Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by slingnow 1794 days ago
Biggest success story? Have you heard about the delta variant and the surge in cases among both unvaccinated AND vaccinated?
3 comments

1.) The "success story" they're speaking about is the broader vaccination requirements that have been around for far longer than COVID.

2.) You mean the surge in cases that are seeing vaccinated people faring statistically far better than the un-vaccinated? I don't think that it was ever a secret that the vaccine wasn't going to be bulletproof or capable of complete success against all variants, especially variants that didn't exist at the time of development.

I have not heard of a surge in cases among the unvaccinated, actually. Do you have a cite? All data I've seen points to a 90%+ effectiveness of Pfizer vs. Delta for infection, and it looks like more than 99% vs. death. It's MUCH MUCH MUCH safer to face potential infection with the vaccine than without.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/27/health/cdc-mask-guidance-vacc...

There are many more breakthrough cases with the delta variant. That said, the vaccines are still very good at combatting serious illness:

    We continue to estimate that the risk of a breakthrough 
    infection with symptom upon exposure to the Delta variant 
    is reduced by seven-fold. The reduction of 20-fold for 
    hospitalizations, and deaths," Walensky said during 
    Tuesday's briefing.
If you look at the numbers, you're significantly less likely to be infected if you've been vaccinated, and hospitalization rates are 95% lower. The fact that we're seeing a good number of people infected after vaccination is classic Bayes theorem.

If we could get 70% of the population vaccinated we could be done with this and move on with our lives.