Mike4 wrote:swill453 wrote:Mike4 wrote:Yes, people (including me) appear to have been answering the question: "Have you been half vaccinated?"
Seems to me it's more than half. The latest data shows a single dose of either vaccine is 80% effective in preventing hospitalisation in the over 80s.
Scott.
Yes there seems to be three separate measures of 'effectiveness', which the media rarely specifies when quoting. Dr John mentioned this the other day. They are, IIRC:
Effectiveness again hospitalisation and death
Effectiveness against mild disease
Effectiveness against infection
Also effectiveness against transmission? Is it possible to be infected but not just at a low enough viral load to be asymptomatic but at an even lower viral load such that one’s virus shedding rate is low enough to not be likely to infect anyone else thus breaking transmission chains?
We the public are presented with results based on ability to avoid symptoms, death, hospitalisations etc. I often wonder whether the raw effects that virologists, immunologists, pharmacologists etc might actually be working from might be reductions in viral loads as the underlying mechanisms going on (governed by a vaccine’s ability to attenuate natural replication rates?) where asymptomatic/mild-symptoms/hospitalised/dead are emergent properties from that underlying dynamic with individual outcomes further perturbed from baselines by co-morbidities, age and other factors (gender, ethnicity etc).
I pity any virologist or immunologist trapped in a room with me any time in the near future. I would have so many questions.
- Julian