Vaccine reluctance & General COVID Discussion

The NYT article posted above says 85x for Texas.

I just found out my brother in law in not vaccinated. I ranted for a few minutes to my husband, his brother, then decided that was not making me any friends in my house. I know this man’s circumstances. He is being irresponsible. Just came on here to rant. Maybe this is the wrong thread. Please tell me where I can complain.

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Complain away! You’ll find lots of support here.

I don’t even argue with the anti vaxxers and those with wrong information. I don’t agree, I don’t disagree, I just sit there with no expression.

Can’t reason with them, don’t even try. And definitely think of ways to not interact unless absolutely necessary. Outside.

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Not a study, but my friends in the airline industry told me that the ventilation systems on airplanes bring in fresh air and that airplanes themselves were safe but that what they worried about were airports.

Very torn. A close friend of my husbands passed away suddenly (not Covid), and the funeral is tomorrow. He is saying we have to go in person to support the surviving wife. The place of worship has a mask and vaccine. requirement. It still worries me. Do we know that KN95 masks on a vaccinated person will help protect us against Delta. i read that even though we need to mask again, Delta is “getting through” more than previous variants. do I double mask? Funerals seem to be superspreader events and I would guess that there will be around 100 people tomorrow. Not sure if I should be posting in this thread, but it seems to be the most active of the Colvid threads.

What’s interesting to me is how much vaccine skepticism is correlated with political orientation before COVID. As such, maybe we should be calling it reluctance rather than skepticism.

I live in a very liberal state and have a lot of affluent friends. Most of them were trying to figure out how to get vaccinations as fast as possible (some gaming it), with the exception of one couple who were the most right wing of all of my local friends/acquaintances (I consult all over the world and have friends/acquaintances in places like Texas and Wyoming whose political opinions I solicit but with whom I never argue). I discovered his political leanings when we had a dinner party on the eve of the invasion of Iraq with the president of a university, a very liberal tech billionaire, someone who is a Cabinet officer now, and my conservative friends (a business school professor and his wife) who was arguing eloquently and vociferously that the only correct and moral course of action was to invade. (Great dinner party by the way). I haven’t asked him or his wife whether they still agree with that call, but they were skeptical of the mRNA vaccines but were going to get J&J and now are spending a lot of time reading about the origins of the vaccine and are wont to believe that it was a virus created by the Chinese and possibly leaked intentionally. These folks are very smart. So the difference between them isn’t the ability to evaluate data. It’s not the science. It is the political predisposition.

While that is an anecdote, I think it is pretty clear that they are examples of a much broader trend.

As such, I don’t think it matters much whether the vaccine has been fully authorized by the FDA. The reluctance won’t go away with data, though it will probably go away with social proof. If enough people they know get vaccinated (or wear masks), they will happily do so without thinking much about it.

I would think that the right persuasive move is to ask them what their doctor is doing and why they wouldn’t do what the most knowledgeable person they know is doing.

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https://www.microcovid.org seems to suggest that airplane risk of COVID-19 can vary. Under custom scenarios, it says that airplanes have 1/6 the risk of generic indoor spaces based on ventilation factors. However, if you are sitting in close proximity to several other people in a full airplane for a long flight, that number of people and their proximity raises the risk.

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I feel like College Confidential is a window into my life right now. I am having an “Inheritance Squabble” with my sister, I am having a “George Floyd” squabble with one BIL, and another BIL is an antivaxxer, as are two of my neighbors (on a very small street). But maybe congenial dinner parties and family reunions are doomed.

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https://www.microcovid.org/ may help you assess COVID-19 risk of the funeral scenario. Use the custom scenario to enter things like your vaccine, proximity to other people, time spent in that proximity, indoor / outdoor, etc


Yes. And the studies on airline safety assume everyone is masked for the whole flight and on the flights I’ve taken, people have their masks off for extended period while eating. That has to increase the risk.

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I wouldn’t put much faith in what people in the industry said. There’re few but more objectively carried out studies on long haul flights (one of them, I recall, was a specific flight from the Middle East to New Zealand) that demonstrated how many passengers could be infected. Unfortnately, airlines actively discourage such studies. Whether airports are safer is another matter. Unsurprisingly, it depends on what a passenger does at the airport. If one purposedly avoids crowded spaces at the airports, airports could be much safer than on the plane, where one doesn’t have the option to avoid other passengers.

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The Delta variant might have changed things recently, but medical experts were concluding earlier this year that looking at the number of children hospitalized with Covid was an overstatement of the risk of hospitalization from Covid by about two-fold. Many kids end up in the hospital for all sorts of things, and all are tested upon arrival. However, at least during this study at Stanford, a good number of those kids who tested positive never developed symptoms:

The researchers analyzed COVID-19 data from Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford between May 10, 2020, when the hospital implemented universal COVID-19 testing for all inpatients, and Feb. 10, 2021.

During the nine-month period, 117 children either had a positive test for the SARS-CoV-2 virus or were hospitalized for MIS-C, the multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children that can follow viral infection by weeks.

Of the 117 patients, 46 (39.3%) had asymptomatic COVID-19, 33 (28.2%) had mild to moderate disease, 9 (7.7%) had severe illness, 15 (12.8%) had critical illness and 14 (12%) had MIS-C. Patients with mild to moderate disease had COVID symptoms but did not need supplemental oxygen, those with severe disease needed oxygen but not ventilation, and those with critical illness needed ventilation and may have had sepsis or multi-organ failure.

The researchers reviewed the medical charts of each child in detail, doing their best to determine which of the 117 hospital admissions were unlikely to have been caused by SARS-CoV-2. They concluded that 53 of the patients (45%) were admitted for reasons unrelated to the virus.

(The senior author of the study) noted that the percentage of positive tests in a children’s hospital is a better measure of SARS-CoV-2’s prevalence in the community than the rate at which kids fall ill with COVID-19. “The higher the prevalence, the higher the likelihood that anyone who has to come to the hospital is going to test positive,” she said. “Just knowing that a child is hospitalized and has the virus is not enough information to determine if they are actually sick with COVID-19.”

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Yes. And the studies on airline safety assume everyone is masked for the whole flight and on the flights I’ve taken, people have their masks off for extended period while eating. That has to increase the risk.

I was always "repulsed"by eating on a plane. Definitely would not do it now.

Unfortunately this data, which was as of 7/26, does not fully account for the Delta variant, which really didn’t start to make an impact until around that time.

Same with my husband’s brother and two of his adult children, all engineers. SIL is an anti vaxxer. Makes me crazy. BIL is heavy.

Have there been cases of the flight crew getting Covid? They are breathing the same air as the passengers and they do this job daily. I’d think that would be a tip-off as to whether flights are safe or risky.

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This is mostly from the pre-vaccine era:

Thanks. It doesn’t say whether those 3,500 FA’s got Covid on flights or not. That number also seems low in comparison to the general population’s infection rate. I’m seeing 121,900 jobs in 2019 so 3,500 confirmed infected is under 3%. However, the death rate of about half a percent of infected is consistent.

I guess pilots would be breathing the same in-flight air. Haven’t found an article on their covid rates but maybe I just have poor google-foo. Also, interestingly, it’s not clear that others will follow United’s and Frontier’s lead in mandating the vaccine for their employees.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/three-us-airlines-no-vaccine-mandate-workers/index.html

True, but note where Southwest, American and Delta are headquartered. In each state, a vaccine mandate would not be popular.