alioth wrote:
This is a reductio ad absurdum argument. By the same token it’s also a binary decision to trust the instruments and not your inner ear when in IMC, or a binary decision to not be e.g., an alcoholic. But we know these things, while they are binary choices, are hard.Getting a COVID jab is easy.
One thing is a five minute procedure you do twice a year, the other is an entire lifestyle change which may be very difficult to do (for example, many people live in places that are actively hostile to any form of transport that is not sitting in a car, which lends itself to a sedentary and very unhealthy lifestyle which is difficult and very expensive to escape). You’re dealing with all kinds of conditioned instincts with food, and it’s orders of more magnitude complex than getting a simple vaccination despite being on the face of it a “simple binary choice”. As I said, trusting the instruments is a “simple binary choice” but so many pilots fail to do it, and we all know why, and we all know it’s not that simple.
I don’t disagree with any of what you write, other than it’s probably not a case of reduction to the absurd.
My point is that you bear absolute responsibility for your choices, regardless of how hard you may find it to make the ‘right’ choice. If we can hold people fully responsible for what injections they decide to receive (or not), we can hold them fully responsible for what they freely elect to put in their mouths.
Malibuflyer wrote:
If we tell people “you must not shot yourself into your knee” – how many of those take a gun and do exactly that because they do not “like being coerced”?
That’s completely absurd, bears no resemblance to the point I’m making, and you know it.
Emir wrote:
Only those who know nothing about vaccination could believe virus would not spread among vaccinated.
Actually no. When the vaccines were being developed and rolled out the general scientific consensus was that widespread vaccination would rapidly decrease transmission to the point where R would become very low and it might actually die out. That is what you normally expect with a viral infection / vaccination scenario – e.g. polio isn’t endemic because nearly everyone is vaccinated and there are no viable hosts, and even if you get one case they probably never come into contact with another viable host.
This is because generally with viruses, what makes you ill (a high viral load) is also what makes you infectious. What we have actually seen, continued high rates of infection even among the vaccinated, is somewhat unexpected. It is probably a combination of Covid-19 being incredibly infectious (i.e. a person with a low viral load is still quite infectious) and the dominant variant now being a different one to that which the vaccines were trialled against.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Sure – but the odds of that become exponentially smaller due to the effect commonly referred to as “herd immunity”: If the vaccination level in a population is high enough the combined effect of the chance for exposure being small and the risk of infection when exposed being also small leads to a self reinforcing circle that limits infections to very local outbreaks. All well understood since decades…
As in my response to @Emir, that assumes that vaccination blocks transmission / infection to a significant enough degree. We don’t yet have the full picture, but it is rapidly starting to look as though that is not the case. Yes of course the unvaccinated transmit more, but the vaccinated appear to transmit enough for the virus to continue to circulate – hence the continued high case numbers. Everyone I know in this village is vaccinated, but we’ve had over 10 cases (among a circle of perhaps 20-30 people that I know well) in the last week and I believe it’s probably circulating among us. I don’t think it’s very likely that they’ve each been individually infected by a random contact with an unvaccinated person, who in rural affluent areas like this are quite rare.
Herd immunity happens based on a population becoming largely resistant to infection, not illness. It appears the current Covid-19 vaccines are not delivering this, so I don’t believe herd immunity is developing and wouldn’t even at 99.9% vaccination rates. Such high rates would of course lead to very few people getting ill, but that is not the same thing as herd immunity.
Graham wrote:
When the vaccines were being developed and rolled out the general scientific consensus was that widespread vaccination would rapidly decrease transmission to the point where R would become very low and it might actually die out.
It also was (and still is) the same “general scientific consensus”, that “widespread vaccination” (your term, not a scientific one) is defined by >80% of population (which translates into >90% of that part of population which is suitable for vaccination).
The problem is, that Anti-Vaxxers cause that we never reach this threshold (and then use the fact that Covid is still around to pretend those scientists must be wrong.
Graham wrote:
We don’t yet have the full picture,
Another fake argument: Yes, it is absolutely right: We never have “the full picture”.
Graham wrote:
but it is rapidly starting to look as though that is not the case.
Where do you look to have this “rapid insight”? If you compare Portugal and Spain in Europe (with vaccination rates >80%) to Germany, UK, etc. you see that they barely have a 4th wave (with some mainly imported cases) and have case frequencies of less than 20% of the frequencies of the less vaccinated countries like UK and Germany. How does that “rapidly” look as if vaccination is not effective.
Graham wrote:
Everyone I know in this village is vaccinated, but we’ve had over 10 cases (among a circle of perhaps 20-30 people that I know well) in the last week
Even in the UK, which is one of the global “leaders” in the metric, for the entire time of the Pandemic less than 15% of population has been infected so far. Last week it have been .4% of the UK population that got infected.
If in your community you observe 33-50% of people infected in just one week that shows a) that this is by far not a good representation of a bigger population and b) the entire village should seriously check their vaccination status. 33-50% breakthrough infections in just a week are an extremely strong indicator that something went wrong with the vaccination and the people do not have any protection at all – even with a completely unvaccinated population that would be an extremely high value
OK let’s cool it, everyone.
Get back to some aviation related talk 
Check the ad hoc meetups thread, and join the telegram group for it, so you don’t miss out.
Malibuflyer wrote:
It also was (and still is) the same “general scientific consensus”, that “widespread vaccination” (your term, not a scientific one) is defined by >80% of population (which translates into >90% of that part of population which is suitable for vaccination).
The problem is, that Anti-Vaxxers cause that we never reach this threshold (and then use the fact that Covid is still around to pretend those scientists must be wrong.
You’re missing what I’m saying. My point is that unless the vaccines prevent infection with a high degree of reliability (which they do not) there is no step towards herd immunity, regardless of the % vaccinated. Herd immunity is where isolated cases cannot propagate because the host does not come into contact with any other viable hosts. Lots of people who are double vaccinated continue to contract Covid-19 – far more than was assumed at the start of the roll-out. Not in as high numbers as in unvaccinated people, but in sufficiently high numbers for the virus to continue to circulate in a 100% vaccinated population.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Where do you look to have this “rapid insight”? If you compare Portugal and Spain in Europe (with vaccination rates >80%) to Germany, UK, etc. you see that they barely have a 4th wave (with some mainly imported cases) and have case frequencies of less than 20% of the frequencies of the less vaccinated countries like UK and Germany. How does that “rapidly” look as if vaccination is not effective.
I’m not going to base any conclusion on the numbers from Spain or Portugal. Those countries are doing very little testing (less than 1/4 as much per head of population) compared to the UK and most infections are completely asymptomatic. Testing and reporting cases is a game of ‘seek and ye shall find’ – if you test more, you find more cases. This much is obvious.
Malibuflyer wrote:
33-50% breakthrough infections in just a week are an extremely strong indicator that something went wrong with the vaccination and the people do not have any protection at all – even with a completely unvaccinated population that would be an extremely high value
Not at all. In any case it’s not like they all had the same batch – you can’t draw that correlation. These people spend a lot of time in close proximity to each other, in the pub, in each others houses, etc. If one gets it, many will get it because the virus is extremely contagious. Then factor in the human aspects – person A hears locally that person B tested positive so they get a test because they spoke to them in the pub on Friday. If they’d not had the news about person B, they wouldn’t have bothered because they’re not unwell – at least not with anything you’d normally worry about – this is winter, people get coughs and colds. So they test positive too, and it’s another one for the numbers. Then persons X, Y and Z hear about it on the grapevine and get tested too, and so on. All these cases would probably go undetected if people weren’t constantly testing themselves, as I don’t doubt happens in Spain and Portugal. As I said right at the start of the pandemic when all the focus was on testing, what useful thing are you going to do with the information when you get a positive test? Not much, except (a) worry and (b) do more tests.
Cases in the UK are almost as high as they’ve ever been despite vaccination, and it is not only the unvaccinated who are infected. If it was, the government would be shouting it from the rooftops to encourage vaccination. It is actually very difficult to get data on the vaccinated / non-vaccinated split for cases, hospitalisations and deaths, at least here. That suggests to me that the data shows something they don’t want to become widely known. Where it is clear the vaccines make a massive difference is hospitalisations – in this ‘wave’ they are 1/4 of what they were in the last one.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Even in the UK, which is one of the global “leaders” in the metric, for the entire time of the Pandemic less than 15% of population has been infected so far. Last week it have been .4% of the UK population that got infected.
The UK is a global leader in the reported infections metric because it does far more testing than every other country. I think it’s a phenomenal waste of taxpayers money, but that’s neither here nor there.
Less than 15% of the population has delivered a positive test result. The true number who have actually been infected is much, much higher.
To be clear, I think pushing vaccination coverage to as close to 100% as possible is a good thing – I don’t argue against it. I do argue against coercion and compulsion, and I don’t think that 100% vaccination would eliminate the virus because it seems to transmit itself quite readily even among vaccinated people. Look again at my polio example – the vaccines are highly effective at preventing anyone even becoming infected, so the virus does not circulate at all in first-world populations.
Graham wrote:
You’re missing what I’m saying. My point is that unless the vaccines prevent infection with a high degree of reliability (which they do not) there is no step towards herd immunity, regardless of the % vaccinated.
Actually there is. According to WHO (according to Swedish authorities) most infections are transmitted by people with symptoms and vaccinated people are unlikely to have symptoms. So even if vaccinated people are infected at the same rate as unvaccinated people, they are still less likely to transmit the virus.
OK let’s cool it, everyone. Get back to some aviation related talk. Check the ad hoc meetups thread, and join the telegram group for it, so you don’t miss out.
Great advice! I’m leaving this thread for good; whatever happens to Covid or because of Covid, I’ll read somewhere else.
Airborne_Again wrote:
So even if vaccinated people are infected at the same rate as unvaccinated people, they are still less likely to transmit the virus.
Yes I fully agree, but not to a degree that would cause the virus to die out in a 100% vaccinated population.
I guess my use of ‘high degree of reliability’ was too ambiguous. Polio vaccines stamp out the virus because any given vaccinated person is pretty much impossible to infect. Covid-vaccinated people are, by comparison, quite easy to infect with Covid. Just not as easy as the non-vaccinated…
Graham wrote:
Testing and reporting cases is a game of ‘seek and ye shall find’
To a degree, but the positivity rate can tell you if a country’s cases are being largely missed. (Austria is one European country with a higher testing rate than the UK, by the way). Spain’s positivity rate (number of COVID tests that are positive as a percentage) as at late October is only 2.4%, and Portugal as at today is 3.1% which suggests that they are not missing a lot of positive cases. The UK’s positivity rate as at today is 4%, so the accuracy of reported infection rates per 100k are likely on a pretty equal footing between the UK, Spain and Portugal – so Spain and Portugal really do have much lower infection rates than the UK and probably missing slightly fewer cases than the UK. (Austria’s postivity rate is only 1.4%).
By contrast, Croatia’s positivity rate stands at 40%, some ten times the rate of the UK, suggesting Croatia is probably missing a very significant number of infections, and its reported positive cases are a fraction of the actual number being infected.
I’ve managed to find some data, here.
The data covers weeks 38-41 of 2021, so quite recent.
The positive test and ICU admission data on pages 13 and 14 is grouped by age but does not give totals and I am not going to export to Excel and add them up, but the largest dataset for positive tests is age 40-49 (130,904 positive tests, 914 ICU admissions) so let’s look at that.
Of 130,904 positive tests, 7,297 cannot be analysed because there is no NHS number to link to that persons vaccination status. 13,022 were unvaccinated and 106,492 had received two doses of a vaccine at least 14 days before their test. The remaining (small) number had only had one dose. It actually give a significantly higher rate of positive cases per 100,000 persons (1,731.3 vs 772.9) for vaccinated people vs unvaccinated. This is the same for most other age groups of interest and it is only below age 30 that the unvaccinated see proportionately more cases than the vaccinated. I wonder why that is? Genuinely no idea.
Now ICU admission. This is where the vaccine makes a real difference. Of the 914 ICU admissions in the 40-49 age group, 398 had received two doses at least 14 days before their test. 461 were unvaccinated, 11 were unlinkable due lack of NHS number and the remainder had received one jab only. This gives 6.5 admissions per 100,000 for the double-vaxxed and 27.4 per 100,000 for the unvaxxed. A massive difference, and the same is true for every age group.
I surmise therefore that the vaccines aren’t actually doing a great deal to prevent transmission, but are making a real difference to healthcare outcomes.
