Hacker News Reader

Comment by dubyah | Hacker News Reader

>When we are talking about many variable numbers, especially of a highly transmissible one, if something can be same, then there are also cases of them being higher.

So, you went with your feelings as opposed to scientific backing on that one. By that rational, they could also be lower too. In fact, they could be on average lower. That statement, however, has some backing. From a vastly larger and more random survey:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/research-and-impact/grou...

>The 13th round of the REACT-1 study looked at swab test data from almost 100,000 people in England between 24 June and 12 July. The research found that infections were three times lower in people who were fully vaccinated, compared to unvaccinated people. The data also suggested that people who were fully vaccinated were less likely to pass the virus on to others, due to having a lower viral load on average and therefore shedding less virus.

View on HN

I states

> they have the same (and sometimes higher) viral load

The "same" is surely a fact as has been shown by 3 studies. The sometimes higher doesn't mean always higher - it means it can be sometimes higher, sometimes lower but on average, it's been determined to be the same. So it's not based on my "feelings".

What matters is how these will turn out in 3-6 more months. When vast majority of people around the world still haven't gotten a single dose while us healthy and young people are being pushed to take it, it doesn't seem well advised in my eyes. They should be saving these for the elders and especially the ones in poorer countries.

  > They should be saving these for the elders and especially the ones in poorer countries.

dont they just throw away the vaccine if its not used?

if that's true, im not sure how declining to get a free vaccine helps the elderly...

The particular issue is, why specifically mention "sometimes higher" if there are no studies to back up that assertion or if you're going to rationalize your assertion on inferences about statistical noise? "Sometimes", "could", and "can" are doing the work of Atlas here. It's a genuinely pointless thing to say and somewhat bewildering to see someone continue to defend.

It's important to note the population of those 3 studies. For generally symptomatic individuals that sought testing, were hospital system patients, or were contact traced individuals, respectively, viral loads(Ct values) are similar between vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Even your first cited paper mentions deficiencies for asymptomatic individuals: >It is also difficult to determine the rate of asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic breakthrough infections and to ascertain whether viral loads in such cases are as high as those in symptomatic breakthrough infections. The “true” proportion of breakthrough infections with high viral loads would require comprehensive, frequent surveillance testing of vaccinated populations to identify these individuals.

The REACT-1 study data is from a large, random sampling of the population.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com