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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 simil

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).
- space_fountain 5y ago
  > The study says the exact opposite: Maybe I'm misinterpreting the study. I interpreted that as being among the fraction of people who are infected both because that's what the title says, and because they say later that "75% of the positive samples were from unvaccinated individuals" which would seem to be inconsistent with the groups having similar viral loads. I thought we were dealing with a random variable composed something like this VIRAL_LOAD = INFECTED ? LOAD_FOR_INFECTED : LOAD_FOR_UNINFECTED And the study is saying that the random variable `LOAD_FOR_INFECTED` isn't correlated with vaccination status. That's indeed an interesting fact, but since `INFECTED` still was correlated (I think) overall for some random person `VIRAL_LOAD` would be too. Honestly a table would make all of this more clear.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    > Maybe I'm misinterpreting the study. With no offense intended, I think you're misunderstanding the whole concept of "viral load". If you are not infected with SARS-CoV-2, you don't have a SARS-CoV-2 "viral load".
    - space_fountain 5y ago
      I was sort of intentionally abusing the term, though I was trying to be clear that I was trying include explicitly people with a number of viral particles low enough to not be infected. My understanding is that a single covid virus infecting a cell won't result in a positive covid test and probably won't make someone sick especially if they're vaccinated. More broadly the point I'm trying to make is that vaccination lowers the expected value of covid shedding because even if they're actually infected they might spread just as well they're less likely to be infected and that phrases like vaccinated people have similar viral loads to unvaccinated individual obscures that point and helps lead people to think vaccines are useless
      - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
        > phrases like vaccinated people have similar viral loads to unvaccinated individual obscures that point and helps lead people to think vaccines are useless I neither stated nor implied any such thing and these sorts of PSAs are really not constructive. HN I believe has a generally well-educated and technical audience that is capable of having intelligent, nuanced conversation about scientific research. In fact, with all due respect, given that you've repeatedly misconstrued and misunderstood the research presented, and by your own admission abused terms, all in an effort to argue something that was totally unrelated to what was being discussed, I'd suggest your efforts are actually counterproductive.

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).

space_fountain 5y ago
> The study says the exact opposite: Maybe I'm misinterpreting the study. I interpreted that as being among the fraction of people who are infected both because that's what the title says, and because they say later that "75% of the positive samples were from unvaccinated individuals" which would seem to be inconsistent with the groups having similar viral loads. I thought we were dealing with a random variable composed something like this VIRAL_LOAD = INFECTED ? LOAD_FOR_INFECTED : LOAD_FOR_UNINFECTED And the study is saying that the random variable `LOAD_FOR_INFECTED` isn't correlated with vaccination status. That's indeed an interesting fact, but since `INFECTED` still was correlated (I think) overall for some random person `VIRAL_LOAD` would be too. Honestly a table would make all of this more clear.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  > Maybe I'm misinterpreting the study. With no offense intended, I think you're misunderstanding the whole concept of "viral load". If you are not infected with SARS-CoV-2, you don't have a SARS-CoV-2 "viral load".
  - space_fountain 5y ago
    I was sort of intentionally abusing the term, though I was trying to be clear that I was trying include explicitly people with a number of viral particles low enough to not be infected. My understanding is that a single covid virus infecting a cell won't result in a positive covid test and probably won't make someone sick especially if they're vaccinated. More broadly the point I'm trying to make is that vaccination lowers the expected value of covid shedding because even if they're actually infected they might spread just as well they're less likely to be infected and that phrases like vaccinated people have similar viral loads to unvaccinated individual obscures that point and helps lead people to think vaccines are useless
    - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
      > phrases like vaccinated people have similar viral loads to unvaccinated individual obscures that point and helps lead people to think vaccines are useless I neither stated nor implied any such thing and these sorts of PSAs are really not constructive. HN I believe has a generally well-educated and technical audience that is capable of having intelligent, nuanced conversation about scientific research. In fact, with all due respect, given that you've repeatedly misconstrued and misunderstood the research presented, and by your own admission abused terms, all in an effort to argue something that was totally unrelated to what was being discussed, I'd suggest your efforts are actually counterproductive.