ToddyHill said:

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This certainly isn't scientific...but last Sunday my wife and I got our first Covid shot at a CVS in Knoxville. When I asked, the Pharmacist said the number of people coming in to get immunized was definitely on the uptick. In fact, we live outside of Knoxville and had to go there as the two local CVS Pharmacies in our area were out of Covid shots.

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Zobel said:

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Some things we think we know about the two.

The vaccines appear to cause a more predictable antibody response.

Antibody response seems to be highly predictive of protection.

Vaccine antibodies are more focused on the receptor binding domain (at least for Moderna)

Vaccine antibodies also seem like they might work better on a broader range of receptor binding domain "single letter" mutations.

Recovered antibodies focus more broadly (N-terminal domain and S2 subunit). Maybe this is bad, maybe this is good, for example perhaps they aren't as good against one specific variant, but maybe broadly better in general, but maybe weaker against other specific variants

Summary... we are pretty sure they're different, they may differ in how they handle different variants, and so we don't really know. ((Reply hazy, try again))

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GBMont3 said:

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Is there any sign (or a dataset you can point me too) that the pace of vaccinations is accelerating now that's it's increasingly obvious we should have it if we can?

Just curious if delta prevalence, staffing-driven hospital capacity issues, reintroduction of restrictions are starting to have any effect.

Seems like vaccinations + natural immunity is the only real way out of this.

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Knucklesammich said:

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I think for 99% of us two outcomes are welcome:

1) wipe out the virus.don't think that is reasonable to expect nor was it ever possible

2) Reduce infection at scale to that of a head cold if you get it all.

If a vaccine gets us to option 2 then majority of folks will
Take that approach. Everyone else will get there via natural immunity (to certain variants or maybe all variants who knows)

Along the way to the non vaxxed population getting to natural immunity is via pain and suffering for a small percentage of but still very large number of people while facilitating a large and probably largely unnecessary burden on healthcare systems and workers.

At some point we will then quantify the burdens that long COVID does or does not put on our HC system.

Maybe we deliver truly proven and successful therapeutics over time? Who knows, It would be nice not to tout every pre print of something as a wonder drug but that horse appears out of the barn.

In my opinion everything else is theatermasks, ivermectin, hcq, kids and covid or whatever else we chose to argue over.

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DadHammer said:

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Either through natural recovery from covid or shots. This will end.

Not sure why so many panic. The death rate is already very very low.

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ORAggieFan said:

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Knucklesammich said:

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I think for 99% of us two outcomes are welcome:

1) wipe out the virus.don't think that is reasonable to expect nor was it ever possible

2) Reduce infection at scale to that of a head cold if you get it all.

If a vaccine gets us to option 2 then majority of folks will
Take that approach. Everyone else will get there via natural immunity (to certain variants or maybe all variants who knows)

Along the way to the non vaxxed population getting to natural immunity is via pain and suffering for a small percentage of but still very large number of people while facilitating a large and probably largely unnecessary burden on healthcare systems and workers.

At some point we will then quantify the burdens that long COVID does or does not put on our HC system.

Maybe we deliver truly proven and successful therapeutics over time? Who knows, It would be nice not to tout every pre print of something as a wonder drug but that horse appears out of the barn.

In my opinion everything else is theatermasks, ivermectin, hcq, kids and covid or whatever else we chose to argue over.

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The only possible option is #2. It's ridiculous we have not come to accept this as our strategy. It's even more ridiculous that countries still think #1 is possible.

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amercer said:

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Irwin M. Fletcher said:

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DadHammer said:

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Either through natural recovery from covid or shots. This will end.

Not sure why so many panic. The death rate is already very very low.

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I agree. Officially we have 38 million cases and 165 million fully vaccinated. So that is 203 million people with some level of immunity. Conservatively there are probably another 50 million that have had it and were never tested, and likely more. So we have 250 million with some level of immunity. This thing is about to peter out as we reach herd immunity.

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Much like the guys who predicted peak oil every year for decades, this will eventually be right. (This board has been predicting imminent herd immunity since July 2020.)

The case numbers in Texas and Florida indicate that we aren't close though. I think we may have wildly overestimated the number of undetected cases, or it may be that asymptomatic/mild cases don't provide much immunity.

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