[danhor]

> you're suggesting that the unvaccinated have become drastically more infectious for no apparent reason

Isn't that the point of concern about the variants? Alpha is vastly more infectious than the original and delta is even more infectious than Alpha, which is the reason why they're able to become the dominant strain in unvaccinated populations (england in early 2021 & india with delta). Both have some immune escape but less than e.g. the gamma variant which hasn't become dominant in most countries with high vaccination rates.

(now, since the covid vaccines don't mean complete sterile immunity, just like all others, increased infectiousness also leads to problems)

The PCR tests do detect the virus if the body fought of the virus immediately, but can also measure the amount remaining (the cycle count) which has a cutoff point. Thus it often doesn't get counted as "infectious".

The antigen tests (the fast, cheap ones) don't trigger on small amounts, also leading to issues and that results in them being more-or-less useless to detect infected vaccinated people.

[native_samples]

It's not clear they're actually more infectious. Claims that they are come from invalid methodologies like comparing the growth rate of one variant when it's new against the decline rate of another when it's old, or making assumptions like the one you just made above. Generally, it's good to treat any claim made by the field of epidemiology as suspect. They aren't incentivised to use statistics correctly.

Re: PCR:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8166461/

In light of our findings that more than half of individuals with positive PCR test results are unlikely to have been infectious, RT-PCR test positivity should not be taken as an accurate measure of infectious SARS-CoV-2 incidence. Our results confirm the findings of others that the routine use of “positive” RT-PCR test results as the gold standard for assessing and controlling infectiousness fails to reflect the fact “that 50-75% of the time an individual is PCR positive, they are likely to be post-infectious”