Note the ‘next couple of months’ timeframe in the OP.
Good news for you is that moderns performs at least as well as Pfizer.
I confess, it is based as much on gut feeling as anything. Contributory factors are:
- The trajectory of UK cases and the implications for Omicron R0
- Anecdotal evidence of breakthrough infections amongst a number of acquaintances
- I run a business and have contact with employees that make limiting personal contact harder
- I have regular contact with two 5 year old twins who can be vectors
- My partner isn’t as risk averse as I am
- My own pandemic weariness
The effective Reproduction rate of omicron appears to be closer to 3. This is not the natural reproduction rate - this is after mitigations. Protection against 2 shots, as evidenced by the numbers posted by the Ontario government where Omicron is in fully swing as as low as 1.2x better than unvaccinated. Delta was about 4x, Alpha was 8x.
Remember that an Rt of 2 will cause logarithmic doubling. 15% to 90% infection doesn’t take all that much time, it’s just 2.5 doublings.
With omicron, all bets are off. That party of in-laws was probably the size of a wedding party. All weekly church-goers. Many unvaccinated. No masks, ever. 13% positivity rate in the county and surroundings with cases going up. They’ll be there for six days. Very high risk environment. Very low risk for serious covid though.
I know they are anecdotes, but it seems to me that about 25% of the vaccinated people I know have come down with COVID despite some level of precautions.
My wife and I had COVID in September, despite being vaccinated. We have since received our boosters in November. For me, a few days of very unpleasant flu symptoms is not worse than 18 months of lock down. (I know it’s life threatening to others, and maybe even ourselves next time)
We’re following mask mandates (which I gather are pretty ineffective but better than nothing) but otherwise living our lives as we wish. We visit people without covid testing, we go to restaurants several times a week, and we don’t ask people who come over what their vaccination status is. I just don’t care anymore.
I just checked my card and it says “booster for the Moderna”.
This Moderna vaccine no match for omicron except with booster, study finds : Shots - Health News : NPR
combined with this:
Leave me feeling less protected but better than not being vaxxed at all.
Unfortunately that’s one of the two default responses people have when faced with an unknown threat, the other being It’ll never happen to me/it’s all a fake! (sound familiar?).
Getting educated on the threat takes work, doubly so when a big chunk of the information has an agenda behind it.
Exactly. You’ve been recently bolstered which would be similar protection if you bolstered with Pfizer. J&j plus a moderns isn’t as good as three modernas but it’s better than another j&j. Btw, two modernas performed better than two pfizers against delta. It’s a good vaccine.
Just curious, have you had an anti-body test done? I mean, your own odds would be even lower than most of us who have just been vaccinated, if you not only got vaccinated but got the booster AND had a confirmed case of covid.
At any rate, according to my own health briefing week before last (basically, it’s the end of the year so no one is actually working atm 
) the medical and EMT folks were saying it was around 1 in 5000 for breakthrough cases according to my notes. It’s possible that omicron will bump that some, though I haven’t seen that confirmed yet (but this is a few weeks old info at this point so no idea).
In any case, I think the odds of vaccinated people getting this thing in the next few months is and remains very low…much lower than people guessing at 50% or higher think it is. But YMMV and I think sticking to the mask mandates and other things like that are all good. I am pretty convinced my odds are low, and I STILL wear my mask, wash my hands and have our office spaces cleaned and disinfected weekly. I realize everyone is getting tired of this stuff, but it does help.
I mean, we already know it’s much more infectious and much more likely to infect vaccinated people. If exponential spread gets going with significantly higher R0, as appears to be happening already, extrapolating from prior strains in not a good way to estimate of the speed and extent of the spread.
I’m not particularly worried about it, since the probability of serious disease is low.
It’s a very different number depending on whether we’re talking about just infection or symptomatic disease.
I haven’t bothered. Not sure what I would do differently if I knew.
Nope. Their vaccinated kid also tested positive, but they don’t know who gave it to whom, or if they both got it from the same source. Their kid is in school where everyone is masked except at lunch, so there are plenty of possibilities.
I just heard that my brother’s 27 year old son is quarantined at home in Colorado until after xmas with COVID-19. He had two Moderna vaccines. He thought he just had a cold, but got tested to be cautious.
I’m fairly sure I’m going to get it. I’m also not very worried about it. I got delta despite being fully vaxxed (Moderna) and it wasn’t bad at all. The only reason I tested then was because my un-vaccinated, anti-mask hubs was pretty sick and I could recognize the COVID symptoms because the dumbass had alpha 6 weeks prior to this.
No idea. I don’t even know how one can begin to even estimate the odds. Lower than the average schmo factoring in the unvaccinated idiots, but how much lower is hard to say. I am triple-vaxxed( but Pfizer), do not eat IN restaurants (but do pickup takeout/have very occasionally eaten on outdoor patios), mask in stores as does most everybody around here (but not N95), don’t go to movies/theatres/indoor events, don’t use public transportation, socialize in person very lightly and only with other confirmed fully vaccinated people. I work around a small cohort of people and my co-workers are all vaxxed and most are slowly boostering up. But the one mildly anti-vaxx guy (‘what if I become sterile?’) has only had a single J&J and is unlikely to go any farther unless forced. I’ve had several family members with mildish breakthrough infections despite being double-vaxxed.
We will see. I’m not expecting to get infected, but won’t be at all surprised if I do.
Odds of catching COVID in the next couple of months? I’d say lower than average:
-
Fully vaxed last May, anticipating a booster in early January.
-
Currently off of work through January 2, not meeting with anyone during that time.
-
Employer is still allowing us to work from home, and I have enough computer-based work to continue working exclusively from home well into February. After that, I might go in from time to time, but the workplace is pretty sparsely populated these days, so when I do go there I don’t often bump into other people.
-
Getting groceries (and pretty much everything else) delivered, so just not going into business establishments.
Wife and I get takeout once in a while, but we end up transferring it out of its original containers onto our own plates and microwaving it - not out of a sense of germophobia, but just to reheat it; the lower risk of contamination by handling takeout containers while eating is just an added benefit.
And I thought I was the pesimist here! According to those figures from the US CDC from last October there had already been 146 million estimated total infections (that is about half the US population already infected once!), 7.5 million hospitalizations and 921,000 deaths (should be over a million by now). That took almost two years, a big part of that time there were no vaccines available and lock downs, masks et al were discouraged by polititians (for lack of a better name) and media (for lack…). In the next couple of months the OP mentions the chances are not so high for vaccinated & boostered, careful people as you seem to imply.
I hope…
I’ll rise my odds to 15%, I just remembered that I have an appointment in a hotspotal hospital in three weeks time. (FTR: I will be boostered by then and I will have to show a negative test result not older than 24 hours, as will everybody else entering that building, as I understand it. The patients for sure, personnel must be vaccinated. Berlin, Germany reporting here. I’ll keep you posted).
ETA: Patients in the last sentence do not include patients that have to be treated for covid, evidently.
Go Team Pfizer!! (Triple vaxxed with Pfizer as well).
The CDC says 50%, see my last post.
Nitpic: exponential doubling.
But the doubling does not refer to the cases already happened months ago, it refers to the cases virulent now. That is much less!