Vaccine

dad4 said:
Not quite. I believe that the chain of contagion that led to each new case contained some unmasked and unvaccinated people.

The identity of the last person in each chain is not really the point. The point is that, if more of us are masked and vaccinated, then covid will reach fewer vulnerable people. The chain will break somewhere along the way.

Yes, I do believe that R<1 eventually leads to zero cases. But it helps even without that effect. Reducing R also leads to significantly fewer cases in the short to medium term. R=.8 has about half as many cases as R=.9, for example. This is true even if you are continually importing new cases from overseas, and therefore never get to zero.
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You sound like a smart person and I get how you would get consumed by R. Using "R" makes politicians and non epidemiologists sound sciency. It's really not very precise and rests on assumptions. It really doesn't capture what's happening in a pandemic and can spike up and down when cases are low.

It's a good marker that can help guide mitigation efforts but it isn't as important as you make it out to be. R doesn't guide epidemiologists on how to manage virul outbreaks.
 
watfly said:
Yes, I agree that the last person on the chain is not really the point. But the fact is there are vaccinated in the chain, so the vaccinated don't break the chain. That's why its illogical to discriminate against the unvaccinated. In some ways it would make more sense to discriminate against the medically vulnerable. The 15 that were infected at the nursing home did nothing to break, or apparently to slow the chain.
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There is almost no way of knowing how Colin Powell contracted the virus, especially since vaccinated peeps can transmit. The virus is obviously circulating amongst the vaxxed.

In Powell's case, if he didn't change the way he interacted with his surrounding, contracting the virus was always a possiblity. He probably knew that and lived his life the best he could. He was vulnerable to any contagion, and he knew it.
 
dad4 said:
That must drive them bonkers.

That’s because you keep making assertions that are simply false, such as “if something is decreasing, then it must be decreasing to zero.”

Not true. Not even remotely close to true. Millions of things decrease without getting near zero. The value of my car is decreasing, but not to zero. The value will never drop below the value as scrap metal. My grandmother‘s height was decreasing for the entire time I knew her. But her height never got close to zero. Temperature in Riyadh falls during autumn. Usually not to zero.

So you make your assertion, and there they are, patiently explaining that your numeric intuition is not nearly as strong as you think it is.
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I’ll tell you the same thing as I told them. You are getting hung up on certain things like the r and zero. If it drops over a year to 20% or less as some studies have suggested it might you get to the same place as zero

cut the bull and stop trying to throw up “math” in an attempt to distract from it. If your underlying assumptions and inputs are garbage so are your equations.
 
dad4 said:
Sure. But it doesn’t bug me as much. As soon as I heard that Alpha and Delta had a higher R, I expected a higher herd immunity threshhold. It was one surprise, not two.

I agree that it is annoying that R is super high at the same time as we have a partially effective vaccine. As you’ve noted, it makes herd immunity hard to reach. 8 months ago, I would have hoped that we could hit herd immunity without masks and without needing to impose on the anti-vax folks.

Unfortunately, the disease changed before we could get there.
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Yet you keep making the same in the box thinking that assumes that threshold is a static number under 100%. Because vaccine immunity changes over time that number might be well over 100% and increasing on a day to day basis….in other words you might never get there (at least not without everyone getting infected and even then maybe not then)…at least we have you in the record now that you are still pursuing the fantasy of zero covid. Best case this fades into the background and new pharma mitigates harm. Worst case periodic mutations and outbreaks kill a bunch of elderlt every year
 
Grace T. said:
I’ll tell you the same thing as I told them. You are getting hung up on certain things like the r and zero. If it drops over a year to 20% or less as some studies have suggested it might you get to the same place as zero

cut the bull and stop trying to throw up “math” in an attempt to distract from it. If your underlying assumptions and inputs are garbage so are your equations.
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Those damned mathematicians, eh?
 
what-happened said:
You sound like a smart person and I get how you would get consumed by R. Using "R" makes politicians and non epidemiologists sound sciency. It's really not very precise and rests on assumptions. It really doesn't capture what's happening in a pandemic and can spike up and down when cases are low.

It's a good marker that can help guide mitigation efforts but it isn't as important as you make it out to be. R doesn't guide epidemiologists on how to manage virul outbreaks.
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If you changed "precise" to "accurate" and "rest on assumptions" to "requires good quality input data" I think you'd better capture it. The term itself has a well defined meaning within the field. The variables that impact it are also straightforward, at least conceptually. They are, however, dynamic in nature and it can be difficult to get good population data, especially if things are changing quickly. What is your basis for saying that it doesn't guide epidemiologists? Just curious. Here is a write up that covers R from basic definitions and modeling variables, to real world measurements, to policy.

 
Grace T. said:
Yet you keep making the same in the box thinking that assumes that threshold is a static number under 100%. Because vaccine immunity changes over time that number might be well over 100% and increasing on a day to day basis….in other words you might never get there (at least not without everyone getting infected and even then maybe not then)…at least we have you in the record now that you are still pursuing the fantasy of zero covid. Best case this fades into the background and new pharma mitigates harm. Worst case periodic mutations and outbreaks kill a bunch of elderlt every year
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Over 100%?

What, exactly, would it mean for over 100% of people to be immune to covid-19?

6 out of 5 mathematicians are baffled by that one.
 
dad4 said:
Over 100%?

What, exactly, would it mean for over 100% of people to be immune to covid-19?

6 out of 5 mathematicians are baffled by that one.
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100% immunization (boosters being a separate round of immunizations than the first two). Again you aren’t understanding your own inputs. And what’s more I knew going in you weren’t going to understand it and was just waiting for you to duff it and you didn’t disappoint.

the question of natural immunity is separate since we know you e been neglecting it: as in you haven’t been able to explain why we are at 88% seroprevalence and still having outbreaks.
 
Grace T. said:
100% immunization (boosters being a separate round of immunizations than the first two). Again you aren’t understanding your own inputs. And what’s more I knew going in you weren’t going to understand it and was just waiting for you to duff it and you didn’t disappoint.

the question of natural immunity is separate since we know you e been neglecting it: as in you haven’t been able to explain why we are at 88% seroprevalence and still having outbreaks.
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That is not what the herd immunity threshold means, Grace. (My guess is that you know this, and are just arguing to avoid conceding the point.)

Read EvilGoalie's link. It has a clear and nicely written explanation of the herd immunity threshold, among many other things.
 
dad4 said:
That is not what the herd immunity threshold means, Grace. (My guess is that you know this, and are just arguing to avoid conceding the point.)

Read EvilGoalie's link. It has a clear and nicely written explanation of the herd immunity threshold, among many other things.
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The herd immunity threshold is the mirror of the immunization rate (assuming we disregard for simplicity sake natural immunity). The herd immunity threshold is falling day over day because people are falling out of immunity because the vaccines effectiveness fades with time. So on day 120 you might have 86% of the population vaccinated but 82% of the population immune (just pulling numbers out of my ass now for simplicity). On day 160 you might have 92% of the pop vaccinated but if vaccine immunity has dropped due to time (again assuming no boosters and no natural immunity) only 70% of your population is immune. Herd immunity becomes a dragon you are chasing that you’ll never reach

again I knew you would duff your inputs. It’s why they don’t people like you in charge of stuff: the heavy numbers guys can’t see the forest through the trees
 
EvilGoalie 21 said:
The volume knob goes to 11.
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Sometimes it does. There’s no rule that says it must go to 10. The inside the box thinking is something stem guys can be famous for and why some orgs struggle with breaking that sort of thinking. One of the recommends that usually comes from consult firms to tech companies is to foster the out of the box though…nasa was great early on with it…it’s a hard culture though to foster among tech types particularly once industries or fields of study mature…academics being the worst unless they are in pioneer fields (my first year out of law school was in consulting…didn’t like it….too much firings…the two bobs were such a drag I’d be spending too much time at chachkies).
 
Grace T. said:
Sometimes it does. There’s no rule that says it must go to 10. The inside the box thinking is something stem guys can be famous for and why some orgs struggle with breaking that sort of thinking. One of the recommends that usually comes from consult firms to tech companies is to foster the out of the box though…nasa was great early on with it…it’s a hard culture though to foster among tech types particularly once industries or fields of study mature…academics being the worst unless they are in pioneer fields (my first year out of law school was in consulting…didn’t like it….too much firings…the two bobs were such a drag I’d be spending too much time at chachkies).
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You're babbling.
 
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