Once a vaccinated person has a breakthrough infection they spread similarly but of course the chance to contract it is lower and the time to "virus clearance" is faster.

There are studies indicating a previous infection provides a stronger and longer lasting response than the vaccine, although this is not definite yet - Israelis and the CDC have made opposing conclusions on this topic.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

Is this true? Countries like Singapore and Israel are seeing huge spikes in cases despite having some of the highest vax rates.

My suspicion is that vaccines have the downside of suppressing symptoms, thus making the vaxxed more likely to spread covid without knowing it.

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/how-vaccines-...

Country-level anecdata is basically useless without a multi-factor analysis due to huge differences in restrictions and self-directed prevention by the public.

Sending mass communication about health with a list of "ifs ands or buts" is incredibly challenging especially for a pandemic level response, so if the communication is simply "get the vaccine" then you're going to get a higher uptick.

I understand your nitpick, but also understand the general population doesn't fully grok this stuff.

EDIT: Lemme also add - the data we're viewing is retrospective. We wouldn't know the effect until now, so of course the message has been "Get the vaccine"

Of course you can only say this only for a big 18-29 age group viewed as an aggregate (regarding mortality), but can't say that generally of members the group.

Eg according to https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-... the deaths in 25-29 age group are dramatically more common than among 18-24 year olds, and there are other individual traits that are big factors in death risk. So it's safe to say that lots of <30 year olds have multi-% death risks, not to mention lifelong or long lasting harm from the additional near death cases.

(But of course the most important thing is to reduce infections between people to keep riskier groups alive, so even without personal death risk it would be incredibly immoral to not get vaxed)

Then the goalposts (sorry for this language but there isn’t any other) shifted to continued transmission and viral mutation, until breakthrough became normalized. Now it’s filling up ICUs and healthcare collapse because of the unvaccinated.

It’s all really sad when the CDC itself needs to cherrypick data until it can proudly say that “vaccines are 5x better than natural immunity” as if it was a competition: man versus nature (never mind the dozens of studies proving otherwise)

So even if you're aged 12 to 29, if you don't get vaccinated you're gambling at taking away someone else's hospital bed. Which will doom the rest of us.

So, can everyone please get fricken vaccinated ffs?

[¹] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

According to [1] at no point in time since March this year (when they started recording this data) have there been more than 100 hospitalizations in the age group 0-30 in Germany a country with 80+ million inhabitants. If this means doom to all of us I don't know anymore.

[1]: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/altersstrukt...

… which just leaves the other arguments to get vaccinated. Namely, lesser chance of long-term symptoms and lesser chance of getting infected (last I checked, outbound transmission doesn't seem to be reduced much, but inbound is, so it still serves to slow overall spread.)

And yet you were more than willing to make the baseless claim in the first place, which is one of the biggest issues with all of this in the first place. The media is doing its best to make covid seem scary as it can and is helped along by misinformation like this, fueling overall distrust.

https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen

Germany is getting quite close to exhausting ICU beds and ventilators. Non-"essential" procedures have already been postponed.

1. In the last wave, some hospitals reported more ICU beds than they were actually prepared to staff, because each available bed in the datasheet got them a hefty government subsidy.

2. A non-negligible number of ICU nursing staff were worked into the ground in the Winter 2020/2021 wave and decided to quit (read: move into similar jobs with less horrible working conditions). From what I hear (caution: anecdata), a lot of the remaining staff are now considering to follow them.

If you're unvaxed and using "So even unvaccinated younger people (age < 30) are better off than the average vaccinated Joe." as a justification, it's a bit like saying "I know being unvaxed I have worse survival odds than a fully vaxed 65 year old, but I prefer that!"

And please just compare data from close time periods, if we can pick different times for our rates, then I would pick October 2016, the chances of dying from Covid-19 at that time was absolute 0, even for the unvaxed!