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Comment by sfink | Hacker News Reader

I disagree.

Before Delta, it was reasonable to resume almost all activities after being fully vaccinated.

I don't believe that is true any longer. There are too many breakthrough cases, presumably driven by a much higher viral load that can overwhelm defenses. (The figures I have seen are 1000x in the upper respiratory tract of infected people; I haven't been following well enough to know what the increase is in actually expressed viruses. But it's going to be a lot, and viral load has proven to be a very significant factor for transmission.)

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Well, I made no predictions for the future. :)

Vaccinated people are still mostly fine, even with Delta. You just don't get the close to 100% protection against severe disease, it's a little lower than that. It's still pretty good protection against severe cases (talking about mRNA vaccines).

What's clearly disappointing is that the vaccines are not very good at preventing Delta from spreading. I have not seen good estimates, but the numbers floating around seem to indicate the vaccines (again, mRNA) are still at least 50% effective against spread, but nowhere near 100%. That's the biggest gap right now.

It is true that viral loads are orders of magnitude higher with Delta. That is still compatible with all the statements above.

Sorry, I was only disagreeing with the summary "You're mostly fine [because you are fully vaccinated]". I agree with everything else you said. My only disagreement is that I read "you're mostly fine" implying that it's still ok to resume (or in this case continue) regular activities. In my opinion, that is definitely no longer true if you live in or near an area with overburdened hospitals, and at the very least changes your calculations in other areas because it's again important to reduce transmission.

Before Delta, I felt like reducing transmission was good but not that important compared to the disadvantages of isolation. Delta shifted the tradeoff back in the other direction. How much is debatable, but personally I feel that quite a few activities that were ok, aren't anymore. I'm definitely still doing more than pre-vaccination, though.

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