I’ve noticed the closer to campus, the more masks I see. Still plenty of people walking around campus/Franklin St w/ masks on. That’s smart considering it’s graduation season.
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Last I heard, there are 5-6,000 breakthrough cases so far. In comparison, there are 6,000,000 reported auto accidents in a year on average.
Against the original strain (the best case scenario), at least 5% of the fully vaccinated people could be infected if they encounter the virus for a period of time without the masks. Since they may not know they’re infected, without their masks, they may more easily infect others. The number of new cases will almost certainly be higher (than it would be otherwsie) as a result of the new CDC guidelines. The CDC isn’t what it used to be and it performed well below expectation during this pandemic (under both the current and previous directors).
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1NJParent, you are making an incorrect interpretation of the statistics. 95% efficacy rate means that fully vaccinated individuals are 95% less likely to contact the virus than non-immunized patients. This means that fully vaccinated individuals have a 0.04% chance of contracting the virus, not 5%, as you stated.
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You are incorrectly interpreting my comment. I didn’t say fully vaccinated people have a 5% chance of being infected. What I said is that they still have a 5% chance of infection if they’re in situations where unvaccinated people are infected.
What is this 5% chance of infection based on? In the Phase 3 studies, the rate of infection in fully vaccinated people wasn’t nearly that high. For example, in the Pfizer vaccine Phase 3 study the rate of infection in fully vaccinated participants was 0.04%, in the placebo group it was 0.74% (the data where the 95% efficacy number come from).
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Not everyone during the trial was infected. Only a subset of them were (that percentage depended on the overall infection rate at the time of trial and it varies). The efficacy number is always based on the percentage of those who have been vaccinated within all infected (including the placebo group).
For example, if 10,000 people were in the trial, 100 of them were found to be infected. Among those 100, if only 5 were vaccinated (the other 95 had placebo) then the efficacy is 95%.
I still don’t understand where the 5% chance of infection you cite is coming from…is it from the clinical trials? Or real world data? Or something else?
Sticking with the Pfizer Phase 3 example, the 95% efficacy comes from the rate of infection in the placebo group (0.74%) vs the infection rate in the vaccinated group (0.04%). (0.74%-0.04%)/0.74% = ~95%. What Does 95% Effective Mean? Teaching the Math of Vaccine Efficacy - The New York Times
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In the example I cited above, only those 100 were exposed to the virus for a period of time that was sufficent to infect them during their daily activities. The other 9,900 didn’t.
That’s not how the vaccine trials calculate efficacy, see the NYTimes article I posted…it is the difference between the vaccinated vs placebo/unvaccinated infection rates. We haven’t seen any infection rates of 5% in any of the clinical studies, or real world studies that I have seen.
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It’s the same thing. The efficacy is always relative (the absolute number is meaningless as the overall infection rate changes from time to time). During this particular trial, 5% comes from 0.04%/0.74% (=5.4%). In other words, the vaccinated has a 5% chance of infection (vs 95% chance of infection for the placebo group) in situations where they could have been infected.
Not quite; the DC Circuit Court ruled that CDC exceeded its authority with the eviction moratorium. As a result, CDC has paused its order. (DoJ to appeal.)
But my point about recommendations to states really focused on masks. Yes, the CDC may have authority for a federal mask mandate — the courts would ultimately decide – but the CDC has no enforcement power of it. (There are only a few thousand federal marshals and Secret Service and they have more important things to do.) So without states and local governments to adopt a mask mandate, a federal rule would be toothless. (That nuance was lost on the press during the past election campaign.)
“Herd immunity” - I had read on the Mayo Clinic site that ‘heard immunity’ doesn’t exist with flu of any type, which is why we continue to have ‘the flu’ and a yearly vaccine for it - I personally believe we are going to learn an awful lot from this latest experiment of masks off, back to ‘normal’ - and I am absolutely concerned about what it is we’re going to learn.
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Flu does mutate in vaccine-evading ways much more than most other viruses, and the traditional methods of flu vaccine production are slow, so the risk of vaccine mismatch to the flu variants high. Also, people call all kinds of minor feverish illnesses “the flu”, obscuring the seriousness of the real flu and resulting in not taking it seriously.
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correct. The so-called ‘24-hour’ flu is not the flu at all, but a stomach bug of some sort.
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24 hour “stomach flu” is often food poisoning, I believe.
New Yorker always nails it.
“One of us always tells the truth; the other always lies. You can ask us each one question. How do you figure out if we’re anti-maskers or vaccinated?”
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My state’s governor recently lifted the mask mandate while still urging unvaccinated people to mask, but of course, that doesn’t stop the anti-vaxers from doing whatever they want. The gov (who has been pretty careful about Covid all along) did so because of the CDC’s announcement but also because my state has made great progress with the vaccination rate.
Problem is, my corner of the state is poorer and more conservative by far than the area that dominates political/economic decisions. More people here don’t want to get vaccinations than in the other side of the state, but also, access for everyone to get vaccinated lagged longer in my area. A lot of people wanting to get vaccinated are just now being able to catch up (especially teens). I really don’t understand why the governor didn’t instead decide that the mandate would be lifted by county, as each county reached the acceptable threshold percentage of vaccination. Full vaccination rate where I live is probably about one third, I’d guess (it was lower a few days ago.) I agree that at some point we need to open things up, but sheesh, we could have used another month or so of caution in my county (or at the very least, until Memorial weekend). It also could have added some incentive for those people who are not die-hard anti-Vaxers (just apathetic) to go ahead and do it. Now there’s little incentive.
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Under this theoretical scenario, even someone who desired one vaccine over another (but was not medically contraindicated for any of them) would still likely have been better off during the vaccine shortage getting the first available one rather than waiting for a preferred one (meaning extra time unvaccinated), since all them them substantially reduce the risk of hospitalization or death. They could then get the preferred one later after supplies are plentiful.
Of course, another scenario (where the mRNA vaccines require two doses, as is the actual reality) where someone would want J&J is that if they were unable to get the vaccination process started until recently or now, and the area they live in is “going back to normal” quickly, getting J&J now gets fully vaccinated in two weeks instead of five or six weeks. This may be the actual scenario in some places.
In reality, the first dose of the mRNA vaccines appears to be about 41% to 71% effective in week 3 after the first dose (but before the second dose), based on some health care worker studies.
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