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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

We’re still learning how vaccines will affect the spread of COVID-19. After you’ve been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, you should keep taking precautions—like wearing a mask, staying 6 feet apart from others, and avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated spaces—in public places until we know more.

This requires more justification. If we took the cautious choice every time we didn’t have all the facts, civilization would collapse.

We may not have gold standard scientific studies but what is our best guess of the distribution of possible consequences of fully vaccinated people attending medium or large gatherings? How do those balance against our best guess of the distribution of costs of continuing to bar such attendance?

Where’s the analysis?

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To me the justification is: we're in the midst of what we already know to be a global pandemic. The number of lives lost is nothing to scoff at. We do not want to declare victory until we know we can declare victory.

Personally, I feel that's a fair justification for the CDC's hesitation.

If we throw out cost benefit analysis and just go with our guts “out of an abundance of caution” we are no better than the anti-vaxxers.

I think there's an argument to be made that we can make the cost benefit analysis with or without assuming the vaccine is a silver-bullet. The CDC is choosing to not make that assumption and make the analysis that way.

I don't think it's fair to put that methodology in the same bucket as anti-vax logic.

Assuming the vaccine is or isn’t perfectly effective aren’t the only two options. They can use a probability distribution. Surely at least one statistician works at the CDC.

Fair point. I guess I'm just not approaching it from the same angle as you. I am just assuming they're doing that kind of work, but are not publicly giving advice until they feel confident in that advice. Maybe I'm wrong in giving them the benefit of the doubt here.

OK, so do a cost benefit. What is the cost of a mask? Next to nothing--a buck at most, and even the disposable ones can be reused a few times. The cost is vanishingly small. Wearing masks and maintaining social distancing is a tiny, minuscule price to pay, even if the benefit is still questionable for people around vaccinated people. It costs almost nothing and is almost zero effort, so why wouldn't you?

I just don't get this thing against masks, for the life of me I don't understand the mentality. In the past people have gone off to war and died for their country, and yet today we have people ready to riot about putting a little piece of cloth on their faces. I can't figure it out.

Do you also claim that medium and large gatherings have zero value?

> In the past people have gone off to war and died for their country,

There’s no evidence that a fully vaccinated person wearing a mask is doing anything positive for anyone, much less their country.

It does not cost anything to avoid gatherings.

Clearly we are going to have gatherings again at some point. The only real question is the timing.

I've heard of vaccinated people coming down with covid. Vaccines are reported to be extremely effective against hospitalization and death, but it looks like there's some evidence vaccines don't completely prevent spreading it.

Considering only 6% are provably true Covid deaths, I'm really not so sure the number of lives lost isn't something to scoff at. Most people that say something like that also get in a car almost every day.

We can diff-in-diff deaths from medical emergencies; there doesn't need to be very strong proof beyond that because of remarkable signal strength.

Can you explain further or link to some resource that does? I am not entirely convinced one way or the other, but I've leaned more and more towards viewing covid like any other cold based on information I'm aware of. The apparent absolute lack of integrity of CDCs summaries of how to interpret their data vs. the appearance of the data has also contributed to my view. I'm not going to say I'd be happy to be proven wrong - it would mean the world is a in a worse state than I'd hope it is, but I don't intend to have an incorrect model of reality, so if my model is wrong please help me correct it.

> Where’s the analysis?

One hand: Analysis takes a while. A quorum/consensus never seems to form within the year.

Other hand: It's disheartening to hear such blatant conjecture from government officials.

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