I don't think this will come as a surprise to anyone, but Charles Gaba has plotted vaccination rates for all 3,144 counties in the United States. Here they are:
It's pretty obvious that the redder a county, the worse its vaccination rate. Of course, red counties also tend to be older, more rural, more conservative, less educated, and more likely to watch Fox News, all of which are associated with lower vaccination rates. So there's a lot going on here.
You've got to remember that these are just simple Fox viewers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.
h/t Mel Brooks.
So more beans?
"Of course, red counties also tend to be older, more rural, more conservative, less educated, and more likely to watch Fox News ...."
And, the elephant in the room, the old confederacy states.
My wife's extended family is an interesting cross section of the non-vaxxed mindset. Despite being in a blue city in a blue state a lot of them are rabid Trumpians. None have been or will be vaxxed. Several work for the state (ironic since they believe in small government) but even the state has not required vaccinations. Why? And this brings me to the other part of her family - for Trumpian republicans a very large number of the women have African American boyfriends. And our state officials are twisting themselves into knots being outraged by anti-vax Republicans but justifying every imaginable reason for non-vaxxed African Americans. Some claim there is no access to the vaccine, when you can't throw a rock without hitting a Walgreens or CVS offering free vaccinations with no appointment requirement.
You do not see the CVS or Walgreens on every corner in poorer communities.
More needs to be done to get minorities vaccinated. But they are still minorities, so don't drive the numbers that much--though that can vary a lot at the local level. And rarely do you hear minority politicians rail against mask mandates.
When governors are blocking mask mandates and are undermining vaccination efforts, that is the real problem.
How many of those unvaccinated African Americans are working-class laborers, whose jobs provide little or no sick/vacation leave to cover possible reactions to the vaccines?
The animation at the end of this post is good.
acasignups.net/21/08/11/us-covid19-vaccination-levels-county-over-time
That's good. The slope (blue over red) was very slight at the start, then jumped in April (when under-65's got the vax), and it's been steepening every 10 days since.
Recently Osterholm and other top epidemiologists said that given how contagious Delta is, basically every unvaccinated person not taking serious mitigation measure will be infected in the next few months.
So the morbid upside to Delta being super contagious…. are we about to reach herd immunity the hard way this winter?
Sure does seem like it.
herd immunity to what exactly, since almost certainly there will be new variants ...
It will not be just the "hard way" through natural immunity or the " easy way" through vaccination. It will clearly be some of both as some are getting covid and natural immunity and more are still getting vaccinated. And I suspect we are going to need a sizable contribution from super immunity from those that are both vaccinated and had covid.
But, if delta is that contagious, it will not take until winter. We will get there much sooner ( and I argue any restrictions are just delaying that so not very useful).
But the question is can we stay below herd immunity and have case continually go down? I am suspecting that sad answer looking at uk is maybe no.
I think we will get to herd immunity which is R being one or below and cases will go down. But immunity from prior cases and vaccinations will be wearing off a little all the time and new natural immunity from new infections decreasing as cases go down ( and likely new vaccinations decrease too). That will cause R to slowly increase back to 1 and cases go flat with R at 1 when we reach an equilibrium where the daily decline from loss of immunity is exactly offset by new immunity from new infections and vaccinations ( periodic boosters are coming for all) with fluctuations do to whether and events. In winter what you need for herd immunity R of 1 is higher so each winter you get a mini wave to get the R back down to 1.
Endemic just like the flu. But maybe just like the flu, once you have some immunity, you retain enough forever that you generally just get somewhat sick and not die.
I hope I an wrong and I still think maybe immunity from natural infection might be strong enough permanently to keep R below 1 once everyone gets it. But I have seen enough to be pessimistic on that score with delta and current vaccine. But maybe can tweak it better with a booster..
Open mic nite at the wingnut chucklehut,
Your death is the least important thing anyone might have to worry about.
Comedy!
I'm Sweet COVID19, & the joke's on me.
See that narrow purple band in the middle?
That's the myth of 'purple America' so dear to the dull.
Well, for the chart maker’s opinion of where “purple” begins and ends anyway…
It's Palm Beach County, 2000.
What's nice about this chart is the use of bubbles with areas in proportion to population. Los Angeles County and Mono County aren't both represented by identical dots.
In other news: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/08/12/cdc-says-over-90percent-of-us-counties-now-meet-its-covid-guidelines-for-indoor-masks.html
I mention FL crossed the century mark the other day--then CovidActNow corrected their tabulations. LA is at 121.8 new cases/day/100K; FL is only at 98.6 now. Positive test rate at 15 and 19% respectively...so yeah, reported values are low.
CovidActNow reserves the red color for critical and severe outbreaks, high levels are more of a yellowish orange. Yellow for medium and green for low. More gradations than CDC so you can visually see differences at higher levels of infection.
I am very discourage by what I see and read. First I had COVID in Dec of 2020. Very mild case. My daughter had it too she is in her 30s. Neither she, now us, would have gone to get tested for anything had it not been for the news of it all.
So let me pose a question to all regarding this. I hope I don't confuse the issue more
Lets say we have a total population of 100 people. 40 of those are ages 55 and up. In the first YEAR we concentrated on THAT group almost exclusively thinking that it affected that age group MORE and young people got cases that were far milder.
So, we didn't push testing for that group.
We are now pushing the narrative that the unvaccinated are causing the Delta surge - but re they?
60 people didn't get tested in the first 2 rounds of COVID - only those in high risk groups did. If you had the virus the natural antibodies are now a year old making them very weak protection AGAINST the Delta variant. So they are PART of the unvaccinated group, but in essence because they had herd immunity we are seriously UNDER counting "break through" cases - which in turn reduces our "fear" of DELTA's true danger.
Am I right on this?
Many MANY people COULD have had the virus early on but mistook it for cold/flu - so no testes. A year later they get symptoms and out of fear of COVID find out they have it. Since they wren't tested in round 1 or 2 how do we know the difference between break though and INITIAL case?
off with his testes!
But, yes, that's a good point.
cld
Freudian slip I guess - I HATE this software package.
But the question still stands
Without testing everyone at the beginning
How do we know the difference between an initial and a break through case.
If we JUST blame the UN vaccinated that really lets the break through cases off the hook for "worry"............and we REALLY don't know which is which
There is a valid point here. We just do not know these things because somehow, with the trillions we spent, nobody thought it was a good idea to do some real random testing to find out.
What we do have however is how many were tested as positive and then later got covid again by a positive test. Now, if everyone who got covid the first time confirmed by a test got tested a second time AND the group who got tested the first time was representative of all who got covid ( with respect to getting it again), then that would be good enough and your point about missing breakthrough cases for those who did not get tested would not matter. We might then be missing breakthrough cases but we still would know the breakthrough %.
But neither of those is likely true. First, you made the point that we are missing breakthrough cases who did not get tested the first time they got covid ( but did the 2nd). But also they might have got a positive test the first time they got covid but not the 2nd. If they got sick the first time that got them to test. But maybe they got less sick the 2nd time because while their immunity was not enough to keep them from getting covid, it was enough so they had no symptoms.
And also those who got covid and were asymptomatic and thus never thought of testing will likely have a lessened immune response and retain antibodies for a shorter time. Which is just the immune system working right. It is not going to waste effort making antibodies that is not a serious threat and that is a good working immune system.
But what is encouraging about this to me is media reporting from media that is biased to push vaccination and downplay natural immunity, which is most. But we are simply not hearing many stories about a great number of breakthrough cases for natural immunity ( like we are for vaccine breakthrough). If there were a lot of natural immunity breakthrough cases , CNN would be trumpeting that all the time.
I am fairly convinced that, looking at actual spread rates in areas, that natural immunity is somewhat better than vaccination In stopping the spread.
I would note here in Los Angeles the striking pattern is that the lowest case numbers ( actual cases now not just R) is lowest in Hispanic neighborhoods not white ( black areas are worst now) . These areas were killed by covid in winter and have high natural immunity even if lower vaccination rates.
rational - you said:
"But we are simply not hearing many stories about a great number of breakthrough cases for natural immunity ( like we are for vaccine breakthrough). If there were a lot of natural immunity breakthrough cases , CNN would be trumpeting that all the time."
How can you say that?
A person who had it, was asymptomatic didn't KNOW they had covid. To them they are just now having their first case. I would have thought my symptoms were cold and flu ONLY until my daughter tested positive who had what we had but also the loss of taste. When she tested positive we decided that we needed to get tested, otherwise we would have NEVER known.
CNN didn't report this because there's no way to CONFIRM it.
We would have needed to test everyone in round one to determine which % of the population had it, or not. That would have given us the baseline we needed to determine whether todays cases are break through or initial.
Given the political climate surrounding COVID THIS has become the two edged sword. Trump didn't want extensive testing because he didn't want CNN reporting on just how bad the virus spread was. Because of this we don't know just how bad the break through cases ARE now.
Given the much higher viral load detected with DELTA its ease of transmission is much greater than the first 3 variants. Given our lack of testing data from Nov 2019 to Jan 2020 we have no definitive answer as to just how BAD the break through cases may be
This MAY or may not be a surge of the un-vaccinated. It MAY be a surge of those people who's anti bodies have just worn out after getting it in the first place
Once you confirm you HAVE IT there's nothing to compare your antibodies to prior to "todays" test. The positive test only tells what your body is looking like TODAY. WE know that vaccines and herd immunity are both viable deterrents against COVID but we simply do not know if the 18 to 60 year old group get tested enough in round 1 to make the determination today
IIRC Israel is reporting that their population is 73% vaccinated (or higher). They are reporting a 0.18% breakthrough rate on new cases. That is very VERY high - much more so than we are reporting. They have records of who got vaccinated like we do but I also believe they tested more extensively than we did. Regardless of which it is their reporting of 0.18% breakthrough of a population that has THAT HIGH a vaccination rate is disturbing
But because we politicized the disease we didn't want to know how bad it was (bad for republicans), nor do we know how bad the breakthrough cases are (again bad for republicans) nor do we know how bad it will be for children returning to school (again potentially very bad for republicans)
I am afraid that now it is too late. We will need to vaccinate all but those who have medical or religious issues with vaccines - which would probably be around the same percentage of those who oppose the polio vaccine - which is much less than 5% of the population
Vog,
I am saying I have not heard that much about breakthrough cases from the 37+ million who have had a confirmed covid case . Of course there is no reporting on breakthrough cases of those who were never confirmed but 37 million is a lot of people. If there was a decent % of breakthrough cases in that 37 million, you should have a large amount of cases there to report and have not heard of that much. Or maybe there are and cnn etc. Is not reporting then which would be puzzling as reporting them would go along with the message they are trying to push.
And to some extent it would be more important to know about that breakthrough cases among those who tested positive without any symptoms ( i.e. random test or because they were exposed) as they are a good proxy for the untested cases. Say there are three times as many actual cases as confirmed cases and almost all unconfirmed has no or minor symptoms. If we find that. 1% of those with confirmed cases with significant symptoms had a breakthrough case ( super good) but 10% of those without bad symptoms had a breakthrough ( not so good) then there are likely close to 10% breakthrough cases in the 3/4 of all cases that are unreported. Note the 10% vs. .1% breakthrough disparity above is just to make the point. Although I would expect fewer breakthrough cases among those who got sick, not that much of a difference.
One thing that is annoying is the reporting you have seen has been on the rarer case of a breakthrough for someone who got real sick the first time. More dramatic story but less important big picture.
If we are finding only .5% breakthrough cases among the subgroup that was tested without symptoms, then expect those untested breakthrough cases we are missing are only .5% too. And that would not be a big worry at all.
Another point. In determining the vaccine efficiency, we are comparing cases among the vaccinated and unvaccinated usually, right? But how many of those unvaccinated had covid? But also how many of vaccinated had covid?
Say 50% of unvaccinated had covid ( I think it might be more!) and 25% of vaccinated have had covid. And we are now seeing an infection rate per month of 5% of unvaccinated and .75% of vaccinated. So vaccine is 85% effective in preventing infection. NO.
What if what is really happening is that those with no vaccine who never had covid are being infected at a rate of 9% and those with no vaccine who were infected have a rate of 1% ( so natural immunity 90% effective). And for vaccinated who never had covid, 1% are infected but 0% who are both vaccinated and had covid are infected.
Then true vaccine effectiveness is 88.9% for those who never had covid and 100% for those that did.
I think we are systematically underestimating vaccine effectiveness because of this.
random
"I think we are systematically underestimating vaccine effectiveness because of this"
That is a very good point
But also a disturbing point as well.
If we, like the Israelis get to that 80% vaccination and/ore have the natural anti bodies WE will be safer.
But is that only temporary? The rest of the world would need to catch up. We can't close our borders to travelers entirely. Mexican immigrants are not the problem.
It's the Indians, Pakistanis and most travelers from the African continent. THATs where the last 2 variants came from and where left un-checked, the next group of variants will come from. It will eventually morph into something that may need a specific booster vaccine to fight.
Given the speed of the Delta spread could we ramp up production and get it out to the public within 90 days?
Heck we can't even get the public to have their kids wear masks in school never mind admit the politicians of their particular political party were wrong, OR we can't admit that our vaunted scientists and immunologists were also wrong because that would destroy our particular narrative.
In this case the press reported what they "knew" - it turned out to be ......not enough......because the very people who should know are still learning and in the process are being hampered by the political parties
When you say .18% breakthrough rate in israel, do you mean cumulative? That is not really bad and not much different from what the us is seeing if you control for timing ( Israel vaccinated earlier and thus vaccinated had a longer time to be exposed) and that Israeli testing is picking up a higher % age of the breakthrough cases.
And some of the reported studies showing low vaccination effectiveness should be taken with a grain of salt. As I said, that many unvaccinated had covid is distorting the #s. And you have to take into account age.
Sounds real bad that recently over half of serious illness cases in Israel are breakthrough cases. But then consider they are 73% vaccinated, that the unvaccinated are almost all young ( very few elderly holdouts in israel) and they are more likely to get seriously I'll anyway. And then realize that a big chunk of the unvaccinated in Israel have had covid as well as being young, likely well over 50% and thus have natural immunity and that their infections ( unlike in usa given timing of waves) are probably on average more recent than vaccinations and thus their immunity has not waned as much.
In israel , I bet the pool of those who have no vaccine , never had covid and are either old enough or have other conditions ( so a fresh case of covid has a significant chance of causing serious illness) is shrinking fast and very small now. So that is being outweighed by the much larger pool of elderly vaccinated where vaccination is pretty effective but not perfect.
I just might mean in Israel the virus is just about out of easy victims and now is left with the ones who have some protection.
And, to me, long term, the effectiveness of natural or vaccine immunity at the peak is not near as important as how well that immunity lasts.
Also note again.that vaccine or natural immunity effectiveness against infection itself is unimportant. What counts is effectiveness against getting seriously ill and effectiveness against infecting others.
Say immunity is actually 0% effective against catching covid, vaccine does nothing there. But it lets your immune system ramp up quickly so 90% effective in stopping you getting sick and 90% effective in lowering your contagiousness. Who cares then that 0% effective in stopping infection.
And contrary to the panic when reported that viral load can be as high with vaccinated cases as unvaccinated, better studies show it drops much faster in vaccinated as thus infectious less longer and less potent while you are.
And again long term, effectiveness against getting sick is not that important if effectiveness against spread is real good. If we can get and stay at herd immunity with vaccine and natural immunity, cases will drop off to near zero so who cares much if you still get sick if you catch it if nobody is catching it? To the contrary is effectiveness only good against sickeness but not spread, it will stay endemic at high levels and, even if low chance of getting sick each time, you will still be getting it every other year or so.
Vog,
Re the point you make re risk from the rest of the world where you are fearful of india and Africa but dismiss the threat from the Mexican border, can I politely ask you to consider if you yourself might be illustrating another of your points?
Why would you think the Mexican border is not also a problem? Immigrants or travelers from india or Africa will generally come in by air. Some airlines require tests to fly and we could ( maybe should) require every international arrival from risky areas to be tested and quarantined if positive. Plus air travelers from india and Africa are mostly middle class or more, not poor, and less likely to be infected.
At the Mexican border ( and I am saying border not mexican immigrants as today most coming over the border are not Mexicans), we have a flood of people coming over who are high risk to have covid, catching only a part, not testing all we do catch, and even releasing into the community those we do test who test positive. How is that not a huge problem?
Travelers by air from india and Africa we can test and control to minimize the problem if we want. An open southern border is an uncontrollable infection vulnerability.
It appears that maybe you are minimizing the border issue as a covid problem, consciously or more likely subconsciously, because that is now a partisan issue where the democratic side is more inclined to less border restrictions ( and reflects badly on a democratic president).
I think your basic point is that this covid issue is too damn important to have everyone go into their partisan positions and be unwilling to ever admit that anything they thought at an earlier date might have been wrong and the " other side" right. And I agree and this is a problem but for both sides. I can give plenty of examples of issues where Democrats have tended to dig in and refuse to change their position when new facts might mean it was wrong ( especially if it could mean that trump was right ).
I do not want to be harsh on this with you. As you do seem someone who is willing to consider other arguments and actually revise their position like a mature adult. Some here reflexively take the partisan position and just refuse to listen to anything challenging it ( and just respond with insults when they are challenged rather than with arguments) . You do not and I appreciate that. Which is why I hope you are somewhat amenable to accepting my point.
Note, on variants that develop a way around the vaccine, they are much more likely to develop in places which are heavily vaccinated than in places which are not vaccinated. If africa has a low vaccination rate but a huge number of cases this year, a vaccine resistant mutation has no big advantage to become prevalent. I do not really consider delta, from what I have seen, to be really a vaccine resistant mutation. It appears that delta being more able to breakthrough vaccination is more simply a function of it being more contagious overall than anything specific about the way the vaccine works. A specific mutation enabling a virus to avoid the vaccine is also likely to make it less effective against the unvaccinated.
Can we act fast enough to get a new vaccine against a new variant? Absolutely. We had the existing vaccine within a few months of getting the genetic code of covid. And adjusting for a new variant should be even quicker.
But we cannot test it quickly to our standards to prove it works and has limited side effects. I would say that, since we already did the first vaccine testing and given the way mnra works ( i.e. it was very unlikely it would be ineffective before you could test), arguably a correct scientific procedure should allow us to take shortcuts in testing with a new booster. But will not happen politically as downside there if wrong is too politically disastrous ( see swine flu).
With covid honestly, for a pandemic, it is pretty mild ..not thst many dying and mostly elderly with short terminating lifespans. We could have done nothing with no vaccine and and still not really threaten our civilization.
But a future virus could be worse and real bad. What if next time it is not just an accidental escape from a lab of an experimental virus or even a prototype bioweapon but a final developed bioweapon that is 20% lethal and very contagious. Are we prepared to do what we need to then? Like use a vaccine without being able to make sure it is not dangerous?
How many watched the tv show " the last ship" where a super pandemic " threatened extinction and the ship developed a vaccine by miracle. Did they do rigorous testing to determine if there are dangerous side effects? Of course not.
Louie Gohmert identifies serious new issue with solar panels,
https://www.rawstory.com/louie-gohmert-2654650142/
They are the Death Star.
Minor quibble with the data. It is dated to 8/10/21. However, when I check my county (San Mateo, CA, population >100k) the vaccination rate is over 89% according to the county dashboard. We voted about 20% or less for Trump. That area looks blank in the chart. Maybe they are calculating the percentages differently?
Probably. I assume they count percent of the eligible population (i.e. minus kids below 12). 80% seems a tad high even for San Mateo County (I live next door in Santa Clara county).
About 70% of the entire population is fully vaccinated. Over 90% of the eligible population is at least partially vaccinated:
https://www.smchealth.org/data-dashboard/vaccination-totals-locations-data
And yet hospitalizations are up by 10x.
Just saw one third of Trump voters have no plan of getting vaccinated.
Well.
Good for them!
We need to encourage more of this kind of thing!
Trump voters are a dialectical illusion. You mean Republican voters. The problem with survey's like these are they are lies. They are statistically created propa.
Notice that Republicans uptake of vaccine has increased in the south since the medical systems are under stress. My my. I think out of all the Anti-Covid vaxxers, Christian Zionists in the party's infrastructure are the most political animals. They basically try and reject whatever mainstream liberal position is. How troubled they will be when Democrats get retaken over by left wing populism.......say high Samuel Watson.
Sorry, but Republicans are higher vaccinated than Democrats, with Democratic counties Republicans noticeably higher. The "plot" ignores density. Many of these Republican counties simply have little population density.
Eh, that is not how they measure it. They simply divide the number of vaccinated individuals by the total number of people (or sometimes the total number of eligible people) and multiply the result by 100. Density does not come into play.
Spades,
I do not think you are right absolutely but you are right relatively.
I have compared counties and also areas within counties (that is available for los angeles) and I do conclude that overall Republicans are less vaccinated then Democrats. And probably even so if you control for rural and urban. A good part of the lower Republican vaccivation rate is an effect of them being more rural but not all.
If you control for race, then that will increase the Republican Democrat differnce in vaccinations, at least for whites. The vaccination difference between white Democrats and white Republicans is clearly bigger than overall differnce because minorities are also less vaccinated and more democratic. I suspect that Hispanic Republicans are a little less vaccinated than Hispanic Democrats but not sure and I would guess that, among blacks, the small number of black Republicans are more vaccinated than black Democrats.
What is true is that the actual difference between Republicans and Democrats is not as big as polls show and too many commentators rely on polls as telling them whether Republicans and Democrats are vaccinated. Some Republicans who are vaccinated will lie to pollsters and say they never will and some unvaccinated Democrats will lie and say they are. Probably more Republicans are lying to pollsters on this as some just like to mess up polls now on any issue.
If you actually look at different areas and real vaccination rates, the big poll differentials are just not conceivable. And some polls show that blacks say that they are vaccinated more than whites and we know that is not true .
I am sure that 1/3 amount of Republicans that cld refers to came from a poll and gaurantee any such poll number is somewhat too high. But not to extent that Republicans will be more than Democrats.
This type of chart, at the county level, is exactly what you want to see. At the state level, things get unclear as there's comingling of rural/urban areas.
"Of course, red counties also tend to be older, more rural, more conservative, less educated, and more likely to watch Fox News, all of which are associated with lower vaccination rates."
Being older is generally associated with higher vaccination rates.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-demographics-trends
When They Fantasize About Killing You, Believe Them
"Decades of living in, studying, and writing about the Middle East have taught me that whenever a political faction becomes obsessed with violent rhetoric and fantasies, brutal acts aren’t far behind. And while there’s always been a strain of militancy on the American right and left fringes, there is something unmistakably new, and profoundly alarming, about the casual, florid, and sadistic rhetoric that is metastasizing from the Republican fringe into the party’s mainstream."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/when-they-say-they-want-kill-you-believe-them/619724/
I already said Attorney General J.D. Vance in the Josh Hawley/Tulsi Gabbard National Unity administration will have Democrats in concentration camps in 2025.
Thanks for that, clear as a bell.
@ rational thought
(wordpress apparently limits the number of responses to a post, sorry
Won't let us edit and the color scheme drives me crazy.
RE Mexican border
I read right here that ILLEGAL immigration is not the problem. MOST immigrants are coming to certain check points, being held and while held being tested (at the very least) but there's more:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/06/why-we-can-be-confident-that-surge-coronavirus-cases-isnt-fault-immigrants/
But isn't herd immunity a failed theory?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/herd-immunity-is-mythical-with-the-covid-delta-variant-experts-say.html?&qsearchterm=herd%20immunity
{snip}
The antibodies procured by natural infection and vaccination usually protect against future infection. If enough people in a population are immune this leads to lower rates of prevalence of disease or viruses in a community. If a virus has less opportunity to spread and infect, it can be greatly controlled or even eradicated
{snip}
Now, I am not a scientist, hell I'm NOT even smart but to me th more people that have anti bodies the better off ANY community is. But think of the U.S. as a community. If we get 80% of people to have anti bodies but the rest of the world is at 40% and a new variant is "spawned there" we might not be able to protect ourselves from it. Correct? UNLESS we close the borders to all travel both legal and illegal.
Look, I am a registered non-affiliated voter. I have split my "ticket" more often then not. Why? Well, I'm the asshole that reads position papers. I look at a persons history and MOST importantly I fully admit to making a mistake. Hell I voted FOR Nixon 'cause I thought we'd get out of Vietnam sooner. Case closed. Boy was THAT a mistake !!! I voted for McCain. But most of my ballot is DEM for this office GOP for that office and I make no bones about it. Except for WAR I want my politicians to admit mistakes. Nobody can be right all the time. It's not hard, it's not rocket science.
But COVID is "different". We punted on round One. WE should have tested EVERYONE instead of concentrating on us older folks (like me) This has lead to all statistics since then being predicated on "estimates" and projections.
Israel is now at a point where they have reached a vaccination level where all who WANT the vaccine have the vaccine and they may mandate more get it.
But THEIR break through cases are based solely on who got JABBED = NOT - who got tested before. If the Jab is the Cadillac of anti bodies and they're showing 0.18% break through? Then we have a problem.
Look, I'm MORE than mature - I'm old but thanks for the compliment
I still am looking for that community on the internet that has 100% adult conversations from people with varying back grounds having polite conversations without the foot stomping, the name calling the insulting meme posting BS you find everywhere these days
So I try to treat EVERYONE like they are just that, until they prove me wrong.
I have better lick here than on Political wire, huffpost and other sites.
Vog
Vog,
Illegal or legal immigration is not THE problem as it is what is causing most of the spread, but it is certainly PART of the problem. Same as entrants from india and Africa could be part of the problem . Saying that we need to shut down our border to India and Africa but not do everything we can re the southern border makes no sense.
I cannot get that wash post article behind the paywall but I have heard some of the arguments I would assume they are making. Yes, most ( but not all) illegal immigrants are being held and many tested. But then we are releasing many of those who tested positive into the community and transporting them all around the nation. If we could test all and enforce a quarantine for those who tested positive that would be controllable but we are not and are too overwhelmed to even try. Prior to Biden the simple perception of trump being anti immigrant discouraged such mass immigration, especially when he had negotiated or coerced Mexico into deals where the refugees had to stay on the other side of the border. The mere appearance of biden welcoming the immigrants or their perception of that, caused much of the problem, even with no policy changes.
The CNBC article on herd immunity is a freaking mess. Are the cited experts idiots are is the reporter writing the story someone who has no idea what he is saying and cannot understand what the experts are saying ( almost sure it is the latter if not both). The continual changes in how herd immunity is defined and then contradicted later while continuing to be wrong are simply pathetic.
So for a few highlights. It starts in the bullet points by saying that herd immunity is when a MAJORITY have immunity. Huh? That is way off. Could be the case for example if immunity is perfect and the initial R is 2, but not with covid. Clearly need way way more than 50%.
Then in the article it right below says that herd immunity is when the spread stops. No. By that definition, if we are extremely lucky, we might get there in 20 years. If it stops completely, that means the virus goes extinct. We have only managed that a few times ( note it seems maybe we just did with one of the flu strains as covid outcompeted it and social distancing killed it off).
There seems to be no 100% accepted definition of " herd inmunity" but the one I think is the most useful and correct is that herd immunity is when cases are going down and R is below 1.0. If stays below 1.0, over time cases will decrease and eventually reach zero. But depends on how far below 1.0 for when and how many new cases first.
For example, if you have 1,000,000 active cases and a cycle of one week, with a constant R of .5, it will most likely be extinct after 21 weeks after 1,000,000 additional cases.
If the R stays at .99, it will take about 26 years with 99,000,000 more cases to go.
But the thing is R is not static. It changes due to weather, behavior, and changes in immunity ( either increased due to increase from more infections or decrease as immunity wears down or new babies are born).
We have already been at herd immunity for covid in fall of 2020 ( for original covid , warm weather, some behavior restrictions and some immunity from infection) and spring of 2021 ( mainly for alpha, better weather, a few remaining restrictions and even more immunity from vaccination and more infections). And we lost it each time due to new strains mostly and some condition changes ( some wearing off of immunity).
I think we are on the verge of herd immunity again and maybe enough to stay there with no restrictions. But will we keep it? My guess is not at least once more R will go above 1 this winter.
And quite likely it will become circylarly endemic like the flu, where we hit herd immunity every spring and lose it every fall.
Depends on how much herd immunity is effective, and how quickly it wears off, and how many become somewhat immune ( I think the last is no problem as will be near 100% as it gets near anyone who is not vaccinated and a big chunk who are)..
If both vaccine and natural immunity are only 50% effective in preventing infection ( and almost no study shows that bad) and yet also another 60% effective in lowering chance to infect others if infected at say october 1st ( including any wearing off by then), and 100% have such immunity, that is 80% effective and herd immunity if R0 is 5.0. For delta, I was concerned that R0 might be higher like 8.0. But now I doubt that because as you see a good amount of spread through breakthrough, that lowers estimate of R0 (because that means not as much of the spread you see is due to unvaccinated. If so, then all we need is to keep adding more extra immunity through additional vaccinations or boosters or the continued infections to offset the wearing away of existing immunity or changing conditions. Do not think we can manage that by winter as weather is a big factor . One reason why I want no restrictions today. Get to herd immunity asap now, keep R below 1.0 through October at least so can get cases low enough that when it goes back above 1.0 in winter, will not be a big wave. But maybe restrictions back some after cases start going DOWN. The correct strategy is often counterintuitive. And thus will never happen politically.