5 ms·

Edit: My understanding of the science here was at least slightly wrong. Please see the reply from LurkingPenguin and eventually my reply to them I think resu

Edit: My understanding of the science here was at least slightly wrong. Please see the reply from LurkingPenguin and eventually my reply to them I think results like vaccinated individuals “can” have viral loads as high as unvaccinated individuals are next to useless. I need to know how likely I am to have high viral loads and my understanding of the science there is that vaccines still do a decent job of lowering the odds. I know you aren’t really arguing against vaccination here, but it seems like it needed to be said and I think the “vaccinated individuals can have high viral loads” line is particularly bad

LurkingPenguin 5y ago
> I think the “vaccinated individuals can have high viral loads” line is particularly bad https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v... https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-similar-between-vaccinated-and-unvaccinated-people https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim... How is a statement about what some researchers are finding "particularly bad"? If vaccinated individuals routinely have viral loads as high as those seen in unvaccinated individuals, it warrants more research into how the virus affects their bodies and what, if any, risks they might face both short term and long term. According to one study[1], vaccination reduces the risk of long COVID by 49%. Given that some studies have found the incidence of long COVID is in the double digit percentages[2], exploring this issue is not purely academic. It is pertinent to the hundreds of millions of vaccinated individuals who are still at risk of infection, even if their risk of hospitalization and death has been significantly reduced. Science works when we ask and investigate important questions. It doesn't work when we ignore these questions because we're afraid of the optics and how they might be misconstrued by some people. In fact, when it comes to COVID generally, it seems evident to me that shying away from difficult questions has had the opposite of the intended effect. It has probably caused more people to adopt anti-science views and reject beneficial measures like vaccination. [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-09-02/risk-of-long-covid-falls-by-half-in-breakthrough-cases https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-09-02/... [2] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/more-than-one-third-of-covid-19-patients-may-experience-long-covid-symptoms https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/more-than-one-thir...
- space_fountain 5y ago
  Welp, this is making me realize I was just wrong. My understanding of the science was something like you can find asymptomatic vaccinated individuals with similar viral loads to asymptomatic unvaccinated people, which is a bit meaningless when you're choosing a threshold for "infected" and when random chance will just see some people at any level. So to be clear it's not that I think the questions shouldn't be investigated, but a statement like "some vaccinated cases have high viral loads" is meaningless to explaining what my risk of spreading covid is. Trying to avoid the sort of bias that comes from trying to reinforce rather than question existing views, but I do still think the statement "No Significant Difference in Viral Load Between Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, Asymptomatic and Symptomatic Groups Infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant" despite being much more precise is still a bit unintuitive in it's implication. Because essentially what this means right is that they sampled people's viral loads, and then cut out everyone below a value they choose to mean "infected". It's still true that even if I had symptoms because I'm vaccinated my odds of having a high viral load are much lower. Presumably if you didn't remove all the samples with less than some concentration you'd see significant differences. I think that something the scientists got wrong consistently with covid was not unflinchingly communicating what was likely to be true mostly out of a fear that the public would take interventions that only moderately improved their safety like wearing a mask, and start doing riskier things or because of a bias towards doing nothing when clear evidence didn't exist. It can feel like similar things are happening with vaccination where it does seem pretty clear that getting vaccinated reduces your risk of passing on covid both because you're less likely to ever get a colony of the virus sufficient to count as "infected" and because you're likely to have a shorter infection.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    > Because essentially what this means right is that they sampled people's viral loads, and then cut out everyone below a value they choose to mean "infected". Huh? Please cite the part of the study you're referring to to argue that the title of the study means the exact opposite of what it says. Every manufacturer of a PCR test specifies a Ct cutoff above which the result is considered false. > It's still true that even if I had symptoms because I'm vaccinated my odds of having a high viral load are much lower. Presumably if you didn't remove all the samples with less than some concentration you'd see significant differences. The study says the exact opposite: > There were no statistically significant differences in mean Ct-values of vaccinated (UeS: 23.1; HYT: 25.5) vs. unvaccinated (UeS: 23.4; HYT: 25.4) samples. In both vaccinated and unvaccinated, there was great variation among individuals, with Ct-values of <15 to >30 in both UeS and HYT data (Fig. 1A, 1B). Similarly, no statistically significant differences were found in the mean Ct-values of asymptomatic (UeS: 24.3; HYT: 25.4) vs. symptomatic (UeS: 22.7) samples, overall or stratified by vaccine status (Fig. 1B). Similar Ct-values were also found among different age groups, between genders, and vaccine types (Supplemental Figure 1).

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

> I think the “vaccinated individuals can have high viral loads” line is particularly bad https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v... https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-similar-between-vaccinated-and-unvaccinated-people https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim... How is a statement about what some researchers are finding "particularly bad"? If vaccinated individuals routinely have viral loads as high as those seen in unvaccinated individuals, it warrants more research into how the virus affects their bodies and what, if any, risks they might face both short term and long term. According to one study[1], vaccination reduces the risk of long COVID by 49%. Given that some studies have found the incidence of long COVID is in the double digit percentages[2], exploring this issue is not purely academic. It is pertinent to the hundreds of millions of vaccinated individuals who are still at risk of infection, even if their risk of hospitalization and death has been significantly reduced. Science works when we ask and investigate important questions. It doesn't work when we ignore these questions because we're afraid of the optics and how they might be misconstrued by some people. In fact, when it comes to COVID generally, it seems evident to me that shying away from difficult questions has had the opposite of the intended effect. It has probably caused more people to adopt anti-science views and reject beneficial measures like vaccination. [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-09-02/risk-of-long-covid-falls-by-half-in-breakthrough-cases https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-09-02/... [2] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/more-than-one-third-of-covid-19-patients-may-experience-long-covid-symptoms https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/more-than-one-thir...

space_fountain 5y ago
Welp, this is making me realize I was just wrong. My understanding of the science was something like you can find asymptomatic vaccinated individuals with similar viral loads to asymptomatic unvaccinated people, which is a bit meaningless when you're choosing a threshold for "infected" and when random chance will just see some people at any level. So to be clear it's not that I think the questions shouldn't be investigated, but a statement like "some vaccinated cases have high viral loads" is meaningless to explaining what my risk of spreading covid is. Trying to avoid the sort of bias that comes from trying to reinforce rather than question existing views, but I do still think the statement "No Significant Difference in Viral Load Between Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, Asymptomatic and Symptomatic Groups Infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant" despite being much more precise is still a bit unintuitive in it's implication. Because essentially what this means right is that they sampled people's viral loads, and then cut out everyone below a value they choose to mean "infected". It's still true that even if I had symptoms because I'm vaccinated my odds of having a high viral load are much lower. Presumably if you didn't remove all the samples with less than some concentration you'd see significant differences. I think that something the scientists got wrong consistently with covid was not unflinchingly communicating what was likely to be true mostly out of a fear that the public would take interventions that only moderately improved their safety like wearing a mask, and start doing riskier things or because of a bias towards doing nothing when clear evidence didn't exist. It can feel like similar things are happening with vaccination where it does seem pretty clear that getting vaccinated reduces your risk of passing on covid both because you're less likely to ever get a colony of the virus sufficient to count as "infected" and because you're likely to have a shorter infection.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  > Because essentially what this means right is that they sampled people's viral loads, and then cut out everyone below a value they choose to mean "infected". Huh? Please cite the part of the study you're referring to to argue that the title of the study means the exact opposite of what it says. Every manufacturer of a PCR test specifies a Ct cutoff above which the result is considered false. > It's still true that even if I had symptoms because I'm vaccinated my odds of having a high viral load are much lower. Presumably if you didn't remove all the samples with less than some concentration you'd see significant differences. The study says the exact opposite: > There were no statistically significant differences in mean Ct-values of vaccinated (UeS: 23.1; HYT: 25.5) vs. unvaccinated (UeS: 23.4; HYT: 25.4) samples. In both vaccinated and unvaccinated, there was great variation among individuals, with Ct-values of <15 to >30 in both UeS and HYT data (Fig. 1A, 1B). Similarly, no statistically significant differences were found in the mean Ct-values of asymptomatic (UeS: 24.3; HYT: 25.4) vs. symptomatic (UeS: 22.7) samples, overall or stratified by vaccine status (Fig. 1B). Similar Ct-values were also found among different age groups, between genders, and vaccine types (Supplemental Figure 1).