You need a citation to understand which part? That poor people most often have service jobs such as retail or food service? That service jobs are higher risk for Covid transmission than white collar jobs? Or that poor people have few resources to address health issues if they get Covid?
I'm not a dev, I just like tech stuff. I say this because I actually work with lower middle class Black and Brown people, though I'm White and lower middle class.
Let me explain something to you guys, we worked through each "wave" and didn't really care. We were not "forced" to work. It was never a big deal.
The whole "woe is the working class during Covid" was just an excuse for neurotic professional class workers to WFH.
"We study the spread of COVID-19 infections and deaths by county poverty level in the US. In the beginning of the pandemic, counties with either very low poverty levels or very high poverty levels reported the highest numbers of cases. A U-shaped relationship prevails for counties with high population density while among counties with low population density, only poorer counties report high incidence rates of COVID-19. Second, we discuss the pattern of infections spreading from higher to lower income counties. Third, we show that stay-at-home mandates caused significantly higher reductions in mobility in high income counties that experienced adverse weather shocks than counties that did not. These effects are not present in counties with high poverty rates. Using weather shocks in combination with stay-at-home mandates as an instrument for social distancing, we find that measures taken to promote social distancing helped curb infections in high income counties but not in low income counties. These results have important policy implications for containing the spread of infectious diseases in the future." (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7756168/)
> High vaccination rates will only exert selection pressure on the virus causing new mutation strains to become dominant.
> How is this not understood?
The same way vaccines create selection pressure, so does natural immunity. Letting people get infected instead of vaccinating them actually makes the dice roll much more, as in orders of magnitude more.
Just look how most of the variants of concern, and mainly delta, appeared before any significant vaccine rollout, and further, delta shows high rates of reinfection vs. infection of vaccinated people.
Only vaccinating those at-risk will keep this going and going for God knows how long, and regularly overcrowding hospitals with very corageous freedom fighters.
Just get your shot instead of playing armchair epidemiologist.
> Only vaccinating those at-risk will keep this going and going for God knows how long, and regularly overcrowding hospitals with very corageous freedom fighters.
The vaccine doesn’t keep people from spreading delta because it’s not a sterilizing vaccine[1][2]. It’s strange there was that big concern over asymptotic spread and the response was to administer an intervention that greatly increases asymptotic cases.
You don't need a sterilizing vaccine. You only need to get R0 below 1. However, Delta is so infectious that mass vaccination will still need to be accompanied by social distancing and masking....
You can calculate different (average case) scenarios yourself with % needed to be vaccinated = (1 - 1/R0) for a sterilizing vaccine and add an adjustment factor for the vaccine efficacy. It's not pretty...
How do you assuredly get R0 below one with a leaky vaccine[1]? R0 can stay >1 with 100% vaccination if the pathogen is contagious enough and the vaccine is leaky enough. Note that the reference I provided is from 2015, so we can rest assured it's not particularly politicized. There is a very real chance that we're going to look back on delta fondly if a Marek's disease type scenario unfolds. Then again that's pretty much optimal for big pharma if they have a vaccine that's effective against a hypothetical omega strain that will reliably kill or maim the unvaccinated.
> How do you assuredly get R0 below one with a leaky vaccine[1]?
Nobody was assuring anything. It won't get it below R0 by itself, parent comment already told you. It's the combination of seatbelt, airbag, while not speeding, drinking, smoking or talking on the phone what keeps people relatively safe on the road, not any single of those elements.
> R0 can stay >1 with 100% vaccination if the pathogen is contagious enough and the vaccine is leaky enough.
Yes. That's why the epidemiological consensus is for vaccinated people to keep wearing masks, particularly indoors.
> There is a very real chance that we're going to look back on delta fondly if a Marek's disease type scenario unfolds
Excuse me from what I'm going to say, but the Marek comparison is an antivax favourite from the gross misunderstanding that you seem to share with them.
The Marek scenario is the result of imperfect vaccination, plus the massification of the poultry industry, plus the fact that infected chickens can carry and transmit the disease for life, including those vaccinated, which is absolutely not the case with COVID-19.
The disease existed before, but outbreaks were relatively local and self contained.
Now, from the second half of the 20th century it started being a major concern with the industrialization of farming. With a vaccine that keeps chickens from having complications or dying, but not from shedding virions for life, all while living on top of each other 100% of their lives, sure, you reach enough selection pressure to make the disease evolve for the worse.
COVID-19 vaccines may let you be contagious for a few days, then the infection eventually clears, and the density of our dwellings is orders of magnitude lower.
> Then again that's pretty much optimal for big pharma if they have a vaccine that's effective against a hypothetical omega strain that will reliably kill or maim the unvaccinated.
Yeah, this goes deeper into tinfoil hat territory. I'd just like to say that interestingly most of big pharma failed to produce vaccines and have been there largely to give the manufacturing power to the small research groups and small/new biotech companies that actually created them.
Luckily there are dozens of vaccines from all around the world by now, I think competition will do the rest.
> Yes. That's why the epidemiological consensus is for vaccinated people to keep wearing masks, particularly indoors.
There's still no reason to believe that adding mask wearing to a leaky vaccine will reduce R0 below one. We'll probably find out though since we're running a huge, albeit uncontrolled, phase 3 clinical trial right now.
We do know on the other hand that a sterilizing vaccine can guarantee herd immunity on its own with vaccination levels well below 100%.
> Excuse me from what I'm going to say, but the Marek comparison is an antivax favourite from the gross misunderstanding that you seem to share with them.
If I were an anti-vaxxer why would I be advocating a (sterilizing) vaccine? And that kind of passive aggressive insult is a common habit of the kind of midwit who vastly overestimates his own intelligence, but let's not waste time on ad hominems shall we? I simply gave the Marek scenario as conclusive proof that imperfect vaccines can select for increasingly lethal variants. It serves as a kind of limit case where everything is maximally unfavorable. Now the question of concern is can similar viral selection occur when some of the variables, such as infection duration of vaccinated individuals, are different. We cannot conclusively answer in the negative with the data we have, so a tail risk exists.
> Yeah, this goes deeper into tinfoil hat territory.
No, it goes further into considering tail risk scenarios, which is something that most people are reliably bad at.
> Luckily there are dozens of vaccines from all around the world by now, I think competition will do the rest.
I will be greatly reassured when competition creates a sterilizing vaccine that eradicates SARS-CoV-2.
Antibodies are useless if they don't have the ability to bind to mutated proteins.
> Some monoclonal antibodies, including bamlanivimab, lost their ability to bind to the spike protein and no longer neutralized the Delta variant. We also showed that the Delta variant is less sensitive to sera from naturally immunized individuals.
> In individuals who had not previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2, a single dose of either the Pfizer or the AstraZeneca vaccine induced a barely detectable level of neutralizing antibodies against the Delta variant. About 10% of the sera neutralized this variant. However, a two-dose regimen generated high sero-neutralization levels against the Alpha, Beta and Delta variants in individuals sampled at week 8 to week 16 after vaccination. [0]
Not exactly. Natural immunity is more durable and more complete. Vaccines are often "leaky", offering only partial protection against very specific markers. Whereas NI is more comprehensive and long-lasting.
"Leaky vaccines" result in catastrophic situations like Marek's disease.
No, the current boosters are the same vaccine as the original vaccinations. The booster shots are given as the antibody count in your blood drops over time and the booster shot keeps them at the maximum for another half year or so.
We don't have precise data about the required level of antibodies to stay healthy yet and in quite a few countries the infection rates are currently high enough to pose a real risk for vaccinated patients in the vulnerable group. The safe play is to give booster shots to keep the immune response at its best.
Excuse me, the correct number seems to be 88%[1] effective against symptomatic COVID from the delta variant after 2 doses vs 95% for the alpha variant.
A high vaccination rate prevents the spread of the disease. Yes, if you have a consistent rate of spread, then the more people with the vaccine, the more likely mutation is to survive. However, if the virus can't spread in the first place, it's chance to mutate is near zero.
