Comment by seriousquestion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seriousquestion | Hacker News Reader

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seriousquestion

Another issue that is skewing the data:

Early in the pandemic, the United States had an undertesting problem. Now we are overtesting those who are immune and asymptomatic. A person with immunity to the coronavirus will fight off an infection. But during and after the person’s exposure to the virus, it’s common for a low number of virus particles to be detectable in the nose. In medicine, we call this virus a “colonizer” — a pathogen that does not cause illness or spread the illness. It’s an incidental finding. But in today’s world of routine coronavirus testing of vaccinated people, these positive tests are inflating the number of positive cases in a misleading way.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/21/covid-test...

The trouble is that there's this unfortunate tendency to try and deal with this by having different standards for what gets counted as a covid case depending on whether the person's vaccinated - either by testing vaccinated people less as suggested in that article or by interpreting the test results differently. Which makes all statistics about the proportion of people who catch Covid, are hospitalized with it, etc who are vaccinated complete and utter garbage - at that point you're not finding Covid cases amongst vaccinated people simply because you're not looking. It resulted in initial numbers out of Israel that seem to have wildly overstated vaccine effectiveness against current variants, and I suspect the same might be happening in the USA right now.

> in today’s world of routine coronavirus testing of vaccinated people

It's worth noting that the CDC is explicitly telling people not to do this:

If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms. (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...)

Agreed that people are still doing it though. That seems reasonable to me given the mixed data around to what degree the vaccine prevents spread.

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