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I remember here in Canada there were concerns about this sort of thing when rolling out our proof-of-vaccination system, but practically speaking, the number of

by yissp 5y ago

I remember here in Canada there were concerns about this sort of thing when rolling out our proof-of-vaccination system, but practically speaking, the number of people with both the technical understanding and inclination to do this is surely too small to have a meaningful impact on COVID spread.

sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
It seems that actually nothing has had a meaningful impact on coronavirus spread.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > seems…nothing has had a meaningful impact on coronavirus spread Not sure if trolling, but in case not, vaccination has had “a substantial impact on mitigating COVID-19 outbreaks” in America [1]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7709178/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7709178/
  - sgtnoodle 5y ago
    The link you provided describes a simulation based on assumed vaccine effectiveness. It's also from 1 year ago. It doesn't seem to reflect any statistically backed insights into what's actually happened over the past year. Or am I missing something?
    - sgtnoodle 5y ago
      Trying to find some actual data, I googled "covid deaths by month" and I stumbled upon this: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-... Notably, the "Growth Factor" plot looks qualitatively very similar from April 2020 until now. Before then, the data looks more noisy to me but not necessarily different on average. I believe folk started getting vaccinated in December 2020? Based on that plot, it doesn't look like the vaccine is helping much for the death rate. Maybe that data source is not legitimate, or maybe "growth factor" isn't the right metric to look at?
      - Ambolia 5y ago
        "Covid deaths" are also a very meaningless metric where every country or region does whatever it wants. Excess deaths would be a better metric, but also hard to remove from there all the damage done by lockdowns, stress generated on the population, and by hospitals stopping attending other diseases in some places.
        sgtnoodle 5y ago
        So what's the right available metric to look at that statistically quantifies the effectiveness of the vaccines? Or does one not exist?
        Ambolia 5y ago
        Control groups. But most countries and trials seem decided to get rid of them as fast as possible.
        ziml77 5y ago
        Why would you remove the excess deaths caused by hospitals not being able to handle non-COVID illnesses due to taking care of COVID patients?
        Ambolia 5y ago
        Because those are dependent on the response to the disease, not the disease itself.
      - bonzini 5y ago
        The current virus has a natural growth factor that is about 3x larger than the OG. So vaccines are at least 66% effective if they are keeping it at bay. Probably more since lots of countries have very low restrictions compared to last year.
    - galaxyLogic 5y ago
      According to the following graph deaths per 100,000 people are: 18 for unvaccinated 3 for vaccinated. at the peak of the graph between July and October 2021. Doesn't that tell us that vaccinations help to significantly reduce Covid-deaths? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status?country=~All+ages https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...
      - DenisM 5y ago
        Reduce deaths? yes. But it tells us nothing about reducing spread.
        galaxyLogic 5y ago
        Good point. Theoretically it could be possible that non-vaccinated infect fewer others than those who are vaccinated -- because unvaccinated more readily die after which they can not keep on infecting others. Nevertheless the goal is not to reduce infections but to reduce deaths and serious illness. Here's an article which says that vaccination does reduce the risk of you infecting others. But this effect diminishes over time quite fast. That would seem like a good reason to get the booster. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
        DenisM 5y ago
        > Nevertheless the goal is not to reduce infections but to reduce deaths and serious illness. Whose goal? There is no shortage of people and organizations that are trying to force others to vaccinate “to prevent spread”. As your link shows the effectives of this is dubious.
        galaxyLogic 5y ago
        > Whose goal? My goal. I assume also your goal. And I assume people who try to "prevent spread" do so because spread of Covid-19 causes death and serious illness. There have been 799,276 Covid-deaths in the US during the short period it's been around. Almost 800k people dead. Dead. If there was no "Covid spread" those people would not have caught Covid and thus would not have died because of it. To reduce Covid deaths and serious Covid illness you must try to reduce its spread. If you stop it from spreading you stop it from killing people. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
  - twofornone 5y ago
    That paper is purely based on a model with [optimistic] assumed effectiveness and transmission parameters. It does not consider any actual infection statistics to come to its conclusion. I'd love to see a paper explaining why some two months ago cases were already at or approaching record highs in countries with 70-90% vaccination rates, like UK, Israel, multiple EU nations...Gibraltar is particularly interesting because it has a nearly 100% vaccination rate, yet the case rate continues to climb unabated. [0] People are treating these vaccines as though they were sacrosanct and unquestionable. Meanwhile the pandemic continues nearly unabated and no, this is not a "pandemic among the vaccinated", despite the fervor with which certain interests have attempted to paint such a picture. Public UK data suggests that vaccinated individuals may actually be more likely to be infected some months after their second doses. But no one is talking about that... 0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/gibraltar/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/gibraltar/ 1. https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/10/10/is-this-ade-uk-data-shows-vaxxed-more-infected-than-unvaxxed-it-is-certainly-a-giant-giant-herd-of-unicorns/ https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/10/10/is-this-ade-uk-data-sho... - yes, it's a blog, but it links to the data for you to review yourself. Check the last two columns of the chart on page 13. This wouldn't be the first time that humans failed to solve a complex problem, I don't see why its so difficult for people to accept this possibility.
    - jschwartzi 5y ago
      In my state the vaccination rate is above 70% and the hospitalization rate has decoupled from the positive rate. The spike this winter ended in October whereas last winter it didn’t end until January. We’ve been on a downward trend even with shows and restaurants open and people having parties. So I would cite that as evidence the vaccine is protecting our population.
      - twofornone 5y ago
        Or perhaps people are acquiring immunity through contact since the majority of cases have been known to be mild or asymptomatic since the pandemic started? And/or the virus is mutating into less infectious substrains? Cold/flu viruses come and go. This virus will do the same. People will see it as evidence that the vaccines worked when in reality the pandemic very likely would have ended without them, yet here we are facing mandates...
  - cik2e 5y ago
    I like this site for COVID data: https://covidactnow.org/ https://covidactnow.org/ At a glance, infection rates and vaccination rates seem to be uncorrelated at best.
    - boc 5y ago
      Current vaccines are non-sterilizing and therefore do not effectively stop the spread/transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) but is very effective at preventing the disease the virus causes (COVID-19). Initially the vaccines were able to keep viral loads low enough to meaningfully stop the spread, but the Delta variant resulting in far higher viral loads and removed that advantage compared to the original virus. Arguing that the infection rates are uncorrelated is one thing, but serious illness and death is what we really need to care about with this virus. And for those metrics, vaccination is highly-correlated to better outcomes.
    - maigret 5y ago
      That’s a common error, reused by antivaxxers. They are indeed because even what we consider relatively high infection levels are just enough to get 15-20% of the population infected per year. This is less than the part of unvaccinated people. That’s why having a very high vaccination rate is critical to kill COVID. Above this threshold you’d see the infection rate affected. Still, vaccinations are good strategies because they still reduce infections, or at least severe forms of it. Without it in many countries would have been totally saturated by Delta.
  - joelbondurant 5y ago
    I can't imagine being as stupid as you.
smnrchrds 5y ago
The current standard all provinces have switched to uses "Elliptic Curve keys using the P-256 curve", does it not? https://spec.smarthealth.cards/ https://spec.smarthealth.cards/
- satellite2 5y ago
  I think the concern were most regarding key theft than a cryptographic attack.
jeroenhd 5y ago
The problem is that the people that are a) evil enough and b) technical enough to understand this will sell COVID passes for hundreds of dollars each. Here in the NL there have been tons of people that sold COVID passes, some working at vaccination places, others working at testing places. Instead of hacking anything, they've just been committing regular fraud. The street value of these passes seems to be round €300 to €500. The government has been blacklisting these passes ever since they were first spotted, leaving many of their "customers" angry now that they can no longer fraud their way through the necessary checks. The problem is not so much a technical one, as modern crypto is quite unbreakable. The pass in the article is based on RSA-512, which has been proven to be breakable all the way back in 1999. With elliptic curve cryptography the system can still remain unbreakable even with shorter keys that can fit into a small QR code, though space is rarely a problem with these codes anyway.
- TylerLives 5y ago
  How did the government recognize the fake passes? Just asking so I can alert my government if I see them somewhere.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    You can't tell from the signature itself, but one big group of people got caught with a vaccination record entered into the system from a company that exclusively takes tests. I don't know the exact methodology the government uses to catch fraudsters, but from someone who just scans the certificates there's no way to find a fake record. That is, a fake record that matches the person's ID card details. Here in the NL, that's your initials and your partial birthday. Most abuse is people using other people's certificates, which can trivially be caught by checking the necessary identification, as you're told to by the scanning app anyway.
  - t0bia_s 5y ago
    Dear comrade, you can't.
Tyr42 5y ago
No one has actually scanned my QR code so far, only scrolled down to see it say "two doses". So it doesn't matter.
defaultname 5y ago
The QR-code based solutions, using elliptic curve asymmetric cryptography, aren't breakable by anyone at present (maybe someone has some monster quantum computer and they could, but they wouldn't be making fake vaccination certificates). The private keys could be stolen or misused of course, but there are very well proven solutions to that given how much of the industry relies upon asymmetric encryption and signing. Originally the certificates were simple "yeah, they are vaccinated" PDFs that people would alter, which was a pretty low bar. In discussions like this I think we really need to frame this in the proper context. We're talking about a certificate saying that you did something that you could do for free, which has significant personal benefits, and even greater social benefits, and that a large majority of the public is entirely behind. Making a fake vaccination certificate is like making a fake Grade school graduation certificate -- if someone is at that point in their life, something has gone seriously wrong. The demand for certificates was just trying to entice the small percentage of holdouts, and of those surely there will be some who will go to great lengths, including committing pretty significant crimes, to avoid it. That pathology can't be fixed easily.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by yissp 5y ago

sushsjsuauahab 5y ago

It seems that actually nothing has had a meaningful impact on coronavirus spread.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> seems…nothing has had a meaningful impact on coronavirus spread Not sure if trolling, but in case not, vaccination has had “a substantial impact on mitigating COVID-19 outbreaks” in America [1]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7709178/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7709178/
- sgtnoodle 5y ago
  The link you provided describes a simulation based on assumed vaccine effectiveness. It's also from 1 year ago. It doesn't seem to reflect any statistically backed insights into what's actually happened over the past year. Or am I missing something?
  - sgtnoodle 5y ago
    Trying to find some actual data, I googled "covid deaths by month" and I stumbled upon this: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-... Notably, the "Growth Factor" plot looks qualitatively very similar from April 2020 until now. Before then, the data looks more noisy to me but not necessarily different on average. I believe folk started getting vaccinated in December 2020? Based on that plot, it doesn't look like the vaccine is helping much for the death rate. Maybe that data source is not legitimate, or maybe "growth factor" isn't the right metric to look at?
    - Ambolia 5y ago
      "Covid deaths" are also a very meaningless metric where every country or region does whatever it wants. Excess deaths would be a better metric, but also hard to remove from there all the damage done by lockdowns, stress generated on the population, and by hospitals stopping attending other diseases in some places.
      - sgtnoodle 5y ago
        So what's the right available metric to look at that statistically quantifies the effectiveness of the vaccines? Or does one not exist?
        Ambolia 5y ago
        Control groups. But most countries and trials seem decided to get rid of them as fast as possible.
      - ziml77 5y ago
        Why would you remove the excess deaths caused by hospitals not being able to handle non-COVID illnesses due to taking care of COVID patients?
        Ambolia 5y ago
        Because those are dependent on the response to the disease, not the disease itself.
    - bonzini 5y ago
      The current virus has a natural growth factor that is about 3x larger than the OG. So vaccines are at least 66% effective if they are keeping it at bay. Probably more since lots of countries have very low restrictions compared to last year.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    According to the following graph deaths per 100,000 people are: 18 for unvaccinated 3 for vaccinated. at the peak of the graph between July and October 2021. Doesn't that tell us that vaccinations help to significantly reduce Covid-deaths? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status?country=~All+ages https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...
    - DenisM 5y ago
      Reduce deaths? yes. But it tells us nothing about reducing spread.
      - galaxyLogic 5y ago
        Good point. Theoretically it could be possible that non-vaccinated infect fewer others than those who are vaccinated -- because unvaccinated more readily die after which they can not keep on infecting others. Nevertheless the goal is not to reduce infections but to reduce deaths and serious illness. Here's an article which says that vaccination does reduce the risk of you infecting others. But this effect diminishes over time quite fast. That would seem like a good reason to get the booster. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
        DenisM 5y ago
        > Nevertheless the goal is not to reduce infections but to reduce deaths and serious illness. Whose goal? There is no shortage of people and organizations that are trying to force others to vaccinate “to prevent spread”. As your link shows the effectives of this is dubious.
        galaxyLogic 5y ago
        > Whose goal? My goal. I assume also your goal. And I assume people who try to "prevent spread" do so because spread of Covid-19 causes death and serious illness. There have been 799,276 Covid-deaths in the US during the short period it's been around. Almost 800k people dead. Dead. If there was no "Covid spread" those people would not have caught Covid and thus would not have died because of it. To reduce Covid deaths and serious Covid illness you must try to reduce its spread. If you stop it from spreading you stop it from killing people. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
- twofornone 5y ago
  That paper is purely based on a model with [optimistic] assumed effectiveness and transmission parameters. It does not consider any actual infection statistics to come to its conclusion. I'd love to see a paper explaining why some two months ago cases were already at or approaching record highs in countries with 70-90% vaccination rates, like UK, Israel, multiple EU nations...Gibraltar is particularly interesting because it has a nearly 100% vaccination rate, yet the case rate continues to climb unabated. [0] People are treating these vaccines as though they were sacrosanct and unquestionable. Meanwhile the pandemic continues nearly unabated and no, this is not a "pandemic among the vaccinated", despite the fervor with which certain interests have attempted to paint such a picture. Public UK data suggests that vaccinated individuals may actually be more likely to be infected some months after their second doses. But no one is talking about that... 0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/gibraltar/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/gibraltar/ 1. https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/10/10/is-this-ade-uk-data-shows-vaxxed-more-infected-than-unvaxxed-it-is-certainly-a-giant-giant-herd-of-unicorns/ https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/10/10/is-this-ade-uk-data-sho... - yes, it's a blog, but it links to the data for you to review yourself. Check the last two columns of the chart on page 13. This wouldn't be the first time that humans failed to solve a complex problem, I don't see why its so difficult for people to accept this possibility.
  - jschwartzi 5y ago
    In my state the vaccination rate is above 70% and the hospitalization rate has decoupled from the positive rate. The spike this winter ended in October whereas last winter it didn’t end until January. We’ve been on a downward trend even with shows and restaurants open and people having parties. So I would cite that as evidence the vaccine is protecting our population.
    - twofornone 5y ago
      Or perhaps people are acquiring immunity through contact since the majority of cases have been known to be mild or asymptomatic since the pandemic started? And/or the virus is mutating into less infectious substrains? Cold/flu viruses come and go. This virus will do the same. People will see it as evidence that the vaccines worked when in reality the pandemic very likely would have ended without them, yet here we are facing mandates...
- cik2e 5y ago
  I like this site for COVID data: https://covidactnow.org/ https://covidactnow.org/ At a glance, infection rates and vaccination rates seem to be uncorrelated at best.
  - boc 5y ago
    Current vaccines are non-sterilizing and therefore do not effectively stop the spread/transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) but is very effective at preventing the disease the virus causes (COVID-19). Initially the vaccines were able to keep viral loads low enough to meaningfully stop the spread, but the Delta variant resulting in far higher viral loads and removed that advantage compared to the original virus. Arguing that the infection rates are uncorrelated is one thing, but serious illness and death is what we really need to care about with this virus. And for those metrics, vaccination is highly-correlated to better outcomes.
  - maigret 5y ago
    That’s a common error, reused by antivaxxers. They are indeed because even what we consider relatively high infection levels are just enough to get 15-20% of the population infected per year. This is less than the part of unvaccinated people. That’s why having a very high vaccination rate is critical to kill COVID. Above this threshold you’d see the infection rate affected. Still, vaccinations are good strategies because they still reduce infections, or at least severe forms of it. Without it in many countries would have been totally saturated by Delta.
- joelbondurant 5y ago
  I can't imagine being as stupid as you.

smnrchrds 5y ago

The current standard all provinces have switched to uses "Elliptic Curve keys using the P-256 curve", does it not? https://spec.smarthealth.cards/ https://spec.smarthealth.cards/

satellite2 5y ago
I think the concern were most regarding key theft than a cryptographic attack.

jeroenhd 5y ago

The problem is that the people that are a) evil enough and b) technical enough to understand this will sell COVID passes for hundreds of dollars each. Here in the NL there have been tons of people that sold COVID passes, some working at vaccination places, others working at testing places. Instead of hacking anything, they've just been committing regular fraud. The street value of these passes seems to be round €300 to €500. The government has been blacklisting these passes ever since they were first spotted, leaving many of their "customers" angry now that they can no longer fraud their way through the necessary checks. The problem is not so much a technical one, as modern crypto is quite unbreakable. The pass in the article is based on RSA-512, which has been proven to be breakable all the way back in 1999. With elliptic curve cryptography the system can still remain unbreakable even with shorter keys that can fit into a small QR code, though space is rarely a problem with these codes anyway.

TylerLives 5y ago
How did the government recognize the fake passes? Just asking so I can alert my government if I see them somewhere.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  You can't tell from the signature itself, but one big group of people got caught with a vaccination record entered into the system from a company that exclusively takes tests. I don't know the exact methodology the government uses to catch fraudsters, but from someone who just scans the certificates there's no way to find a fake record. That is, a fake record that matches the person's ID card details. Here in the NL, that's your initials and your partial birthday. Most abuse is people using other people's certificates, which can trivially be caught by checking the necessary identification, as you're told to by the scanning app anyway.
- t0bia_s 5y ago
  Dear comrade, you can't.

Tyr42 5y ago

No one has actually scanned my QR code so far, only scrolled down to see it say "two doses". So it doesn't matter.

defaultname 5y ago

The QR-code based solutions, using elliptic curve asymmetric cryptography, aren't breakable by anyone at present (maybe someone has some monster quantum computer and they could, but they wouldn't be making fake vaccination certificates). The private keys could be stolen or misused of course, but there are very well proven solutions to that given how much of the industry relies upon asymmetric encryption and signing. Originally the certificates were simple "yeah, they are vaccinated" PDFs that people would alter, which was a pretty low bar. In discussions like this I think we really need to frame this in the proper context. We're talking about a certificate saying that you did something that you could do for free, which has significant personal benefits, and even greater social benefits, and that a large majority of the public is entirely behind. Making a fake vaccination certificate is like making a fake Grade school graduation certificate -- if someone is at that point in their life, something has gone seriously wrong. The demand for certificates was just trying to entice the small percentage of holdouts, and of those surely there will be some who will go to great lengths, including committing pretty significant crimes, to avoid it. That pathology can't be fixed easily.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]