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Comment by randmeerkat | Hacker News Reader

According to this yahoo article about 65 - 70% of the population needs to be vaccinated until we can get back to normal. That said there still may be mutations or other complicating factors that could throw a wrench in things.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/around-65-75-of-the-populatio...

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Immunized, not vaccinated. In particular, patients who have recovered from COVID-19 are (mostly) immune and count towards "herd immunity".

(Obviously vaccination is by far the preferable of those two options!)

Only for a while. Anywhere from 2 months to 2 years depending on who you ask, and severity of disease - 3 to 7 months for most people.

No one with any credibility is suggesting 2 months...

As of October, "The confirmed examples worldwide [of re-infections] could possibly be counted on your fingers" [0].

Immune memory cells, which are more potent than antibodies, persist for longer than 6 months [1].

We don't have data to support 2 years of immunity, but current evidence is pointing at it being long-lasting [2].

[0] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/10/14/im... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03207-w [2] https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1349898485756162048

Lots and lots and lots (hundreds of thousands) of people in Russia have been officially infected and diagnosed twice. Many Russian docs who worked with Covid patients have already been sick three times. And yes, most of the time they say it's 3-5 months for asymptomatic cases and 9 months and more for severe symptomatic.

Do you have a source on that? I'm concerned about reinfection, I had it back in March last year.

Got tested for antibodies, the test did detect some but concluded I didn't have immunity anymore.

This comment is not consistent with other data.

It appears that Russia has a different distribution of coronavirus strains than the rest of Europe [0], but the strains in Russia are certainly found elsewhere. If hundreds of thousands of Russians were re-infected this would be observed elsewhere and documented.

The closest thing I can find to reporting on this matter is here [1]. The Siberian Times does not appear to be a reputable news source [2], and its claims do not match the magnitude of those above. It reports that Russia’s chief sanitary doctor Anna Popova said, "in Russia there was not a single confirmed case of coronavirus reinfection." Furthermore, the doctor on the other side of this disagreement has "heard about other cases [of re-infection] elsewhere in Russia from colleagues" (and claims to have been re-infected).

This is not "lots and lots (hundreds of thousands)"...

There is evidence of re-infections in the scientific literature, but they are exceedingly rare (tens of people worldwide). Long-term immunity will have to be measured, especially in light of new variants, but current evidence points in that direction.

[0] https://nextstrain.org/ncov/europe?transmissions=show

[1] https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/virology-profess...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siberian_Times

Do those kind of calculations assume that the people who are vaccinated are spread fairly uniformly throughout the population, or do they take into account that people who will not take the vaccine will have a tendency to clump so that we are likely to have some cities or counties with high vaccination rates and other cities or counties with low vaccination rates?

That number has been thrown around for here immunity. But I don't think it answers the GP's question because

* Herd immunity numbers assume no ongoing vaccination -- they more or less say, "If life went back to normal, would the virus slow down or speed up?"

* Age-related mortality and age-related vaccination rates are important. If we vaccinate all of the people who are at serious risk, the danger is mostly gone. There have obviously been deaths in populations not at serious risk, but not in proportion to the economic costs of locking down the economy.

And as an aside, vaccine immunity is estimated to be about as good as post-infection immunity. And most estimates of the actual infection rate put them several times (some estimate 8-10x, but that's looking unlikely IMO) the measured case rate.

Imho you’re underestimating the impact of the disease in general. Disease is much more than who lives or dies, there’s also people who “survive”. A number of asymptomatic covid patients have severe lung damage. Vaccinating “at risk” people who might die doesn’t account for all the people who might live permanently disabled lives as a result of a covid infection.

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/01/14/asymptomatic-covid-l...

There are three X-rays in this article, and the covid one is completely bogus. Kind of stains the credibility of the article and the company the produced it.

Considering the source for that is a single trauma surgeon on Twitter, I'm going to wait until there's something formally published on the matter. We have no information on the condition of the patient with "covid lung", or even a comparison between asymptomatic patients vs patients put on ventilators. Not saying you're wrong, but that article seems sensationalized and quite honestly lacking in relevant information.

As an anecdote, my sister had Covid in March and had lung damage in October when she went for a checkup.

Also, we're not going to get much research on this until after the pandemic is over, because of pandemic related lack of routine medical care.

The micrograph shown in that link was taken from this NEJM article, which clearly says that the patients in the study died from Covid:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432

Dying from Covid is not “asymptomatic Covid”. So your evidence for this phenomenon consists of a local news article where they’ve quoted the opinion of one person, mis-represented a figure from a journal article, and showed x-rays with no citations or context.

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