If you offer the vaccine to everybody in e.g. Texas and only 10% of the populace take you up on the offer, you’ve accomplished nearly zero in affecting COVID transmission. Conversely if you offer vaccination to everybody and 95% take it, you’ve probably stopped COVID cold. At least in that area until the local population mixes with a less compliant population elsewhere.
In the absence of widespread vaccination compliance on a planetary scale, the answer to “When can we stop wearing masks and avoiding being near other humans?” is “Never”.
If “never” is the answer, good luck getting people to comply with it at all. People have been, for the most part, willing to accept some fairly drastic changes to their lives because they perceive them as temporary and having an endpoint, even if we don’t know exactly when that is. If there’s no endpoint, the choice is between “go back to normal now and accept that life now comes with a set of risks that didn’t exist before” and “never go back to normal ever again,” and the vast majority of people are going to choose “now.”
As he said, that will only be the case if a large proportion of humanity is stupid enough to decline the vaccine. If a large proportion of humanity was stupid enough to decline the smallpox vaccine, then millions of us would still be dying of smallpox every few years. Same deal with COVID.
If people have the opportunity to get vaccinated and choose not to, I don’t feel nearly as obligated to restrict my own life to lessen the chance they’ll get Covid.
Until we provide vaccines to all the poor people in all the poor or governmentally challenged countries they’ll be a large reservoir. Like billions and billions. Which will continuously drip-feed disease into every wealthier, more stable country via the flows of travelers, refugees, etc.
We may well persuade ourselves that losing X number of Europeans or Americans or whatever every year is close enough.
I know if I’m vaccinated and all that’s left is hold outs, I’m going back to normal. If the answer to how long do we go with no social gatherings is “forever”, I will vote for the party that disagrees. I will not accept this “new normal” forever.
Assuming the Phase III testing data from Moderna holds up in the real world, 9 of 10 people who make your decision will be fine. In the presence of widespread holdouts the 10th will soon have COVID.
Yo pays yo money and yo takes the chances your fellow citizens have chosen to direct your way.
What is the mechanism that makes this true? Isn’t it the same mechanism that calls asymptomatic spread into question? As in, if you don’t have loads of virus in your body, you don’t have much to spread to others, and if you do have loads of virus in your body, you’ll be in a battle with it.
There is so much about the reasoning surrounding this pandemic that does not reconcile. So much. Unless I’m missing something, it appears to me as though there is a significant amount of people who simultaneously believe that asymptomatic spread is a problem but that spread from vaccinated people won’t be, and I can’t see how those two things are any different.
If you’re spreading the virus, then you have a significant amount of virus in your body. Asymptomatic spread is because, for whatever reason, some people don’t feel symptoms despite having a significant amount of virus. Vaccination would enable you to defeat the virus before it grew to significant numbers in your body.
No, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that people protected by the vaccine are still contagious. It’s not like that idea isn’t being discussed. The general best guess, based on past efforts, is that it will lower how infectious you are too.
How common does it seem to be that people have a significant amount of virus yet aren’t aware of it? Like, with other viruses, I mean. Is that one reason influenza spreads so well?
If I understand correctly (and I might not—surely someone will correct me if I’m wrong), many of the symptoms you suffer from when you have a cold, flu, etc. are not caused directly by the virus but by the body’s response to it as it attempts to fight the infection. That partly explains why you can be infectious before you feel sick.
Many diseases are contagious before symptoms, for example the flu can be contagious a day or so before symptoms develop. This is in part because
For example, an infection doesn’t directly cause a fever. The infectious agent would probably prefer you didn’t get a fever, because the increased temperature makes it more difficult for the infectious agent to do its thing. The body responds to the infection by raising its temperature, so now you have chills and other things associated with a fever.
The explanation I heard about transmission of COVID-19 after vaccination, from a medical expert on one podcast or another, is that the vaccine gives you immunity, but that the immune system cells in particular tissue may not be immune, because those cells were not exposed to the virus.
The mucus membranes in your nose might catch COVID-19, and it starts replicating and getting expelled. The virus won’t be able to spread to the rest of your body, because you’ve been vaccinated, but during the few days that it takes your body to fight off the infection in your sinuses, you may be contagious. (I hope I didn’t butcher that explanation too badly.)
The explanation was given as a medically plausible method of action for vaccinated people to be carriers, but with the big caveat, that we just don’t know yet. A scientist saying “I don’t know” is very, very different from “we’ll never know” or “it’s impossible to know.” Somebody somewhere is shoving a swab up vaccinated people’s noses every few days to find out (at least I hope so!)
As can be seen, a single active case, can send multiple adults to quarantine for a minimum of 10 days. Each of those adults’ jobs needs to be covered for the school to keep running.
If the adults were vaccinated then quarantine would probably be much shorter (if it turns out vaccinated people can be carriers), or not necessary at all (if it turns out vaccinated people can’t be carriers).
