Vaccination continues to reduce transmission (less for Omicron than before, but it was known never to be be 100%) but it also significantly reduces the number of people with serious cases (still quite successful even with Omicron).
That means there’s a big side effect from people not getting vaccinated: the healthcare system has finite capacity and when it’s full of people who wouldn’t be there if they’d been vaccinated, that means space isn’t available for anyone who has some other problem and the healthcare system is losing a lot of expensively trained people due to stress. It is extra hard on them to watch people die for avoidable reasons and many nurses, doctors, etc. have left at least temporarily due to burnout.
Not sure where the early downvotes are coming from but this is correct: my state has 95% 2 dose vaccination of adults and currently 150 ventilated patients- half of those are unvaccinated.
So 5% of the population represents 50% of ICU ventilator capacity.
While I'm sure the unvaccinated represent more, it's also true that many reporting stats considered double vaccinated to be in the unvaccinated category if they are eligible for a booster and haven't had them.
I don't know which sites you're seeing but the ones I use tend to break that out as “partially vaccinated” or “fully vaccinated” vs “fully vaccinated with booster” — which is good since the evidence has shown that there's a big difference between the waning protection against infection (i.e. neutralizing antibodies) versus protection against severe cases (i.e. T cells) even for partial vaccination.
Yup. I’ve seen similar gaming. Of the people who died in Singapore, 5/8th weren’t “fully vaccinated”, so they lump in the ones with one dose and those who haven’t met some predefined period of time post-2nd dose.
How much does it reduce transmission? Do you have links or know the studies to look for? (It's difficult for me to wade through everything out there and know what the "good" studies and data are)
> Our results show that the Omicron VOC is generally 2.7-3.7 times more infectious than the Delta VOC among vaccinated individuals (Table 3). This observation is in line with data from (18), which estimated that 19% of Omicron VOC primary cases in households in the UK resulted in at least one other infection within the household, compared to only 8.3% of those associated with the Delta VOC. Furthermore, we show that fully vaccinated and booster-vaccinated individuals are generally less susceptible to infection compared to unvaccinated individuals (Table 2). We also show that booster-vaccinated individuals generally had a reduced transmissibility (OR: 0.72, CI: 0.56-0.92), and that unvaccinated individuals had a higher transmissibility (OR: 1.41, CI: 1.27-1.57), compared to fully vaccinated individuals.
> Surprisingly, we observed no significant difference between the SAR of Omicron versus Delta among unvaccinated individuals (Table 3). This indicates that the increased trans-missibility of the Omicron VOC primarily can be ascribed to immune evasion rather than an inherent increase in the basic transmissibility.
That last part is why the boosters matter: neutralizing antibodies (which your body stops producing over time after the infection) can prevent someone from getting sick at all, whereas the longer-lasting T cell response helps your immune system fight it off more effectively. If the entire population is boosted, that would have been plenty to fight off Delta but with Omicron we still need a combination of other measures (masks, air filtering/exchange, etc.) and eventually updated boosters to put an end ot it. That doesn't mean that being vaccinated isn't worthwhile, of course: you're still far more likely to have a better outcome if you get it and the window where you're contagious is smaller.
I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated but we're really chasing our tails by focusing on antibody levels. In the long run cellular immunity is more important. We can't give everyone boosters every few months just to keep antibody levels up.
That's why the different between the neutralizing antibodies and T cells is so important: when the pandemic is raging, your odds of exposure are high and so public health people are concerned about the ability of vaccinated individuals to slow the spread impacting the entire healthcare system. The medical system is under levels of stress which haven't been seen in a century so they're understandably focused on trying all of the tools available to calm things down.
Once it's spreading at a lower level, your risk of personal exposure is much lower and the long-lasting T cell response becomes more of a focus because that reduces risk to the person and you're less worried about the crunch of many thousands of people showing up at the hospital at the same time because for someone vaccinated it's more like something like influenza where most people have a bad week or two but don't urgently need medical treatment.
That means there’s a big side effect from people not getting vaccinated: the healthcare system has finite capacity and when it’s full of people who wouldn’t be there if they’d been vaccinated, that means space isn’t available for anyone who has some other problem and the healthcare system is losing a lot of expensively trained people due to stress. It is extra hard on them to watch people die for avoidable reasons and many nurses, doctors, etc. have left at least temporarily due to burnout.