I thought I had covid early in the pandemic. Took a serology test and found out that I had not had it. I suspect a lot of people that think they had it are the same.
Unfortunately, T-cell tests are not available in Europe, and apparently not reliable in the US. Which confirms the original point: there seems to be little interest in detecting previous infections.
Many people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 will probably make antibodies against the virus for most of their lives. So suggest researchers who have identified long-lived antibody-producing cells in the bone marrow of people who have recovered from COVID-191.
The study provides evidence that immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection will be extraordinarily long-lasting. Adding to the good news, “the implications are that vaccines will have the same durable effect”, says Menno van Zelm, an immunologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-27/previous-...
Previous Covid Prevents Delta Infection Better Than Pfizer Shot
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label.
Which T-cell test(s) are you referencing? What are the rates of false negatives or false positives?
Particularly when natural immunity comes for "free" and apparently works better, at that point insisting on vaccines for everybody is just completely nonsensical.
Rather shift resources to testing to get costs for that down, which is more work, but also doesn't come with the risk of later discovering "Oops, this vaccine that made people filthy rich turned out to have some nasty long-term side-effects!".
Which is also a very real possibility, considering they've been developed and approved in record time with the population at large acting as subjects for the first non-clinical trials.
The prophylactic costs less than the diagnostic. It has negligible risk of harm. It's a determinable and unambiguous event, unlike trying to verify a possible infection and sustained immune response.
The obvious rational policy decision for public health is to mandate the vaccine for everyone.
Those not previously infected gain immunity. Those previously infected ... either get a not-strictly-necessary injection, or far more likely, a useful booster.
And the administration, diagnostic, and monitoring costs are far lower.
Quebec is the only province that will let you get only 1 dose of the vaccine, instead of 2, if you were previously infected. With that 1 dose, that's enough to have access to the vaccine passport.
But there are absolutely no places in Canada that accepts prior infection as being fully vaccinated.
My comment was not intended to be an argument against any testing for pre-infection; I think the rationale for that is pretty solid, but I think that the regulatory establishment needs to be prepared to inform people that they might not be able to prove their previous infection and in that case they should get vaccinated.
This was back before tests were widely available. I have genuinely had it twice myself, but people largely have though for the past two years that if they were sick it was COVID.
How soon after you were ill? Aren't the antibodies nigh undetectable XX weeks after you recover?
Does the US now have a digital verifiable certificate system for tested or previously infected as well as vaccinated or is it still a piece of paper?
Without this you have to just vaccinate everyone because there is no other way to manage it.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
I think this will be more relevant to vaccinating kids: If this result holds for kids as well, and considering that Covid is not dangerous for kids, maybe kids are better off getting covid
> medRxiv (pronounced "med-archive") is a free online archive and distribution server for complete but unpublished manuscripts (preprints) in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The context is important, even if it turns out to be true.
2 ICU prevented admissions / million first doses
87 hospital prevented admissions / million first doses
0.16 ICU prevented admissions / million second doses
6 hospital prevented admissions / million second doses
> Having the vaccine is not compulsory.
> Prof Whitty said an "offer" of vaccination will be made to all children aged 12-15.
> But he said young people and their parents needed to be supported and there should be no stigma attached to their choice.
Children are at low risk from COVIS
Let’s get the kids vaccinated. It’s the cheapest way out of this thing.
Also, I haven’t see data on what the R0 is from vaccinated person to vaccinated person with Delta. If it’s above 1 then all we’re doing is creating immense selective pressure for vaccine escape.
I’m fully vaccinated, not anti-vax, and not an expert. This is just my understanding based on what I’ve read.
Emphasis on created
* Most viruses are less infectious than covid, especially delta covid.
* The covid vaccines are novel, targeting a specific protein. Natural immunity targets more than one protein, I've heard up to 28 in case of covid. This should make vaccine escape much harder, as it is significantly more difficult to mutate around 28 proteins at the same time. By 'natural immunity' I mean immunity gained by exposure to the natural pathogen, either through live infection or an inactivated pathogen vaccine.
Can make the same argument for the vaccinated people. Vaccines don’t prevent infection, they reduce symptoms. So by same logic they run around with the infection spreading it to everyone.
I think we should be wary of those "easy way outs", because nothing seems to indicate that vaccines are a panacea. They are of course the best that us adults can do right now to protect ourselves, but if restrictions get too relaxed simultaneously, then we ve just created pressure on the virus to create a variant that will escape completely. This is a marathon and we are not yet done. a combination of vaccines with distancing will be required for a long time. Humans are adaptible, the earlier we start the better.
(Also, we shouldn't argue in absolutes, it s not going to fix anything)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...
Is that actually true, though? I'm vaccinated - am I not better off having that vaccine, being less likely to be hospitalized or die even if I get a breakthrough case?
Even if natural immunity via infection is better in every way (no idea if this is true, but suppose it is for the sake of this question), am I not better off having that occur while vaccinated and therefore less likely to die?
It seems as though natural immunity is great if it doesn't kill you. And even if the death rate is low, 1% of a large number is still a lot of dead people. We could reduce that number and just deal with the less severe breakthrough cases.
Source?
That's not how R values work at all. Firstly, an R value of 1.5 and an R value of 5 have wildly different outcomes in terms of controlling spread, and vaccines that can reduce R values can reduce spread even if the R value remains above 1. More to the point, though, "transmission is happening in vaccinated people" doesn't imply that the R value is above 1, and it doesn't look like you've provided any evidence that that's the case, nor does the fact that infections sometimes occur, in and of itself, suggest it.
Only lockdowns brought it back down which creates other problems around immune health in the population. (see NZ for example, RSV is clogging up the hospitals now with young kids who had degraded their immune systems the last year or so with all the hardcore lockdowns there)
Completely ridiculous.
https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/vaccinatio...
They're not perfect, but arguing they're not that effective is just stupid.
B. Consider that the 'cases ratio' is tainted because of faulty CDC guidance. If you test more aggressively conditioned on vaccination status, you are going to get biased ratios. At this point anything but sampling studies is pretty much worthless in assessing how prevalent breakthrough infections are. We've got to thank CDC for that.
> Five days earlier, I had gone to a house party in Montgomery County. There were 15 adults there, all of us fully vaccinated. The next day, our host started to feel sick. The day after that, she tested positive for COVID-19. [...] At this point, 11 of the 15 have tested positive for COVID."
If the vaccines reduce breakthrough infections at 1 : 7 rate, an outbreak incident where 11 : 15 get infected has a probability of about 1 : 1,000,000,000. Rather unlikely, perhaps something else is at play:
> The official Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guideline stated that, since I was fully vaccinated, I didn’t need to do anything different unless I started developing symptoms. I’m an epidemiologist at a major medical research university, which has a dedicated COVID exposure hotline for staff. I called it, and workers said I didn’t need to do anything.
> The CDC announced in May that it was only going to collect data on breakthrough infections that led to hospitalization or death, which are fortunately rare. But that means that outbreaks like ours will fly under the radar.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0804-bre...
Edit: Especially if the ratios do not match ratios calculated in other countries where delta case reduction is around 1 : 2.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It sounds like you reject the entire concept of public health. That is going to be a bit of a problem when you are engaging in a debate about public health policy.
The burden of proof is on the health authorities to quantify win/win scenarios. Not fly by the seat of their pants, sometimes based on faulty/incomplete data and guesswork. 'First, do no harm'. If you are unsure, then don't do it.
You want to make an R-based argument? What is the contribution of children in the past 4 weeks? Do you have evidence that children shed more covid compared with vaccinated adults? Do you have evidence that R is a constant, will your calculations hold 6 months from now? Are you accounting for the selection effect of leaky vaccines on virus evolutionary trajectory? What is the cumulative 20 year ADE risk?
For worst case scenario, do you have a 20 year study of leaky mRNA vaccines against infectious disease in some animal population? No, we're experimenting on humans in a world's first. There have been vaccine disasters. Fortunately not in humans. Warning: NSFL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...
Inaction is not an escape from responsibility or prevent consequences. Doing nothing is sometimes the worst choice.
In the beginning all the panic was about the "most vulnerable" in the population, while the young ones apparently could deal with it fine enough.
A year and a half later and we are rushing to vaccinate the youngest ones, even tho it doesn't prevent them from spreading and they have great chances to get trough the disease without the vaccine already.
The ultimate goal here seems to be to just get everybody vaccinated, possibly even yearly.
Now we have enough for everyone and it turns out kids are spreading it to each other. It's true the vaccine doesn't totally stop someone from spreading the vaccine, but it does help.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
They recommend it, they don’t mandate it.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-issues-updated-advic...
“For otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year old children, their risk of severe COVID-19 disease is small and therefore the potential for benefit from COVID-19 vaccination is also small. The JCVI’s view is that overall, the health benefits from COVID-19 vaccination to healthy children aged 12 to 15 years are marginally greater than the potential harms.
Taking a precautionary approach, this margin of benefit is considered too small to support universal COVID-19 vaccination for this age group at this time. The committee will continue to review safety data as they emerge.”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
“Individuals who were previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 seem to gain additional protection from a subsequent single-dose vaccine regimen. Though this finding corresponds to previous reports, we could not demonstrate significance in our cohort.”
At the moment, this does not justify mandating the vaccine for those previously infected.
And without some hard numbers comparing the two fairly little downsides we shouldn't attempt to compel people's behavior either way.
How does it make sense then for them to vaccinate?
I also got vaccinated later. I had about a 24 hour reaction each time.
I wanted to make sure my body latched onto the spike protein. Immune systems latch onto all manner of things--sometimes relevant, sometimes not relevant, sometimes actively harmful.
This is an important point. Your body's reaction to natural Covid is far more unpredictable than to the vaccine. That may give you a more robust immune response--or that may give you something related to an autoimmune disorder.
As a comparison, I had a much worse reaction to Shingrix (the shingles vaccine) which hit me hard for about 4 days and I could barely move the arm that got the shot.
Your mileage may vary.
>Side effects can affect your ability to do daily activities, but they should go away in a few days.
> Common side effects: [Tiredness, Headache, Muscle pain, Chills, Fever, Nausea]
>Side effects after your second shot may be more intense than the ones you experienced after your first shot. These side effects are normal signs that your body is building protection and should go away within a few days.
I don't have a specific study for prior immunity vs. second shot, but neither COVID nor the vaccine are magic - both behave in a more or less standard manner. I've seen references to studies though:
>Dr. Erin Morcomb, a family medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic Health System in La Crosse, Wis., and head of its COVID-19 vaccination team, confirms that the reactions can vary based on your health history. "What we've seen in studies is that the second dose does tend to have a little bit more potential to cause side effects than the first dose, but for people who have had COVID-19 infection previously and then recovered, they are at higher risk of having those same side effects after their first dose," she says.
from https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/strong-reaction-to-...
If the vaccine fails you then you will get covid (like you would have in the same situation without vaccine) and will develop natural immunity then.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
At the same time though, I can imagine it would be really difficult/expensive to verify the proof of previous infection vs. verifying vaccination, and there could be the appearance of incentivizing anti-vaxxers to go infect themselves with COVID.
I thought the process was straightforward, convenient, and cheap.
It's pre-print FWIW
But the devil's in the details anyways. How long would that be considered good for, since we'll probably be looking at regular annual boosters? Would extremist anti-vaxxers have a perverse incentive to get infected so as to rejoin society while avoiding the vaccine?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this a ton lately. Moreover, we've asked you repeatedly in the past to stop. If you continue this way we're going to have to ban you, so really, would you please review the guidelines and use HN as intended?
Can you clarify who you mean by "they"? I don't suspect you mean Israel in that context.
Exposure to this years seasonal flu will give better immunity to this year’s seasonal flu, than the vaccine for last year’s seasonal flu will give to this year’s seasonal fly. One day we’ll be able to say “Duh” in response to annual COVID flavors.
There will be vaccines specifically made for the delta variant and others.