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> Later on, a lot of hyperboles were suggested about vaccines, like that they made you "immune", that vaccination would mean that no restrictions would be neede
by glogla 5y ago
> Later on, a lot of hyperboles were suggested about vaccines, like that they made you "immune", that vaccination would mean that no restrictions would be needed anymore, or that once a threshold of 70% was reached we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would be over. This was clearly not true, but it pushed many hesitant people into vaccination.
It was true then - it was what the math showed before Delta was around. The required size of population for the herd immunity to take over depends on the contagiousness of the disease - it is pretty much inverse of the R number at least in the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered/Removed) model.
For the original variant, the number was about 75 %, with Delta being more contagious, the number is a out 85 %. Worth to mention that this is of total population that can get the virus - you see news like "country X vaccinated 80 % people" but sometimes that is eligible population which is not the same as all susceptible population. When you see antivaxxers claiming vaccines don't help "because of Israel", this is exactly the difference - Israel had almost 80 % eligible population vaccinated, but only about 60 % of total population, which wouldn't be enough for the original variant, much less for Delta.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago> It was true then - it was what the math showed before Delta was around. True, but it was a very rough estimate (COVID R0 confidence intervals were, and to my knowledge still are, very wide) and the potential for change due to new variants appearing was known and discussed very early in the pandemic (the March 2020 variant that ravaged Europe was already an "updated" version of the original virus). And all this didn't prevent our president from confidently appearing on TV and saying that when we reached 70% vaccination rate, we would have herd immunity. He even provided exact dates when that would be achieved, so some people actually expected that he would hold a press conference that day declaring the pandemic over. Of course, the messaging became diluted later on. While perhaps not an outright lie, at the very least it was a half truth, and unrealistic hyping.
- glogla 5y ago> At the very least, it was a half truth, and unrealistic hyping. It was what the data showed at that time. Calling if half-truth because people couldn't predict course of a pandemic year in advance seems over the top. Do you know what will happen in a year? No idea who is your president, so I can't comment on that specific communication.