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> I've got an 8 million person state's worth of cases for evidence here. But the only way you can draw any conclusions is with a control experiment, another co

• roenxi 4y ago
  > That does not change the fact that vaccinated people are infected less frequently and recover more quickly than non-vaccinated people, and so they don't spread the disease as efficiently as unvaccinated people. Disease spread is an exponential process. That will delay the date that everyone has gotten COVID by for a week or two. Who cares? > That's about 6.5 million cases shy of the worst case. 2.4 recorded cases is evidence that literally everyone was exposed to COVID. Worst case for what I could have predicted in advance (8 million residents, 70% reduction from vaccine-induced symptomlessness so people don't get teted, predicts around ~2.4 million cases expected if everyone is exposed to COVID. Which is about what happened. High vaccination rates did nothing to delay the spread. The idea that it could has been debunked. It didn't. > The rate of spread matters a lot. That is a different argument, but the evidence I've seen is that that isn't true either - and I already have reason to believe you aren't cross-checking your assumptions against ground truths. The high vaccination rates basically meant that speed of spread was a non-issue. The targeted attacks against unvaccinated people were unwarranted and have look even worse than expected in hindisight. I too was expecting the vaccine to do something about the spread. It just turns out it doesn't.
  • lisper 4y ago
    > for a week or two And how do you arrive at that figure? You cannot possibly have arrived at it by any principled means, because... > Disease spread is an exponential process Indeed. And because it is an exponential process, decreasing the rate of spread will not result in a fixed delay for all infections, it will result in a decrease in the exponent. Some people will get it a week later than they otherwise would have, some two weeks later, some three weeks... and if you reduce the exponent enough, the result will be exponential decay rather than growth, and some people will never get it at all. And even if you don't get to that point, reducing the exponent can make the difference between hospitals having enough capacity, and being overloaded and having people dying in the streets and having to rent refrigerator trucks to store the bodies. Furthermore, vaccines are dramatically effective at reducing the rate of severe illness and death, so even if everyone gets infected and even if they get infected as quickly as they otherwise would have, you still have fewer people dying from covid, and you also have fewer people dying from other causes because the hospitals are overloaded with covid patients. That seems like a win to me. > > The rate of spread matters a lot. > That is a different argument Different from what? Your original claim was there is no societal benefit to vaccination, only an individual benefit, and that is just plainly false. One of the reasons it is false (but far from the only reason) is that lowering the rate of spread has societal benefits in and of itself, even if everyone eventually gets infected anyway, and even if there were no other benefits, like reducing the risk of serious disease and death. BTW, there are more logical holes in your argument: > Most people I talk to had COVID and caught it off a vaccinated individual. Well, of course they did. That's because: > it is impossible for it to be the vaccinated. There aren't enough of them and they've been locked out of a lot of places where superspreader events are happening If you isolate all of your unvaccinated population, then of course all of the transmission is going to happen among the vaccinated. The vaccines aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they confer no public-policy benefits. They clearly do. Honestly, the quality of your reasoning is comparable to a flat-earther.
    • roenxi 4y ago
      > And how do you arrive at that figure? You cannot possibly have arrived at it by any principled means, because... Trough to peak of the initial outbreak was 4 weeks, and the 2nd wave peaked after another 12 weeks. How quickly do you think the virus can spread? :p Voila, the stats [0]. You need to ground-check your assumptions. > You also have fewer people dying from other causes because the hospitals are overloaded with covid patients. That seems like a win to me. We're two years in to this, we could have beefed up the hospital staff. I suppose strategies that are human-rights friendly are off the cards in Australia because they aren't exciting enough. Frankly, the idea that this response was needed because COVID patients would overwhelm the hospital system is a bit of a reach. Ordinary flu season overwhelmed the hospital system. An ordinary day overwhelmed the hospital system. We do not go to extreme lengths to stop the hospital system getting overwhelmed. We certainly don't lock people in their houses, ban free association, ban people from working, or start forcing people to undergo what is effectively a medical procedure. Furthermore we had a lot of time to beef up the hospital system to cope as this pandemic has been a thing for more than a year by now. The argument is underdeveloped. > lowering the rate of spread has societal benefits in and of itself What are they and how are you measuring them? Because intuition hasn't been a good guide so far. > BTW, there are more logical holes in your argument: Point them out, I reckon I can patch them up with evidence. > If you isolate all of your unvaccinated population, then of course all of the transmission is going to happen among the vaccinated. The vaccines aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they confer no public-policy benefits. They clearly do. Well, they confer enormous benefits to people who get vaccinated. But Australia has been in human-rights-abuse mode for a while now and it makes me very uncomfortable. I'd rather people had been honest up front that the vaccine wasn't going to have any impact on the spread of COVID. A lot of people were saying they would and they've turned out to have ... charitably I might say an immeasurable ... impact on the spread. [0] https://chrisbillington.net/COVID_NSW.html https://chrisbillington.net/COVID_NSW.html