitted respirator, preferably NIOSH P100 elastomeric with replaceable cartridges. If you can convince your doctor, they can prescribe monoclonal antibodies right after you get exposed, with no symptoms or testing needed.
- nvr219 5y ago
  I've seen nobody wear respirator or anyone recommend wearing that to avoid infection until this comment.
  - mrob 5y ago
    I wear a EN 149 P3 elastomeric half mask respirator (99.97% effectiveness) and face shield whenever I go into shops or other indoor spaces other than my own home. It's a lot more comfortable than a surgical mask. If everybody did the same then the pandemic would probably be over by now.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- murkle 5y ago
  Cost is "£1000-£2000 per treatment" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58281332 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58281332
  - Vecr 5y ago
    In the US the federal government buys it, though I'm not sure they are going to continue doing so. In the tristate area and Florida it's apparently pretty easy to get.
criticaltinker 5y ago
If you think you're getting sick, the number one action you should take is to begin treatment early. You need to take action before symptoms get worse. The author had a high grade fever for a week but never mentioned seeking any treatment. Things you should do yourself: take vitamins and nutritional supplements, drink plenty of water, get your body moving, isolate yourself from others, wear a mask. Things your doctor should do for you: prescribe antivirals, also corticosteriods & antithrombotics if symptoms continue to worsen. The goal is to avoid the hospital and severe outcomes - many clinics will prescribe these safe & widely available over the counter medicines with little to no consultation. Whether you're vaccinated or not, this should be the standard of care for everyone - it's no different than most other viral infections. For some reason very few people seem to be aware of this advice, and all the scientific evidence supporting it (in the context of SARS-CoV-2 and in general).
- arn 5y ago
  Most things on your list are fine and prob won't hurt, but you didn't explicitly mention one thing that has studied benefit which is monoclonal antibodies. Also needs to be done early.
- sonicggg 5y ago
  Nonsense, get monoclonal antibodies as soon as possible. The earlier the better. All you said was available during 2020, and people have been taking vitamins minerals, etc. and dying anyway.
- javagram 5y ago
  > For some reason very few people seem to be aware of this advice, and all the scientific evidence supporting it (in the context of SARS-CoV-2 and in general). It’s because most of it is not backed by scientific evidence, there aren’t proved to be any general “antiviral” drugs you can effectively take to fight colds or other viruses. Tamiflu does exist for flu and maybe takes a day off your disease course, but even that is disputed. Zinc has as many negative studies as positive, high doses of vitamin C (e.g. “Emergen-C”) have flamed out in trials in the past. Some of them may have a small effect but don’t think it’s going to be a game changer in the fight against COVID-19. Only monoclonal antibodies and the vaccine are.
htlkjlrh 5y ago
Fuck everyone in this thread that support covid measures. Kill yourselves.
ilikehurdles 5y ago
I must have been living under a rock to come back to the transformation hn underwent. Has every covid discussion on hn turned into a discussion you'd see on a Joe Rogan episode? A grain of signal, a silo of noise. This is a festival of morons who adopted libertarianism as a substitute for critical thinking. Seems as though the hackers have exited the building. Getting ahead of the reprimand: I would love nothing more than to never return to this burning shit-heap of what hn used to be. Feel free to ban me any time.
11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
Looks like actual cases will make up a material portion of herd immunity. Columbia reports that up to 1/3 of Americans already had contracted COVID by the end of 2020: https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/one-three-americans-already-had-covid-19-end-2020 https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
- throwaway20371 5y ago
  Five reasons why COVID herd immunity is probably impossible https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2 Here’s why herd immunity from Covid is ‘mythical’ with the delta variant https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/herd-immunity-is-mythical-with-the-covid-delta-variant-experts-say.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/herd-immunity-is-mythical-wi... The developer of the AstraZeneca shot says the Delta variant has made herd immunity impossible because vaccinated people can still transmit the virus https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immunity-not-possible-astrazeneca-developer-2021-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
  - nomoreplease 5y ago
    That’s talking about herd immunity from vaccines. OP is talking about herd immunity from natural infection. So your links don’t invalidate the point, considering Israel research just proved that natural immunity is 13x more effective against Delta than Pfizer mRNA
    - throwaway20371 5y ago
      ......? Herd immunity is herd immunity. It doesn't matter what caused it. Natural immunity is great, but most people clearly don't have and won't get natural immunity. Having had COVID-19 already also does not make you later immune, to any variant. You can get it again and spread it again. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-you-get-covid-19-more-than-once/ https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-you-get-covid-19-more...
    - 5y ago
nickysielicki 5y ago
At the beginning of the pandemic, health agencies started misrepresenting and overstating the certainty of science, in order to attempt to get more buy-in from the public. It started with masks. The studies that we had about masks really were not great, but they did a risk-reward calculation behind closed doors: worst case scenario, the surgical masks don't impact the spread and it changes nothing; best case scenario, we reduce community spread. The problem with this is that if they told the public that this was how they were thinking about the problem, they wouldn't get people wearing the masks, so they overstated their confidence in it when speaking to the public. A good amount of people truly believe that the science was clear. But it wasn't. It continued with tests. It's much better to have a high rate of false positives than to have any rate of false negatives, so they pumped up the cycle count to accomplish this. They later toned it down. To the public, the tests aren't even questioned, most people believe they're pretty accurate, and most people are unaware that they have changed the criteria throughout the last year and a half. They sold it to the public like this because they knew that people would avoid getting tested and staying quarantined if they didn't trust the tests. Lately, it's about the vaccines. There is no serious scientist that believed that the vaccines would prevent COVID from becoming endemic. It was obvious that this was going to be with us for the rest of our lives back all the way in April of last year (or earlier). There are no serious scientists that believe that 2 shots and a booster is going to be the end of it, and yet they're happy to tell us that we "might" need boosters. Do any serious scientists actually believe that? These aren't "breakthrough" cases, because it's not truly a vaccine in the sense that the Polio vaccine was a vaccine. It's a prophylactic. We always knew it was a prophylactic, but they sold it to the public as something else, because people wouldn't get it if they didn't lie. We need to decide if we're okay with science agencies lying to us. Is their purpose to exact change on society, or is their purpose to do good science and tell us honest results? All of the confusion in this article stems from the misrepresentations they sell us.
- 1helloworld1 5y ago
  Your assumption is that everyone is just as rational as you. Scientific agencies should just give out the exact probability numbers and let people decide for themselves. That's not how the world works. Our brains just cannot intuitively grasp probabilities (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-our-brains-do-not-intuitively-grasp-probabilities/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-our-brains-do...). Presenting the precise and most accurate information to the public without any embellishment sounds great in theory, but it doesn't work in practice.
y7 5y ago
> Recent research from the U.K. suggests that vaccinated people are about 50% less likely to develop long COVID than those who are unvaccinated. To me that doesn't sound like that great of a risk reduction.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  That's on top of the reduced risk of catching it in the first place. Estimates of that vary widely, let's use 1/6. So 1/12 risk of long COVID.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Have you factored in the reduced chance of symptomatic disease? That comes before long COVID. With (two months after) vs without = ~0.2 vs 0.05×0.5×0.2 = ~20% vs ~0.5% (Explanation: chance of symptomatic disease 2 months after reported as 5% vs "control"; chance of long COVID after symptomatic infection reported as 2.3% as bare minimum, 13% to other research and 40% to a large interpretation.) Edit: to the three British studies of 2.3%, 13% and 40%, after this thread I can add 25% from a post from user tfehring, including link to article: «something like a quarter of people with symptomatic COVID seem to have some kind of cognitive symptom (mainly “brain fog” and/or short-term memory loss) 8 months later». I will update the tentative value for the chance of long COVID, but the ratio, half of one twentieth, does not change.
raylad 5y ago
The #1 thing to do if you have or think you have COVID-19 is nasal irrigation. It decreases your chance of hospitalization by a factor of 19X: Rapid initiation of nasal saline irrigation: hospitalizations in COVID-19 patients randomized to alkalinization or povidone-iodine compared to a national dataset https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.16.21262044v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.16.21262044v... >Conclusion Patients who initiated isotonic saline nasal irrigation after a positive COVID-19 PCR test were 19 times less likely to be hospitalized than the national rate. Iota-carrageenan nasal sprays can also not only help prevent nasal infection, but can help cure it: Efficacy of a nasal spray containing Iota-Carrageenan in the prophylaxis of COVID-19 in hospital personnel dedicated to patients care with COVID-19 disease A pragmatic multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial (CARR-COV-02) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.13.21255409v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.13.21255409v... > The incidence of COVID19 was significantly lower in the I-C group compared to placebo (1·0% vs 5·0%) (Odds Ratio 0·19 (95% confidence interval 0·05 to 0·77; p= 0·03). Carrageenan nasal spray may double the rate of recovery from coronavirus and influenza virus infections: Re-analysis of randomized trial data https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34128358/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34128358/ > The increase in recovery rate was 139% for coronavirus infections, 119% for influenza A infections, and 70% for rhinovirus infections. Here's a list of all the nasal sprays containing one branded iota-carragenan ingredient in every country in which they are licensed: https://www.carragelose.com/en/portfolio/launched-products https://www.carragelose.com/en/portfolio/launched-products
- SinParadise 5y ago
  sorry, this works too well. Only the best horse Ivermectin and finest Hydrochroloquine for me, coupled with a FDA approved vitamin protocol.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- raylad 5y ago
  Why am I downvoted for posting useful information referencing published placebo-controlled studies?
GoodJokes 5y ago
With this and Afghanistan coverage one really needs to analyze what the media CHOOSES to cover. There are plenty of other things just a little less rare and way more scary than breakthrough cases of covid. With Afghanistan, the major news stations devoted a like a grand total of 5 minutes on Afghanistan before we withdrew.
tomohawk 5y ago
This is what post pandemic looks like. Covid is endemic, and just like you probably don't know anyone who has never had the flu or the cold, it will be the same with this. Get your vax! It'll likely keep you out of the hospital when you do get it. Mask up all you want. Avoid crowds. Shun and shame people. You're still going to get it, just like everyone else.
aazaa 5y ago
> In my case, it was worse than expected, but, in the parlance of public health, it was "mild," meaning I didn't end up in the hospital or require oxygen. > ... > It was a miserable five days. My legs and arms ached, my fever crept up to 103 and every few hours of sleep would leave my sheets drenched in sweat. I'd drop into bed exhausted after a quick trip down to the kitchen. To sum it up, I'd put my breakthrough case of COVID-19 right up there with my worst bouts of flu. Even after my fever cleared up, I spent the next few weeks feeling low. "Mild" can mean different things to different people. I doubt this description of "mild" fits most people's concept of the word, as it sounds like a severe case of the flu. The fact that these infections are happening against a backdrop of normalization efforts should give anyone who thinks we're out of the woods pause. As the rate of infection increases, so does the risk to the vaccinated. It's another demonstration, once again, of how our public health system (and the CDC in particular) has failed us: > ... "quantifying that [chance of symptomatic case in an unvaccinated person] in the U.S. is very challenging" because our "data is so shoddy." Some time ago, the CDC stopped counting/sequencing "mild" breakthrough cases, so we're flying blind mostly. Maybe it's delta the reporter caught. Maybe something else. Who knows? https://www.newsweek.com/why-did-cdc-stop-counting-mild-asymptomatic-breakthrough-covid-cases-1616802 https://www.newsweek.com/why-did-cdc-stop-counting-mild-asym... What's clear is that COVID-19 isn't going away any time soon. What's also clear is that it shares the tendency that all RNA viruses have to mutate at an extremely rapid rate. It has shown that it can change much faster than we can adapt.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > What's clear is that COVID-19 isn't going away any time soon. This isn’t new information. It was obvious all the way back in March of 2020 that covid was here forever. Life must go on. We cannot live with this myopic fixation on exactly one specific form of illnesses. These “experts” have already asked enough out if people. We’ve been asked to put our lives on hold for more than 1.7 years now. Dragging any of this on after the first vaccines came out was unethical as hell. Vaccines were it. There is nothing else we can do besides attempt to build some myopic hellscape where our entire existence is centered around stopping the spread of covid.
  - 5y ago
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bob229 5y ago
Sounds just fine. The vaccine is doing its job. Time to let the virus rip through the unvaccinated and let them face the consequences
stakkur 5y ago
Current CDC data on breakthrough cases: .04%. 99.6% of vaccinated people are not contracting COVID.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  100% minus .04% does not equal 99.6%, and a link to the source of the data would make your comment more credible.
  - stakkur 5y ago
    I have no ‘claims’ to make; this is public, easily accessible, free information. CDC running vaccination dashboard: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-... CDC Breakthrough Case Investigation and Reporting https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre... As of 9.7.2021, of approximately 178M Americans fully vaccinated, there have been 14,115 breakthrough cases requiring hospitalization or who died. I’ll leave it to you to calculate that percentage. For those familiar with the usual limitations of data collection, it’s clear there is no ‘perfect’ count of breakthrough cases, so hospitalization/mortality are the most concrete data available. However, there is reporting beyond just those two categories, so the CDC estimates .04% of those fully vaccinated develop breakthrough cases.
birdyrooster 5y ago
Sherman should have continued marching through the south for several years completely displacing all of the traitors who have become the Republican Party today. Then we could have public health.

155 points by dsr12 5y ago

ttul 5y ago

NB: The plural of anecdote is not “data”.

arcticbull 5y ago
I like that haha. Will use.
- ColinWright 5y ago
  You are one of today's ten thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
ColinWright 5y ago
While what you say is true, I'm surprised that you think it is the most relevant and useful thing to say given the content. I've read the article and it has lots of useful things to say. It may have been written because they themselves caught the virus, but the article is not just their story.
jakelazaroff 5y ago
The plural of anecdote is data, though. That’s the original expression [1]; unclear why it became popular to flip it around. [1] http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/ http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-i...
- dnautics 5y ago
  This article is fantastic, I love the quote about no data having a virgin birth.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Well, the correct puralization would "biased data". With data, the method of collection matters a great deal in determining the amount of bias inherent in your dataset. The implication of flipping the expression around is that poorly collected data isn't really data (which is silly). That is a bit silly, but so is the implication of the original expression which implies that simply having more anecdotes resolves issues of data bias.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
dnautics 5y ago
Actually the original quote is "the plural of anecdote is data". As a scientist, I support the original. All scientific observations start as anecdote.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  All scientific observations may start as an anecdote, but hopefully they continue with a sampling methodology that minimizes bias in your data.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    It's impossible to eliminate bias. Whenever you report a measurement, the answer to "why did you choose to measure that particular thing to represent the phenomena" implicitly encodes a set of biases, and a tower of biases that a lot of other accessory things are built on (why did you use that instrument? Why does that instrument use mechanism X and not mechanism Y? Why do you use filter Z when processing your data? Why did you use exposure time T for the imaging, why did you pick that particular P-value threshold, etc.) these are all at some point, subjective judgements. Biases are not a priori bad
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      Bias is unavoidable, but definitely reducable. Biases are the least harmful when they are well understood. The problem with just haphazardly collecting anecdotes is that the biases tend to be poorly understood becuase the collection protocol is inconsistent and poorly documented.
dilap 5y ago
I'll disagree with you on this. A collection of anecdotes absolutely is data. It may have more (and unknown) sample bias than you'd like, but it is real data. Just because something happens outside the context of a formal study does not mean it's not data, nor that it can be safely disregarded.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

People get sick. It happens. I am well-aware that by resuming my pre-pandemic lifestyle, and only wearing a mask in the spaces where they're mandatory, I am increasing my risk of getting ill. But I'm not going to change my behavior, because I'd rather be sick for a week than sit at home 24/7 for the next year, or wear a mask every time I step outside, and constantly monitor my physical distance from other people. My life is passing me by right now, and I want to enjoy it while I can.

Jabbles 5y ago
- sit at home 24/7 - wear a mask These 2 things seem rather different in magnitude.
- quantified 5y ago
  Especially because a lot of outside doesn’t need a mask. If you live in a dense urban core, it might. If you live in light urban, or suburban/rural, you can mask when stepping into the store or whatever. Don’t forget that masks are to protect others at least as much as yourself.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    And wearing a mask is not just direct individual risk reduction either. Preventing spread reduces opportunities for the virus to mutate, which reduces the larger systemic risk that a new mutation is created that is even more adapted to bypassing vaccines and masks.
  - akira2501 5y ago
    > Don’t forget that masks are to protect others at least as much as yourself. That seems to depend on the mask itself, some masks explicitly state that they offer no protection to the wearer and only serve to provide protection to others _from_ the wearer. This article, for me, highlights one of the major problems of this entire response. Various establishments keep trying to present a rather black-and-white binary view on these subjects. They're doing a particularly poor job of explaining the spectrum of risks and protections that are available and how to apply that knowledge to your own individual circumstances.

ColinWright 5y ago

Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/1036356773 https://text.npr.org/1036356773

blub 5y ago
Thanks. NPR used to have a pop-up asking if one wants to be tracked or go to the text-only version. Now they only offer getting tracked or some convoluted guide on “other options”.

transfire 5y ago

If you feel like you might be getting it, boils some water and breath the hot steam through your nose for at least 30 minutes -- longer the better. The infection generally starts in the nasal cavities, so if you catch it early you have a good chance of stopping it.

jpxw 5y ago
Is there any study to back this up?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- VRay 5y ago
  What, you think the risk of inhaling scalding steam is worse than the possibility that it helps in some way?

wyager 5y ago

> Where did I get it? Who knows. Like so many Americans, I had loosened up with wearing masks and social distancing, after getting fully vaccinated I’m not a fan of this vaguely hamartiological style of reasoning. The narrative structure is like a biblical cautionary tale. The author had something bad happen to him, and so he’s searching for a transgression he committed that he can use to construct a punishment narrative.

jimmaswell 5y ago
Never heard the word hamartiological before but it's perfect here and describes exactly how I've felt too.
shkkmo 5y ago
risk analysis != hamartiology I don't see any punishment narrative. I think you a reading into the article to support your own narrative. Indeed, the entire article is about adjusting how one sees the related risks given the information that has emerged around the vaccines and the delta varriant.
- wyager 5y ago
  This article is not risk analysis. It’s just a bunch of narrative stories.

notanzaiiswear 5y ago

Unfortunately the vaccination can also have side effects, but data seems to be hard to come by. When I read "unvaccinated people have ten times higher odds of being hospitalised because of covid", apart from wondering about the absolute odds which are notably missing from the article (ten times more than one in a hundred is different from ten times more than one in a million), I wonder how many become hospitalized because of vaccines. It may well be that the number is low and vaccinated still comes out ahead, but it would be nice to know. (Also have to factor in the risk of getting Covid to begin with - while they say everybody will get it eventually, will that eventually be in time to be a variant the vaccine still works against? And why bother with masks if everybody will get it anyway?).

ceejayoz 5y ago
> Unfortunately the vaccination can also have side effects, but data seems to be hard to come by. Data is not hard to come by. It is being closely monitored, leading to short pauses in administration of the J&J and Astrazeneca vaccines while small clusters of rare side effects were investigated. We can very comfortably say it's nothing like the 600k Americans dead of COVID, despite more Americans getting vaccinated than have gotten COVID.
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  I think deaths are counted differently, though - everybody who dies within one month after testing positive is counted for Covid (afaik - at least in some places). For vaccines, I am not aware of such rules. So the numbers can not easily be compared. That is the problem. As I said, I am ready to believe that Covid kills more. But what if you factor in the odds of infection, and also individual odds (age, no co-morbidities, that sort of thing)? The odds are very different for somebody in their twenties and somebody in their eighties. "Closely Monitored" - OK so where exactly is the data? "Closely Monitored" is just a call to "trust the institutions".
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > "Closely Monitored" - OK so where exactly is the data? "Closely Monitored" is just a call to "trust the institutions". Submitted to the FDA, first for the EUAs, then for the full approvals, and still on an ongoing basis for longer term monitoring. They're so careful about reporting everything that they submitted a lightning strike as a potential adverse event. https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struck-by-lightning-after-moderna-injection-13774498/ https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struc... > I think deaths are counted differently, though - everybody who dies within one month after testing positive is counted for Covid (afaik - at least in some places). For vaccines, I am not aware of such rules. So the numbers can not easily be compared. That is the problem. Again, easily addressed. Look at total deaths, for the entire country, regardless of cause. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm If vaccines were killing anything like the numbers COVID did, you'd see it. Instead, you can see in March 2021 the excess deaths largely go away (after being elevated for more than a year) for a couple months, as vulnerable populations got protected. It doesn't tick back up until Delta hits, and even then, the spike is much smaller than previous ones.

aml702 5y ago

Imagine getting your news from NPR.

birdyrooster 5y ago

> I had loosened up with wearing masks and social distancing Moron > We had flown across the country, seen friends [without masks], stayed at a hotel, eaten indoors [without masks] Moron People don’t think N95s and social distancing are worth the effort and then they act like other people’s shitty behavior excuses them. They knew all of this but want to feign ignorance now because of consequences. I’m glad they got sick because they can evangelize the correct behavior but they knew all along. What a stupid fucking idiot. Please flag and downvote me Floridamen, you only further prove the point.

systemvoltage 5y ago

"Next, a headache clamped down on the back of my skull. Then my eyeballs started to ache. " Why do I feel like this was written in an alarmist tone with some kind of an agenda?

quantified 5y ago
Probably because anyone who got a solid case of COVID will raise the alarm for others and have an agenda of preventing it. The 24 hours of reaction I got from shot #2 convinced me that I really wanted to avoid a full case.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nvr219 5y ago
The agenda of reducing the spread of covid? Yes that's the agenda... It's a good one!
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  You snark, but the agenda of a new source such as NPR should be to objectively inform the public. That means, highlighting the risks of a breakthrough case such as the one in the article with the addition of probability of getting such a case, using data as a means of supporting their arguments about risks post-vaccination, etc. The entire article is written in a spooky manner, indirectly extrapolating a single anecdotal experience written in alarmist tone.
ketzo 5y ago
Have you had COVID? It fucking sucks. This vivid description is pretty accurate to my experience. Is it an alarmist tone or an accurate expression of symptoms? Why do you immediately take it for an agenda? Sometimes, if you feel scared while reading something, it doesn't mean that the author is trying to make you scared for no reason; it might mean that they are just describing something that is a little scary.

readflaggedcomm 5y ago

No mention of testing for flu, only multiple negative tests for covid. There is more than one disease.

waiseristy 5y ago
He did a PCR that returned positive
- htlkjlrh 5y ago
  Oh yeh, PCR tests are so reliable aren't they. Fuck off commie.
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
Multiple negative rapid tests for covid followed by a positive PCR lab test, which is known to be more accurate. I'm curious why you didn't mention the positive covid test?
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  What if he had gotten a PCR test for other diseases? If you deny science enough, all you see if what you want to see.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Everyone I know that suspected they had covid, when they went to doctor/hospital/urgent care, they got tested for Covid and for the flu. It's pretty standard.

whiddershins 5y ago

There’s a lot of conflicting data about the vaccine effectiveness against reducing symptoms of breakthrough infections. It’s interesting though, that the author’s symptoms sound about average for someone of their age group if unvaccinated, which is around the same or slightly worse than what all of the people under 50 I know who got Covid reported, whether vaccinated or not.

TravelPiglet 5y ago
I know quite a few people 35-55 who went to hospital with severe symptoms and a few with breakthroughs this fall. None of the breakthrough cases required more than perhaps a day or two of rest.

marricks 5y ago

It’s depressing how all these stories just reinforce the idea that the US could never suffer another lockdown. We have exploding cases and even a brief lockdown would greatly decrease them, but the political will to try and stop it has completely dried up, likely from business interests.

hrfbi 5y ago
I don't have a business and I don't want to be shut in home. If you want to then lock yourself down, thanks.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  No one wants to do chemotherapy or have tumor excisions, but you need to or you suffer a worse fate.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    Chemotherapy is actually an excellent analogy. We don't give chemotherapy to everyone just because a few people might have undetected cancer.
    - infinityplus1 5y ago
      Cancer does not spread rapidly through air. Also, chemotherapy is done after you get cancer. It is not a preventative measure.
      - birdyrooster 5y ago
        It is preventative though, it prevents the cancer from progressing and metastasizing.
        infinityplus1 5y ago
        It is not preventative in the sense that you can't ask millions of people to get chemotherapy just in case.

jessriedel 5y ago

> The vaccines aren't a forcefield that ward off all things COVID. They were given the greenlight because they greatly lower your chance of getting seriously ill or dying. > ... there were reassuring findings earlier this year that the vaccine was remarkably good at stopping any infection, even mild ones. This was a kind of bonus, we were told. Isnt this false? If I recall, there was not enough data in early clinical trials to tell how effective the vaccines were at preventing severe illness and death, and the vaccines were largely approved based on reducing the risk ratio of infection EDIT: pretty sure I'm right. See data below.

birdyrooster 5y ago
Willful ignorance, confirmation bias, etc. Unthinking people are the bedrock of this world and they will twist themselves into knots to assuage their guilt.
alexpw 5y ago
It is true/correct. It's much easier to measure hospitalizations rather than infection, and the #s in the real world confirmed the advertised effectiveness from the trial, for Alpha.
- jessriedel 5y ago
  I think you're wrong. For instance, this website about the emergency use authorization for the Moderna vaccine says, for equal sized vaccinated and control groups, that > Vaccine efficacy against hospitalization due to COVID-19 was 89% (95% CI: 13%, 89%). Deaths were also uncommon, 6 in the vaccine group and 7 in the placebo group. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/recs/grade/covid-19-moderna-etr.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/recs/grade/covid-19-modern... In other words, there was not nearly enough data to tell whether it was effective at reducing deaths, and only weak data on hospitalizations. Do you have a cite that describes it otherwise? If not, please edit your comment.

ummonk 5y ago

“ To sum it up, I'd put my breakthrough case of COVID-19 right up there with my worst bouts of flu.” Exactly. I see no reason why I’d take strong measures to avoid getting exposed to it (now that I and 90% of adults around me are fully vaccinated) when I never did the same for the flu. Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost sight of what constitutes a normal disease burden.

ceejayoz 5y ago
Perhaps we were too lackadaisical about flu. I've certainly enjoyed not getting the usual bouts of cold and flu my kids would bring home from school every winter. I hope at least one lesson we take from COVID is "people should be able to take sick days rather than coming to work/school sick".
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  It’s perfectly fine for that to be ones risk tolerance and to take mitigation steps. It’s not to mandate them by government fiat.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    We've been quite comfortable with vaccine mandates for decades. My kids needed proof of MMR, DTaP, and several others to be able to attend school. Colleges have similar requirements. Hand washing is mandated "by government fiat" in many scenarios, as are quite a few other OHSA or public health scenarios - try working on a construction site without a hard hat, for example.
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      In 2019 or earlier, when have you had to show an ID and proof of vaccination to enter any building other than your own house? And for schools, didn't you used to have private schools or homeschooling as an option to avoid these kind of mandates? And hard hats aren't really comparable, since you can take them back off at the end of the workday.

andrewclunn 5y ago

The recognition that the medical establishment is still unsure of many things regarding a still developing situation is a good first step. The next is to realize that the misinterpretations of their knowledge and understanding are the direct result of misrepresentation of events and facts by media outlets.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

So did I a few weeks ago. I was vaxxed in April. And then caught it in early August. Three days of sweating and chills, a week of coughing and loopy-head. Positive PCR test. 3 weeks later and I still have a chest-cough I can't shake. Of course, if I didn't have the vaccine, I probably would be in an overflowing hospital close to death.

ralusek 5y ago
Assuming that you're between 18-49 years old, the CDC puts the infection fatality rate for that age group at 0.15%. So, unvaccinated, you would have a 99.85% chance of not dying. Being vaccinated, of course, further improves your odds. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... The younger you are within that bracket, your odds improve even more. If you have no comorbidities, even better. Basically, I wouldn't be worrying about death as any given young individual, but at a population scale, COVID is quite deadly. I'm personally much more worried about the other reported effects and lasting tissue damage.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  > Assuming that you're between 18-49 years old That is a huge range of ages and varying risk levels - in effect, you are over-averaging. **************** For a 45 year old caucasian male with no comorbidities non-smoker 0.16 (95% CI: 0.14 - 0.17 ) times the risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to the average risk for the US population absolute rate of mortality of 1.3 (95% CI: 0.6 - 2.8 ) per 100000 individuals in subgroups of the population with a similar risk profile to yours during the period of 09/11/2021 - 10/01/2021. This estimate is calculated based on the CDC's Ensemble mortality forecast data.. 95% CI: Error bounds with 95% confidence. **************** For an 18 year old caucasian male with no comorbidities non-smoker 0.02 (95% CI: 0.02 - 0.02 ) times the risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to the average risk for the US population. absolute rate of mortality of 1.3 (95% CI: 0.6 - 2.8 ) per 100000 individuals in subgroups of the population with a similar risk profile to yours during the period of 09/11/2021 - 10/01/2021. This estimate is calculated based on the CDC's Ensemble mortality forecast data.. 95% CI: Error bounds with 95% confidence. **************** Calculated using JHU's COVID-19 Mortality Risk Calculation https://covid19risktools.com:8443/riskcalculator https://covid19risktools.com:8443/riskcalculator

hvocode 5y ago

I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick. The whole point was to prime the immune system so that when exposed, the likelihood of extreme effects would be drastically reduced. That’s it. (E: I don’t get why people downvote this - all of the benefits of vaccination are precisely due to what I describe. Lower likelihood of individual bad outcomes, which reduces burdens on healthcare, and ideally, reduces community spread by reducing the amount of virus that replicates in an individual and can be passed on. This is why I was one of the first in line when I could get the vaccine. Perhaps daring to critique people with unrealistic vaccine expectations is unacceptable?)

ianai 5y ago
Right. It’s like a hardware update for an immune system.
TobTobXX 5y ago
But all the regulations around us create this covid-proof impression. Eg. where I live, hospitals consider introducing vaccination requirements for visitors. But that somehow defies logic. The vaccine only reduces symptoms (and might thus save yourself, or others, when extended with the hospital-bed-limit-thought), but it wouldn't stop you from transmitting the disease if you are infected (and vaccinated) but you aren't aware. So I don't even blame the public, but rather the regulators. They ought to know better. Edit: I might need to support this claim. The most trustworthy source I found was this article by the JHU [1] (2021-08-02). While there are many that claim different numbers (ranging from stopping roughly 60% to 0%), for transmission, no one claimed that virus infection is influenced. [1]: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-transmission-by-vaccinated-individuals https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-trans...
- thephyber 5y ago
  The vaccine does a reasonable job at reducing transmission in the aggregate. It lessens the average viral load, shortens the average time a person is infectious, etc. Treating transmission as a boolean ignores the large-but-not-100-percent improvement. Better to treat it as a distribution. I don’t see what you are blaming regulators for.

whb07 5y ago

Here’s an interesting calculator from Oxford using Britain’s data from COVID: https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation My wife is a nurse and doesn’t follow up the data and she was in disbelief that her “risk” of serious/death was around 0.00005% or somewhere near that.

nkozyra 5y ago
As a nurse, what's her risk of spreading it to someone with a much, much greater risk of death?
- rogerkirkness 5y ago
  If we're going to run society this way, we're going to need much more difficult driving tests.
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    Unless bad driving is an infectious airborne pathogen, I'm not following this analogy.
    - dgfitz 5y ago
      Sure seems to be in the mid Atlantic region of the US. Also, I’m sure you get the point they were making, why be unreasonable about it?
      - Igelau 5y ago
        Is there a better name for the "playing dumb" style of argument?
    - Smaug123 5y ago
      Come on - obviously bad driving is not primarily an infectious airborne pathogen. Bad driving is something you can unilaterally inflict on other people to permanently ruin their lives, as is an infectious airborne pathogen.

mlac 5y ago

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but the pharma companies burying some side effects doesn’t help anything. Here is one example in Pittsburgh with severe side effects [1] (temporary paralysis, loss of fine motor control and a continuously flapping hand). The news did one story and both the person impacted and news station were contacted and told to not run a follow up story or they would have “problems” (this is second-hand info, but I have no reason to distrust the source). I think transparency is key in a situation like this. Yes we will have side effects, but if we are ever going to get past it, our only hope is very high vaccine compliance. The unvaccinated are causing a drag on the economy, the healthcare system, and the country. We don’t know if the vaccine side effects impact the same people who are most likely to die from COVID or not, so it’s definitely a decision under uncertainty. [1] https://www.wpxi.com/news/top-stories/bethel-park-woman-paralyzed-12-hours-after-getting-first-dose-pfizer-vaccine-doctors-searching-answers/ZSYTEX4H4FHKDFVSPGS3ILJZUI/ https://www.wpxi.com/news/top-stories/bethel-park-woman-para...

laurent92 5y ago
I don’t know why you’re downvoted. The French president clearly decided to manage this crisis by lying a lot, to the point that he says the opposite every two months: - “Masks are absolutely useless for the general population” in April 2020 => Mandatory in September. - “There will be no vaccine passport” in May 2021 => Vaccine passport enforced in bars on 01/08/2021. And so on. Now they want us to take the vaccine, but gave pharma and ministers exemption of responsibility on it. Also, the French govt injected AIDS to 10,000 patients in 1985 and spent 6 years to admit it. And that was when the press was free!
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  Science is not static.
  - jhawk28 5y ago
    The issue is that they are changing things without the data changing so it feels like it is more politics driven than science driven.

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htlkjlrh 5y ago

"muh breakthrough case"

htlkjlrh 5y ago

I really wish covid related articles would be banned from HN. This has nothing to do with startups. This has nothing to do with hacking. Covid is pure democratic/liberal/commie propaganda. FUCK RIGHT OFF!

Vecr 5y ago

I searched for "monoclonal" and "respirator" in the article and found nothing. If you want go avoid getting infected, wear a correctly fitted respirator, preferably NIOSH P100 elastomeric with replaceable cartridges. If you can convince your doctor, they can prescribe monoclonal antibodies right after you get exposed, with no symptoms or testing needed.

nvr219 5y ago
I've seen nobody wear respirator or anyone recommend wearing that to avoid infection until this comment.
- mrob 5y ago
  I wear a EN 149 P3 elastomeric half mask respirator (99.97% effectiveness) and face shield whenever I go into shops or other indoor spaces other than my own home. It's a lot more comfortable than a surgical mask. If everybody did the same then the pandemic would probably be over by now.
  - deleted 5y ago
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murkle 5y ago
Cost is "£1000-£2000 per treatment" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58281332 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58281332
- Vecr 5y ago
  In the US the federal government buys it, though I'm not sure they are going to continue doing so. In the tristate area and Florida it's apparently pretty easy to get.

criticaltinker 5y ago

If you think you're getting sick, the number one action you should take is to begin treatment early. You need to take action before symptoms get worse. The author had a high grade fever for a week but never mentioned seeking any treatment. Things you should do yourself: take vitamins and nutritional supplements, drink plenty of water, get your body moving, isolate yourself from others, wear a mask. Things your doctor should do for you: prescribe antivirals, also corticosteriods & antithrombotics if symptoms continue to worsen. The goal is to avoid the hospital and severe outcomes - many clinics will prescribe these safe & widely available over the counter medicines with little to no consultation. Whether you're vaccinated or not, this should be the standard of care for everyone - it's no different than most other viral infections. For some reason very few people seem to be aware of this advice, and all the scientific evidence supporting it (in the context of SARS-CoV-2 and in general).

arn 5y ago
Most things on your list are fine and prob won't hurt, but you didn't explicitly mention one thing that has studied benefit which is monoclonal antibodies. Also needs to be done early.
sonicggg 5y ago
Nonsense, get monoclonal antibodies as soon as possible. The earlier the better. All you said was available during 2020, and people have been taking vitamins minerals, etc. and dying anyway.
javagram 5y ago
> For some reason very few people seem to be aware of this advice, and all the scientific evidence supporting it (in the context of SARS-CoV-2 and in general). It’s because most of it is not backed by scientific evidence, there aren’t proved to be any general “antiviral” drugs you can effectively take to fight colds or other viruses. Tamiflu does exist for flu and maybe takes a day off your disease course, but even that is disputed. Zinc has as many negative studies as positive, high doses of vitamin C (e.g. “Emergen-C”) have flamed out in trials in the past. Some of them may have a small effect but don’t think it’s going to be a game changer in the fight against COVID-19. Only monoclonal antibodies and the vaccine are.

htlkjlrh 5y ago

Fuck everyone in this thread that support covid measures. Kill yourselves.

ilikehurdles 5y ago

I must have been living under a rock to come back to the transformation hn underwent. Has every covid discussion on hn turned into a discussion you'd see on a Joe Rogan episode? A grain of signal, a silo of noise. This is a festival of morons who adopted libertarianism as a substitute for critical thinking. Seems as though the hackers have exited the building. Getting ahead of the reprimand: I would love nothing more than to never return to this burning shit-heap of what hn used to be. Feel free to ban me any time.

11thEarlOfMar 5y ago

Looks like actual cases will make up a material portion of herd immunity. Columbia reports that up to 1/3 of Americans already had contracted COVID by the end of 2020: https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/one-three-americans-already-had-covid-19-end-2020 https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...

throwaway20371 5y ago
Five reasons why COVID herd immunity is probably impossible https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2 Here’s why herd immunity from Covid is ‘mythical’ with the delta variant https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/herd-immunity-is-mythical-with-the-covid-delta-variant-experts-say.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/herd-immunity-is-mythical-wi... The developer of the AstraZeneca shot says the Delta variant has made herd immunity impossible because vaccinated people can still transmit the virus https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immunity-not-possible-astrazeneca-developer-2021-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
- nomoreplease 5y ago
  That’s talking about herd immunity from vaccines. OP is talking about herd immunity from natural infection. So your links don’t invalidate the point, considering Israel research just proved that natural immunity is 13x more effective against Delta than Pfizer mRNA
  - throwaway20371 5y ago
    ......? Herd immunity is herd immunity. It doesn't matter what caused it. Natural immunity is great, but most people clearly don't have and won't get natural immunity. Having had COVID-19 already also does not make you later immune, to any variant. You can get it again and spread it again. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-you-get-covid-19-more-than-once/ https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-you-get-covid-19-more...
  - 5y ago

nickysielicki 5y ago

At the beginning of the pandemic, health agencies started misrepresenting and overstating the certainty of science, in order to attempt to get more buy-in from the public. It started with masks. The studies that we had about masks really were not great, but they did a risk-reward calculation behind closed doors: worst case scenario, the surgical masks don't impact the spread and it changes nothing; best case scenario, we reduce community spread. The problem with this is that if they told the public that this was how they were thinking about the problem, they wouldn't get people wearing the masks, so they overstated their confidence in it when speaking to the public. A good amount of people truly believe that the science was clear. But it wasn't. It continued with tests. It's much better to have a high rate of false positives than to have any rate of false negatives, so they pumped up the cycle count to accomplish this. They later toned it down. To the public, the tests aren't even questioned, most people believe they're pretty accurate, and most people are unaware that they have changed the criteria throughout the last year and a half. They sold it to the public like this because they knew that people would avoid getting tested and staying quarantined if they didn't trust the tests. Lately, it's about the vaccines. There is no serious scientist that believed that the vaccines would prevent COVID from becoming endemic. It was obvious that this was going to be with us for the rest of our lives back all the way in April of last year (or earlier). There are no serious scientists that believe that 2 shots and a booster is going to be the end of it, and yet they're happy to tell us that we "might" need boosters. Do any serious scientists actually believe that? These aren't "breakthrough" cases, because it's not truly a vaccine in the sense that the Polio vaccine was a vaccine. It's a prophylactic. We always knew it was a prophylactic, but they sold it to the public as something else, because people wouldn't get it if they didn't lie. We need to decide if we're okay with science agencies lying to us. Is their purpose to exact change on society, or is their purpose to do good science and tell us honest results? All of the confusion in this article stems from the misrepresentations they sell us.

1helloworld1 5y ago
Your assumption is that everyone is just as rational as you. Scientific agencies should just give out the exact probability numbers and let people decide for themselves. That's not how the world works. Our brains just cannot intuitively grasp probabilities (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-our-brains-do-not-intuitively-grasp-probabilities/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-our-brains-do...). Presenting the precise and most accurate information to the public without any embellishment sounds great in theory, but it doesn't work in practice.

y7 5y ago

> Recent research from the U.K. suggests that vaccinated people are about 50% less likely to develop long COVID than those who are unvaccinated. To me that doesn't sound like that great of a risk reduction.

bryanlarsen 5y ago
That's on top of the reduced risk of catching it in the first place. Estimates of that vary widely, let's use 1/6. So 1/12 risk of long COVID.
mdp2021 5y ago
Have you factored in the reduced chance of symptomatic disease? That comes before long COVID. With (two months after) vs without = ~0.2 vs 0.05×0.5×0.2 = ~20% vs ~0.5% (Explanation: chance of symptomatic disease 2 months after reported as 5% vs "control"; chance of long COVID after symptomatic infection reported as 2.3% as bare minimum, 13% to other research and 40% to a large interpretation.) Edit: to the three British studies of 2.3%, 13% and 40%, after this thread I can add 25% from a post from user tfehring, including link to article: «something like a quarter of people with symptomatic COVID seem to have some kind of cognitive symptom (mainly “brain fog” and/or short-term memory loss) 8 months later». I will update the tentative value for the chance of long COVID, but the ratio, half of one twentieth, does not change.

raylad 5y ago

The #1 thing to do if you have or think you have COVID-19 is nasal irrigation. It decreases your chance of hospitalization by a factor of 19X: Rapid initiation of nasal saline irrigation: hospitalizations in COVID-19 patients randomized to alkalinization or povidone-iodine compared to a national dataset https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.16.21262044v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.16.21262044v... >Conclusion Patients who initiated isotonic saline nasal irrigation after a positive COVID-19 PCR test were 19 times less likely to be hospitalized than the national rate. Iota-carrageenan nasal sprays can also not only help prevent nasal infection, but can help cure it: Efficacy of a nasal spray containing Iota-Carrageenan in the prophylaxis of COVID-19 in hospital personnel dedicated to patients care with COVID-19 disease A pragmatic multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial (CARR-COV-02) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.13.21255409v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.13.21255409v... > The incidence of COVID19 was significantly lower in the I-C group compared to placebo (1·0% vs 5·0%) (Odds Ratio 0·19 (95% confidence interval 0·05 to 0·77; p= 0·03). Carrageenan nasal spray may double the rate of recovery from coronavirus and influenza virus infections: Re-analysis of randomized trial data https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34128358/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34128358/ > The increase in recovery rate was 139% for coronavirus infections, 119% for influenza A infections, and 70% for rhinovirus infections. Here's a list of all the nasal sprays containing one branded iota-carragenan ingredient in every country in which they are licensed: https://www.carragelose.com/en/portfolio/launched-products https://www.carragelose.com/en/portfolio/launched-products

SinParadise 5y ago
sorry, this works too well. Only the best horse Ivermectin and finest Hydrochroloquine for me, coupled with a FDA approved vitamin protocol.
- deleted 5y ago
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raylad 5y ago
Why am I downvoted for posting useful information referencing published placebo-controlled studies?

GoodJokes 5y ago

With this and Afghanistan coverage one really needs to analyze what the media CHOOSES to cover. There are plenty of other things just a little less rare and way more scary than breakthrough cases of covid. With Afghanistan, the major news stations devoted a like a grand total of 5 minutes on Afghanistan before we withdrew.

tomohawk 5y ago

This is what post pandemic looks like. Covid is endemic, and just like you probably don't know anyone who has never had the flu or the cold, it will be the same with this. Get your vax! It'll likely keep you out of the hospital when you do get it. Mask up all you want. Avoid crowds. Shun and shame people. You're still going to get it, just like everyone else.

aazaa 5y ago

> In my case, it was worse than expected, but, in the parlance of public health, it was "mild," meaning I didn't end up in the hospital or require oxygen. > ... > It was a miserable five days. My legs and arms ached, my fever crept up to 103 and every few hours of sleep would leave my sheets drenched in sweat. I'd drop into bed exhausted after a quick trip down to the kitchen. To sum it up, I'd put my breakthrough case of COVID-19 right up there with my worst bouts of flu. Even after my fever cleared up, I spent the next few weeks feeling low. "Mild" can mean different things to different people. I doubt this description of "mild" fits most people's concept of the word, as it sounds like a severe case of the flu. The fact that these infections are happening against a backdrop of normalization efforts should give anyone who thinks we're out of the woods pause. As the rate of infection increases, so does the risk to the vaccinated. It's another demonstration, once again, of how our public health system (and the CDC in particular) has failed us: > ... "quantifying that [chance of symptomatic case in an unvaccinated person] in the U.S. is very challenging" because our "data is so shoddy." Some time ago, the CDC stopped counting/sequencing "mild" breakthrough cases, so we're flying blind mostly. Maybe it's delta the reporter caught. Maybe something else. Who knows? https://www.newsweek.com/why-did-cdc-stop-counting-mild-asymptomatic-breakthrough-covid-cases-1616802 https://www.newsweek.com/why-did-cdc-stop-counting-mild-asym... What's clear is that COVID-19 isn't going away any time soon. What's also clear is that it shares the tendency that all RNA viruses have to mutate at an extremely rapid rate. It has shown that it can change much faster than we can adapt.

spookthesunset 5y ago
> What's clear is that COVID-19 isn't going away any time soon. This isn’t new information. It was obvious all the way back in March of 2020 that covid was here forever. Life must go on. We cannot live with this myopic fixation on exactly one specific form of illnesses. These “experts” have already asked enough out if people. We’ve been asked to put our lives on hold for more than 1.7 years now. Dragging any of this on after the first vaccines came out was unethical as hell. Vaccines were it. There is nothing else we can do besides attempt to build some myopic hellscape where our entire existence is centered around stopping the spread of covid.
- 5y ago

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bob229 5y ago

Sounds just fine. The vaccine is doing its job. Time to let the virus rip through the unvaccinated and let them face the consequences

stakkur 5y ago

Current CDC data on breakthrough cases: .04%. 99.6% of vaccinated people are not contracting COVID.

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
100% minus .04% does not equal 99.6%, and a link to the source of the data would make your comment more credible.
- stakkur 5y ago
  I have no ‘claims’ to make; this is public, easily accessible, free information. CDC running vaccination dashboard: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-... CDC Breakthrough Case Investigation and Reporting https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre... As of 9.7.2021, of approximately 178M Americans fully vaccinated, there have been 14,115 breakthrough cases requiring hospitalization or who died. I’ll leave it to you to calculate that percentage. For those familiar with the usual limitations of data collection, it’s clear there is no ‘perfect’ count of breakthrough cases, so hospitalization/mortality are the most concrete data available. However, there is reporting beyond just those two categories, so the CDC estimates .04% of those fully vaccinated develop breakthrough cases.

birdyrooster 5y ago

Sherman should have continued marching through the south for several years completely displacing all of the traitors who have become the Republican Party today. Then we could have public health.