Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by luckylion 1631 days ago
> Vaccination reduces infection severity and length. Reduced infection severity reduces coughing, which reduces spread. Reduced infection length gives less time for transmissibility.

At the same time, less severe cases would make ideal spreaders: you're not aware you're infectious and you're not hindered from going out by being sick. I don't think that's a compelling reason for "vaccination reduces spread". Portugal's also doesn't suggest that, currently peaking despite 88% with two vaccinations and 26% with three.
1 comments
tragictrash 1631 days ago
The issue here is not with the vaccine. We need better and cheaper test kits. I live in the USA and frankly the response has been a joke. If we had billions of these test kits that were effective and cheap, we would be able to reduce the spread with the latest developments.

The vaccine is tool. We need to pick the best tool for the job. Vaccines reduce severity and risk. Talking about Nations peaking, and only talking about the vaccine is like trying to build a house using nails and your bare hands. There is another tool that we need to be effective. It's called testing and I haven't seen 1 Western Country executes successfully on this.

link
luckylion 1631 days ago
I agree. It feels like bureaucrats and accountants focusing on the wrong issue at times. Germany had free tests, then stopped offering them for free for the unvaccinated (while the vaccinated no longer needed tests to go to restaurants etc ... which, yeah, let's not talk about it), citing costs (but probably mostly to increase the pressure to get vaccinated). Apparently it might have cost "up to 700mm Euro per month" (including significant sums being redirected via fraud). Germany's regular federal budget is ~550bn Euro per year. Paying for temporary leave of employees costs around 20bn per year. So they're saving 700mm per month (well... they did, for something like six weeks, they're back to free testing again), prolonging the time where they pay around 1500mm per month for furloughed employees and the economy suffers. But hey, costs for testing are down!
link