COVID-19 Outbreak Information Updates (Reboot) [over 150.000,000 US cases (est.), 6,422,520 US hospitilizations, 1,148,691 US deaths.] (8 Viewers)

[bonnjer]

you still can get a mild or asymptomatic case, which means you can still be contagious.

Has it been proven for sure that you're still contagious if you've been vaccinated and have an asymptomatic or mild case? I haven't read much on this lately, so it's quite possible I missed it.

 

[gboudx]

Not speaking for Ward, but my thoughts. You can still get the virus after being vaccinated. Even if you don't die or don't get severely sick, you still can get a mild or asymptomatic case, which means you can still be contagious. So avoidance is still probably the best course of action until most people are vaccinated.

Most people can walk into a grocery store with a pharmacy, or most any pharmacy and get a vaccination now. If they choose not to do so, then whatever happens to them or their loved ones, is on them. Recent news from the CDC says that fully vaccination people are less likely to spread the virus anyway. Me and mine are all vaccinated and have been fully for almost 2 months. Avoidance is not a concern for us anymore. I'll still wear the mask in any business that requires it, but in absence of that requirement, I'm not wearing it, nor are we limiting the things we do in public. But I understand and respect other's decisions to live their lives as they see fit. But avoidance and doing what most of us have been doing over the past year is over for us. The vaccine's are plentiful, convenient and free.

 

[gboudx]

Has it been proven for sure that you're still contagious if you've been vaccinated and have an asymptomatic or mild case? I haven't read much on this lately, so it's quite possible I missed it.

This is from May 27, so pretty recent. While it won't say in absolutes that you can't spread it, you can read it and derive the conclusion for yourself.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

CDC provides credible COVID-19 health information to the U.S.

www.cdc.gov

A growing body of evidence indicates that people fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) are less likely to have asymptomatic infection or to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to others. Studies are underway to learn more about the benefits of Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccine. However, the risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in fully vaccinated people cannot be completely eliminated as long as there is continued community transmission of the virus.

 

[faceman]

Most people can walk into a grocery store with a pharmacy, or most any pharmacy and get a vaccination now. If they choose not to do so, then whatever happens to them or their loved ones, is on them. Recent news from the CDC says that fully vaccination people are less likely to spread the virus anyway. Me and mine are all vaccinated and have been fully for almost 2 months. Avoidance is not a concern for us anymore. I'll still wear the mask in any business that requires it, but in absence of that requirement, I'm not wearing it, nor are we limiting the things we do in public. But I understand and respect other's decisions to live their lives as they see fit. But avoidance and doing what most of us have been doing over the past year is over for us. The vaccine's are plentiful, convenient and free.

I've been wearing mine now since last week. There is a nasty upper respiratory virus going around here. Several of my fellow employees have called in sick the last two weeks. I'm no longer worried about Covid like you,but a mask will also help against other respiratory illnesses.

 

[superchuck500]

Has it been proven for sure that you're still contagious if you've been vaccinated and have an asymptomatic or mild case? I haven't read much on this lately, so it's quite possible I missed it.

For the vast majority of people, no. The research has shown that you simply never build up enough virus. And as a function of total vaccination, break-through cases have been a very, very small number.

I think how we view these risks is very subjective. I don't wear a mask ever anymore unless I'm going in a location that requires it. I have no problem with it, I always have one on me. But I'm fully vaccinated, plus 30 days, and I don't see any evidence that my continuing to wear a mask on a purely voluntary basis is worth considering. I get that others may choose differently and I support that.

And, of course, should the situation change (e.g. if break-throughs increase due to variants or waning vaccine effectiveness), I can easily change this behavior. It's an evolving situation.

 

[SaintRob]

I've been wearing mine now since last week. There is a nasty upper respiratory virus going around here. Several of my fellow employees have called in sick the last two weeks. I'm no longer worried about Covid like you,but a mask will also help against other respiratory illnesses.

My brother who had Covid last year and then completed the Moderna shots two months ago, developed flu-like symptoms this past Friday. He was lethargic and had a fever of 101. On Sunday morning he went to get tested. He tested negative for Covid, Flu, and RSV. Turns out he has a really bad upper respiratory infection.

 

[gboudx]

I've been wearing mine now since last week. There is a nasty upper respiratory virus going around here. Several of my fellow employees have called in sick the last two weeks. I'm no longer worried about Covid like you,but a mask will also help against other respiratory illnesses.

Yes, now we get to be reacquainted with our old nemesis', the multiple common cold viruses. It was nice not getting sick for over a year.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Good but long article
=================

EARLY ONE MORNING, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.

Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it.

For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.”

That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.

Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious person.

The incidents contradicted the WHO’s main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn’t the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks?

Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO’s experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence—proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day..........

Thinking it might help her overcome this resistance, she’d try from time to time to figure out where the flawed 5-micron figure had come from. But she always got stuck. The medical textbooks simply stated it as fact, without a citation, as if it were pulled from the air itself.

Eventually she got tired of trying, her research and life moved on, and the 5-micron mystery faded into the background. Until, that is, December 2019, when a paper crossed her desk from the lab of Yuguo Li..........

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill

All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences.

www.wired.com

 

[Saint_Ward]

Just curious why you are still so cautious and worried if you and your wife received the vaccine.

More cautious, less worried. The whole point of that story was to show, via an example, that I don't need to be worried.

I know I wrote a lot, but it was buried in there. I've also written this idea about 4 times on this site, but I understand there are hundreds of posts on this.

" I still use my mask in the stores; for two main reasons. 1, I don't trust other people, and in the rare chance I catch covid, I know I'm fine, but I don't want the hassle of quarantining from work, etc. and 2, I just want to observe how things go for a while."

Keep in mind I live and work in an urban/suburban area, connected to three major metro areas.

The vaccines do a great job at preventing death, and serious illness. The two mRNA vaccines, even with updated real world results, seem to do an excellent job at preventing even catching it, but not perfect. So, there is still a chance to catch it, especially with people who are unvaccinated who in some cases are basically lying to the public and going out and about unmasked. If that person actually caught it, but still doesn't know, my risk goes up. It's still small, but it goes up. And right now, if I did catch it, and went ahead and got tested, I wouldn't be able to go to work until I get a negative test or a certain number of days with no symptoms, even though I'm vaccinated. Since, many at work still aren't. We are still in masks at work, BTW. So, I don't want to deal with the hassle. We're already understaffed, so it would just turn into punishment for me, not a free paid vacation at home. If the work guidance chances, that will go a long way to changing my behavior as well.

My wife is going to be starting a new job next week. I'd hate to have to quarantine from her, make life a bit more miserable, or potentially she has to start her new job late, due to having to also quarantine. As far as I know, there aren't any new rules to this for vaccinated people, and workplaces still have to be concerned about their unvaccinated workers or clients. My wife's internship was at a place dedicated to drug addiction treatment for HIV positive people.

So, with all of that in mind, I can still take on some risk, but I wanted to see how it was going to play out first. Right now, in my little area, it still seems like 90-95% are masked in stores that are following the current CDC recommendation of the vaccinated don't need it.

Other locations still just require masks. So, I have to have one around me anyway. And honestly, I have just gotten used to wearing it. It's like a wedding ring. At first, it feels weird, then after a while, it feels weirder not wearing it. I've been in a mask every day at work for 14-15 months, 8 hours a day. It's barely an inconvenience at this point.

 

[superchuck500]

Some of best research on post-vaccination infection has come from studying infection in the medical/healthcare worker community - large numbers of them were vaccinated in the opening phases of the roll-out, and they're usually willing to participate in monitoring. A pair of studies from California and Texas found that post-vaccination infection happened between 1.17% and .05%, depending on which cohort data you look at.

These rates are very, very low, especially when you consider that these data came from January through March, when community infection rates were still very high. As virus continues to circulate less and less in the community, infection for all people goes way down, and for vaccinated people it realistically approaches zero.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2101927

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2102153

 

[Saint_Ward]

Some of best research on post-vaccination infection has come from studying infection in the medical/healthcare worker community - large numbers of them were vaccinated in the opening phases of the roll-out, and they're usually willing to participate in monitoring. A pair of studies from California and Texas found that post-vaccination infection happened between 1.17% and .05%, depending on which cohort data you look at.

These rates are very, very low, especially when you consider that these data came from January through March, when community infection rates were still very high. As virus continues to circulate less and less in the community, infection for all people goes way down, and for vaccinated people it realistically approaches zero.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2101927

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2102153

Yes and even those studies have limitations, mostly due to short interactions. Unlike my co-workers, the doctor isn't in the patient's room for 8 hours a day. Lucky to see them for 8 minutes (in a hospital).

And of course, you have generally stronger hygiene practices of medical staff after seeing a patient.

Of course, the big thing they deal with is close interactions to high viral load persons.

I also assume the healthcare workers were still using PPE, as usual. I don't know what the infection rate was before they were vaccinated, but ~1% infection rate, with all the PPE on, and vaccinated...

 

[AARPSaint]

Good but long article
=================

EARLY ONE MORNING, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.

Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it.

For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.”

That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.

Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious person.

The incidents contradicted the WHO’s main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn’t the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks?

Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO’s experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence—proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day..........

Thinking it might help her overcome this resistance, she’d try from time to time to figure out where the flawed 5-micron figure had come from. But she always got stuck. The medical textbooks simply stated it as fact, without a citation, as if it were pulled from the air itself.

Eventually she got tired of trying, her research and life moved on, and the 5-micron mystery faded into the background. Until, that is, December 2019, when a paper crossed her desk from the lab of Yuguo Li..........

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill

All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences.

www.wired.com

If you have the time, please read the linked article. It explains why the science had so much contradiction in the early days of the pandemic. Not to be discouraging, because it is very long-- but it's well worth the time.

 

[Optimus Prime]

I do wonder if the next time there is a contagious potentially deadly disease the advice will be to mask up and distance, even before they know for sure if it’s necessary, just to be on the safe side

 

[Arathrael]

Yes and even those studies have limitations, mostly due to short interactions. Unlike my co-workers, the doctor isn't in the patient's room for 8 hours a day. Lucky to see them for 8 minutes (in a hospital).

And of course, you have generally stronger hygiene practices of medical staff after seeing a patient.

Of course, the big thing they deal with is close interactions to high viral load persons.

I also assume the healthcare workers were still using PPE, as usual. I don't know what the infection rate was before they were vaccinated, but ~1% infection rate, with all the PPE on, and vaccinated...

I mentioned it earlier, but the continuing indication in the UK is that the vaccines do have less protection against symptomatic disease with the (now very much dominant here) Delta strain (e.g. one study estimates that after one dose of Pfizer or Astrazeneca, effectiveness drops to 33.5% against Delta compared to 51.1% against Alpha, after two doses of Pfizer, 87.9% compared to 93.4%, after two doses of Astrazeneca, 59.8% compared to 66.1%).

So it's only a modest drop after two doses, but it is a drop, and it's a pretty significant drop in effectiveness after just one dose. There's naturally a degree of uncertainty in these figures as more data emerges, but it's enough to make me continue to wear a mask, certainly if I've only had one dose, but I'd also wear one in areas with high numbers of cases after two doses.

 

[faceman]

My brother who had Covid last year and then completed the Moderna shots two months ago, developed flu-like symptoms this past Friday. He was lethargic and had a fever of 101. On Sunday morning he went to get tested. He tested negative for Covid, Flu, and RSV. Turns out he has a really bad upper respiratory infection.

My wife caught it and has a few Comorbidity's . Asthma is one of those, but only occurs when she catches a cold virus. She has gone maskless since she has been fully vaccinated. She caught it somewhere and spent 6 hours in the ER yesterday. She is fine now after treatment. Whatever this virus is it's nasty. She now wears her mask while in public.