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by Florin_Andrei 1768 days ago
Well, I made no predictions for the future. :)

Vaccinated people are still mostly fine, even with Delta. You just don't get the close to 100% protection against severe disease, it's a little lower than that. It's still pretty good protection against severe cases (talking about mRNA vaccines).

What's clearly disappointing is that the vaccines are not very good at preventing Delta from spreading. I have not seen good estimates, but the numbers floating around seem to indicate the vaccines (again, mRNA) are still at least 50% effective against spread, but nowhere near 100%. That's the biggest gap right now.

It is true that viral loads are orders of magnitude higher with Delta. That is still compatible with all the statements above.

1 comments

Sorry, I was only disagreeing with the summary "You're mostly fine [because you are fully vaccinated]". I agree with everything else you said. My only disagreement is that I read "you're mostly fine" implying that it's still ok to resume (or in this case continue) regular activities. In my opinion, that is definitely no longer true if you live in or near an area with overburdened hospitals, and at the very least changes your calculations in other areas because it's again important to reduce transmission.

Before Delta, I felt like reducing transmission was good but not that important compared to the disadvantages of isolation. Delta shifted the tradeoff back in the other direction. How much is debatable, but personally I feel that quite a few activities that were ok, aren't anymore. I'm definitely still doing more than pre-vaccination, though.