These are the outcomes we were hoping for. Glad you're feeling better.
My symptoms until Friday were just runny nose and cough, and working at a school and both my girls in day care, I get a cold every other month right now. It wasn’t until Friday that I had the fatigue and lost my sense of smell. Still don’t have a fever. Currently quarantined in my bedroom.
Thanks. Lost my sense of smell, but Friday PCR test came back negative, but because I took it only 3 days after exposure I have to get another test today. Hopefully this will be a rapid test.
even if protection against infection is wearing off, the breakdown of vaxxed vs. non-vaxxed among the ICU'ed and dead is staggering
Protection against severe illness still appears quite strong based on many data points from all over the world. That a higher percentage of hospitalized patients are vaccinated in areas with high vaccination rates is a perfect example of the base rate fallacy. It's exactly what we would expect to see with an effective vaccine (and I wish we had a high enough percentage of the population vaccinated here in the US for that to be the case).
That said, there clearly is some waning immunity, especially against mild infection. Who exactly will benefit the most from boosters (other than the elderly and those with severely compromised immune systems) and the degree of clinical benefit they provide is still not entirely clear, but I am probably at least a few weeks out of data with my knowledge there.
Buddy of mine has a breakthrough case. M-I-L brought it home, and 4 of the 5 members of their family have popped positive (including both parents, each of whom was fully vaxx'd). Only one spared was the 2 year old.
He was getting his Rogan cocktail on doctor's orders and the nurse told him "Half of our therapeutic patients were fully vaccinated." Not good.
What say you health care Deacs? Is the protection wearing off, or does the protection against severe illness carry forward?
OTOH, this article says the worst is behind us. If we go get children-aged vaccines approved and the holdouts all gave each other delta, we might back into herd immunity whether we like it or not.
I'm not a doctor. but I'm in the Pfizer study. So I'm not even close to the final word on this.
My understanding, based on the information that the doctor running the study has imparted, is that there are two things about the vaccine that keep us save: (1) training our B-cells to mount an immune response, and (2) an increase of antibodies.
If you have enough antibodies floating around in your blood, you can be exposed to the virus and not really get sick. When you first get the Pfizer vaccine, you have a shitload of these badasses just prowling around your blood. They aren't "smart" like B-cells, but there are a shitload of them and they do the job fast.
^^^ These are the things that are waning/reducing/becoming less as time goes by. Sometimes these are dropping like a rock, other folks seem to keep them around longer.
For the B-cells, they can and do mount an immune response to the virus, but they do so at a much slower rate than antibodies. So, you're going to get "sick" before the B-cells can churn out enough juice to fight off the virus. These guys are the reason that the breakthrough infections aren't as bad. Since the vaccine trains the B-cells to know what the virus looks like, it can mount the fight quicker than if they don't have a blueprint to work from.
^^^ These are not materially waning/reducing/becoming less as time goes by.
Not totally sure I follow. Are you saying that in Tel Aviv, for instance, a higher % of hospitalizations are "vaccinated patients" because that mirrors the general pop (but the total number of hospitalizations are lower than would be with lower vax rates)? Sorry for the dumb.