Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

TheMillenniumRider said:

I guess I can chime in here, I can’t attest to 0.08% or 74% either. But one of our towns nearby posts their infection rates, split by vaccinated and unvaccinated rates. The vaccinated infection rate is around the 5% mark.

I only know of it because a coworker was mentioning it, I figured I would double check the data.

I’d love to see that data. There is no doubt the number falls somewhere between 0.08%-74%. It is not an insignificant number, less the CDC wouldn’t have abruptly changed course to undermine ONE (I said ONE) of the primary motivators (I” won’t have to wear a mask”) for getting the vaccine in the first place.

Something spooked the CDC. Provincetown is the only study they released to justify their about-face.

U.S. finally reaches milestone of 70% of adults with at least one COVID-19 shot

Yeah, but...

Aamilj said:

Instead of making some smartass comment to justify the fact you were unaware you were sharing faulty data with unrelated denominators…the very mark of the uneducated… Admit you made a mistake and move on. I don’t think you are stupid. I think you got tricked by faulty denominators.

Says the guy who has written paragraphs to rewrite math.

Delta spreads through and via the vaccinated too. We know this is true. Otherwise the CDC would have never changed their recommendation. Not an opinion. FACT!

No one ever said it doesn't. I literally gave you the current data on it. I'm focusing on your incorrect assertion that "not getting the disease is not an option." That doesn't even make sense. Of course it's an option. 164 million people are currently not getting the disease, because they're vaccinated. That 125k people did, despite being vaccinated does not make this less true. Not only is it an option, it's the primary option. Right now, 97% of the people in the hospital are not vaccinated, and Delta is the primary strain of infection.

Here are some frequently asked questions, answered by experts this week. I'll call this part out:

The rate of breakthrough cases reported among those fully vaccinated is “well below 1 percent in all reporting states, ranging from 0.01 percent in Connecticut to 0.29 percent in Alaska,” according to the Kaiser analysis.

So Gonchs article continuously reinforces that vaccines protect against death or serious illness. What wasn’t mentioned was transmission. Does this virus just continue to circulate among the vaccinated but with far less symptoms?

The CDC stopped tracking that in May, for some reason, so we don't really have super clear data on it.

Also, the 74% figure doesn't mean anything without the context of how many people are vaccinated in Provincetown. If 74% of people are vaccinated and 74% of positives are vaccinated, then it's obviously totally ineffective. But, if 99.9% of people are vaccinated, then of 10,000 people, 9990 are vaccinated and 3 got sick while of the remaining 10 unvaccinated people 1 got sick. That seems pretty darn effective. Without that baseline, the 74% really doesn't mean anything.

To reply to Gonch's philosophical proposition with the most coach-speak (but still true) phrase of all time: "Control the controllables." You can't control what happens after you get vaccinated or what happens if you don't get vaccinated, but you can control whether you get vaccinated. So do what you can, and leave the outcome to God/chance/the universe.

From the CDC Director:

“Our vaccines are working exceptionally well,” Walensky told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “They continue to work well for Delta, with regard to severe illness and death – they prevent it. But what they can't do anymore is prevent transmission.”

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-vaccine-updat...536828ea1e

Ok, so we are not stopping this virus from circulating, so with that being said we are at a fork in the road. Do we stay in masks forever, or do we return to normal and if you choose to get vaccinated then you get less sick or not at all, or don’t get vaccinated and take the risk.

everyone argued to get vaccinated to stop the transmission, but that is now apparently off of the table so in my eyes it now becomes you get vaccinated because you don’t want to get sick.

am I missing something?

Aamilj said:

If you choose not to vaccinate your kids to Polio and your kids never get Polio, you didn't win any special trophy, and you certainly didn't help anything. You just got yourself a thank you note from Polio for helping in his comeback-bid

That’s not how it works. If you kids never get Polio, they neither helped nor hurt Polio’s cause.

That's precisely how it works. The reason we have occasional outbreaks of diseases like the Measles is due to low vax rates from the glue-sniffers. Choosing not to get a vaccine for any disease indirectly contributes to that diseases' livelihood. Saying "your vaccine doesn't count" is analogous to saying one's vote doesn't count.

If you're unvaxxed and don't get Covid, you didn't do anything intelligent; you didn't do anything. You simply got lucky.

The needs of the many...

Yeah, I think your point was missed entirely. Not getting a vaccine doesn’t guarantee you’ll get polio, but it sure gives it a better chance for a resurgence. Polio says “Well, ya win some ya lose some” and gets busy writing those thank you notes anyway.

TheMillenniumRider said:

Ok, so we are not stopping this virus from circulating, so with that being said we are at a fork in the road. Do we stay in masks forever, or do we return to normal and if you choose to get vaccinated then you get less sick or not at all, or don’t get vaccinated and take the risk.

everyone argued to get vaccinated to stop the transmission, but that is now apparently off of the table so in my eyes it now becomes you get vaccinated because you don’t want to get sick.

am I missing something?

They’re not saying Delta is impossible to guard against, they’re saying that vaccines are not very effective at preventing transmission. Though Delta is more contagious, I think masks and social distancing measures are still better than doing nothing. The mechanisms by which masks and distancing vs. vaccines prevent infection/transmission are completely different.

TheMillenniumRider said:

Do we stay in masks forever, or do we return to normal and if you choose to get vaccinated then you get less sick or not at all, or don’t get vaccinated and take the risk.

Those aren't the only two outcomes or choices. If enough people get vaccinated, we get to normal.

Remember, reported infections are a lagging indicator, and hospitalization and death even laggy-er. So in Louisiana, where it's bad enough to swamp hospitals, they're seeing a 4x increase in vaccination. What will it look like a month from now? It's likely to improve.

OhioStater said:

If you're unvaxxed and don't get Covid, you didn't do anything intelligent; you didn't do anything. You simply got lucky.

There have been 35 million cases in the US. So far nine of ten people haven't gotten it.

Is that luck or just the odds at this point?

Let's go to Vegas and play some odds.

Scenario 1: The dealer tells you that you have a 90% chance of winning something if you play at his table. OK. If you do end up losing in this scenario, your odds of going bankrupt seem to increasing due to some recent changes in how the house defines losing.

Scenario 2: The dealer tells you that you have a 99.2% chance of winning. And not only will you win everything you would in scenario 1, but you would also increase the odds of everyone else in the room of having a chance at winning something, and preventing others from losing. Oh, and if you do "lose" in this scenario, at most you will only lose about $100. There is a near zero chance of going bankrupt and you may, in fact, not even notice you lost.

If you choose scenario 2, you have to agree to get the covid-19 vaccine.

Well, in the case of an infectious disease, the odds get a lot better for someone that does nothing if the majority of the people around that person are taking action. It’s not so much luck as it is you befitting from the responsible behavior of those around you, allowing you to lick door knobs all day and night.

Lord Gonchar said:

There have been 35 million cases in the US. So far nine of ten people haven't gotten it.

Weird, did anything else happen pre-vaccine that might have influenced that outcome?

OhioStater said:

If you choose scenario 2, you have to agree to get the covid-19 vaccine.

Do I have to wear a seat belt in either scenario?

OhioStater said:

Let's go to Vegas and play some odds.

We don't even have to go to Vegas. Let's just have a national lottery.

Just by being a citizen you're entered. You literally have to do nothing. You have a 90% chance of winning. If you lose, you have 1.7% chance of having everything taken from you. You also have a non-zero chance of having nothing taken from you. The entire spectrum between exists as loss outcomes. You might get hit with a loss that doesn't affect you much ("Oh no! Here's your $2, Chet.) or is potentially devastating without totally bankrupting you (Oh no! I only have $2 left, Chet.)

Also, if you lose, another smaller drawing occurs that can cause your neighbors to automatically be disqualified and trigger their own lose scenarios.

However, you can increase your winning odds to 99.2% by becoming a Super Fun Time Sparkle Lottery Fan Club VIP Elite Member. It's totally free. All you have to do is go on down to your local lottery office and fill out some quick paperwork and leave with your super swell new membership packet (which includes not only your personalized membership card, but also a decoder ring and candy).

If you lose as a Super Fun Time Sparkle Lottery Fan Club VIP Elite Member, the lose scenario still kicks in, but the odds are greatly skewed towards the nothing end of the spectrum. Some will get hit with a bankrupt as Super Fun Time Sparkle Lottery Fan Club VIP Elite Members, but those are basically outlier scenarios.

However, a lose is a lose and the secondary drawing still occurs that can disqualify your neighbors. As of this writing, there's mixed opinions on how the odds of the secondary actually compared to the odds of the non-Super Fun Time Sparkle Lottery Fan Club VIP Elite Members. But we do know that neighbors have been disqualified in secondary drawings due to a loss by a Super Fun Time Sparkle Lottery Fan Club VIP Elite Member.

If you signed up to be a Super Fun Time Sparkle Lottery Fan Club VIP Elite Member, you agree to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

*Also, kids under 12 (and certain adults) are not eligble for Super Fun Time Sparkle Lottery Fan Club VIP Elite Membership.

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Let me post a bit of a reset here. First the disclaimer: I'm not an expert, I didn't even watch any YouTube videos about this stuff, and I never cared for life science classes when I was in school. If you know that I'm wrong here, please correct me...

Viruses spread because they infect cells in the host, where they can multiply. This multiplication serves two ends: first, it enables the virus to infect more cells in the host, which is how it does damage, and second, the viral load in the host's cells gets distributed by whatever method happens to work for the particular virus. In the case of the novel coronavirus SARS-Co-v2 and its variants, we now know it gets into respiratory aerosols and droplets and mostly spreads that way.

The mRNA vaccines stimulate the body's immune system to recognize the target virus and to attack it, thus eliminating or reducing it in the body. All three of the vaccines used in the USA, though, do not directly target the virus. Instead, they target the spike protein on the virus, which has the effect of being less selective, which makes the vaccine effective against variants, and perhaps even against totally different coronaviruses (I'm hoping for this one, but nobody is making the claim at this time). The exciting thing about this is that the vaccine actually causes the body's immune system to target and attack the virus's method of infection--that is, it is effective at preventing infection and thus preventing replication of the virus, and that's how the vaccine prevents spread of the virus. So far it seems really effective at that; even with the delta strain, getting immunized reduces your chances of becoming infected by between 95% and 99%. Back in January it was looking like 99.3%; now the best estimates seem to be around 95% at worst.

As of today, given the possibility of a 70% undercount, infections...all infections...in Ohio represent between 10.3358% and 34.4525% of the total population. Those numbers represent both the measured infections and the worst-case estimate. Let's assume that the real number is right in the middle at about 22%. That puts your odds of being infected at about 22%. Extrapolate to 350,000,000 people, and that means we can expect 77,000,000 people to become infected. Immunize *everybody*, and at a 95% reduction in infection odds, you're still looking at 3,850,000 infections. But compare that to the total population and you've now reduced your infection risk from 22% to just over 1%. The news media are screaming about the huge number of breakthrough infections, but without context. It's giving the impression that the vaccines are not effective, when in fact these vaccines are *exceptionally* effective.

Now, in updating guidelines last week, the CDC cited that vaccinated people *who are infected with COVID-19* are actually able to spread virus at levels at least equal to if not higher than people who have not been vaccinated *and who are also infected with COVID-19*. I'm not sure why this is a surprising finding. The vaccine works by interrupting the virus' ability to infect an immunized host. Once the host is infected, it's more or less business as usual for the virus. More worrisome is that the CDC also cited a particular incident where a large percentage of infected people in a particular outbreak were in fact immunized. The issue here is that if you have a large percentage of the population that has been immunized and you have a number of cases, a significant number of those cases will be among immunized people. It doesn't mean the vaccine doesn't work, it means you're bumping into the limits. It is also significant to note that while a non-trivial number of immunized people then tested positive for the virus, indicating they were passing it around, that group was a subset of a larger population which is still exhibiting the 99:1 ratio of unvaccinated:immunized patients with serious illnesses.

It's almost as though the CDC is deliberately trying to downplay the effectiveness of the vaccine in an effort to reinstate universal masking requirements, which doesn't seem to be a reasonable response from a scientific perspective, but rather from a social one, as the un-inoculated have demonstrated in the last month that they will willfully ignore demands that they continue with masks and distancing and the like even as the immunized try to get back to normal.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

Between reporting delays and strong day-of-week effects (even though this data is onset-adjusted) it takes a few days for the actual pattern to appear; this Monday became the top new case day for the current surge just yesterday. What's interesting to me is to look at the rise in new cases and compare it to things that are happening in the real world. The daily case count was declining until June 30, which means the reversal isn't connected to the end of the State emergency declaration and public health orders on June 2. The surge started in the last week of June, so it can't be blamed on the Independence Day holiday. And if it is a seasonal surge, it's happening about two months earlier than it did last year, when the fall surge hit at the end of September. My read of this is that we're definitely looking at a "Delta surge" caused by nothing more than the arrival of a more contagious form of the virus. Looking at what is happening now, and comparing that to what happened last Fall with all of the mandated mitigation efforts in place, my conclusion is that this virus is going to do its thing. It's going to do it either rapidly, as in Florida, or more slowly, but one way or another a significant portion of the population is going to end up with COVID antibodies. So we just need to choose whether to get them the easy way, or the hard way.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.