We’re still learning how vaccines will affect the spread of COVID-19. After you’ve been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, you should keep taking precautions—like wearing a mask, staying 6 feet apart from others, and avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated spaces—in public places until we know more.
This requires more justification. If we took the cautious choice every time we didn’t have all the facts, civilization would collapse.
We may not have gold standard scientific studies but what is our best guess of the distribution of possible consequences of fully vaccinated people attending medium or large gatherings? How do those balance against our best guess of the distribution of costs of continuing to bar such attendance?
i’m young, vaxxed, and i still think about the implications of covid when going to events. It goes kind of like this:
- Is this a public area where immunocompromised people have to be (e.g. grocery stores, doctors offices?) If so then I wear a mask
- Is this an area which isn’t really safe for immunocompromised people anyways (e.g. restaurants, gyms). If so then i don’t wear a mask unless they require it or someone asks me
- Am I hanging out at a friends house or venue with other friends, all young and presumably vaccinated? If so then i don’t take any precautions, even if it’s a large tightly-packed gathering the risk of any serious infection is minimal and the virus is spreading anyways
People need to understand that “stay safe and weigh the risks” does not mean “take unnecessary precautions and constantly worry”. It takes 2sec to realize that hanging out with vaccinated friends and family and strangers is completely fine, and maybe i should bring a mask in my pocket just in case i need to call a Lyft or stop somewhere.
i’m young, vaxxed, and i still think about the implications of covid when going to events. It goes kind of like this:
- Is this a public area where immunocompromised people have to be (e.g. grocery stores, doctors offices?) If so then I wear a mask
- Is this an area which isn’t really safe for immunocompromised people anyways (e.g. restaurants, gyms). If so then i don’t wear a mask unless they require it or someone asks me
- Am I hanging out at a friends house or venue with other friends, all young and presumably vaccinated? If so then i don’t take any precautions, even if it’s a large tightly-packed gathering the risk of any serious infection is minimal and the virus is spreading anyways
People need to understand that “stay safe and weigh the risks” does not mean “take unnecessary precautions and constantly worry”. It takes 2sec to realize that hanging out with vaccinated friends and family and strangers is completely fine, and maybe i should bring a mask in my pocket just in case i need to call a Lyft or stop somewhere. It’s basically automatic
Why should you not attend medium-size gatherings after being vaccinated? It's okay to be in a group of 100 people in a plane, but not in that same group of people in a field outside? It doesn't make any sense to me. There are more people dying from shark attacks than from covid spread through medium-size gatherings of vaccinated people.
I feel like the CDC has this mistaken idea of how to get trust, that they will become trusted by always erring on the side of "more lockdown". But always making the same mistake isn't the way to get people to trust you, it's the way to get people to realize, oh this group doesn't really tell you the truth. They are like the boy crying wolf, giving you many false warnings and making it impossible to tell the real warnings.
I don't really have any evidence for this, but one possible thought process behind discouraging larger gatherings among vaccinated people is that (some) unvaccinated people would be likely to join in on those gatherings if they become renormalized too early. It's inevitable that large gatherings will be renormalized soon enough and that a lot of people who decline to get vaccinated will join them, but I can imagine many people would see telling a noble lie (of omission) to defer that inevitability for as long as possible as the right call.
So, the expert in the article agreess you shouldn't sit at home 24/7 for the next year:
> Even with delta, the goal is not to go back to a lockdown mindset, though, says Malani. "My hope is that people who are fully vaccinated should really feel like this risk is manageable."
> "Feel good about spending time with your friends, or having a small dinner party, but make sure everyone is vaccinated," she says
But you probably should still be wearing masks in crowded indoor locations and avoiding/reducing large gatherings.
Since it's all statistical, it's not all of nothing, going to an occasional large gathering isn't the same as might as well go to one every day, you can prioritize ones important to you.
But it's up to you. The important thing is if you do get sick or know you're sick, please quarantine to avoid infecting others.
The annoying thing is, all the risks are proportional to how much covid there is in the community. If we could get rates down, then we wouldn't have to worry so much. So it's not just about what we are willing to risk personally, it's about trying to change social behavior to get risks much further down, so everyone in the community can do more stuff safer!
This is my nth time posting in this thread, and I only kept getting downvotes instead of explanations. Ah, the wisdom of HN crowds never cease to awe me sometimes (and disgust me sometimes). Come on, explanation, bring it. Do the vaccines work or not? What is the reasoning we should avoid social gathering, indoor gathering, and using mask if we already got vaccinated? Does this mean we will end up doing this until this empire's sunset?
Let's flip that around: what is the effect of an asymptomatic COVID sufferer entering a room of people (some of whom are vaccinated vs. some who are not)?
Children aren't currently eligible for any vaccine, and some immunocompromised people can't get the vaccine.
I disagree reason is somehow going to overpower the conspiracy machine. Rules and consequences speak directly to those too greedy to vaccinate or are petrified by fear of some conspiracy theorized takeover.
That’s a great analysis, but I think there is one more aspect which needs to be considered. The decision should not be purely individual, since there is a tragedy of the commons aspect. To any individual, the risks of Covid are relatively low, and the long term risks of the vaccine are hard to know, so personally choosing not to get the vaccine seems reasonable. Yet if every individual makes that same calculation, we won’t reach herd immunity, and the risk to everyone will go up as a consequence. This is one of those situations were each individual making the best choice for themselves doesn’t result in the best result for everyone.
While this may be true, one's ultimate responsibility is for oneself. Other people should be vaccinated, too, that is their responsibility. There's only so much that people who are being responsible and following the science can do.
Also, while this Omicron is so new, I think anyone who is vaccinated should still wear a mask when around great numbers of other people, and other people should also wear their masks.
And why would one go to a restaurant or other kinds of unmasked events, anyways, while this new variant of covid is so unknown? I wouldn't go to the Sturgis motorcycle event, vaccinated or not, booster shot or not, asymptomatic or symptomatic, masked or not masked.
A lot of it has nothing to do with being vaccinated or not, but having common sense or not. It is not common sense to go to places where there can be a lot of people and hang out there.
The thing is, you're not representative of unvaccinated folks. You're an extreme outlier. Most of them haven't done this research.
In my opinion, if you're nice and wear a mask in crowded conditions, don't go around hanging especially indoors in big groups, your position is kind of ok.
Though I'd still look at the numbers to check if vaccines reduce infection rates and rate of spread. Because if that's true, it might be worth getting vaccinated to protect others a bit more.
We also seem to be in almost the talismanic phase of the pandemic. By all means, most should IMO get vaccinated to reduce the risk of serious disease. But I'm unconvinced that other mitigations for large indoor events are appreciably more effective than wearing an energy crystal around your neck.
There's some real irony that the people most likely to spread COVID -- those who are vaccinated and thus don't show symptoms -- are the ones "allowed" to engage in the most risky behaviour like large gatherings at restaurants, bars, theatres, sports arenas. Meanwhile those second-class citizens who are non-vaccinated won't take those risks and will also definitely know if they are sick, hilariously probably behaving the most safely/cautiously, as everyone should. Just as expected, infection rates just skyrocket due to new variants and people thinking "I'm protected" as they act as if there's no pandemic at all. Great.
That’s not really the same thing since an individual who, for example, goes to large gatherings also endangers others by making essential activities like going to the grocery store more dangerous for everyone. Besides that, wider spread of the virus increases the odds of dangerous mutations that make the vaccine less effective or the illness more severe. More spread also risks hospital overloads, which will hurt the medical outcomes of everyone. Going out beyond essential needs hurts everyone.
On the other hand, getting a potentially faulty vaccine would seem to mostly only be a risk to the individual, although I suppose there is some risk of overwhelming hospitals still.
Please just stay home for a few more months so this shit can finally fucking end. It’s already been a year.
Edit: an important factor, too, is that understanding the potential risks of the AZ vaccine is hard, and the average person may not expected to fully understand them. Right now, it seems like even the authorities don’t understand them.
Those are very good points. Totally agree, the vast majority of people are gonna be careful and display caution staying at home etc.. I think covid vaccines should be compelling by their efficacity and safety. This is all so stringent for something so rightly divisive
Nobody is willing to take a stance that strong, because they can't know that for sure. There could be further viral mutations, an unexpectedly sudden decline in immunity from vaccines, a string of unlucky superspreader events, a completely unrelated pandemic, or any of a lot of other uncontrollable, unknowable factors that could make continued restrictions necessary in an almost-fully-vaccinated population.
It's an unfortunate circumstance that 90% of people being fully vaccinated might not be enough to stop COVID-19 in its tracks. Even just 1% of people being unvaccinated makes millions of people who could catch, mutate, and transmit the virus. Especially if those people were loosely clustered together, and didn't take precautions against spreading disease, they could possibly keep the virus active (and hospitals busy) for a long time on their own.
The vaccination locations are the largest group of people anyone I know how been around in a year. Dozens of people coming in and out of a room every 15 minutes, plus having to sit next to strangers for 15 minutes to make sure you don't have an adverse reaction is a larger risk than most take ever.
I generally agree with you (minus the rage) and agree re: being vaccinated at this point means it's pretty much over for individuals and their associates who are also vaccinated.
The only quibble I take is that, while it's likely you (and by proxy, the experts you cite) are correct that we won't go back to square one, it is still a (low) possibility. Probably low enough that it isn't worth concerning yourself with, except to be aware that the possibility is there. And probably slightly higher than the normal chance of a random breakout until we get closer to vaccinated herd immunity worldwide. But I'm not suggesting it should necessarily change any significant behavior of those vaccinated, just something to pay a bit more attention to than normal and be ready to take action if needed (i.e. don't throw away all the masks just yet).
And that said, I really appreciate you including sources and I'm sorry I don't have any handy to back up my statement, but it does come from reading and listening to experts. That said, it's my recollection and summary of that so I'd encourage anyone to take it with that grain of salt.
The take-away should be that we should mask up and try to isolate independent of vaccination status. Sadly, lots of vaccinated people think the ride is over for them and behave accordingly, in addition to the ones who never cared in the first place. We may see the fruits of that in winter, when the freshly normalized carelessness might lead to a larger increase in infections.
This requires more justification. If we took the cautious choice every time we didn’t have all the facts, civilization would collapse.
We may not have gold standard scientific studies but what is our best guess of the distribution of possible consequences of fully vaccinated people attending medium or large gatherings? How do those balance against our best guess of the distribution of costs of continuing to bar such attendance?
Where’s the analysis?
reply