I am guessing around 70. Believe it or not, my wife knows another couple who went to dinner indoors with this couple before the symptoms surfaced, and the husband of the second couple contracted the virus and needed to be hospitalized and put on oxygen. He’s okay now. My wife told me that the second couple were about 70-years old, So, I am guessing that the first couple also would have been senior citizens. The obituary had not shown up in the Tampa Bay Times as of yesterday.
Waiting for Trump to hold a MAGA rally with priority seating for unvaccinated attendees who elect to go maskless.
Speaking only for myself while I would certainly feel very badly if anyone I knew who refused to be vaccinated passed away as the result of a Covid-19 infection but I also consider his/her death an avoidable tragedy attributable to wilful ignorance much that same way I would feel about someone who refused to use a seat belt and died in an automobile accident when said death would have been fully preventable had the individual bothered to buckle up.
It actually seems a bit crazy, considering almost nobody is beyond 6 months from being “fully vaccinated”. Most data I see suggests the immunity is still strong. But I always figured at about the 1 year mark it would start waning, none of the “experts” I saw predicted lifetime immunity. Testing out boosters now makes perfect sense. Unless there is some overall drastic collapse of immunity they are seeing, I’m not sure how they can justify rushing out 3rd doses under an emergency use unless it’s part of a trial. Of course if the vaccines all work the same, I’d expect an emergency use to be not far off. But it seems early.
I hear you. I assumed we'd all need a booster shot at some point. But my immediate reaction is that some will perceive it as Pfizer doing this for $$$, but I think what they're more concerned about is that the effectiveness of their vaxx remains in the high 90s with the Delta strain.
As lo As long as 30-40% of the country remains unvaccinated, these variants will be a problem as there are 100-125 million potential remaining hosts to allow the virus to continue to mutate and proliferate. And as a result, we are all at some level of risk. Cases in the US have tripled the past 3 weeks. The polio vaccine didn't eliminate the virus, but it eliminated the hosts. Delta won't be the last covid-19 variant we'll see. And the next one will be worse. That's just how viruses work. Would be best if everyone just put their politics aside, rolled up their sleeves and got a shot. It's not difficult calculus. And then this nightmare will be largely over instead of seeing case numbers go the wrong way as they have for the past month. For supposedly the smartest nation in the world, we've made this far more difficult than it should have been.
Not arguing against vaccines but just curious about some of the more educated opinions about leaky vaccines and their potential to create altered and potentially more lethal strains since this doesn't seem to be mentioned at all in this thread and the blame for mutations are being places solely on the unvaxed. This is not a loaded question but I understand that viruses operate and replicate through different mechanisms and this may or may not be pertinent to covid
. What do you mean about leaky vaccines? The vaccines can’t leak COVID because they don’t contain live virus.
Leaky vaccines unless I'm misunderstood is the term for viruses that survive vaccines. Loosely similar to insects that survive pesticides and are now more resistant to them. Could some vaccines make diseases more deadly? | Science | AAAS
Not at all what I meant even if I'm incorrect. Not in any way worried about the vaccine itself " causing" infections as some tend to believe with typical flu shots. Fully aware vaccines don't use live viruses
They aren't literally leaking. The hypothesis is the vaccine eliminates / prevents most the virus, but stronger mutations may survive, via natural selection and then the stronger mutation spreads more rapidly. Similar to what anti bacterial soaps did. It's a hypothesis. Edit: actually upon further reading, a dangerous virus with unvaccinated hosts often kills the host. The disease can't spread if hosts die. Some vaccines may lessen the severity but the host still gets the virus, stays alive, and spreads it. The more it spreads the more chance it has to mutate and get worse.
Again...i understand what you explained in the first paragraph but the term is simply a term used to explained the theory....not a literal leak. Not sure how I didn't convey that already. Its a theory and it isn't meant as an anti vaccine argument simply that it is a theory that creating superstrains or mutations may not be solely blamed on unvaccinated people. Not much has been "normal" about covid and this is one theory regarding mutations than might at least be studied as well.
Read and researchers at the Pirbright Institute in Compton, U.K., infected chickens with Marek’s disease virus of different strains known to span the spectrum from low to high virulence. When the birds weren't vaccinated, infection with highly virulent strains killed them so fast that they shed very little virus—orders of magnitude less than when they were infected with less virulent strains. But in vaccinated birds, the opposite was true: Those infected with the most virulent strains shed more virus than birds infected with the least virulent strain In the example the initial virus was so lethal it often killed the host. Covid while deadly, even at its worst was only deadly to a small percent of carriers, so I'm not sure the concept really applies in this case.
It makes rational sense on the surface. A vaccinated person has like 99% less chance at “severe illness” to this point. But once more and more breakthroughs happen, that is almost like a different “version” of the virus (one that is also capable of infecting the vaccinated). I don’t think anyone thinks it’s going to create some mutant supervirus, just that as the virus evolves and mutates it will start chipping away at the immunity vaccines have given this far. I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone is worried about, and it still is the fault of the “unvaccinated” as they are the primary spreaders of the virus. Though Isreal shows even very high vax is rates isn’t going to stop this thing totally. So it’s probably something we will be living with for awhile
what's wrong with having to get another shot? People get yearly flu shots if they want to increase the odds of being protected against the flu.
