Comment by CarelessExpert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CarelessExpert | Hacker News Reader

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> There will be no significant herd immunity effect.

This is a statement that lacks critical nuance.

Will there be herd immunity that eliminates the virus from the population?

I agree, the answer is probably "no".

But vaccines significantly reduce the chance of acquiring covid upon exposure, and they reduce the period in which you're infectious if you experience a breakthrough case.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1

The result is that R is significantly reduced in a highly vaccinated population. This reduces the rate of spread and the chance any one person will be exposed, thereby protecting the vulnerable.

I know everyone is throwing around the example of Israel's experience, but no one seems to be considering just how much worse things would be for them if they didn't have a high rate of vaccination. The answer: a lot worse. Especially when you consider that, even with Delta, vaccines are highly protective against hospitalization and death:

https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...

Unfortunately that's not how it works in the real world. Since the virus is now endemic, the chance that vulnerable people will be exposed over the next several years approaches 100%. Reducing R0 only slows down the spread a little. We don't have a practical way to reduce it below 1.

> Reducing R0 only slows down the spread a little.

Reproduction is an exponential function. A small change in R has a large effect in rate of spread.

> We don't have a practical way to reduce it below 1.

First, this is just not true. Even the (likely pessimistic) Israeli data indicates that vaccinations reduce chance of infection by over 60%. This cuts R in half from 5-7 to 2-3, and probably less when you consider the window of infection is shorter for breakthrough cases.

Combined with other measures--contact tracing, masks, social distancing, improved ventilation, etc--the measures that got Alpha transmission below 1 without a vaccine would be effective with Delta in vaccinated populations. This could allow moving to a model of managing hotspots rather than dealing with unsourced community spread.

Second, you presume that there will never be a vaccine effective against Delta. I'd rather we do what we can now--which means driving of vaccination rates as high as possible as quickly as possible--to slow spread and buy time for targeted boosters to come out than to throw up my hands and just assume that everyone is gonna get COVID so we might as well just give up and stop trying.

Nope. Not wearing masks forever. Vaccines were the end. If they don’t work, nothing will. Either way the only ethical thing to do is learn to live with it and go back to normal.

Life is way to short and we can’t just piss it away being myopically focused on slowing exactly one very specific illness. Sorry.

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