I get a daily news summary from the Times. Today’s included a long discussion of what effectiveness means to the pros and to us. Here is probably the most relevant paragraph:
By those measures, all five of the vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson — look extremely good. Of the roughly 75,000 people who havereceivedone ofthe fivein a research trial, not a single person has died from Covid, and only a few people appear to have been hospitalized. None have remained hospitalized 28 days after receiving a shot.
Hmm; that doesn’t look right. Maybe someone can make sense of it. Anyway, the news is basically good. Get a shot, any shot. They may not prevent disease, but they seem to all prevent really serious disease. One of the things they discuss is how the disease a vaccinated person gets compared to seasonal flu. Conclusion: Much less serious.
What the article doesn’t mention is how effective the vaccines will be in preventing the spread of covid. That will always be an issue, since not everyone can be vaccinated. And it will remain a major issue until most people have been vaccinated.
All those “only slightly sick” people can spread covid. Probably some others who’ve been vaccinated can, too, since we know that a lot of the spread is from asymptomatic people. Based on how other vaccines work, the odds are that people who’ve been vaccinated will be less contagious for a shorter time than people who haven’t been vaccinated. But “how much less” and “how much shorter” and what’s the chance of “not contagious at all” are still unanswered questions.
Yes, the article doesn’t address that. Here is my WAG (warning: I have no expertise on this; it just based on reading between the lines of what has been published and my own sense of how infections work).
I expect that a lot of vaccinated people will have asymptomatic disease and will be contagious. And people with mild symptoms will spread it even better. But even so they will be less contagious and for less time than unvaccinated people who get the disease.
This means that even vaccinated people should wear face masks. At least until there is enough vaccine that everyone who wants it can get it. As for the anti-vaxxers, the hell with them. What I really feel bad about are the immunocompromised people or others who cannot get vaccinated for whatever reason. Right now the medical profession is split on recommendations for pregnant and nursing women. Although if it were my wife, I don’t think she would hesitate.
Here’s some preliminary reporting that suggests at least the AZ version has a substantial effect on transmission.
That’s great news, and it also talks of the greater spacing of the doses in the UK and how it will probably provide an increased level of protection, also good news.
If we get multiple vaccines with that level of benefit (and also with the already mentioned reduction of severity) and the speedy matching to new variants then it is excellent news all round.
Unfortunately it seems that vaccine resistance and escape are already being seen.
That said, with so many vaccines available, at least our immediate problem, the pandemic might subside. Even if we need to continue to live with the disease it the background indefinately.
Probably need to update the shot every few years.
I’m certain we will live with the disease in the background for the foreseeable future. How many diseases have actually been eradicated? Smallpox…i guess SARS-1. I can’t think of any others.
But if we can knock it back to “usually just a cold” it won’t matter, except that we’ll probably want to get our kids immunized or maybe young adults… And maybe we’ll all need boosters.
I take my lesson from the casinos. They make a profit because they play the odds. No one thing we do guarantees anything, but each individual measure we take, be it social distancing, masks, vaccination, whatever, cuts down the odds that we will contract the disease.
Along the lines of this post, I recently read (sorry, can’t recall where) a conjecture that a pandemic of 1890 or so is still around and is simply one of the common colds. Simply that virtually everyone gets it during their first year and is thereby not exactly immune, but henceforth resistant to serious disease. The speculation was that this is what would happen with out new Covid.
The 1889-1890 pandemic was responsible for one of the seminal cases in contract kay, Carlill v Carbolic Smoke ball Company.
Contract law books had to include a disclaimer explaining to disbelieving modern students that people totally used to die of the flu. I suspect the new editions won’t have to bother.
Eh @Northern_Piper
Boy, I wish I could. A large percentage of my family back in the US have gotten their initial shots as of today, but here in Alberta they’re still saying the general public probably won’t be able to until September or so. It’s gonna be a crappy summer, if true.
The 1890 pandemic was a flu, not a cold but interestingly it is thought to have contributed to the high degree of mortality in young adults in the 1918 pandemic. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/18/2/10-2042_article
