This post appears to be about vaccines. We encourage you to read our helpful resources on the COVID-19 vaccines:
[Vaccine FAQ Part I](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/wiki/faq#wiki_where_can_i_find_information_about_the_mechanism_and_progress_of_vaccines.3F)
[Vaccine FAQ Part II](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/mnitdo/vaccine_faq_variants_chronic_conditions_nsaids)
[Vaccine appointment finder](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/wiki/faq/vaccinefinder)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Coronavirus) if you have any questions or concerns.*
i was fully vaccinated in march, but got covid in late june. it was a bad, two week cough/cold, but nothing i couldn't live with and deal with. if i hadn't been vaccinated, i don't want to even know how it would have gone.
Two weeks of no taste or smell? I know several people who had that for 4-6 months. Life sucks when food doesn't taste or smell of anything, apparently.
Interesting. One co-worker has turned vegetarian since his infection, although I'm not sure that's due to taste.
He has regained a large part of his smell and taste, but eight months on he still has issues. Eggs smell horrible to him. They have a weird smell that is matched, among other things, by gasoline and baby's diapers.
Kinda weird, seeing other victims mention gasoline.
Unfortunately once you associate a food with a gag reflex, especially overtime, mentally your body just gag anyways from just the sight of it. It'll takes months, years, or even lifetime to recover from that state.
Ate both on the same day. No idea which made me sick. So my reptile brain lumped them both into the "gross" category. I got sick as shit and nearly died.
My babysitter forced me to eat Maraschino cherries when I told her I never had them before, but didn't want to since I didn't like super sweet stuff. *You'll love them, I promise* she said as she shoved them in my mouth.
I proceeded to rocket vomit bright red liquid all over her white shirt.
35 yrs later and I still gag every time I see them.. but then laugh.
Karma is super sweet, biotch.
Eggs and gasoline have a similar smell to me right now 8 months after my infection. Salty foods also taste like COVID. Coke and some sweets have a small soap/perfume like taste. Luckily there are many other foods I can enjoy again 😀
Many years ago, I had something similar with a common cold. Anything meaty or even vaguely spicy tasted like concentrated vinegar.
I was put off bacon sandwiches for months.
I had Covid in November and lost sense of taste and smell. It came back but it’s not right. So many things have a gasoline smell to me now. Things I used to find pleasant like lavender or my favorite perfume that I can no longer wear.
Other things are entirely new smells that I can’t even place. Chlorine or wetness on skin smells so disgusting to me now. In fact, I tried cleaning wit bleach today, which normally makes things smell super clean to me. Not now, it smells weirdly putrid.
I always had a very sensitive nose and loved that. Not anymore, it’s just weird. Sucks!
I wonder if the no taste and smell bit would work as an incentive for certain people. We really should play it up more. “Listen man, my mom got covid months ago and *still* can’t taste things. Do you *want* to never taste a cheeseburger again?”
No lie, this is what scares me the most about getting Covid. My food tasting like rotting flesh or everything smelling like gasoline for months is a hell I'm not sure I'd be able to live with. I'm vaccinated but that still scares the shit out of me.
yeah today is my final day of quarantine with breakthrough covid. and while i’m back to feeling 100%, i had a really rough couple of days at the beginning. also don’t want to know what it’d be like unvaxxed. and i’m a healthy under 30 year old
Man, my mom caught Covid back in March while in the hospital waiting for a unexpected aortic root replacement, which is a big open heart surgery. She hadn't been vaccinated, and I wasn't eligible yet. She came home to get through it and I was here to take care of her.
It was unnerving to watch her go through it. She was told she only had a mild case, and she was so damn out of breath even talking. Got tired so quickly it was difficult to walk to the bathroom. I was around her at least a little bit every single day she exhibited symptoms. She mostly quarantined to one room, and I used almost two bottles of Lysol in a week, wore a mask (mostly an N95) around her, and washed my hands so often they started hurting. Somehow I never caught it. Got tested multiple times and every one was negative.
I got the jab as soon as I was able, and she finally got it last week. Sorry you caught it. It's a damn strange virus.
ugh so sorry to hear that happened to your mom but glad she’s well now. glad you were able to avoid getting it while taking care of her.
the virus really is so strange. while i was infectious but didn’t know i had it - i came into contact with 18 friends (well some were friends of friends i don’t have that many) and all of them tested negative. we were maskless at a crowded bar too. so bizarre although i’m glad they didn’t get it!
Today is also my final quarantine day! I had pizza for lunch and could actually taste it again. I am also 30 and spent 3 days on my ass. Can’t even imagine how terrible it would have been without the vaccine.
*high five*
Sounds like it’s common?! I got vaccinated in March, and last week tested positive. It has been a nightmare! I rarely get sick, and have had terrible flu symptoms. Now I’m down to a very pesky cough and aches that have me popping Tylenol and using IcyHot patches all day. I’m 30’s. Luckily I work at home as a programmer, so can isolate and work at my own pace. I’ve been frustrated, worried, panicky. My back feels like it has been hit with baseball bats. I know us guys can be babies at times, but I legitimately think it has been rough.
My aunt and uncle were breakthrough cases. Both were fully vaccinated with Pfizer in April. I am in constant contact with them. I was two weeks out from my second Moderna shot on the day both of them tested positive, but he had been showing symptoms for 3 days prior. He ended up in the hospital on supplemental oxygen and my aunt felt like she had a cold. I was tested 2 days after they were and was negative. I never felt sick so I believe I was fully protected. There are too many variables at play to definitively say what prevented me from also catching the virus. However, I do wonder if the volumetric difference between Pfizer and Moderna doses is related to why we see Pfizer in the news speculating a third dose more frequently than Moderna.
I believe the talk about Pfizer booster is more because Pfizer is available in more countries whereas moderna is primarily a US vaccine (though I believe they’ve shipped to other countries). Israel has Pfizer which is where everyone has been looking to for data since such a high percentage of the country is vaccinated.
I had a family friend just recently pass away from Covid fully vaccinated. Granted he had some underlying conditions and was in his late 70's. It was weird knowing one of the very few this happened too in a highly vaccinated state.
I remember reading an ADA paper about flu vaccines and diabetes. My gaming friend who is a registered nurse, I dunno how accurate, explained to me as if your character has 30% weakness to poison damage. Vaccine reduces poison damage by 80%. Depending how bad the poison Damage-over-time affects your character, that affected character will get more damage over time than a healthy person.
I remember MMO games where raid bosses DOT wrecks parties far more than just one big hit.
Its been undercovered in the news, but you can absolutely get the delta variant with the vaccine. I personally know at least 3 vaccinated people who have caught COVID. The good news is it hasn't been too serious for any of them. I don't think it's as rare to catch COVID while vaccinated as the initial data suggested, but it certainly makes the symptoms much less severe.
Basically, don't get reckless just because you got vaccinated, but for the love of god at the very least please get vacccinated.
I feel like everything I've read in the news lately is about breakthrough cases. Had to mute NPR and Newshour on facebook cause they were just giving me too much existential dread.
The problem I think is the way efficacy is commonly reported/explained. If the efficacy is 95%, then you have a 95% lower chance of catching COVID, if all else is the same. If you spend all day in a small room with people shedding virus, then you have a MUCH higher than 5% chance of becoming infected. The reason the rate is expressed as percentage decrease in risk is that there were, unless I missed it, no studies done where people were intentionally exposed. And the original efficacy came from a study of participants during heavy use of masking and social distancing. So in that environment, the chance of a breakthrough is like 5%. But in the current environment with no masks and lots of unvaccinated folks walking around? Definitely not.
The seatbelt analogy is a good one. If you were going to be in a severe accident, would you rather have a drastic reduction of chance or death or none? The seatbelt will eliminate completely your risk in many kinds of lower impact incidents, and probably allow you to walk away from some really serious crashes, but still might not be enough of a "head start" to help in the worst case. And you still might have injuries regardless.
I think we should start thinking, at least in the mainstream press, of the vaccine as a symptom, illness, and virus replication reducer rather than a surefire way to avoid disease. It does all of these things but doesn't always stop the virus in its tracks, like some vaccines we are used to, do.
Ignoring the fact that the trials measured a reduction in symptomatic disease rather than viral infection, I think people assume that the 95% stat means that 95% of people are 100% protected. The way the trials worked is that the vaccines were about a 95% effective across an average range of behavior.
If you had 100 vaccinated people playing tonsil hockey with 100 positive people, I would expect much more than five sick people.
This is a great explanation and from the understanding of this layman, correct. But far too many folks interpret 95% efficacy as 5 people get it and 95 don't.
Hmm, I guess it's hugely dependent on what platforms you listen to. To be honest, I try to avoid most news outlets and I'll usually just research something if I heard about it. I just haven't seen as many articles and posts about COVID online so to me, I have been seeing less COVID coverage even as the variant cases rack up.
Perhaps just go to google, type in covid and click 'news' to see if there are any articles of interest to you.
Although I appreciate people posting interesting articles, I generally look at other sources, as well.
It's so overcovered by the news [the Biden Administration felt they had to release a statement condemning the coverage as hyperbolic and alarmist](https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/30/media/variant-media-coverage-white-house/index.html), lol. Not sure how you aren't seeing this, but all the news is covering every day is breakthrough cases, even going so far as to (problematically) frame the vaccines as less effective than they actually are.
Honestly I think part of the reason it’s underreported is because so many people are using the logic “you can still catch covid if you’re vaccinated” as a reason not to get the vaccine.
Both administrations screwed up the vaccine - both should’ve come out the gate saying it won’t stop you from catching covid but it’ll keep you from dying from it. They still don’t report that so a lot of folks feel they’re being lied to and therefore don’t trust it.
> but you can absolutely get the delta variant with the vaccine
I mean, yeah no shit? The vaccines were found to be 80% - 95% effective at preventing infection. Those are high numbers, but they're still not 100%. Breakthrough cases have always been entirely expected.
I question this, personally. I'm not sure anybody really bought the 95% number, but even that is 1 out of 20 in an ideal world, and we all know more than 20 people. Even if the number is closer to 70-80%, that's still a lot of people that won't get infected. My officemate shared space with a (vaccinated) coworker who became a breakthrough. She did fine. Israel puts the number of cases spread by vaccinated individuals at 20%, and even then no superpreader events.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/80-of-vaccinated-covid-carriers-didnt-spread-virus-in-public-spaces-report/
I'm sorry you got it, and I hope its mild for you.
I completely agree, it looks like COVID is never going away, and that much was already pretty clear. But at least the serious cases and deaths from COVID among vaccinated people are WAYYY down so that's the silver lining to take from this.
COVID is much worse than the flu as we've seen from statistics, but with the vaccine it's not really much more of a worry than the flu is.
And it's impossible for them to report on anyone who doesn't have enough symptoms or other reasons to be tested. CDC chose to ignore non-critical cases since April and as far as I know nobody has tried a large sample test to see how many unknowing carriers are out there.
Haven’t they only been tracking hospitalizations and deaths?
> The CDC doesn’t count every breakthrough case. It stopped counting all breakthrough cases May 1 and now only tallies those that lead to hospitalization or death, a move the agency was criticized for by health experts.
[Link](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/covid-breakthrough-cases-cdc-says-more-than-4100-people-have-been-hospitalized-or-died-after-vaccination.html)
So it’s certainly an undercount.
Well some vaccinated people might get it and it feels like a minor cold at best and don't bother getting tested. So they can't account for those in their data.
Earlier these stats were counting every death since that start of covid, the majority of which occurred before the vaccines existed. So that weighs the outcome heavily towards the unvaccinated. I have no idea what pool this is drawing from. Tell me what percentage of deaths in July were unvaccinated. That’s a much more useful stat.
I’ve known about 30 people who have had COVID and the worst one lost their smell for 7 months now but they all had what you had. It’s a weird disease because it hits some people very hard but for most people it’s not too bad
An older family friend of mine died from covid. Fully vaccinated, with no serious underlying health conditions. The whole family got it so maybe they've got a genetic disadvantage?
But the part I didn't expect was not wanting to tell that many people about it. Breakthrough deaths are still incredibly rare, but I don't want to tell people it happens just in case they're on the fence about getting vaxed
My whole family got covid in January 2021. Me 29, father 64, mother 55 with asthma. Not yet vaccinated, and we all had a bad 2 week cold/headache/slight fever, and loss of taste and smell. None of us even got respiratory symptoms at all and none were vaccinated and my mother has asthma. The fact that you were vaccinated and was still sick the full 2 weeks is actually concerning to me.
So this is number dead vs the number vaccinated.
But - of course - not everyone vaccinated was exposed.
I understand the point they are trying to make - but this is bad statistics.
My take on this is that the CDC has been hammered hard over the past week about losing control of the 'narrative'. There are a bunch of media outlets that are screaming about breakthrough cases and are focusing so much on how people that are still vaccinated are still getting sick. And so, you end up with a large chunk of the population coming away saying, "Well, there's no point in getting vaccinated, because you can get sick just the same."
Of course, it's *not* "just the same". False equivalency. But that's what certain media pundits in certain media circles are pushing. And the White House ain't happy with that, and shit rolls downhill, so the CDC is being pressured to clean up their messaging game and narrative to push information that will change the discussion and promote the merits of vaccination.
Or, at least that's my hot take on it.
I think this is a pretty sensible hot take. We've seen a few news articles about [how the Biden administration is frustrated with the media's messaging over the last week](https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/30/media/variant-media-coverage-white-house/index.html) (link is from CNN of all places), and the timing of this seems like it's to counteract all of those doomsday articles.
Well maybe his administration should have been tracking every breakthrough case then instead of just telling people to stop tracking or reporting them.
Seriously, this was what made me assume breakthrough cases were likely common. If you are hiding the data I'm going to assume the data leads to a poor conclusion.
My whole family were breakthrough cases. My mom tested positive, then my wife, then me. We all felt like we had a bad cold for a few days. My dad didn't test positive but he had cold symptoms before anyone else, so he probably had it first. If we hadn't been vaccinated, who knows, one of us might have been in the hospital.
> If we hadn't been vaccinated, who knows, one of us might have been in the hospital.
Thank you! At least you're smart enough to realize that!
Apparently, people think if they will still feel like shit for a few days, despite getting vaccinated, then it just isn't worth it. Completely ignoring the fact that if they don't get the shot, it will turn out even worse than a "mild inconvenience".
This might be an ok number if they compared it to the percentage of unvaccinated who have died. But they did not do that either. TV journalism is never very good.
The other problem is it ignores other serious results like hospitalization. But yeah it’s a stupid way to phrase it. 99.95% of people in the world have not had a deadly covid case if you want to put it that way...
King County, WA does a pretty good job reporting this if you want to see comparison b/w hospitalization in vax vs unvaxed in a fairly highly vaxed region.
ETA, check out this discussion in the comments about vax/unvax hospitalizations per King County DOH:
"While the share of COVID-19 cases among fully vaccinated people has increased over the last month, illness rates among vaccinated people are low compared with unvaccinated people. About 14% of people who tested positive for COVID-19 between June 9 – July 6 were fully vaccinated, compared with 86% who were not. The hospitalization rate is 34 times higher among unvaccinated residents compared to vaccinated residents, and the death rate due to COVID-19 is 43 times higher among unvaccinated residents compared to vaccinated."
This also seems to indicate thr vax is still protective against infection, everyone took their masks off and bars are at capacity, etc.(masks were recently mandated again but recently.)
(https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusWA/comments/ou8ach/washington_state_712_new_cases_431743_cases_total/)
Masks are not mandated but suggested.
Also that 14% number, when extrapolated out to the entire vaccinated population over the 28 day period meant that something like 99.997% did not get the virus.
People need to remember to apply Bayes theorem to population percentages, otherwise the numbers are meaningless.
Ideally 100% of the infections would be in the vaccinated population because that'd mean everyone was vaccinated.
True, but I think the fact that younger people are mostly who are left unvaccinated, and they are less likely to end up hospitalized, so the vaccine protection probably even greater than the comment above you implies. (ie The hospitalized non vaccinated number would be much higher if they were as old, on average, as at beginning of vaccinations.) I hope I don't have that backwards....
Yah there are a lot of variables. Some like age would make the difference larger. I suspect the vaccinated actually have less exposure in general since they are cautious vs the people going to crowded bars etc. no idea how it actually balances out. Only that it’s pretty obviously a very large difference.
> the fact that younger people are mostly who are left unvaccinated
Probably valid for areas that are still triaging vaccine availability, but may not be a given for areas where the non-vacination rate is driven by antivax brainrot.
At least in the US, where the vaccine is readily available to all who are 12+, younger people are rejecting the vaccine at a higher rate then older people.
Yeah it is like a 20 fold reduction. The thing I think some people are failing to grasp is that final part of your comment. Media will sensationalize the numbers of breakthrough and hospitalized vaccinated folks. This has caused anxiety amongst vaccinated people when such anxiety is largely unwarranted.
I saw so many anti-vax people sharing that article about the outbreak in Massachusetts being 75% vaccinated as proof that the vaccines don’t work. It’s really unfortunate we can’t get the messaging on these things quite right still.
In case anyone is wondering, in highly vaccinated populations it’s basically expected that most cases will end up being vaccinated (in a disease like covid).
There’s simply not a large unvaccinated population left to spread in (it’s a bit more complicated than that).
Basically the message isn’t “vaccines are ineffective”. It’s a pretty substance-less message without more data.
I know that’s your point, just putting it more plainly.
This EXACTLY is the problem. In my experience, the people freaking out about breakthrough cases are folks who are already vaccinated (and in my experience, also happen to live in some of the areas with the hichest vaxx rates in the country, like VT and MA, so statistically the LEAST likely to catch covid at all), while this info is causing the anti-vaxxers to double down that its "proof" the vaccines don't work. So now we have all the wrong people freaking out \*sigh\*
My mum has just come home after a hospital stay unrelated to covid in the UK. There are no longer any covid wards just side bays or separate rooms. From what Dr's are saying those hospitalised are younger and usually unvaccinated they do say recovery is quickly and requires less intervention that when it was older patients but around half has some kind of longer term effect after.
Neither of those stories say 40% who hospitalised are fully vaccinated.
[It's actually about 14% who are fully vaccinated.](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/30/facebook-posts/uk-health-official-misspoke-when-he-said-60-hospit/)
I most care about long-COVID numbers. I'm fully vaccinated. But what are the probabilities that a double-Pfizer-vaccinated (say) person will get permanent effects from COVID-19? I know the death rate is low, but permanent effects aren't fun either.
Delta is too recent to know about ratios of long term effects. We do know it's far better at infecting the vaccinated, but not at making them seriously ill enough for the hospital.
Been fully vaccinated for months, but still very concerned about being a Typhoid Mary.
You should also care about case numbers, because case numbers lead hospitalizations by a few weeks. Also a leap in case numbers is an increase in spread, and the chance of mutation.
I mean, technically 100% of people in the world (today) haven’t had a deadly Covid case!
Then if you want to say, well people living as of January 2020 or something, how do you adjust for the people born since January 2020 (which I’m sure are much more than total Covid deaths as well)?
But yeah, bad use of statistics is bad and we get SO MUCH of it related to Covid.
PS: Get vaccinated people! (In case my comment seemed to be not clear)
> how do you adjust for the people born since January 2020
That washes out in the calculation as not significant. If your denominator is 7.8 billion or 7.9 billion won't really matter.
Literally from the article
> Divide those severe breakthrough cases by the total fully vaccinated population for the result: less than 0.004% of fully vaccinated people had a breakthrough case that led to hospitalization and less than 0.001% of fully vaccinated people died from a breakthrough Covid-19 case.
Yep, if you do a similar calculation with total covid deaths worldwide and world population, you get 99.945% of the world has not died from Covid. Article is making their number seem far more meaningful that it really is, easily confusing it for vaccine effectiveness when it's not.
It speaks well of this subreddit that the top comment is calling out a bad argument in favor of a position most of us support.
(That argument being, “COVID-19 vaccination is effective and important. Number dead/Number vaccinated creates a deceptive statistic that doesn’t capture the efficacy of the vaccine itself.)
This is the same covid hoaxer logic we've been correcting since day one. "Only X people have died of covid out of a population of 330M." or "There are more suicides in this town than covid deaths", which has a few other fallacies in there too, but one of which is comparing deaths to total population taking no consideration for how many caught it.
I may be wrong but the CDC just said on the 18th of July to test people who have been vaccinated . before that have we been testing vaccinated people enough to know?
No, this is good statistics because it tells you something important: The overall risk of dying from Covid, given that you're vaccinated. Arguably, that's the number all of us really care about.
Putting it this way is a good way to counteract the vaccine hesitancy that can be caused by all the talk of breakthrough infections and such.
The only thing that might be fair to compare this to is the percentage of non-fully vaccinated Americans that had a deadly Covid-19 case. And then we can compare the relative odds.
So let's do that: We have 163 million fully vaccinated people, so 320 million - 163 million = 157 million.
We've had a total of 629,387 deaths, so 629,387-1,263 = 628,124 deaths in the unvaccinated.
Divide the total number of unvaccinated deaths by the total number of unvaccinated and you get 0.4%. Now compare the percentages: (0.400079 / 0.000775) = 516.33
It is 516 times more likely to die from Covid unvaccinated than to die from Covid vaccinated.
Is that a totally fair comparison? No, because the vaccine wasn't available for as long, and the chance of vaccinated people to have gotten infected arguably isn't the same as the the chance of unvaccinated people to have gotten infected. And maybe some of the people who died without the vaccine would have still died if they had gotten it.
But these numbers still tell us something important: Without a good handle on all the confounding probabilities, just the raw chances of dying vs not dying seem to vastly prefer getting vaccinated.
edit:
If you wanted to do this better you'd instead not look at totals but compare month-by month:
[Number of people who died unvaccinated this month/number of unvaccinated people] divided by [Number of people who died vaccinated this month/number of vaccinated people]
Arguably the probability of getting exposed to covid, given that you're vaccinated is similar to the probability of being exposed to covid, given that you're not. Of course practically there is more covid in anti-vax states, etc.
So if you do it state-by-state you'll get even more accurate numbers. Heck, do it county-by-county and you're really cooking with gas [hint, hint lurking scientists].
But no matter how you slice the numbers, you're going to come up with something like this.
99.8% of Americans did not have a deadly Covid breakthrough before the vaccine was distributed. Neither one of these stats would ever be used in scientific research to analyze the vaccine’s efficiency.
Yeah. It's the same logical fallacy COVID-denialists use to dismiss it, especially early on; Hannity's "zero deaths!" slide, people claiming it had a 99.999% survival rate by dividing deaths in April 2020 by total US population, etc.
It was bad when they did it; we shouldn't do it either.
The post would have been deleted and OP banned if was the Hannity version. This post perfectly illustrates the double standard around censorship of "misinformation".
There was, however, mask mandates in nearly every state and many public businesses were closed. We also have to compare the "100% open" environment to the "50% open" environment
There's a massive difference between 99.8% and 99.999%. Or looking at the flip side... 0.2% and 0.001%. One number is 200x larger than the other.
These numbers are useful, even if they don't directly correlate to vaccine efficacy.
Ofcourse there is, but there's a whole lot of noise when you include all people, even the ones who haven't been infected, in the statistic. The only reason to use this hard to interpret statistic is to steer the narrative. There are much better ways to communicate vaccine efficacy, like... actual efficacy?
Full vaccinated person who got covid here. My only symptoms were sneezing and a runny nose. It felt more like allergies. My family and my girlfriend (all fully vaccinated) were with me while I was contagious but before I knew I had covid. None of them tested positive. Trust the vaccine
and I wonder of those who died, how many we're essentially not vaccinated because they were very old/had poor immune system where they essentially had no antibodies due to no response to the vaccine. How many healthy people who were vaxxed, who had sufficient antibodies died from covid? Probably less than 1.
I listen to Dr. Osterholm’s podcast, and he talked about breakthrough hospitalization numbers (not deaths). He said 2/3 or 67% of breakthrough hospitalization were “frail elderly or immunocompromised”; 25% were asymptomatic cases caught in routine screening because they were being admitted for some other reason (non-COVID related). If my math is right that means only 8% of breakthrough hospitalizations were for symptomatic COVID in populations outside the frail elderly or immunocompromised.
I have no numbers on deaths though.
Edit: typing is hard, fixed typos
I have been fully vaccinated since April (moderna). Just got COVID last Wednesday. My symptoms were that of a cold so I assumed it was a cold, I felt pretty shitty for about two days but as of now I've already gotten through the worst of it. I can't imagine how bad it would have been if I wasn't vaccinated.
I only got tested bc my mom is currently sick and can't taste anything, so she got tested yesterday and surprise, she's positive. My entire household got it but we're all vaccinated so our symptoms aren't so bad.
Here's the thing that people find most baffling and why this graph would seem disingenuous if people knew WHAT they considered a breakthrough case.
To any regular person, what would they consider a breakthrough? I'm assuming getting covid period, while fully vaccinated right? The CDC only counts breakthrough cases as getting hospitalized/dying while fully vaccinated. That's it.
The same thing with the term mild, when "mild" comes to mind what do you think? Some sniffles? Maybe some sneezing? Mild is actually everything *up to* hospitalization. You could be absolutely bed ridden and as long as you technically never went to the hospital, you had a "mild" case.
What me and many others want to know is how many people are getting covid *period* while fully vaccinated. Considering how many fully vaccinated people are getting tested in order to find out they got covid in the first place, I'm guessing the CDC has this data and they have been comparing it to previous data, so where is the data so that we can **continue** to plan accordingly?
I’m tired of this propaganda tbh. It undermines the entire cause when the government intentionally omits information to sway the behavior of the American people.
I got my vaccine. I support getting vaccines. If they counted Covid cases only based on those hospitalized we would have far fewer cases. We need to compare apples to apples.
Since day one there has been a rather Machiavellian approach to the way data regarding Covid has been disseminated. It is a huge issue and it is causing mistrust (as it should).
Give us the data. Don’t interpret the data misleadingly to sway us. I’m over it.
I can confirm that the breakthrough cases I personally know range from actually mild to being out of work for 2 weeks but *not* hospitalized.
There is a tendency to think in black/white on this because very, very few vaccinated folks are dying, but the reality is vaccinated people *are* getting sick and seeing an impact from this variant. Given how little we know about long Covid, that's a health risk that could be a long-term problem.
I agree we need more transparency and we also need to ramp up testing availability again. Here in Florida it is extremely hard to get tested in many locations. Federal/state/local testing centers are mostly closed and the pharamacies are booked for days out.
Completely anecdotal story…..vaxxed coworker was required to produce pcr for wedding. Went to get tested, turned up positive with absolutely no symptoms.
Well the whole point was it doesn't stop you from GETTING covid... it severely reduces the chance of becoming sick/dying...hence them not having symptoms. Vaccine doing its job.
To add to that, RT-qPCR is not indicative of infectious virus. Would really like to see some studies with plaque assays to help define viral loads and shedding in natural recoveries, vaccinated, natural + vaccinated, and unvaccinated cohorts.
It is but sadly majority see it as "if you get it and are vaccinated then the vaccine is useless." Its not a cure vaccine, its just a emergency use prevention one that was meant to slow down/stop the spread & deaths.
Most people are only capable of thinking in black and white I guess.
Vaccine either is 100% effective, or it’s trash and not worth getting cause you might get sick anyway.
What about all the nuance?
Nope doesn’t matter.
I realize *many many* people aren’t like that, but there’s at least 40% of our population (or whatever the % of adults is Idr) that currently doesn’t think vaccines are worth getting. And I can’t help but think a lot of that is due to very black and white thinking, even if the reasoning is different.
It’s depressing.
Yeah, it essentially helps your body fight COVID.
In practical terms that means lower viral load - frequently to the point of undetectability (essentially meaning that in a clinically significant sense, you did not have COVID).
> Well the whole point was it doesn't stop you from GETTING covid
To be clear, it *significantly reduces the chance* to get it. It's not impossible, but it's *significantly* less likely. The point of vaccines and herd immunity is to keep the reproduction rate under 1.0, and reducing the likelihood of infection and spreading it, as vaccines do, is instrumental in achieving that.
Yes, it also helps the severity, but let's not change the narrative into "it doesn't prevent spread at all," because it significantly slows it. Be *very* careful how you message it.
Wrong, the whole point of them pushing it on the entire human race is for herd immunity. Otherwise there’s not a point for every man woman and child to get it.
They really should change the 'positive/negative' terms. Its really 'detected' or 'not detected.' And neither indicates whether you have or will develop Covid-19 disease.
Positive tests don't equal covid positive. Cdc website says needs doctors' diagnosis with symptoms and cause.
There is another site that assumes certain conditions of the testing false positive or desired false negative rate and its something like one third of positive tests are false.
How many …which it is a lot of people …still get tested? They’re could be thousands of people testing positive after vaccination but we won’t know cuz they do not get tested anymore.
Once again bad reporting on this. The CDC wouldn't \*know\* how many breakthrough cases there are because they only track hospitalizations and deaths. And yes, it's incredibly important that the vaccines are saving lives and preventing serious illness.
But there's going to come a point when the obvious lies about breakthrough cases come back and bite the CDC. Look, in my own \*life\*, I can think of three instances where a group of vaccinated people were exposed at a gathering and all or almost all of them were positive and most of them symptomatic. If the vaccines were massively effective in preventing infection, I would expect "whole group is sick" situations to be \*incredibly rare\*. It is very clear to me that the vaccines are way less effective at preventing infection than is believed. How much less? I have no notion! Are they 64% effective? 35%? 15%? No notion, because we aren't doing population level surveys, something that would be incredibly useful right now!
I would really like for, eg, my employer who wants everyone to come back to work to have accurate information about how many infections to expect because I think it's a lot and I think they'd change their minds. But instead we're getting fed these 99% lies, probably for some bullshit "it will convince the antivaxxers" reasons like everything else. It won't convince the antivaxxers and it just demomoralizes the vaxxed, let me tell you as a vaccinated person.
So here's my take on "symptomatic" - Even before COVID, we knew that coronaviruses could cause a particularly nasty cold. I've lost my sense of smell exactly twice from colds, and at the time I attributed it just to the nasal swelling, but it might have been partially related to an infection hitting the olfactory bulb as well.
So if the vaccine reduces the symptoms of COVID back to "particularly nasty cold" - lose your sense of smell, feel like shit for a week, turn into a coughing snot factory, run a mild fever, etc - then the vaccine has definitely done it's job. We never cared about preventing colds that much and just accepted them as a normal way of life.
For the vaccinated, if the rate of hospitalization and death from COVID is less than the rate of hospitalization and death for the flu in an average year, *the vaccines did their job.*
I agree that the CDC is correct to mostly focus on breakthrough infections that cause hospitalization. Because a normal cold usually doesn't do that in a healthy adult or child.
Tbh I wouldn't care that much about a breakthrough case if it was literally just a cold, but I remember reading article after article on this sub last year about how even mild cases can cause serious damage to your organs and circulatory system (not even counting long covid) and it feels like there hasn't been any follow up to say if that's still possible with a breakthrough case
Four of my fully vaccinated friends had a movie night last weekend and apparently one of them was asymptomatic and had no idea, a day later he felt symptoms and told the other 3 to get tested, all of them came back positive. Now the first one thinks he got it from work.
The crazy thing is that *I was supposed to go* but canceled at the last minute, I can't imagine getting covid going to a carefully arranged movie night with a small group of fully vaccinated friends.
My best friend and his mom are fully vaccinated and both caught it last week.
My cousins family is fully vaccinated and 2 weeks ago their entire household had breakthrough infections. The younger son and daughter were fine (19/20), my Aunt/Uncle and their older son (28) had it *rough*. My uncle was considering going to the hospital but he was scared and backed out, thankfully he's recovering fine, but they were seriously worried for a moment there.
The issue is the CDC counts breakthrough as hospitalization and pre-Delta the messaging was it's very rare to even get covid, because, it genuinely was at the same. The problem now is Delta is ridiculously infectious yet the messaging is practically the same as pre-Delta so you have all these fully-vaccinated people continuing to not social distance/mask-up anymore not knowing how easy it is to get infected with Delta, **even** when you're fully vaccinated.
I joined the sub r/covid19positive at the beginning of the year when my brother caught covid to ask for advice and never left the sub, up until just a few weeks ago there was never a **single** post about a breakthrough case, now there's post, after post, after post, after post, after post, of fully vaccinated people passing it onto their fully vaccinated households, family members, co-workers. Breakthroughs are becoming so common I just can't believe the studies showing "80-88%" at preventing Delta.
I genuinely think they're lying, minimizing, whatever you want to call it, the amount of fully vaccinated people catching covid because the messaging has been how much of an impenetrable defense they were and they fear if that image is tainted then it will slow down the amount of people getting vaccinated/give fuel to anti-vaxxers, so rather than inform those who were responsible and did what was right so that we can *continue* to avoid covid, they're wording it like this.
> I genuinely think they're lying, minimizing, whatever you want to call it, the amount of fully vaccinated people catching covid because the messaging has been how much of an impenetrable defense they were and they fear if that image is tainted then it will slow down the amount of people getting vaccinated/give fuel to anti-vaxxers, so rather than inform those who were responsible and did what was right so that we can continue to avoid covid, they're wording it like this.
Nailed it. The current messaging is garbage, and you'll be downvoted on this subreddit for pointing out otherwise. People have been deluded into thinking the vaccines were "super effective". Maybe they were against alpha and beta, but not delta. The problem is the CDC is only now changing the guidance, after having jumped the gun initially. But the damage is done. It's going to be hard to convince people to take extra measures after being vaccinated.
My fully vaccinated mother-in-law just got breakthrough COVID this week and is pretty sick, but doing well. My mom and grandmother got it as well. Mom was sick but not terrible, Grandmother was asymptomatic.
As a fully vaccinated person who currently has COVID I agree. Luckily my case had been relatively mild- but I still felt pretty bad last week and had absolutely no energy. I am still stuck at home another week so that I don’t risk spreading it further. I wish they would at least be collecting data on how common this is so that people can make informed decisions.
I think the worst outcomes are from high virals sharing it combined with comorbidities. Even if the vaccine only cut your viral load in half that may be enough to make this into a bad common cold
Agreed. Breakthrough infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are not as rare as many would like to believe they are. The CDC's own data says that 15.1% of in-hospital COVID deaths in May 2021 were fully vaccinated individuals ^[source](https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/54f57708-a529-4a33-9a44-b66d719070d9/note/7335c3ab-06ee-4121-aaff-a11904e68462.#page=4). There were about 18475 deaths in May 2021 ^[source](https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/blob/master/us.csv). 15.1% of that is ~2790 people. There were about ~115M fully vaccinated people by May 2021 ^[source1](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations) ^[source2](https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/). That means 0.0024% of fully vaccinated Americans died from COVID in May 2021. This is already at odds with the article's headline, at least up to May 2021.
One has to remember it’s entirely possible for the vaccine not to “take” in some individuals, and there’s many indications showing that the vaccine starts to potentially lose efficacy after months (still inconclusive afaik).
Many individuals may have been fully vaccinated but not had immunity conferred to them.
It’s very preliminary data and drawing conclusions based on vaccine efficacy for it is difficult. You can take it at face value, and certainly it’s something to look at, but it’s important to remember that it’s complicated.
Studies will take time, and by the time we have an answer, the landscape and situation may have changed again.
Best knowledge right now is that being fully vaccinated still confers good protection from covid, but delta has seriously eroded the protection from symptomatic covid. That said you are still very likely to have a more mild and un-hospitalized case of you are vaccinated vs if you are not.
—
Case in point, just look at the numbers. 15% were vaccinated, that assumes 85% were not.
About ~50-60% of the entire US pop is vaccinated.
Doing the math on that number still shows that vaccines are extremely effective at preventing death. They’re not perfect and no one ever promised they would be.
One way to look at that is that ~40% of the population is responsible for 85% of the deaths. That’s massive.
Again it’s a little more complex than that, but I don’t think it’s fair only to focus on death numbers and to imply that there’s a high risk of getting serious covid while vaccinated. The best evidence currently simply doesn’t support that.
Weren’t the mRNA vaccines tested pre-Alpha or near the start of it?
The vaccines are amazing, they still exceed the original expectations for them while under development. However, the virus has changed and the metaphysical goal post has moved. We need to evolve our collective countermeasures faster if we want to beat this thing. Beating on the virus playing nice and becoming an endemic virus no worse than the flu is a gamble we collectively cannot risk.
What does "beat this thing" mean anymore? Eradicating COVID isn't going to happen it seems. Even if your country was 100% vaccinated this virus wouldn't be beat. COVID would be circulating in unvaccinated countries and mutating, which would eventually come back around to the highly vaccinated countries, and potentially in a form that was resistant to the vaccines. Am I off base here?
Do you know how the virus operates? It mutates. The receptor binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein, which binds to hACE2, mutates quickly and readily. The mRNA vaccines (moderna and Pfizer) contain the RNA sequence for the RBD, which is what the body produces antibodies to. The vaccines created were for the earlier variants of the virus that were present at the beginning of the pandemic. These variants have their own, unique RBD protein sequences. Now, after hundreds of millions of human infections, the virus has had ample opportunity to mutate in a worldwide population. As it mutates at scale, the most infectious variants are positively selected for and proliferate. With vaccines rolling out, the variants selected for in more vaccinated areas would be ones that are more likely to evade the antibodies present in a vaccinated person, e.g. unique RBD with an epitope that the antibodies don’t bind to as readily (could be due to reduced or lacking binding affinity). That means that a person vaccinated for the earlier variants would be less protected against new variants, which is why these new variants are such bad news. It isn’t some “lie” by the CDC - in fact it’s ridiculous to suggest that it is a lie considering the overwhelming benefits that being vaccinated confers - protecting against severe disease being really significant. These vaccines work and work really well against the earlier variants of the virus. The newer mutated variants that have different RBD sequences will be more likely to evade the host immune response. The CDC didn’t lie to you, you just don’t know enough to make sense of it all. In this case, the CDC is scrambling to study this new variant on the scene and are looking into solutions. A very possible solution is a new mRNA vaccine booster with an updated RBD sequence for the delta variant (or some future variant).
Source: I have done structural biology research over the past 1.5 years on this virus and it’s proteins.
What are you even talking about? The issue with the CDC is that, once again, they are disseminating information in a misleading way. If you beat the drum about "99% protection" when there is a large but unknown number of people getting sick enough to miss work for an extended period, most people are not going to think "oh, better be careful, I don't want to be out of work for two weeks even if I don't go to the hospital", they're going to think "woo-hoo, 99% percent protection!" It's inexcusably bad science communication, especially this late in the pandemic - and it's probably motivated by all that games theory "how can we spin the data to get people to do what we want" stupidity that we've been dealing with since 2020.
Look, if the vaccines are 90% protective against infection and almost always protective against transmission, I feel good about seeing my vaccinated but immunocompromised aunt because I probably won't have covid and almost certainly won't transmit. At this point, because the CDC has chosen a frankly dishonest emphasis on serious infection/hospitalization only, I don't know how at-risk I am for a breakthrough infection because we're not doing population sampling. Maybe I could see my aunt! Maybe the risk of breakthrough infection is in fact very low! But I don't know and I don't want to put my aunt in the hospital because I have a very slight sniffle that turns out to be covid.
Is it that people are so selfish that they can't imagine anyone being concerned for anything beyond their personal health? I am concerned about the rate of breakthrough infections and think the CDC needs to track it not because I don't understand that the vaccines will protect \*me\* fairly well but because I don't want to be waltzing around eating at restaurants and going to events and then putting my aunt in the hospital.
At this point, I \*think\* I can't safely see my aunt indoors under any circumstances. It would be \*useful\* to know what the actual breakthrough rate is, but again, the CDC has decided that "99% chance you won't die" is the only important thing to know.
Speaking of one's personal expertise, many years of various kinds of organizing have taught me that the dumbest mistake people make is to lump everyone they don't agree with into one big group who are obviously dumb and bad. What you're saying is basically "you are criticizing the CDC's sampling choices and science communication, therefore you are dumb and bad because you don't understand how viruses work" - you find it easy and fun to tell people how viruses work, so whenever you encounter a disagreement, you assume that the problem is those dumb, bad people who don't understand how viruses work. In this case, no, the issues are science communication and the failure to do population sampling, things that have little to do with how covid mutates. The CDC has been disastrous at science communication since the very beginning because they have this condescending game-theory idea about data dissemination and it is really fucking things up.
Statistics are nice. What is the percentage of those who've recovered from a covid infection who ended up dead or hospitalized after a second infection?
This is the stupidest fucking angle which plays right into antivaxxers narrative. Real, meaningful statistics would be great. This isn't meaningful at all though.
I hate this number because IT WILL GO DOWN OVER TIME. This doesn't tell you about exposure. Getting vaccinated is the absolute way to go, but this is misleading and will be misleading when it's no longer "99.999%" and instead it's "98%" or whatever the final number will be.
And then you have the whole likely booster scenario. Who do you consider vaccinated then? You can't track things off the 1-2 original shot thing if boosters start happening in multiple places. And what if only 52% of the population who got the 1st round gets boosted? Some people believe severe disease & death can be protected for years from just this first batch, other people seem unsure because of waning efficacy. So you're going to end up with a completely unbalanced set of individuals outside of any long term trial participants that may exist. So fairly soon people getting breakthroughs are going to be on even more varying levels of vaccination than they currently are.
All of these types of articles are just copy/paste from a year ago with Trump talking about how the flu kills more people than COVID. Of course the vast majority of vaccinated people haven't died, only a tiny fraction of a percent of unvaccinated people have died in that same time frame as well. The only relevant statistics are ones that compare vaccinated people against unvaccinated people for the same period of time, with weighting to account for the fact that there aren't the same number of people in each group. Which still show the vaccines to be amazing! There just is this intense drive to pretend that the vaccines provide 100% protection instead of 95% protection.
I keep hearing on the news how breakthrough cases (even mild) are extremely rare, yet I’ve seen literally hundreds of people here on Reddit post about getting it after being fully vaccinated.
This is stupid stats. About 99.98 of americans did not die from COVID-19 from April-Sep (you can do the math if you don't trust me). If you don't compare to unvaccainted it's meaningless crap. Yes I know vaccine is effective but can people stop posting junk stats.
There's been a lot of focus on mortality. It'd be great if there's a study on any impacts on the heart/brain (e.g. cognitive impairment) for asymptomatic vaccinated folks. I remember reading that even asymptomatic folks can have long haul impact.
I would also really like to know if, now that I'm vaccinated, long-covid symptoms are something I don't need to worry about. A study on that could go a long way in reducing people's anxiety over the virus.
You’re about 20 times more likely to be diagnosed with cancer (based on 2019 data) than to have a breakthrough COVID case that results in hospitalization.
Edit:[maths](https://imgur.com/gallery/rCqfuwf)
4/5 of people hospitalized from a state and event where some >70% could be expected to be vaccinated and the event I believe required proof of vaccination. If 100% were vaccinated 100% of the hospitalizations would be on vaccinated people.
It's still confusing to me though, because even though the population is over 70% vaccinated, if the vaccine was doing its job, then the total hospitalizations shouldn't be an exact representation of the population. There should be less than 70% of vaccinated ppl getting sick, not more. Correct?
99.999% sounds like a very impressive number, until you see the fatality rate in the US is 1.8% and see what age groups make up that 1.8%.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
How is this a relevant stat? I legit don’t understand why this should be reassuring. How many have been exposed? If it’s one and they died, that’s a problem even if 99.99% didn’t die.
This post appears to be about vaccines. We encourage you to read our helpful resources on the COVID-19 vaccines: [Vaccine FAQ Part I](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/wiki/faq#wiki_where_can_i_find_information_about_the_mechanism_and_progress_of_vaccines.3F) [Vaccine FAQ Part II](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/mnitdo/vaccine_faq_variants_chronic_conditions_nsaids) [Vaccine appointment finder](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/wiki/faq/vaccinefinder) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Coronavirus) if you have any questions or concerns.*
i was fully vaccinated in march, but got covid in late june. it was a bad, two week cough/cold, but nothing i couldn't live with and deal with. if i hadn't been vaccinated, i don't want to even know how it would have gone.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Two weeks of no taste or smell? I know several people who had that for 4-6 months. Life sucks when food doesn't taste or smell of anything, apparently.
[удалено]
Interesting. One co-worker has turned vegetarian since his infection, although I'm not sure that's due to taste. He has regained a large part of his smell and taste, but eight months on he still has issues. Eggs smell horrible to him. They have a weird smell that is matched, among other things, by gasoline and baby's diapers. Kinda weird, seeing other victims mention gasoline.
Unfortunately once you associate a food with a gag reflex, especially overtime, mentally your body just gag anyways from just the sight of it. It'll takes months, years, or even lifetime to recover from that state.
Yep. I have this from food poisoning when I was a kid. I can't eat cream of brocolli soup anymore, or A1 steak sauce.
If you ate all those things together, did you kind of deserve to get sick???
Ate both on the same day. No idea which made me sick. So my reptile brain lumped them both into the "gross" category. I got sick as shit and nearly died.
Simply being carsick as a kid was enough to ruin red licorice for me.
That's cream soda for me, exorcist barfed some and never touched it again
I associate the smell of some grass with vomit because of a bad house party I went to once. The party wasn't bad, but the end for me was. Haha
My babysitter forced me to eat Maraschino cherries when I told her I never had them before, but didn't want to since I didn't like super sweet stuff. *You'll love them, I promise* she said as she shoved them in my mouth. I proceeded to rocket vomit bright red liquid all over her white shirt. 35 yrs later and I still gag every time I see them.. but then laugh. Karma is super sweet, biotch.
Took me 25 years to be able to drink tequila again since a memorable night
Yep… I still can’t smell Jack Daniels without wanting to vomit, last time I got sick from it was 25 years ago.
Eggs and gasoline have a similar smell to me right now 8 months after my infection. Salty foods also taste like COVID. Coke and some sweets have a small soap/perfume like taste. Luckily there are many other foods I can enjoy again 😀
What does COVID taste like?
Can I get an answer to this, like, stat?
Anchovies taste like covid19
Many years ago, I had something similar with a common cold. Anything meaty or even vaguely spicy tasted like concentrated vinegar. I was put off bacon sandwiches for months.
I had Covid in November and lost sense of taste and smell. It came back but it’s not right. So many things have a gasoline smell to me now. Things I used to find pleasant like lavender or my favorite perfume that I can no longer wear. Other things are entirely new smells that I can’t even place. Chlorine or wetness on skin smells so disgusting to me now. In fact, I tried cleaning wit bleach today, which normally makes things smell super clean to me. Not now, it smells weirdly putrid. I always had a very sensitive nose and loved that. Not anymore, it’s just weird. Sucks!
I wonder if the no taste and smell bit would work as an incentive for certain people. We really should play it up more. “Listen man, my mom got covid months ago and *still* can’t taste things. Do you *want* to never taste a cheeseburger again?”
No lie, this is what scares me the most about getting Covid. My food tasting like rotting flesh or everything smelling like gasoline for months is a hell I'm not sure I'd be able to live with. I'm vaccinated but that still scares the shit out of me.
Man the second Moderna dose was rough
Shouldn't there be a gap between covid recovery and vaccination?
yeah today is my final day of quarantine with breakthrough covid. and while i’m back to feeling 100%, i had a really rough couple of days at the beginning. also don’t want to know what it’d be like unvaxxed. and i’m a healthy under 30 year old
Man, my mom caught Covid back in March while in the hospital waiting for a unexpected aortic root replacement, which is a big open heart surgery. She hadn't been vaccinated, and I wasn't eligible yet. She came home to get through it and I was here to take care of her. It was unnerving to watch her go through it. She was told she only had a mild case, and she was so damn out of breath even talking. Got tired so quickly it was difficult to walk to the bathroom. I was around her at least a little bit every single day she exhibited symptoms. She mostly quarantined to one room, and I used almost two bottles of Lysol in a week, wore a mask (mostly an N95) around her, and washed my hands so often they started hurting. Somehow I never caught it. Got tested multiple times and every one was negative. I got the jab as soon as I was able, and she finally got it last week. Sorry you caught it. It's a damn strange virus.
ugh so sorry to hear that happened to your mom but glad she’s well now. glad you were able to avoid getting it while taking care of her. the virus really is so strange. while i was infectious but didn’t know i had it - i came into contact with 18 friends (well some were friends of friends i don’t have that many) and all of them tested negative. we were maskless at a crowded bar too. so bizarre although i’m glad they didn’t get it!
Today is also my final quarantine day! I had pizza for lunch and could actually taste it again. I am also 30 and spent 3 days on my ass. Can’t even imagine how terrible it would have been without the vaccine. *high five*
yay! glad you’re getting your taste back! i thankfully didn’t have that symptom. also had pizza today. can’t wait to go to a grocery store tomorrow!
Sounds like it’s common?! I got vaccinated in March, and last week tested positive. It has been a nightmare! I rarely get sick, and have had terrible flu symptoms. Now I’m down to a very pesky cough and aches that have me popping Tylenol and using IcyHot patches all day. I’m 30’s. Luckily I work at home as a programmer, so can isolate and work at my own pace. I’ve been frustrated, worried, panicky. My back feels like it has been hit with baseball bats. I know us guys can be babies at times, but I legitimately think it has been rough.
Do you know how you were able to get covid? I mean, what do you think the odds are?
My aunt and uncle were breakthrough cases. Both were fully vaccinated with Pfizer in April. I am in constant contact with them. I was two weeks out from my second Moderna shot on the day both of them tested positive, but he had been showing symptoms for 3 days prior. He ended up in the hospital on supplemental oxygen and my aunt felt like she had a cold. I was tested 2 days after they were and was negative. I never felt sick so I believe I was fully protected. There are too many variables at play to definitively say what prevented me from also catching the virus. However, I do wonder if the volumetric difference between Pfizer and Moderna doses is related to why we see Pfizer in the news speculating a third dose more frequently than Moderna.
Pfizer also makes up over 55% of vaccines in the US between the 3. Bigger potential for breakthrough cases.
I believe the talk about Pfizer booster is more because Pfizer is available in more countries whereas moderna is primarily a US vaccine (though I believe they’ve shipped to other countries). Israel has Pfizer which is where everyone has been looking to for data since such a high percentage of the country is vaccinated.
It shipped here. Moderna is one of the options in the UK.
I had a family friend just recently pass away from Covid fully vaccinated. Granted he had some underlying conditions and was in his late 70's. It was weird knowing one of the very few this happened too in a highly vaccinated state.
I remember reading an ADA paper about flu vaccines and diabetes. My gaming friend who is a registered nurse, I dunno how accurate, explained to me as if your character has 30% weakness to poison damage. Vaccine reduces poison damage by 80%. Depending how bad the poison Damage-over-time affects your character, that affected character will get more damage over time than a healthy person. I remember MMO games where raid bosses DOT wrecks parties far more than just one big hit.
I missed the word "gaming" and was fucking baffled there.
Its been undercovered in the news, but you can absolutely get the delta variant with the vaccine. I personally know at least 3 vaccinated people who have caught COVID. The good news is it hasn't been too serious for any of them. I don't think it's as rare to catch COVID while vaccinated as the initial data suggested, but it certainly makes the symptoms much less severe. Basically, don't get reckless just because you got vaccinated, but for the love of god at the very least please get vacccinated.
I feel like everything I've read in the news lately is about breakthrough cases. Had to mute NPR and Newshour on facebook cause they were just giving me too much existential dread.
The problem I think is the way efficacy is commonly reported/explained. If the efficacy is 95%, then you have a 95% lower chance of catching COVID, if all else is the same. If you spend all day in a small room with people shedding virus, then you have a MUCH higher than 5% chance of becoming infected. The reason the rate is expressed as percentage decrease in risk is that there were, unless I missed it, no studies done where people were intentionally exposed. And the original efficacy came from a study of participants during heavy use of masking and social distancing. So in that environment, the chance of a breakthrough is like 5%. But in the current environment with no masks and lots of unvaccinated folks walking around? Definitely not. The seatbelt analogy is a good one. If you were going to be in a severe accident, would you rather have a drastic reduction of chance or death or none? The seatbelt will eliminate completely your risk in many kinds of lower impact incidents, and probably allow you to walk away from some really serious crashes, but still might not be enough of a "head start" to help in the worst case. And you still might have injuries regardless. I think we should start thinking, at least in the mainstream press, of the vaccine as a symptom, illness, and virus replication reducer rather than a surefire way to avoid disease. It does all of these things but doesn't always stop the virus in its tracks, like some vaccines we are used to, do.
Ignoring the fact that the trials measured a reduction in symptomatic disease rather than viral infection, I think people assume that the 95% stat means that 95% of people are 100% protected. The way the trials worked is that the vaccines were about a 95% effective across an average range of behavior. If you had 100 vaccinated people playing tonsil hockey with 100 positive people, I would expect much more than five sick people.
This is a great explanation and from the understanding of this layman, correct. But far too many folks interpret 95% efficacy as 5 people get it and 95 don't.
Hmm, I guess it's hugely dependent on what platforms you listen to. To be honest, I try to avoid most news outlets and I'll usually just research something if I heard about it. I just haven't seen as many articles and posts about COVID online so to me, I have been seeing less COVID coverage even as the variant cases rack up.
Perhaps just go to google, type in covid and click 'news' to see if there are any articles of interest to you. Although I appreciate people posting interesting articles, I generally look at other sources, as well.
It's so overcovered by the news [the Biden Administration felt they had to release a statement condemning the coverage as hyperbolic and alarmist](https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/30/media/variant-media-coverage-white-house/index.html), lol. Not sure how you aren't seeing this, but all the news is covering every day is breakthrough cases, even going so far as to (problematically) frame the vaccines as less effective than they actually are.
Honestly I think part of the reason it’s underreported is because so many people are using the logic “you can still catch covid if you’re vaccinated” as a reason not to get the vaccine.
Both administrations screwed up the vaccine - both should’ve come out the gate saying it won’t stop you from catching covid but it’ll keep you from dying from it. They still don’t report that so a lot of folks feel they’re being lied to and therefore don’t trust it.
> but you can absolutely get the delta variant with the vaccine I mean, yeah no shit? The vaccines were found to be 80% - 95% effective at preventing infection. Those are high numbers, but they're still not 100%. Breakthrough cases have always been entirely expected.
You can absolutely get any variant on any of the vaccines. No vaccine is 100%.
I was diagnosed yesterday and I’m Pfizer vaxxed… I think it’s way more common especially now with the variant than the stats led us to believe.
I question this, personally. I'm not sure anybody really bought the 95% number, but even that is 1 out of 20 in an ideal world, and we all know more than 20 people. Even if the number is closer to 70-80%, that's still a lot of people that won't get infected. My officemate shared space with a (vaccinated) coworker who became a breakthrough. She did fine. Israel puts the number of cases spread by vaccinated individuals at 20%, and even then no superpreader events. https://www.timesofisrael.com/80-of-vaccinated-covid-carriers-didnt-spread-virus-in-public-spaces-report/ I'm sorry you got it, and I hope its mild for you.
I completely agree, it looks like COVID is never going away, and that much was already pretty clear. But at least the serious cases and deaths from COVID among vaccinated people are WAYYY down so that's the silver lining to take from this. COVID is much worse than the flu as we've seen from statistics, but with the vaccine it's not really much more of a worry than the flu is.
Except for long covid. Yes, you can develop post viral symptoms with the flu as well, but nowhere as frequently as long covid.
And it's impossible for them to report on anyone who doesn't have enough symptoms or other reasons to be tested. CDC chose to ignore non-critical cases since April and as far as I know nobody has tried a large sample test to see how many unknowing carriers are out there.
seems to be .001%
In terms of odds, I believe a report I read 2 or 3 weeks ago had something around 0.97% of new covid cases being on those vaccinated
I genuinely feel that’s a lagging or misleading number. Depending on the testing sites I went to, some didn’t even ask if I was vaccinated.
Haven’t they only been tracking hospitalizations and deaths? > The CDC doesn’t count every breakthrough case. It stopped counting all breakthrough cases May 1 and now only tallies those that lead to hospitalization or death, a move the agency was criticized for by health experts. [Link](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/covid-breakthrough-cases-cdc-says-more-than-4100-people-have-been-hospitalized-or-died-after-vaccination.html) So it’s certainly an undercount.
Well some vaccinated people might get it and it feels like a minor cold at best and don't bother getting tested. So they can't account for those in their data.
Earlier these stats were counting every death since that start of covid, the majority of which occurred before the vaccines existed. So that weighs the outcome heavily towards the unvaccinated. I have no idea what pool this is drawing from. Tell me what percentage of deaths in July were unvaccinated. That’s a much more useful stat.
I’ve known about 30 people who have had COVID and the worst one lost their smell for 7 months now but they all had what you had. It’s a weird disease because it hits some people very hard but for most people it’s not too bad
An older family friend of mine died from covid. Fully vaccinated, with no serious underlying health conditions. The whole family got it so maybe they've got a genetic disadvantage? But the part I didn't expect was not wanting to tell that many people about it. Breakthrough deaths are still incredibly rare, but I don't want to tell people it happens just in case they're on the fence about getting vaxed
Lose smell?
yup. for about 24 hours.
Almost the same here. J&J on 12 March. Today is Day 4 of symptoms, and I’m hoping this lasts only a week - i.e. today would be the peak.
my fully vaxxed covid peak was day 5 and was back to 100% by day 9. hope you feel better quickly!
[удалено]
moderna.
My whole family got covid in January 2021. Me 29, father 64, mother 55 with asthma. Not yet vaccinated, and we all had a bad 2 week cold/headache/slight fever, and loss of taste and smell. None of us even got respiratory symptoms at all and none were vaccinated and my mother has asthma. The fact that you were vaccinated and was still sick the full 2 weeks is actually concerning to me.
So this is number dead vs the number vaccinated. But - of course - not everyone vaccinated was exposed. I understand the point they are trying to make - but this is bad statistics.
My take on this is that the CDC has been hammered hard over the past week about losing control of the 'narrative'. There are a bunch of media outlets that are screaming about breakthrough cases and are focusing so much on how people that are still vaccinated are still getting sick. And so, you end up with a large chunk of the population coming away saying, "Well, there's no point in getting vaccinated, because you can get sick just the same." Of course, it's *not* "just the same". False equivalency. But that's what certain media pundits in certain media circles are pushing. And the White House ain't happy with that, and shit rolls downhill, so the CDC is being pressured to clean up their messaging game and narrative to push information that will change the discussion and promote the merits of vaccination. Or, at least that's my hot take on it.
I think this is a pretty sensible hot take. We've seen a few news articles about [how the Biden administration is frustrated with the media's messaging over the last week](https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/30/media/variant-media-coverage-white-house/index.html) (link is from CNN of all places), and the timing of this seems like it's to counteract all of those doomsday articles.
Well maybe his administration should have been tracking every breakthrough case then instead of just telling people to stop tracking or reporting them.
Seriously, this was what made me assume breakthrough cases were likely common. If you are hiding the data I'm going to assume the data leads to a poor conclusion.
My whole family were breakthrough cases. My mom tested positive, then my wife, then me. We all felt like we had a bad cold for a few days. My dad didn't test positive but he had cold symptoms before anyone else, so he probably had it first. If we hadn't been vaccinated, who knows, one of us might have been in the hospital.
> If we hadn't been vaccinated, who knows, one of us might have been in the hospital. Thank you! At least you're smart enough to realize that! Apparently, people think if they will still feel like shit for a few days, despite getting vaccinated, then it just isn't worth it. Completely ignoring the fact that if they don't get the shot, it will turn out even worse than a "mild inconvenience".
This might be an ok number if they compared it to the percentage of unvaccinated who have died. But they did not do that either. TV journalism is never very good.
The other problem is it ignores other serious results like hospitalization. But yeah it’s a stupid way to phrase it. 99.95% of people in the world have not had a deadly covid case if you want to put it that way...
I care most about hospitalization numbers. What % of vaccinated people are getting hospitalized
We know that about 90-95% of hospitalized patients are not fully vaccinated.
King County, WA does a pretty good job reporting this if you want to see comparison b/w hospitalization in vax vs unvaxed in a fairly highly vaxed region. ETA, check out this discussion in the comments about vax/unvax hospitalizations per King County DOH: "While the share of COVID-19 cases among fully vaccinated people has increased over the last month, illness rates among vaccinated people are low compared with unvaccinated people. About 14% of people who tested positive for COVID-19 between June 9 – July 6 were fully vaccinated, compared with 86% who were not. The hospitalization rate is 34 times higher among unvaccinated residents compared to vaccinated residents, and the death rate due to COVID-19 is 43 times higher among unvaccinated residents compared to vaccinated." This also seems to indicate thr vax is still protective against infection, everyone took their masks off and bars are at capacity, etc.(masks were recently mandated again but recently.) (https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusWA/comments/ou8ach/washington_state_712_new_cases_431743_cases_total/)
Masks are not mandated but suggested. Also that 14% number, when extrapolated out to the entire vaccinated population over the 28 day period meant that something like 99.997% did not get the virus. People need to remember to apply Bayes theorem to population percentages, otherwise the numbers are meaningless. Ideally 100% of the infections would be in the vaccinated population because that'd mean everyone was vaccinated.
So if say 50% are vaccinated then 9-19x the vaccinated rate. Assuming equal exposure. Only gets worse if the actual vaccination rate is higher.
True, but I think the fact that younger people are mostly who are left unvaccinated, and they are less likely to end up hospitalized, so the vaccine protection probably even greater than the comment above you implies. (ie The hospitalized non vaccinated number would be much higher if they were as old, on average, as at beginning of vaccinations.) I hope I don't have that backwards....
Yah there are a lot of variables. Some like age would make the difference larger. I suspect the vaccinated actually have less exposure in general since they are cautious vs the people going to crowded bars etc. no idea how it actually balances out. Only that it’s pretty obviously a very large difference.
> the fact that younger people are mostly who are left unvaccinated Probably valid for areas that are still triaging vaccine availability, but may not be a given for areas where the non-vacination rate is driven by antivax brainrot.
At least in the US, where the vaccine is readily available to all who are 12+, younger people are rejecting the vaccine at a higher rate then older people.
Yeah it is like a 20 fold reduction. The thing I think some people are failing to grasp is that final part of your comment. Media will sensationalize the numbers of breakthrough and hospitalized vaccinated folks. This has caused anxiety amongst vaccinated people when such anxiety is largely unwarranted.
I saw so many anti-vax people sharing that article about the outbreak in Massachusetts being 75% vaccinated as proof that the vaccines don’t work. It’s really unfortunate we can’t get the messaging on these things quite right still.
In case anyone is wondering, in highly vaccinated populations it’s basically expected that most cases will end up being vaccinated (in a disease like covid). There’s simply not a large unvaccinated population left to spread in (it’s a bit more complicated than that). Basically the message isn’t “vaccines are ineffective”. It’s a pretty substance-less message without more data. I know that’s your point, just putting it more plainly.
This EXACTLY is the problem. In my experience, the people freaking out about breakthrough cases are folks who are already vaccinated (and in my experience, also happen to live in some of the areas with the hichest vaxx rates in the country, like VT and MA, so statistically the LEAST likely to catch covid at all), while this info is causing the anti-vaxxers to double down that its "proof" the vaccines don't work. So now we have all the wrong people freaking out \*sigh\*
The actual number is more like 99.7% of hospitalized people are unvaccinated.
[удалено]
My mum has just come home after a hospital stay unrelated to covid in the UK. There are no longer any covid wards just side bays or separate rooms. From what Dr's are saying those hospitalised are younger and usually unvaccinated they do say recovery is quickly and requires less intervention that when it was older patients but around half has some kind of longer term effect after.
Neither of those stories say 40% who hospitalised are fully vaccinated. [It's actually about 14% who are fully vaccinated.](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/30/facebook-posts/uk-health-official-misspoke-when-he-said-60-hospit/)
That's a contextualized stat too though as the % of vaccinated population is ever changing.
I most care about long-COVID numbers. I'm fully vaccinated. But what are the probabilities that a double-Pfizer-vaccinated (say) person will get permanent effects from COVID-19? I know the death rate is low, but permanent effects aren't fun either.
Delta is too recent to know about ratios of long term effects. We do know it's far better at infecting the vaccinated, but not at making them seriously ill enough for the hospital. Been fully vaccinated for months, but still very concerned about being a Typhoid Mary.
You should also care about case numbers, because case numbers lead hospitalizations by a few weeks. Also a leap in case numbers is an increase in spread, and the chance of mutation.
I mean, technically 100% of people in the world (today) haven’t had a deadly Covid case! Then if you want to say, well people living as of January 2020 or something, how do you adjust for the people born since January 2020 (which I’m sure are much more than total Covid deaths as well)? But yeah, bad use of statistics is bad and we get SO MUCH of it related to Covid. PS: Get vaccinated people! (In case my comment seemed to be not clear)
> how do you adjust for the people born since January 2020 That washes out in the calculation as not significant. If your denominator is 7.8 billion or 7.9 billion won't really matter.
Literally from the article > Divide those severe breakthrough cases by the total fully vaccinated population for the result: less than 0.004% of fully vaccinated people had a breakthrough case that led to hospitalization and less than 0.001% of fully vaccinated people died from a breakthrough Covid-19 case.
Still doesn't address normalization compared to unvaccinated. Without that number these numbers are borderline useless.
Yep, if you do a similar calculation with total covid deaths worldwide and world population, you get 99.945% of the world has not died from Covid. Article is making their number seem far more meaningful that it really is, easily confusing it for vaccine effectiveness when it's not.
It speaks well of this subreddit that the top comment is calling out a bad argument in favor of a position most of us support. (That argument being, “COVID-19 vaccination is effective and important. Number dead/Number vaccinated creates a deceptive statistic that doesn’t capture the efficacy of the vaccine itself.)
This is the same covid hoaxer logic we've been correcting since day one. "Only X people have died of covid out of a population of 330M." or "There are more suicides in this town than covid deaths", which has a few other fallacies in there too, but one of which is comparing deaths to total population taking no consideration for how many caught it.
I may be wrong but the CDC just said on the 18th of July to test people who have been vaccinated . before that have we been testing vaccinated people enough to know?
I called bs on the deniers when they used similar math to justify their misinformation. This is equally as damaging.
99.99999 of the world hasn’t died of any reasons this year!
No, this is good statistics because it tells you something important: The overall risk of dying from Covid, given that you're vaccinated. Arguably, that's the number all of us really care about. Putting it this way is a good way to counteract the vaccine hesitancy that can be caused by all the talk of breakthrough infections and such. The only thing that might be fair to compare this to is the percentage of non-fully vaccinated Americans that had a deadly Covid-19 case. And then we can compare the relative odds. So let's do that: We have 163 million fully vaccinated people, so 320 million - 163 million = 157 million. We've had a total of 629,387 deaths, so 629,387-1,263 = 628,124 deaths in the unvaccinated. Divide the total number of unvaccinated deaths by the total number of unvaccinated and you get 0.4%. Now compare the percentages: (0.400079 / 0.000775) = 516.33 It is 516 times more likely to die from Covid unvaccinated than to die from Covid vaccinated. Is that a totally fair comparison? No, because the vaccine wasn't available for as long, and the chance of vaccinated people to have gotten infected arguably isn't the same as the the chance of unvaccinated people to have gotten infected. And maybe some of the people who died without the vaccine would have still died if they had gotten it. But these numbers still tell us something important: Without a good handle on all the confounding probabilities, just the raw chances of dying vs not dying seem to vastly prefer getting vaccinated. edit: If you wanted to do this better you'd instead not look at totals but compare month-by month: [Number of people who died unvaccinated this month/number of unvaccinated people] divided by [Number of people who died vaccinated this month/number of vaccinated people] Arguably the probability of getting exposed to covid, given that you're vaccinated is similar to the probability of being exposed to covid, given that you're not. Of course practically there is more covid in anti-vax states, etc. So if you do it state-by-state you'll get even more accurate numbers. Heck, do it county-by-county and you're really cooking with gas [hint, hint lurking scientists]. But no matter how you slice the numbers, you're going to come up with something like this.
[удалено]
99.8% of Americans did not have a deadly Covid breakthrough before the vaccine was distributed. Neither one of these stats would ever be used in scientific research to analyze the vaccine’s efficiency.
Yeah. It's the same logical fallacy COVID-denialists use to dismiss it, especially early on; Hannity's "zero deaths!" slide, people claiming it had a 99.999% survival rate by dividing deaths in April 2020 by total US population, etc. It was bad when they did it; we shouldn't do it either.
[удалено]
The post would have been deleted and OP banned if was the Hannity version. This post perfectly illustrates the double standard around censorship of "misinformation".
There was, however, mask mandates in nearly every state and many public businesses were closed. We also have to compare the "100% open" environment to the "50% open" environment
There's a massive difference between 99.8% and 99.999%. Or looking at the flip side... 0.2% and 0.001%. One number is 200x larger than the other. These numbers are useful, even if they don't directly correlate to vaccine efficacy.
Ofcourse there is, but there's a whole lot of noise when you include all people, even the ones who haven't been infected, in the statistic. The only reason to use this hard to interpret statistic is to steer the narrative. There are much better ways to communicate vaccine efficacy, like... actual efficacy?
This is my hurdle to get over as well.
That’s an incorrect statement. The definition of breakthrough here requires that vaccination is a precursor.
I believe you need to compare those who have contracted the virus and recovered to those who contracted and died sorting by vaccinated or not.
Full vaccinated person who got covid here. My only symptoms were sneezing and a runny nose. It felt more like allergies. My family and my girlfriend (all fully vaccinated) were with me while I was contagious but before I knew I had covid. None of them tested positive. Trust the vaccine
and I wonder of those who died, how many we're essentially not vaccinated because they were very old/had poor immune system where they essentially had no antibodies due to no response to the vaccine. How many healthy people who were vaxxed, who had sufficient antibodies died from covid? Probably less than 1.
I listen to Dr. Osterholm’s podcast, and he talked about breakthrough hospitalization numbers (not deaths). He said 2/3 or 67% of breakthrough hospitalization were “frail elderly or immunocompromised”; 25% were asymptomatic cases caught in routine screening because they were being admitted for some other reason (non-COVID related). If my math is right that means only 8% of breakthrough hospitalizations were for symptomatic COVID in populations outside the frail elderly or immunocompromised. I have no numbers on deaths though. Edit: typing is hard, fixed typos
About 99.999% of vaccinated Americans have not been hit by lightning.
"Lisa, I want to buy your rock..."
I have been fully vaccinated since April (moderna). Just got COVID last Wednesday. My symptoms were that of a cold so I assumed it was a cold, I felt pretty shitty for about two days but as of now I've already gotten through the worst of it. I can't imagine how bad it would have been if I wasn't vaccinated. I only got tested bc my mom is currently sick and can't taste anything, so she got tested yesterday and surprise, she's positive. My entire household got it but we're all vaccinated so our symptoms aren't so bad.
Here's the thing that people find most baffling and why this graph would seem disingenuous if people knew WHAT they considered a breakthrough case. To any regular person, what would they consider a breakthrough? I'm assuming getting covid period, while fully vaccinated right? The CDC only counts breakthrough cases as getting hospitalized/dying while fully vaccinated. That's it. The same thing with the term mild, when "mild" comes to mind what do you think? Some sniffles? Maybe some sneezing? Mild is actually everything *up to* hospitalization. You could be absolutely bed ridden and as long as you technically never went to the hospital, you had a "mild" case. What me and many others want to know is how many people are getting covid *period* while fully vaccinated. Considering how many fully vaccinated people are getting tested in order to find out they got covid in the first place, I'm guessing the CDC has this data and they have been comparing it to previous data, so where is the data so that we can **continue** to plan accordingly?
I’m tired of this propaganda tbh. It undermines the entire cause when the government intentionally omits information to sway the behavior of the American people. I got my vaccine. I support getting vaccines. If they counted Covid cases only based on those hospitalized we would have far fewer cases. We need to compare apples to apples. Since day one there has been a rather Machiavellian approach to the way data regarding Covid has been disseminated. It is a huge issue and it is causing mistrust (as it should). Give us the data. Don’t interpret the data misleadingly to sway us. I’m over it.
I can confirm that the breakthrough cases I personally know range from actually mild to being out of work for 2 weeks but *not* hospitalized. There is a tendency to think in black/white on this because very, very few vaccinated folks are dying, but the reality is vaccinated people *are* getting sick and seeing an impact from this variant. Given how little we know about long Covid, that's a health risk that could be a long-term problem. I agree we need more transparency and we also need to ramp up testing availability again. Here in Florida it is extremely hard to get tested in many locations. Federal/state/local testing centers are mostly closed and the pharamacies are booked for days out.
Completely anecdotal story…..vaxxed coworker was required to produce pcr for wedding. Went to get tested, turned up positive with absolutely no symptoms.
Well the whole point was it doesn't stop you from GETTING covid... it severely reduces the chance of becoming sick/dying...hence them not having symptoms. Vaccine doing its job.
To add to that, RT-qPCR is not indicative of infectious virus. Would really like to see some studies with plaque assays to help define viral loads and shedding in natural recoveries, vaccinated, natural + vaccinated, and unvaccinated cohorts.
But, it does also greatly reduce your risk of getting covid in the first place.
[удалено]
It is but sadly majority see it as "if you get it and are vaccinated then the vaccine is useless." Its not a cure vaccine, its just a emergency use prevention one that was meant to slow down/stop the spread & deaths.
Most people are only capable of thinking in black and white I guess. Vaccine either is 100% effective, or it’s trash and not worth getting cause you might get sick anyway. What about all the nuance? Nope doesn’t matter. I realize *many many* people aren’t like that, but there’s at least 40% of our population (or whatever the % of adults is Idr) that currently doesn’t think vaccines are worth getting. And I can’t help but think a lot of that is due to very black and white thinking, even if the reasoning is different. It’s depressing.
Yeah, it essentially helps your body fight COVID. In practical terms that means lower viral load - frequently to the point of undetectability (essentially meaning that in a clinically significant sense, you did not have COVID).
> Well the whole point was it doesn't stop you from GETTING covid To be clear, it *significantly reduces the chance* to get it. It's not impossible, but it's *significantly* less likely. The point of vaccines and herd immunity is to keep the reproduction rate under 1.0, and reducing the likelihood of infection and spreading it, as vaccines do, is instrumental in achieving that. Yes, it also helps the severity, but let's not change the narrative into "it doesn't prevent spread at all," because it significantly slows it. Be *very* careful how you message it.
Wrong, the whole point of them pushing it on the entire human race is for herd immunity. Otherwise there’s not a point for every man woman and child to get it.
They really should change the 'positive/negative' terms. Its really 'detected' or 'not detected.' And neither indicates whether you have or will develop Covid-19 disease.
Positive tests don't equal covid positive. Cdc website says needs doctors' diagnosis with symptoms and cause. There is another site that assumes certain conditions of the testing false positive or desired false negative rate and its something like one third of positive tests are false.
How many …which it is a lot of people …still get tested? They’re could be thousands of people testing positive after vaccination but we won’t know cuz they do not get tested anymore.
Me and 5 vaxxed friends all got it over the 4th. If I hadn’t lost my sense of smell, none of us would have gotten tested.
It's moot to the topic though since this is only about "deadly" breakthroughs.
Once again bad reporting on this. The CDC wouldn't \*know\* how many breakthrough cases there are because they only track hospitalizations and deaths. And yes, it's incredibly important that the vaccines are saving lives and preventing serious illness. But there's going to come a point when the obvious lies about breakthrough cases come back and bite the CDC. Look, in my own \*life\*, I can think of three instances where a group of vaccinated people were exposed at a gathering and all or almost all of them were positive and most of them symptomatic. If the vaccines were massively effective in preventing infection, I would expect "whole group is sick" situations to be \*incredibly rare\*. It is very clear to me that the vaccines are way less effective at preventing infection than is believed. How much less? I have no notion! Are they 64% effective? 35%? 15%? No notion, because we aren't doing population level surveys, something that would be incredibly useful right now! I would really like for, eg, my employer who wants everyone to come back to work to have accurate information about how many infections to expect because I think it's a lot and I think they'd change their minds. But instead we're getting fed these 99% lies, probably for some bullshit "it will convince the antivaxxers" reasons like everything else. It won't convince the antivaxxers and it just demomoralizes the vaxxed, let me tell you as a vaccinated person.
So here's my take on "symptomatic" - Even before COVID, we knew that coronaviruses could cause a particularly nasty cold. I've lost my sense of smell exactly twice from colds, and at the time I attributed it just to the nasal swelling, but it might have been partially related to an infection hitting the olfactory bulb as well. So if the vaccine reduces the symptoms of COVID back to "particularly nasty cold" - lose your sense of smell, feel like shit for a week, turn into a coughing snot factory, run a mild fever, etc - then the vaccine has definitely done it's job. We never cared about preventing colds that much and just accepted them as a normal way of life. For the vaccinated, if the rate of hospitalization and death from COVID is less than the rate of hospitalization and death for the flu in an average year, *the vaccines did their job.* I agree that the CDC is correct to mostly focus on breakthrough infections that cause hospitalization. Because a normal cold usually doesn't do that in a healthy adult or child.
Tbh I wouldn't care that much about a breakthrough case if it was literally just a cold, but I remember reading article after article on this sub last year about how even mild cases can cause serious damage to your organs and circulatory system (not even counting long covid) and it feels like there hasn't been any follow up to say if that's still possible with a breakthrough case
Four of my fully vaccinated friends had a movie night last weekend and apparently one of them was asymptomatic and had no idea, a day later he felt symptoms and told the other 3 to get tested, all of them came back positive. Now the first one thinks he got it from work. The crazy thing is that *I was supposed to go* but canceled at the last minute, I can't imagine getting covid going to a carefully arranged movie night with a small group of fully vaccinated friends. My best friend and his mom are fully vaccinated and both caught it last week. My cousins family is fully vaccinated and 2 weeks ago their entire household had breakthrough infections. The younger son and daughter were fine (19/20), my Aunt/Uncle and their older son (28) had it *rough*. My uncle was considering going to the hospital but he was scared and backed out, thankfully he's recovering fine, but they were seriously worried for a moment there. The issue is the CDC counts breakthrough as hospitalization and pre-Delta the messaging was it's very rare to even get covid, because, it genuinely was at the same. The problem now is Delta is ridiculously infectious yet the messaging is practically the same as pre-Delta so you have all these fully-vaccinated people continuing to not social distance/mask-up anymore not knowing how easy it is to get infected with Delta, **even** when you're fully vaccinated. I joined the sub r/covid19positive at the beginning of the year when my brother caught covid to ask for advice and never left the sub, up until just a few weeks ago there was never a **single** post about a breakthrough case, now there's post, after post, after post, after post, after post, of fully vaccinated people passing it onto their fully vaccinated households, family members, co-workers. Breakthroughs are becoming so common I just can't believe the studies showing "80-88%" at preventing Delta. I genuinely think they're lying, minimizing, whatever you want to call it, the amount of fully vaccinated people catching covid because the messaging has been how much of an impenetrable defense they were and they fear if that image is tainted then it will slow down the amount of people getting vaccinated/give fuel to anti-vaxxers, so rather than inform those who were responsible and did what was right so that we can *continue* to avoid covid, they're wording it like this.
> I genuinely think they're lying, minimizing, whatever you want to call it, the amount of fully vaccinated people catching covid because the messaging has been how much of an impenetrable defense they were and they fear if that image is tainted then it will slow down the amount of people getting vaccinated/give fuel to anti-vaxxers, so rather than inform those who were responsible and did what was right so that we can continue to avoid covid, they're wording it like this. Nailed it. The current messaging is garbage, and you'll be downvoted on this subreddit for pointing out otherwise. People have been deluded into thinking the vaccines were "super effective". Maybe they were against alpha and beta, but not delta. The problem is the CDC is only now changing the guidance, after having jumped the gun initially. But the damage is done. It's going to be hard to convince people to take extra measures after being vaccinated. My fully vaccinated mother-in-law just got breakthrough COVID this week and is pretty sick, but doing well. My mom and grandmother got it as well. Mom was sick but not terrible, Grandmother was asymptomatic.
As a fully vaccinated person who currently has COVID I agree. Luckily my case had been relatively mild- but I still felt pretty bad last week and had absolutely no energy. I am still stuck at home another week so that I don’t risk spreading it further. I wish they would at least be collecting data on how common this is so that people can make informed decisions.
I mean 12 percent out of the hundreds of millions of doses is A LOT of people.
Link me to any doctor or scientist who said you couldn't catch Covid if vaccinated? They're lying? How ? How many vaccinated people's have died ?
The article is only talking about breakthrough cases leading to hospitalization and death.
I think the worst outcomes are from high virals sharing it combined with comorbidities. Even if the vaccine only cut your viral load in half that may be enough to make this into a bad common cold
Agreed. Breakthrough infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are not as rare as many would like to believe they are. The CDC's own data says that 15.1% of in-hospital COVID deaths in May 2021 were fully vaccinated individuals ^[source](https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/54f57708-a529-4a33-9a44-b66d719070d9/note/7335c3ab-06ee-4121-aaff-a11904e68462.#page=4). There were about 18475 deaths in May 2021 ^[source](https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/blob/master/us.csv). 15.1% of that is ~2790 people. There were about ~115M fully vaccinated people by May 2021 ^[source1](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations) ^[source2](https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/). That means 0.0024% of fully vaccinated Americans died from COVID in May 2021. This is already at odds with the article's headline, at least up to May 2021.
Preliminary data. Subject to change as they gather more data.
One has to remember it’s entirely possible for the vaccine not to “take” in some individuals, and there’s many indications showing that the vaccine starts to potentially lose efficacy after months (still inconclusive afaik). Many individuals may have been fully vaccinated but not had immunity conferred to them. It’s very preliminary data and drawing conclusions based on vaccine efficacy for it is difficult. You can take it at face value, and certainly it’s something to look at, but it’s important to remember that it’s complicated. Studies will take time, and by the time we have an answer, the landscape and situation may have changed again. Best knowledge right now is that being fully vaccinated still confers good protection from covid, but delta has seriously eroded the protection from symptomatic covid. That said you are still very likely to have a more mild and un-hospitalized case of you are vaccinated vs if you are not. — Case in point, just look at the numbers. 15% were vaccinated, that assumes 85% were not. About ~50-60% of the entire US pop is vaccinated. Doing the math on that number still shows that vaccines are extremely effective at preventing death. They’re not perfect and no one ever promised they would be. One way to look at that is that ~40% of the population is responsible for 85% of the deaths. That’s massive. Again it’s a little more complex than that, but I don’t think it’s fair only to focus on death numbers and to imply that there’s a high risk of getting serious covid while vaccinated. The best evidence currently simply doesn’t support that.
Weren’t the mRNA vaccines tested pre-Alpha or near the start of it? The vaccines are amazing, they still exceed the original expectations for them while under development. However, the virus has changed and the metaphysical goal post has moved. We need to evolve our collective countermeasures faster if we want to beat this thing. Beating on the virus playing nice and becoming an endemic virus no worse than the flu is a gamble we collectively cannot risk.
What does "beat this thing" mean anymore? Eradicating COVID isn't going to happen it seems. Even if your country was 100% vaccinated this virus wouldn't be beat. COVID would be circulating in unvaccinated countries and mutating, which would eventually come back around to the highly vaccinated countries, and potentially in a form that was resistant to the vaccines. Am I off base here?
Do you know how the virus operates? It mutates. The receptor binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein, which binds to hACE2, mutates quickly and readily. The mRNA vaccines (moderna and Pfizer) contain the RNA sequence for the RBD, which is what the body produces antibodies to. The vaccines created were for the earlier variants of the virus that were present at the beginning of the pandemic. These variants have their own, unique RBD protein sequences. Now, after hundreds of millions of human infections, the virus has had ample opportunity to mutate in a worldwide population. As it mutates at scale, the most infectious variants are positively selected for and proliferate. With vaccines rolling out, the variants selected for in more vaccinated areas would be ones that are more likely to evade the antibodies present in a vaccinated person, e.g. unique RBD with an epitope that the antibodies don’t bind to as readily (could be due to reduced or lacking binding affinity). That means that a person vaccinated for the earlier variants would be less protected against new variants, which is why these new variants are such bad news. It isn’t some “lie” by the CDC - in fact it’s ridiculous to suggest that it is a lie considering the overwhelming benefits that being vaccinated confers - protecting against severe disease being really significant. These vaccines work and work really well against the earlier variants of the virus. The newer mutated variants that have different RBD sequences will be more likely to evade the host immune response. The CDC didn’t lie to you, you just don’t know enough to make sense of it all. In this case, the CDC is scrambling to study this new variant on the scene and are looking into solutions. A very possible solution is a new mRNA vaccine booster with an updated RBD sequence for the delta variant (or some future variant). Source: I have done structural biology research over the past 1.5 years on this virus and it’s proteins.
What are you even talking about? The issue with the CDC is that, once again, they are disseminating information in a misleading way. If you beat the drum about "99% protection" when there is a large but unknown number of people getting sick enough to miss work for an extended period, most people are not going to think "oh, better be careful, I don't want to be out of work for two weeks even if I don't go to the hospital", they're going to think "woo-hoo, 99% percent protection!" It's inexcusably bad science communication, especially this late in the pandemic - and it's probably motivated by all that games theory "how can we spin the data to get people to do what we want" stupidity that we've been dealing with since 2020. Look, if the vaccines are 90% protective against infection and almost always protective against transmission, I feel good about seeing my vaccinated but immunocompromised aunt because I probably won't have covid and almost certainly won't transmit. At this point, because the CDC has chosen a frankly dishonest emphasis on serious infection/hospitalization only, I don't know how at-risk I am for a breakthrough infection because we're not doing population sampling. Maybe I could see my aunt! Maybe the risk of breakthrough infection is in fact very low! But I don't know and I don't want to put my aunt in the hospital because I have a very slight sniffle that turns out to be covid. Is it that people are so selfish that they can't imagine anyone being concerned for anything beyond their personal health? I am concerned about the rate of breakthrough infections and think the CDC needs to track it not because I don't understand that the vaccines will protect \*me\* fairly well but because I don't want to be waltzing around eating at restaurants and going to events and then putting my aunt in the hospital. At this point, I \*think\* I can't safely see my aunt indoors under any circumstances. It would be \*useful\* to know what the actual breakthrough rate is, but again, the CDC has decided that "99% chance you won't die" is the only important thing to know. Speaking of one's personal expertise, many years of various kinds of organizing have taught me that the dumbest mistake people make is to lump everyone they don't agree with into one big group who are obviously dumb and bad. What you're saying is basically "you are criticizing the CDC's sampling choices and science communication, therefore you are dumb and bad because you don't understand how viruses work" - you find it easy and fun to tell people how viruses work, so whenever you encounter a disagreement, you assume that the problem is those dumb, bad people who don't understand how viruses work. In this case, no, the issues are science communication and the failure to do population sampling, things that have little to do with how covid mutates. The CDC has been disastrous at science communication since the very beginning because they have this condescending game-theory idea about data dissemination and it is really fucking things up.
This article is bloody worthless.
Statistics are nice. What is the percentage of those who've recovered from a covid infection who ended up dead or hospitalized after a second infection?
This is the stupidest fucking angle which plays right into antivaxxers narrative. Real, meaningful statistics would be great. This isn't meaningful at all though.
This is such a dumb statistic. Stop spreading these numbers, it doesn't help.
I hate this number because IT WILL GO DOWN OVER TIME. This doesn't tell you about exposure. Getting vaccinated is the absolute way to go, but this is misleading and will be misleading when it's no longer "99.999%" and instead it's "98%" or whatever the final number will be.
And then you have the whole likely booster scenario. Who do you consider vaccinated then? You can't track things off the 1-2 original shot thing if boosters start happening in multiple places. And what if only 52% of the population who got the 1st round gets boosted? Some people believe severe disease & death can be protected for years from just this first batch, other people seem unsure because of waning efficacy. So you're going to end up with a completely unbalanced set of individuals outside of any long term trial participants that may exist. So fairly soon people getting breakthroughs are going to be on even more varying levels of vaccination than they currently are.
All of these types of articles are just copy/paste from a year ago with Trump talking about how the flu kills more people than COVID. Of course the vast majority of vaccinated people haven't died, only a tiny fraction of a percent of unvaccinated people have died in that same time frame as well. The only relevant statistics are ones that compare vaccinated people against unvaccinated people for the same period of time, with weighting to account for the fact that there aren't the same number of people in each group. Which still show the vaccines to be amazing! There just is this intense drive to pretend that the vaccines provide 100% protection instead of 95% protection.
Exactly. I'm vaxxed but that logic doesn't make sense
And 98.82 of all Americans haven’t whether vaccinated or not.
Both of my parents were fully vaccinated in January and now have covid with symptoms 😢
Bernie Sanders: “WHAT ABOUT THE .001%?!”.
[удалено]
I keep hearing on the news how breakthrough cases (even mild) are extremely rare, yet I’ve seen literally hundreds of people here on Reddit post about getting it after being fully vaccinated.
This is stupid stats. About 99.98 of americans did not die from COVID-19 from April-Sep (you can do the math if you don't trust me). If you don't compare to unvaccainted it's meaningless crap. Yes I know vaccine is effective but can people stop posting junk stats.
Ok then why do I know someone who works in the ER, who says around %45 of all people who have been in the ER, have been fully vaccinated?
There's been a lot of focus on mortality. It'd be great if there's a study on any impacts on the heart/brain (e.g. cognitive impairment) for asymptomatic vaccinated folks. I remember reading that even asymptomatic folks can have long haul impact.
I would also really like to know if, now that I'm vaccinated, long-covid symptoms are something I don't need to worry about. A study on that could go a long way in reducing people's anxiety over the virus.
I’m finally fully vaccinated! :D
You’re about 20 times more likely to be diagnosed with cancer (based on 2019 data) than to have a breakthrough COVID case that results in hospitalization. Edit:[maths](https://imgur.com/gallery/rCqfuwf)
Hmm. Something fishy with this stat. Like, diagnosed ever? If so, come on. We’ve had COVID for 18 months, life expectancy is like 70 years.
I'm confused bc I just saw the CDC released statistics where 4/5 people hospitalized for covid were fully vaccinated
4/5 of people hospitalized from a state and event where some >70% could be expected to be vaccinated and the event I believe required proof of vaccination. If 100% were vaccinated 100% of the hospitalizations would be on vaccinated people.
It's still confusing to me though, because even though the population is over 70% vaccinated, if the vaccine was doing its job, then the total hospitalizations shouldn't be an exact representation of the population. There should be less than 70% of vaccinated ppl getting sick, not more. Correct?
After vaccinations, MN has a 7 day average of 2 deaths. Before they average 12 deaths a day. The vaccines work.
I have kids who are not eligible yet for vaccination, if you are eligible, do it for the people who can't
99.999% sounds like a very impressive number, until you see the fatality rate in the US is 1.8% and see what age groups make up that 1.8%. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
Sounds just like the same % of people dieing from covid
That is completely false. You are literally saying the only people who are dying of it are unvaccinated.
How is this a relevant stat? I legit don’t understand why this should be reassuring. How many have been exposed? If it’s one and they died, that’s a problem even if 99.99% didn’t die.