Transmission

[Whathefisgoingon]

So for a while now I’ve been feeling like I only really want to socialise with friends who have been vaccinated. I appreciate not everyone feels this way but aside from them being “safer” I’ve grown resentful of those in my life who are not having it as they’ve been pedalling anti vax nonsense.

I am now confused though, and I’m not sure I understand if vaccinated people are actually safer as the Delta variant is dominant.

It was my understanding that with the original strain, transmission was significantly reduced, but with Delta apparently those who are vaccinated and infected have the same viral load as those who are not vaccinated, and are therefore able to transmit it just as much as the unvaccinated.

Once I read that, I figured.. well, you have to actually have covid to transmit it, and the vaccines reduce the chance of you catching it. But of course that’s not how it works, is it? Because even as a vaccinated person I will still become infected and be covid positive, I just (hopefully) won’t suffer severe disease.

So how exactly are vaccinated people less “dangerous” to others?

Genuine question. Both DP and I have been double jabbed since May and I’m now thinking that the precautions I’ve been taking with certain unvaccinated people are kinda pointless.

@Chessie678

On average a person who has had the vaccine is less likely to have and therefore transmit covid. But a vaccinated person who works on a covid ward or who goes to clubs / festivals every weekend or just comes into contact with a lot of people for whatever reason is probably higher risk than an unvaccinated person who sees few different people.

So I think you're kidding yourself if you're making a decision not to see unvaccinated people based on your own safety. I suspect it's a lot more about not approving of their choice (which is fine - you just have different values and see this as a deal breaker).

These are all specific examples designed to be outliers though?

On average, someone vaccinated is less less to transmit the virus than someone who is unvaccinated.

The reason does make a difference IMO - if someone is following medical advice not to be vaccinated, they are acting on good, strong evidence and are likely to be following the evidence in other ways too, and being cautious

This just feeds the narrative:

vaccinated = good
non vaccinated = bad
can't be vaccinated = must be good?

Can someone maybe not be able to get the vaccine but perhaps are good with that because they didn't want it?

What about other vaccine status? Should we moralise on that also?

This is all just absolute madness. It's like masks, everyone goes on about how everyone must wear masks, good people wear masks to reduce spread.

Well I am in a hotspot in Scotland, everyone I see is wearing a mask but numbers are still sky high. We have huge numbers vaccinated but numbers are still sky high.

To be honest I don’t really want to mix with unvaccinated people in any case because we are clearly very different types of people.

Divide and conquer.
Step one complete.
Check ✔

@ZednotZee

To be honest I don’t really want to mix with unvaccinated people in any case because we are clearly very different types of people.

Divide and conquer.
Step one complete.
Check ✔

Why do you think the governments PH campaign approach is "divide and conquer" rather than, "encourage vaccination in an infectious disease pandemic"?

How could it have been done differently? Messaging has been a lot lighter here than in other countries like France.

Ironically, vaccine passports (the most contentious of the vaccine policies) is the least likely to fall under your remit of "divide of conquer" given that it only effects the person, it's not do with you and the wider population.

@ZednotZee Not really. Covid aside, I feel the same about parents who refuse their children’s routine immunisations.

@ZednotZee

To be honest I don’t really want to mix with unvaccinated people in any case because we are clearly very different types of people.

Divide and conquer.
Step one complete.
Check ✔

So? If I don't like someone's decisions and values it's my decision if I want to avoid their company.

DH double vaccinated and caught Covid at work from another double vaccinated person who also spread it to a number of others (all vaccinated). So yes you can catch and spread it vaccinated or not. The main thing is that these people have not been seriously ill or needed hospital treatment. I think given that households/ close contacts of positive cases are currently out and about in droves and are probably higher risk, trying to avoid Covid by staying away from a few unvaccinated folks almost seems pointless.

@ollyollyoxenfree
Yes that's true. On average vaccinated people transmit covid significantly less. If you are considering the risks of an event for 50,000 people allowing only vaccinated people to attend may well reduce risks of transmission even if some vaccinated people are more likely to have covid than non-vaccinated people because of the averaging affect (not saying I approve of this policy but there's probably some logic to it).

But if you are considering your own friendship group there will be huge variation in the risk of any one individual having covid for lots of reasons other than whether they have been vaccinated. You could easily have a vaccinated friend who works with hundreds of members of the public with three children at school and who hasn't had covid yet and an unvaccinated friend who works from home, has no children at school and doesn't see a large number of people. The second might be lower risk.

If you really wanted to choose your friends based on risk of them having covid, you'd be best implementing some kind of points based system to assess their risk based on various factors rather than just considering vaccination status. You could strike people off if their risk score got too high. You probably wouldn't have any friends after that though.

@Chessie678

I refer you back to my original comment

A group of vaccinated people, on average, will transmit less than a group of unvaccinated people.

As I said, this isn't specifically a reason to avoid anyone based on their vaccination status unless you are trying to lower your risk for whatever reason, but the anti-vaccine crowd need to stop peddling it as a reason to not get vaccinated.

In large groups - these examples that you mention - working in a hospital, working in a school, wfh - are likely to be equally distributed. This is why we talk about it using the phrase "on average".

Of course you can argue unvaccinated people are more likely to take risks as they take COVID less seriously, or conversely, vaccinated people are more likely to take risks because they think they're protected. Either way, it does affect the fact that vaccines reduce transmission.

Ugh - either way, it does not affect the fact that vaccines reduce transmission.

@ollyollyoxenfree
Yes absolutely but you wouldn’t expect to see that affect in one relatively small group anything like as strongly so in my mind it doesn’t make sense to assess your friends like this unless you have thousands of them.

I think many people are searching for certainty that they can avoid it by doing x or not doing y and wanting almost zero risk. Now that pretty much all mitigation measures have gone or are optional I think only by becoming a hermit and avoiding others completely is this possible.