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by Izkata 1101 days ago
Do you know why it's "laboratory-confirmed"? Because they didn't test anyone until after symptoms showed.

Your confusion here is exactly what I'm talking about. The press release didn't conflate SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) with COVID-19 (the disease, as defined by a combination of symptoms and the virus). The line you quoted is measuring people who got sick, filtering out those who got sick due to a different virus, it's not measuring people who were infected. They didn't test all participants, so they couldn't make any claims against infection.

Edit:

> and whether a vaccinated individual who still catches COVID-19 (since protection against infection is obviously not 100%) can transmit it.

Getting infected does not mean you caught COVID-19, it means you were infected with SARS-CoV-2. You didn't get COVID-19 if you didn't get sick. Treating the two terms as the same thing is a media conflation people have just accepted, and an annoyance I have to explain every time this comes up because Pfizer was using the correct definitions in that press release.

1 comments

Yes, you are correct that I should’ve said symptomatic infection (or COVID-19) because they were only trying to power the study for what they needed to clear EUA and not measuring ability to block transmission. The second paper I linked made the same mistake in its table header.