That isn’t going to accomplish anything IMO. We have lots of variants already here. No country sequences every single case, and some don’t look much at all, so we don’t even have 100% certainty that a variant began in the place that we think it did. And then there have been similar mutations arising in multiple places. And we have plenty of unvaccinated people of our own, so keeping out travelers doesn’t make sense to me at this point. The best thing we could do is to do as much as we can to help vaccinate the rest of the world.

I think this article is based on the same study that was also profiled in the New York Times. The one that shows a correlation with health visits for high cholesterol after Covid? If so, it’s been criticized as not a very good study, due to lack of control group and other issues.

Bumping because it’s so good.

It is a problem for countries that don’t have enough vaccine yet. That’s very true. California has such a high vaccination rate and such a low number of cases now that I am not sure why it would be a large concern there.

Maybe we are talking past each other? I am saying that the initial high seroprevalence might have been faulty. A lot of people seem to think there was something up with that. The already biased blood donor sample came up with 44% previously infected. They got the 76% from making a lot of assumptions and adjustments from there. If the 76% were flawed, than any analysis based on that will necessarily be flawed as well. Anyway, the number of reinfections says nothing about the number of severe reinfections. It seems to me that the problem is ultimately not with reinfections; getting periodically reinfected with some viruses is the norm. When we can quickly fight them off and have mild symptoms or no symptoms, it’s not a problem, except for the extremely frail among us who can die from even a common cold virus. The problem in Manaus was supposed to be an overwhelm of the medical system. Maybe there were significant reinfections, but did those reinfections end up in the hospitals? The situation is one unknown after another, from my perspective. I’m not aware of any other place that had 45% infected in their first wave, much less 75%. There were definitely isolated (usually poor and crowded) areas that did (parts of Mumbai, Queens) but an entire city as a whole, haven’t heard that. Of course data on serology is so incomplete that maybe we can’t say for sure, but we haven’t seen anything like 75% before the fall anywhere else in the world, to my knowledge.

Data from Public Health England shows protection from hospitalization with Delta is 94% after FIRST DOSE of Pfizer, 71% one dose AZ. After two doses AZ, 92%, two doses Pfizer, 96%. https://khub.net/web/phe-national/public-library/-/document_library/v2WsRK3ZlEig/view_file/479607329?_com_liferay_document_library_web_portlet_DLPortlet_INSTANCE_v2WsRK3ZlEig_redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fkhub.net%3A443%2Fweb%2Fphe-national%2Fpublic-library%2F-%2Fdocument_library%2Fv2WsRK3ZlEig%2Fview%2F479607266 This is about as good as we get from real world data for non-Delta anywhere. I know there are people who don’t want to be infected with Covid even if the result is cold symptoms, but that was never a realistic expectation for the vaccines. This news is not doom, it’s fantastic; the vaccine prevents the severe cases. A good thread: https://threader.app/thread/1404601939850108937 Excerpt:

Clickbait (but it got me, LOL) Just another article about something bad that might happen some time in the future. Nothing substantial. No evidence that natural immunity isn’t long lasting, or that vaccinations will be better than natural immunity.

Yeah, this doesn’t seem like anything new. Very mild cases always looked like that. I wonder if this reflects the fact that a lot of the cases the UK is picking up now are through screening, not as many anymore from sick people seeking care. At least that is what I’ve read about their approach. Delta doesn’t seem to be spreading nearly as fast in the US as it has in the UK, even accounting for the head start in the UK.

Singapore sees just a few cases of myocarditis after second dose mRNA and recommends limiting strenuous activity for young men and teens for one week after the second dose. https://www.thestar.com.my/aseanplus/aseanplus-news/2021/06/12/singapore-reports-four-cases-of-heart-inflammation-after-second-jab-of-mrna-covid-19-vaccines

Some studies on reinfection. Probably they all have issues of one kind or another, but so do the post-vaccination studies. Overall it looks pretty good. Austria, about 90%, “comparable with the highest available estimates of vaccine efficacies” England, 84% at median of 7 months, “minimum probable effect” because they excluded seroconversions Qatar, 95% protective, reinfections less severe than initial, most reinfections found incidentally through screening and contact tracing, up to seven months England, zero symptomatic reinfections in 1,000 health care workers Israel, reinfection rate 0.1% up to 10 months in ~150,000 health care workers, 2.6% hospitalized after second positive PCR. One death but not clear with first or second positive test Some studies of immunity in previously infected Variants have negligible effects on T cell reactivity Robust T cell immunity six months after infection Neutralizing antibodies measured 5-7 months after infection Neutralizing antibodies correlate with virus-specific T cells in those recently infected SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans Durable immunity in multiple branches of immune system, at levels that are predictive of long-term memory (years) and promising of protection from severe disease for “substantial time” according to author

Thanks for clarifying. Those articles don’t show any evidence for reinfection in Brazil. Those numbers are a guesstimate based on the same antibody study from Manaus that we’ve been talking about here. They take the high seroprevalence and then assume that because it was so high, some must have been reinfections. But it seems just as likely that that was a faulty assumption. Good evidence for reinfection due a particular variant would have to take a population with documented infection and show how many had documented reinfection, hopefully with some amount of sequencing involved. I don’t think that evidence exists. And sure, they had a few thousand in vaccine trials in 2020, but so did the US and the UK and others. We still don’t think of these countries as having had vaccination available when surges began, since those are very tiny numbers. I think there are other papers looking at reinfections than those you have there. Reinfections happen and are expected to happen, just as post-vaccine infections will also occur, but they seem to be infrequent and largely less severe in either case. Not to say that we haven’t or couldn’t see more immune evasion with a variant, but vaccination and previous infection both seem to be about equally good thus far.

Well, I didn’t say alignment. That’s different than conceding a particular point. I think @sneezyone also has a point about how the spectrum is defined. Maybe I don’t know enough about the most extreme of the fringe ends to call it a circle.

Maybe. Sometimes. It’s also the way straight into groupthink. “That statement is bad because it is something someone on the right (or the left) said.” No, I don’t think so. I don’t worry about it at all when I find myself occasionally agreeing with someone on the far left or far right on some aspect of an issue. It happens when you try to think critically.

Yes, I think there is a connection from what I have read over the past couple of years, which I’m too tired to think about right now and find links. I think Marxist gets conflated with “communist” and there is some confusion there. I think clear parallels with Marxism can be seen in CRT ideology which seems at its core to depend on a lens of oppressors vs. oppressed.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage Scroll to “state trends.” You can also use drop down menus to see more granular data on each state.

Normally I dislike the color-coded charts, since there is a lot of pseudo-science and opinion to them, but this one doesn’t seem terrible, especially because she puts the caveat about transmission rates and/or vaccination rates. Note that almost all states are below the rates of community transmission she lists, though of course you might want want to look at the more localized level especially if more risk-averse. (47 states are below 10/100,000, two are at 10, and one is at 12/. 37 states are at or below half that rate, <= 5/100,000). So then the chart becomes unnecessary entirely, doesn’t it, because if community transmission is so low, nothing is actually “high risk,” unless perhaps someone has a particularly high risk person in their household and cannot take any risk at all.

To point #1, I think the surge began even before they had any vaccines. To #2, do you remember the publication where you saw this number? I didn’t think there was anything definitive on that. I have also seen suggestion that vaccines could potentially do better with immunity to variants as opposed to natural infection. But there is another school of thought that says that natural infection may do better, because the resultant immunity is so much broader in scope. It could in fact be that those who received those inactivated virus vaccines made by the Chinese and those who were initially infected with the virus will have better long-term immunity, because they have more T-cell immunity to work with should the virus continue to mutate. While those of us who got spike protein vaccines will be chasing down any significant mutations with newer vaccines. There is talk that the next generation of vaccines would not focus only on one protein. There is a lot of talk about a lot of things, though, LOL, time will tell.

This article is from around the time many articles were highlighting the antibody study from Manaus showing a high prevalence of infection. It talks about the problems with the study (self-selected population of blood donors, offered paid rides to bring them in for testing, and then the 70+% publicized was actually derived from a model that they used to extrapolate to the total population). It also mentions another study of households done over a similar time period that showed only 14% of the population had immunity. But that was pretty much ignored in the reporting, perhaps because it didn’t make for such a good headline. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/study-estimates-76-percent-of-brazilian-city-exposed-to-sars-cov-2-68272

A lot of people even said India had herd immunity, and then look what happened. It does make you wonder sometimes when people say that about the US, but at least now with vaccines we have real studies that show they work and documented numbers of people vaccinated. I think what we have now that we didn’t have when they were saying that about Manaus, is all the data showing that immunity seems to be at least protecting against severe disease with variants. So I guess there could have been a lot of reinfection due to variants, but if there is a wave that is also accompanied by large numbers of hospitalizations, it’s less likely that those severe cases are mostly reinfections.

Germany approves Pfizer for 12-17 but only for those with pre-existing conditions. https://news.yahoo.com/german-panel-gives-limited-approval-145104409.html There is an FDA vaccine advisory meeting today about what is appropriate re testing and approving Covid vaccines for children. Slides from myocarditis presentation are here. Info from 12-15 year olds largely still unavailable.

I don’t think it’s new information. I can’t fault colleges or businesses; I expect that they go by what public health agencies say. A lot of people, rightly or wrongly, have been saying that public health is extremely slow on this issue. But it is unethical to require an unnecessary medical treatment, so public health needs to act like this is also an emergency, to acknowledge natural immunity as protective in guidance to other organizations. Yes it’s a novel virus, but it’s not a new family of virus, and reading and listening to various scientists from the beginning, there was never any reason to think that getting infected would confer zero immunity, that you would get reinfected every couple of months, and most especially, that you would get very sick each time. That was IMO a fear-based narrative drummed up by rumor and a scientifically illiterate press. What I primarily heard even over a year ago is that we seem to get reinfected with common cold Coronaviruses every few years, so that maybe that would happen with this one, maybe as little as every 1-2 years, or maybe it would be longer. But that generally, it would be milder after the first exposure, for most people. There is still the idea that many of us will get reinfected with very mild or asymptomatic infections over the years, boosting the immunity gained from vaccination or previous infection. This could be expected as we won’t all continue to have super high neutralizing antibody titers over time. I don’t know if the Manaus story has been fully resolved, but I thought the concern about huge numbers of reinfections with a variant is based on one problematic antibody survey that was not confirmed in other studies. There is a lot more on that than the January article someone else just linked.

This is interesting. https://www.timesofisrael.com/israelis-propose-1-dose-shortcut-to-herd-immunity-for-vaccine-poor-countries/ They go on to link this to the idea that one dose may also avoid most of the rare myocarditis cases after the second shot.

I think the idea is that an antibody test should be viewed as proof of vaccination, which is what I think @ktgrok is saying. If someone thinks they had it and that is the reasoning behind not getting vaccinated, fine, but that shouldn’t count to get on an overseas flight or avoid a college or healthcare work requirement. But positive antibodies should, and right now, it’s not clear that they do, or at least, most organizations are silent on natural immunity. If someone did have it but has no antibodies, then maybe a vaccine is still a good idea, though I guess we don’t know that for sure yet, either. I don’t think that needs to mean that everyone gets a test before vaccination, either, but if you would prefer to and it’s positive, that should count. That was not part of the argument when the vaccine rollout began. The people that called for delaying vaccination for previously infected back in December and January were simply saying that if someone who isn’t in the highest risk group knows they have had PCR-confirmed Covid, they should have gotten in the back of the line when resources were limited, because with thousands per day dying, people who had no immunity should have been prioritized. Even that ten percent of known cases meant someone that didn’t really need it, while someone who did was having to wait.

This is factual reporting, but it is also looks like they are hunting for stories. Is there an indication that all of the Covid hospitalizations are due to Covid-related disease? Or is this a case or admitted for something else and testing positive for Covid? They do not say, and we cannot assume anymore. Trusdale TN has only 11,000 people. In the last 14 days, the case rate has declined just like everywhere else, but the 14 day average is 4 per 100,000, and that is cases, which means this county has much fewer than one positive test per day! https://covid19.tn.gov/data/dashboards/?County=Trousdale There have been 41 total hospitalizations in the past 3 months. Even assuming Covid hospitalizations are all for Covid disease in that county, when numbers are very small, any increase can be a large percentage. The 700% increase could be, the average over 14 days was 0.5 persons in the hospital, and now it is 3. Or something even lower than that (am I doing the math right?). So where is the 700% percent hospitalization increase coming from? Is this county a hospitalization hub for surrounding counties, so that other hospitals are now sending all their cases there? Is the increase really all people actually sick with Covid? Is there something else going on? How about some digging into what the ER doctor said, about the likelihood of a positive test going into the hospital- where is that data coming from, and why would that be (many possibilities). But there is nothing about that, no putting the numbers in context. Instead, they use words like “surged.”

+1000. Why should a young male, for example, take any small risk of vaccination to fulfill a college requirement if they already are protected from previous infection? It makes no sense and is unethical.