I’ve heard people say they don’t want to go to the doctor or hospital for an issue because they’re worried they could catch Covid.
The same people might still eat in a restaurant - probably do TBH. They just know that really sick people go to the hospital/doctor and don’t expect them in the restaurant.
I’m not saying it’s a good call. I’m just saying I’ve seen it happen, more than once.
People have very interesting ways of calculating individual risk/benefit, especially with covid and delta variant.
If and when you do get a severe case of COVID be sure to come back here and tell how you’d do it all again…
You live your life as you see fit, and let others do the same. If others wish to be more careful than you, they have the right, just as you have the right to be less careful.
I’m sorry you’re “fed up”. What you call “extreme paranoia” others classify as “extreme care”.
If you go to the hospital, you will receive care, vaccinated or not. Individual doctors, dentists or other healthcare providers can set their own rules, but you will not be turned away from a hospital if you need care. It shouldn’t matter if you have your vaccine card or not. So please don’t worry. You will be required to have a mask though! And they will provide one if you forgot yours.
I never told anyone else how to live. I was just trying to point out that not everyone thinks of these things the same way. Obviously my views on this are different than the majority here. I’m done. Have a nice day.
This is not the general sentiment right now….we have the exact opposite which is what’s creating all the friction in our country.
If people who are vaxxed believed the vaccines would protect them then most of them wouldn’t care about the unvaccinated. The issue is that many people who are vaccinated are still afraid they’re going to get Covid and are pointing at the unvaccinated as the source of the problem.
The reality appears to be that the Covid vaccines are much more akin to the flu vaccine in that it helps protect against severe disease but does not prevent transmission. It isn’t the silver bullet against Covid that people were hoping it would be so we could return to pre-Covid times and fear levels. Unless science figures out a way to create a vaccine that addresses transmission as well as protection a return to pre-2020 life is unlikely to happen and some segments of the population are coming to grips with that reality faster than others.
The reality is that both are true. The vaccine isn’t a silver bullet and unvaccinated people continue to contribute much more than their share to the spread of Covid.
I’m vaccinated and still paranoid about Covid because I have a child who is immune compromised. I’m also not too keen on getting really sick even if I don’t end up in the hospital, especially since we don’t really know the potential long-term consequences of Covid. I’ll feel a lot better when we have more effective and readily available treatment options to go along with the vaccine.
deleted for privacy reasons
Do we really know this? Supposedly vaccinated people carry viral loads similar to unvaccinated people. If we aren’t doing surveillance testing of the public at large do we know how many asymptomatic breakthrough cases are occurring? Or breakthroughs that make people sick but not enough to require hospitalization? What are their viral loads? Are they contributing to transmission? Still so many unanswered questions.
I’m one of the fearful vaccinated. I was so happy to receive the vaccine but given the current circumstances it hasn’t made me feel better about flying, dining indoors, going to see movies or concerts etc… I’m very disappointed that the vaccines haven’t broken or significantly reduced the transmission of the virus. I reluctantly admit to myself that I’ll have to be willing to accept a certain amount of risk to return to my prior life and I’m not there yet. All those unvaccinated that get infected are also moving us toward herd immunity (who knows if that’s even possible now with variants still emerging around the world). If Covid is the new flu then no amount of vaccination will eradicate it. It seems like that’s the more likely reality than the idea that mass vaccination (on a global scale…because that’s part of the equation…remember delta came out of India) will give us back our pre-Covid lives.
We don’t know the exact extent of breakthrough cases, but there is data that suggests that people with breakthrough cases have a lower viral load on average and are contagious for a shorter amount of time. The studies are cited here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1
There is definitely a lot of unanswered questions, but it stands to reason that people who are sicker for longer will be more likely to pass their illness on to others. And, while we don’t really have a good idea of the number of asymptomatic or less serious infections among vaccinated people, we also don’t know the extent of the same among non-vaccinated people.
I am very confused and upset with information coming from the Israel, the most vaccinated country in the world. We all got vaccinated as soon as we could. My mom got her booster. With all that we live our lives as we were before pandemic. I realize that we can get infected but all information out there indicate it should not be severe for fully vaccinated individuals. Covid is not going anywhere in the next year or two and everyone makes decisions for themselves
Of course, with contagious diseases, people making decisions for themselves are also making decisions for everyone else. Vaccines were about to turn COVID-19 into a personal choice with primarily personal consequences – but then the Delta variant came, produced significant breakthrough infections, and caused an explosion of cases that overwhelmed many hospitals, preventing access to some non-COVID-19 medical care.
Once I was fully vaxxed by mid-April, I did begin to slowly transition back to a quasi-normal life. I was NOT afraid of COVID any more. I began dining out again, and not wearing masks. We were told that vaxxed people need not be wary of unvaxxed people. Up until mid July life was pretty good. The unvaxxed could not hurt me.
THEN THE DELTA VARIANT DID EXACTLY WHAT WE WERE WARNED IT WOULD DO!! (caps for point of emphasis, not yelling).
The delta variant is pretty much like a completely different disease. Now the unvaxxed can hurt me. So I’m back to being cautious again, though not quite as cautious as pre-vaccine. I know that I can still contract COVID, but the vaccine will very likely make the infection less severe. I reacted as I did because #me29034 described living life as if the alpha variant was still predominant as it was up until mid-July. His/her tone, describing my approach as “paranoia” is what triggered me.
#me29034 wants to live their life as if it is pre-delta variant.
It is a whole new disease.
I feel the same. I would love to see data on how many are infected by a vaccinated person vs. infected by a non-vaccinated one. Especially since so many hospitals are mandating the vaccine! The data would be very hard to come by though, since I don’t think vaccinated people who develop mild symptoms bother to go to a doctor.
This assumes that the hospital is not full, right?
Is there any triage based on resource consumption? For example, a hospitalized COVID-19 patient occupies a hospital bed a median of 10-13 days ( https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html ). In contrast, the median length of hospital stays for all causes in 2018 was 4 days ( Analysis of length of hospital stay using electronic health records: A statistical and data mining approach - PMC ). This suggests that, at a full hospital, each hospitalized COVID-19 patient denies 2-3 other patients care requiring hospitalization.
Of course, triaging this way can have implications on other care that consumes a lot of hospital resources (e.g. complex surgery requiring lengthy recovery in the hospital) when the hospital is full.
From the Nature article I posted above, a summary of some of the findings from a study in England that randomly sampled more than 100k people, vaccinated and unvaccinated:
“One massive analysis of Delta transmission comes from the UK REACT-1 programme, led by a team at Imperial College London, which tests more than 100,000 UK volunteers every few weeks. The team ran Ct analyses for samples received in May, June and July, when Delta was rapidly replacing other variants to become the dominant driver of COVID-19 in the country. The results suggested that among people testing positive, those who had been vaccinated had a lower viral load on average than did unvaccinated people. Paul Elliott, an epidemiologist at Imperial, says that these results differ from other Ct studies because this study sampled the population at random and included people who tested positive without showing symptoms.”
There’s a link to the original source in that passage.
Disclaimer: I haven’t had time to look at all the the methods findings from the original study.
All true. But my point was that the poster was wondering if they showed up at the hospital would they be denied care if they couldn’t prove vaccination status. The answer is no, you will not be denied care. Everyone who is sick will be provided care at the hospital (private offices maybe not). But your point is well taken: you will receive treatment at the hospital, once staffing and triage can get to you.
But other studies suggest that viral loads go down faster in vaccinated people.
And some will trust taking livestock meds before the vaccine - what??
And do they know what is in all the prescription and OTC meds they take?