RE: close price26 Nov 2021 17:30
Vaccines are not, and have never been, binary in their effect. They work on a balance of probabilities. Getting ill in the presence of virus is also a matter of probabilities. There are thresholds of levels of virus you need to get into your system before the virus can establish and replicate exponentially. People take in a horrifying range of virus all the time, but if they are slow to replicate they need to be transmitted in high numbers [low contagion], or if they are fast to replicate they only need low numbers [high contagion]. Then there is the host, strong immune system can keep the internal R number below 1 so there is no exponential growth and instead the virus is eradicated from the system. The level symptoms as the body fights the virus can range from nothing to quite bad, as with flu and colds. If the host has a weak system, the virus can run out of control rapidly and you then end up with hospital and deaths.
Covid has a high contagion, you don't need a great deal to be absorbed before there is enough for the kinetics to be self-sustaining and the body then has to try and step in. This is where the vaccination comes in. With an antibody already present in the system the body can attack the virus even before it becomes self-sustaining internally. If it starts to spread exponentially the presence of antibody gives the immune system a head start, these are the people with mild symptoms that easily recover. There is a section of the population whose immune systems, despite being primed with an antibody is just not able to stop the exponential growth.
In spreading the virus, the threshold is the critical part. It is why you here more learned discussion talking about build up in a small room and people inhaling the airborne virus over extended periods of time. The masks do not stop the micro droplets becoming airborne, most droplets get out. But the concentration needs to build up over some time before the host is able to take in enough for the virus to become self-sustaining. Saturated masks are well over the threshold and transmission into the host is pretty much guaranteed. Most viruses do not survive more than a couple of seconds once exhaled which is why most don't have pandemics. Covid can survive for a while in the air, but much longer on surfaces.
There is a bubbling pot of probabilities, but the vaccination definitely reduces the internal spread for most and the quantity expressed by infected people is therefore greatly reduced. Eventually the probabilities, if enough are vaccinated or have antibodies [as in the plague], creates a geometric progression of infection tending to zero (if the virus doesn't mutate itself to destruction first). It is why at the very start the immediate advice was not to use masks. It was and continues to be a terrible error.
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