[alpaca128]

The vaccine does not completely prevent you from getting infected or from being able to infect others. It drastically reduces the chance, especially of the more dangerous symptoms affecting the lungs, but it doesn't grant complete immunity.

Besides, measures like masks also affect many other diseases; this recent winter they were effective enough to reduce influenza-related deaths by over 95% compared to the year before.

[blabitty]

>this recent winter they were effective enough to reduce influenza-related deaths by over 95% compared to the year before.

A little hard to chalk that up to masking alone given all the other drastic societal changes. What about WFH and distancing?

[alpaca128]

I never excluded other measures beside masks. I mainly mentioned masks ("measures like masks") because they were the main topic here.

[astrange]

“Drastically reducing the chances” is all you need, because everyone else has also gotten vaccinated and there isn’t a supply of bats dropping fresh virus on you to constantly challenge it.

The COVID vaccines really are so good there’s not much reason to take extra precautions as long as you’ve gotten one. Variants don’t even matter since it’s not the flu.