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Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

Aleh said:
This is really hard to answer. First off, people who are vaccinated are likely to simply not get the disease at all. Do you want me to count this as "zero symptoms", or is your question comparing a person who got sick without the vaccine to that same person getting vaccinated and then getting sick anyway?
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Ah, no. 'Zero symptoms' is slightly different to 'did not catch', in that asymptomatic carriers can still spread but you presumably can't if you did not catch it in the first place.

The vaccine is supposed to be 95% effective after the second shot has had time to take effect. In looking up what '95% effective' meant, it seems to mean 'a 95% reduction in the amount of people in the vaccinated group who catch COVID over X period in comparison to how many people in the control unvaccinated group catch COVID in the same period'. I assumed asymptomatic cases would go into the 5% who still caught it, though I guess that depends on whether they actually tested people who showed no symptoms.

I wanted to know if it also caused a lower rate of severe symptoms in that 5%. My bad if my wording was off. If that's too difficult to answer, or I'm still wording it wrong, then that's fine, as the lowered chance of catching it is enough even without any measurable benefits in the event that you do.
 
LurkingInTheDeceit said:
Ah, no. 'Zero symptoms' is slightly different to 'did not catch', in that asymptomatic carriers can still spread but you presumably can't if you did not catch it in the first place.
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Asymptomatic carriers don't have the disease. Definitions vary -- Wikipedia, for instance, quotes a disease as "a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not due to any immediate external injury."

This is somewhat atypical, as it's mixing medical and legal definitions and the medical dictionary it quotes gives a more typical version. Merriam-Webster's medical dictionary gives another: "an impairment of the normal state of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts that interrupts or modifies the performance of the vital functions, is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms, and is a response to environmental factors (as malnutrition, industrial hazards, or climate), to specific infective agents (as worms, bacteria, or viruses), to inherent defects of the organism (as genetic anomalies), or to combinations of these factors : sickness, illness."

TL;DR? You need to have a medical issue or symptom to have a disease... but cause doesn't matter (which is why, say, the traumatic injuries from a car accident are considered a disease by medical professionals).

COVID is the disease; the virus is SARS-CoV-2. It's entirely possible to be infested with the latter without having the former; it's why Mary Mallon isn't considered to have had Typhoid.

Secondly, I wasn't even referring to that, but rather to the increased chance of an exposure failing to produce an infection in someone who has been vaccinated.
 
Aleh said:
Asymptomatic carriers don't have the disease. Definitions vary -- Wikipedia, for instance, quotes a disease as "a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not due to any immediate external injury."

This is somewhat atypical, as it's mixing medical and legal definitions and the medical dictionary it quotes gives a more typical version. Merriam-Webster's medical dictionary gives another: "an impairment of the normal state of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts that interrupts or modifies the performance of the vital functions, is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms, and is a response to environmental factors (as malnutrition, industrial hazards, or climate), to specific infective agents (as worms, bacteria, or viruses), to inherent defects of the organism (as genetic anomalies), or to combinations of these factors : sickness, illness."

TL;DR? You need to have a medical issue or symptom to have a disease... but cause doesn't matter (which is why, say, the traumatic injuries from a car accident are considered a disease by medical professionals).

COVID is the disease; the virus is SARS-CoV-2. It's entirely possible to be infested with the latter without having the former; it's why Mary Mallon isn't considered to have had Typhoid.
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O-kay? This semantics lesson is trying to tell me that when you said-
First off, people who are vaccinated are likely to simply not get the disease at all. Do you want me to count this as "zero symptoms"
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-you were saying 'people who are vaccinated are likely to simply not (show any negative symptoms). Do you want me to count this as zero symptoms'? That seems like a weird question to ask, as with that definition the answer is obviously yes. Are you clarifying this because you're pointing out the 95% who don't catch it actually include asymptomatic transmitters as 'BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19' refers to the disease not the virus?

Either way, what I'm getting from this is my question cannot be answered. That's fine.
 
LurkingInTheDeceit said:
Either way, what I'm getting from this is my question cannot be answered. That's fine.
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All you need are:

Twins

and

Warcrimes​

This post is not a solicitation for warcrimes upon twins, nor a call for any such action, nor any intent to condone such action. I'm just pointing out the sort of inhumane set up you'd need to get really precise data about this.

Honestly looking at some of the horrible long-term effects of oxygen-deprived organs, the overt sickness symptoms for the disease seem much less important, and the even less-intense overt sickness symptoms of the vaccine seem kinda trivial. But that's just my opinion.
 
evildice said:
This post is not a solicitation for warcrimes upon twins, nor a call for any such action, nor any intent to condone such action. I'm just pointing out the sort of inhumane set up you'd need to get really precise data about this.
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I mean, sure. If we're going complete fantasy, throw in some Coil time-split action to get the really precise data comparison. I'm not really looking for that level of precision though, just anything solid that points in the direction of the vaccine benefiting its recipients if they actually catch the dis- virus.

This isn't possible because of confounders, category ambiguity and getting a reliable control group (I think). The second could probably be combatted by using an unambiguous category (how many people die who caught the virus with vs without the vaccine) but the other two are statistical things I can't comment on.

evildice said:
Honestly looking at some of the horrible long-term effects of oxygen-deprived organs, the overt sickness symptoms for the disease seem much less important, and the even less-intense overt sickness symptoms of the vaccine seem kinda trivial. But that's just my opinion.
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Don't disagree, the protection from catching it in the first place is good enough to go through the relatively minor symptoms of the vaccine.
 
LurkingInTheDeceit said:
I wanted to know if it also caused a lower rate of severe symptoms in that 5%. My bad if my wording was off. If that's too difficult to answer, or I'm still wording it wrong, then that's fine, as the lowered chance of catching it is enough even without any measurable benefits in the event that you do.
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FTR, they do publish vaccine efficacy against severe disease and death. AFAICT, even if you get infected post-vaccination your symptoms are likely ameliorated by the shot, compared to people who get infected without the vaccine. Recent example: a disease cluster in India, where 15 seniors at some kind of retirement home all got infected (all having been vaccinated). All 15 survived; meanwhile, covid in seniors has like a 5-10% mortality rate, so ordinarily you'd expect 1-2 fatalities in that group.
 
LurkingInTheDeceit said:
I wanted to know if it also caused a lower rate of severe symptoms in that 5%. My bad if my wording was off. If that's too difficult to answer, or I'm still wording it wrong, then that's fine, as the lowered chance of catching it is enough even without any measurable benefits in the event that you do.
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I somehow missed this. The answer is that the Pfizer vaccine seems to almost entirely protect against severe disease. Obviously it's not actually perfect, but they literally didn't get so much as a single case of severe COVID in the vaccinated group when they looked.

LurkingInTheDeceit said:
O-kay? This semantics lesson is trying to tell me that when you said-
-you were saying 'people who are vaccinated are likely to simply not (show any negative symptoms). Do you want me to count this as zero symptoms'? That seems like a weird question to ask, as with that definition the answer is obviously yes. Are you clarifying this because you're pointing out the 95% who don't catch it actually include asymptomatic transmitters as 'BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19' refers to the disease not the virus?
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I thought I was relatively clear:
Aleh said:
... which is a request for data on symptom severity in the same individual depending on whether they got the vaccine or not.

This is really hard to answer. First off, people who are vaccinated are likely to simply not get the disease at all. Do you want me to count this as "zero symptoms", or is your question comparing a person who got sick without the vaccine to that same person getting vaccinated and then getting sick anyway?
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A large part of the point here was that the exact definition of what you're talking about makes a shitton of difference in statistics, with the ultimate point being that the question wasn't answerable as you asked it.

Let's say that I've somehow miraculously turned into Coil, complete with his fictitious powers, and have decided to use this power to answer your question. In one timeline, I give a thousand people a COVID vaccine. In another, I give them a fake vaccine. I then take detailed medical data on all of them.

Oh, and since I'm Coil, I ventilate their bedrooms with COVID particles -- in both timelines -- after the vaccine's taken effect. Calvert's a dick like that.

In the timeline where they got a fake vaccine, two thirds of my victims patients -- about 666 (a fully appropriate number, given what Coil just did to them) develop symptomatic COVID. About 540 of them only develop "mild" symptoms. 540 of them only suffer "mild" COVID (which is still a nasty bug). Of the remaining 126, about half -- 63 or so -- only suffer "moderate" COVID symptoms. The remaining 63 suffer severe COVID, and many need to be hospitalized. Despite the medical professionals' best efforts -- Panacea wasn't available -- anywhere from six to thirty-three die.

In the timeline where I gave them a real vaccine, only 33 people develop COVID symptoms at all. 26 or 27 suffer "mild" COVID symptoms. The remaining six or seven suffer "moderate" COVID. Nobody suffers severe disease or needs to go to the hospital.

Those numbers, by the way, were largely drawn from the Pfizer clinical trial data and from the United Kingdom's government fact sheets on COVID infection. Anything else, I rectally sourced while trying to keep things as realistic as possible.

That said, this leaves Coil-Me with a bit of a dilemma if he's going to try and answer your question: Does he compare the 666 unvaccinated COVID victims to their vaccinated selves, or does he compare them to the 33 people who developed COVID despite the vaccine (the so-called "breakthrough infections")? Or does he compare the 33 people who developed COVID when vaccinated to their unvaccinated selves?

Each of these comparisons would be answering a slightly different question, and would be useful in different circumstances, for making different decisions. The numbers, obviously, would also be quite different.

And this is why exact wording is so important when asking for numbers. Statistics can give very different results depending on how you look at something.

Edit: I just realized that one aspect of my numbers was potentially misleading: I couldn't find, after admittedly minimal searching, data on the ratio of mild to moderate symptoms in Pfizer breakthrough infections. As such, I calculated based on the same ratio I used for unvaccinated cases... which I should be clear is an assumption, one that's very unlikely to be true. The number of deaths and severe cases, however, remains zero.
 
evildice said:
I almost feel the urge to start a rumor that the Pfizer vaccine will alter your DNA to give you a larger and longer-lasting erection.

HbZs6B3.jpeg
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MadGreenSon said:
Totally true, I got it and I am fucking like an NTR doujin bull.
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ok so I was legitimately thinking about make a snippet like this for some good old power fantasy stress relief (the shadow government that rules the world putting giga-stud drugs in the covid vaccine so that people will want to take them and that the people who do will outbreed the anti vaccinators) and I'm kind of worried if it'll be seen in poor taste. maybe I should just change it to some made-up virus?
 
The-Lewd-Dude said:
ok so I was legitimately thinking about make a snippet like this for some good old power fantasy stress relief (the shadow government that rules the world putting giga-stud drugs in the covid vaccine so that people will want to take them and that the people who do will outbreed the anti vaccinators) and I'm kind of worried if it'll be seen in poor taste. maybe I should just change it to some made-up virus?
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Probably a bit poor taste, yeah.
 
The-Lewd-Dude said:
ok so I was legitimately thinking about make a snippet like this for some good old power fantasy stress relief (the shadow government that rules the world putting giga-stud drugs in the covid vaccine so that people will want to take them and that the people who do will outbreed the anti vaccinators) and I'm kind of worried if it'll be seen in poor taste. maybe I should just change it to some made-up virus?
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Terrible taste. Do it anyway. :p
 
karnArjuna said:
Just wanted to say this to the ones in the future. Yes, this did happen, and it was only the beginning. I had to fight off 16 people each day during the pandemic to get rations. It was every man for himself. Me and my friends were doing well the first few weeks....until they came.

New York was the first to fall.

Then Kansas.

When Washington fell we knew things could only get worse.

This as much as I can write now, I'll be back with an update on the situation. And if there are any survivors reading this....Then may god have mercy.
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I don't know what exactly you think you're doing, but don't do it here.
 
Well, it looks like my state is nearing a 70% vaccination rate, which means most restrictions will probably be lifted soon, according to the state governor at least. We'll see how it goes.
 
28Ez0n1.png

That is in Moscow. It went from ~2K people infected/day to here. The new indian strain got brought over here and most of the new arrivals have this one.

And apparently, more than enough of the vaccine is being produced, it's just that there is a big problem with actually getting people to get up from their ass and get vaccinated.
 
Valikdu said:
28Ez0n1.png

That is in Moscow. It went from ~2K people infected/day to here. The new indian strain got brought over here and most of the new arrivals have this one.

And apparently, more than enough of the vaccine is being produced, it's just that there is a big problem with actually getting people to get up from their ass and get vaccinated.
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Without axis labels, that graph literally looks like something out of How to Lie With Statistics.
 
Valikdu said:
You can see the graph here: https://yandex.ru/covid19/stat?utm_source=main_graph&utm_source=main_notif&geoId=213

The levels have been basically stable since February, until just ~10 days ago, and today there have been more new cases than at any single day previously.
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First off, that site's in Russian. I don't speak Russian.

Secondly, the key element is the labeling of the axes. The graph is poorly-done even in the original by that standard.

I will assume that "Число новых заражений и смертей, Москва" partially covers it (Google Translate gives me "New infections and deaths, Moscow," which does partially cover it, but doesn't really give me key information about the presentation of data). That's still not much to go on, even with the way the data-hovering thing works after I ran the entire site through Google Translate.
 
On the good news front, being vaccinated seems to help your survival rate quite a bit:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemima...-last-month-were-unvaccinated-analysis-finds/
Not sure how much Delta impact is being measured, though.

Delta does seem to be spreading:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/del...ontinue-to-wear-masks-as-variant-spreads.html
... so put your masks back on.

On that topic, MIT has made a face mask which also detects the virus, so you can protect others while you protect others:
https://news.mit.edu/2021/face-mask-covid-19-detection-0628

... but even if we do watch out for each other, the knock-on effects of the pandemic years seems to be levying a heavy toll on America:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1272206
http://press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/june/lifeexpectancy.pdf


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The vast majority of Covid-19 anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories originated from just 12 people, a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) cited by the White House this week found.

CCDH, a UK/US non-profit and non-governmental organization, found in March that these 12 online personalities they dubbed the "disinformation dozen" have a combined following of 59 million people across multiple social media platforms, with Facebook having the largest impact. CCDH analyzed 812,000 Facebook posts and tweets and found 65% came from the disinformation dozen. Vivek Murthy, US surgeon general, and Joe Biden focused on misinformation around vaccines this week as a driving force of the virus spreading.

On Facebook alone, the dozen are responsible for 73% of all anti-vaccine content, though the vaccines have been deemed safe and effective by the US government and its regulatory agencies. And 95% of the Covid misinformation reported on these platforms were not removed.

Among the dozen are physicians that have embraced pseudoscience, a bodybuilder, a wellness blogger, a religious zealot, and, most notably Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nephew of John F Kennedy who has also linked vaccines to autism and 5G broadband cellular networks to the coronavirus pandemic.

Kennedy was since removed from Instagram, which Facebook owns, but not from Facebook itself.

"Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies," wrote CCDH's CEO, Imran Ahmed, in the report. "All have been particularly ineffective at removing harmful and dangerous misinformation about coronavirus vaccines."

Although platforms have since taken measures to remove many posts and even remove three of the 12 from one platform, the CCDH is calling on Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to completely deplatform the disinformation dozen they believe are dangerous and instrumental in creating vaccine hesitancy at a crucial moment in the pandemic.

"Updated policies and statements hold little value unless they are strongly and consistently enforced," the report said. "With the vast majority of harmful content being spread by a select number of accounts, removing those few most dangerous individuals and groups can significantly reduce the amount of disinformation being spread across platforms."
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