We talk about misinformation…here is a prime example of why people are skeptical. I know 4 people who have had myocarditis from the vaccine. That doesn’t jive with the 0.007% above, even if that 0.007% is real.
Another thing to note is almost all of these people have never had any sort of cardiac imaging or tests done before. That makes it even more difficult to conduct these studies because there isn’t a baseline to compare to. The article you posted states “suggesting either prior myocardial injury or normal athletic adaptation of the heart.” This is a real thing. I had an echo done 3 years ago that showed adaptation of my heart. My cardiologist said a lot of athletes see this, but never know it because why would a young healthy adult have an echo done.
Honestly, I don’t know anyone who has had it from either Covid or the vaccine (my 13 year old male twins have had 3 mRNA vaccines without a problem). But I know that is anecdotal. So far, research says you are more likely to get myocarditis from Covid than the vaccine, so I’m going to go with research rather than my own personal experience.
Let’s stick with science as the moderators have requested.
both sides of the debate are guilty of saying the other side is uneducated. Truth is there are some very intelligent people on both sides. Comments saying we just have to educate the other side don’t work and only piss of the party involved in the conversation.
It’s tempting to think of things as binary (vaccinated or not, boosted or not, exposed or not, etc), but really it’s probably more helpful to think of it more as a series of dice rolls.
Imagine that every time you’re around the virus, you have to roll a die. If it comes up a “1”, you get infected. Then, you have another series of dice rolls to determine how severe your infection is and what all body systems are impacted (lungs, myocarditis, kidneys, etc).
We have quite a bit of control over both how often we roll that initial infection die AND the number of sides it has.
Limiting the number and frequency of contacts will reduce the number of dice rolls. For instance, going to a crowded event during a surge is going to be a LOT of dice rolls. Every interaction with an infected household member is also a dice roll. You could get a “1” on the very first roll in either situation, or you could go a hundred rolls with never getting a “1”. How many sides the die has is hugely significant.
Getting vaccinated and staying up to date on boosters has a huge impact on the number of sides on the die.
With omicron, if you are unvaccinated, you are 5 times as likely to be infected as someone that is vaccinated and boosted. You are 3 times as likely to be infected as someone who has completed just their initial vaccination series. Being vaccinated and boosted is a multiplier for the number of sides to your die. One or both parties being masked also multiplies the number of sides of the die, as does having higher quality masks. The more sides you can add to the die, the lower your chances of rolling a “1”.
Likewise, being vaccinated and boosted multiplies the number of sides on your “severity of outcomes” die. Underlying conditions can reduce the number of sides.
There is also a dice roll element to how much virus the infected person is shedding at any given time. I’m not sure they have data yet on how much being vaccinated and/or boosted impacts viral shred with omicron.
There were somewhat mixed results in the studies on earlier variants which would also have been pre-boosters, but I think the most common result was a similar peak viral load regardless of vaccination status. The primary advantage was the lower odds of being infected in the first place. However, I believe the other common finding was that those vaccinated peaked quicker in viral load, so would have less cumulative viral shed over the course of the infection.
I suspect everyone else’s vaccination status is likely playing the most significant part in the risk analysis, though.
This seemed related. From YLE. See the second bullet point in particular.
Viral load isn’t the same thing as infectious load, though
All the previous studies (except the U.K. report) analyzed “viral load” or the number of virus particles because it’s the easiest to measure for a quick turnaround study. However, and importantly, the number of viral particles does not equal the number of infectious particles. And the latter is what we are truly interested to answer: Are we infectious?
The final “real world” study was conducted in Switzerland among 384 symptomatic individuals at a community testing center, who were tested during the first five days of symptoms. The goal was to examine the relationship between viral load (measured by PCR) and contagiousness (measured by lab experiments). What did they find?
The precise viral level by PCR was not a great predictor of infectiousness—it was a modest 31% correlation. This is okay, but certainly not fantastic.
The number of infectious particles was lower among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated people.
Omicron was not substantially different from Delta, either in terms of viral load or contagiousness. In other words, we need to look elsewhere to understand Omicron’s mysteriously high contagiousness.
I agree. It does bother me to use “both sides” with this though. I see it as more of a spectrum that depends on one’s specific circumstances, weight placed on hard science vs soft sciences, views on caution and risk, and views on individualism and collectivism. There are a lot of nooks and crannies along that spectrum with all those variables for people to fall without being firmly on a “side.”
Yes, this is tricky, and a problem larger than covid in my opinion. It’s hard not to sound condescending when trying to share information with someone on a sensitive topic, and hard not to take it as condescending when on the other end. The media and the extremes found on twitter don’t really help with this and add fuel for division. Not all of the unvaccinated are dumb or reckless, and not all of those using the most protective measures are living in fear or scared to get on with their lives.
I think in any conversation or relationship, it works well to let the other know you care about them, you don’t think they’re stupid, and sometimes just be willing to listen first. (And oh boy do I fail at doing this more than I want to admit.) That can go a long way to building the mutual respect and trust needed to make a difference with some of these discussions rather than abruptly using data as a weapon or giving an implied (intentional or unintentional) hint of moral or intellectual superiority. The less we succumb to the “140-character troll your opponents” culture and instead build real connections and try to just be kind, this country will be better off. I’m so glad this forum is much more the latter than the former.
Speaking of YLE, her weekly update is worth taking the time to read:
A couple highlights…
Initial data on Omicron BA.2 shows it being slightly more transmissible but slightly less vaccine evasive than Omicron BA.1. Keeping an eye on the UK and South Africa for the potentially for cases in the US to bump back up.
The UK is estimating that Omicron still has roughly twice the IFR as the flu.
Note: The US generally considers the flu to have an IFR of 0.1. I’m not sure how vaccination status plays into either data set, so that could explain some of the difference.
A couple interesting Omicron tidbits I’m seeing from elsewhere…
Two different lab studies have shown Omicron infections might create better protection against Delta than Omicron. (Which is really unexpected. I’m not sure if that’s a BA.1 vs BA.2 issue? And while more protection against Delta is helpful, less protection against extremely transmissible Omicron is not.)
The difference in number of mutations between BA.2 and BA.1 is greater than the number between Alpha and the original variant. So while BA.1 and BA.2 are both part of the Omicron lineage, they are far from being twins.
Oh, and there’s this concept of “original antigenic sin” that gets raised periodically in these discussions. Basically, the hypothesis is that whatever version of the virus you’re originality exposed to, any future boost to your immunity will primarily boost against that original version and less so towards the subsequent exposures.
A similar to your situation occurred recently with an acquaintance’s family. She did wind up with a mild case from her tested-postive son. She even mentioned that here’s her house “all closed up because of how cold it’s been”. All the air just recirculating.
Thank you for writing out that detailed and helpful explanation. This was the easiest to understand explanation I have seen. I am going to share this with DH and DS18.
“We talk about misinformation…here is a prime example of why people are skeptical. I know 4 people who have had myocarditis from the vaccine. That doesn’t jive with the 0.007% above, even if that 0.007% is real.”
But what do we do about this, then? There was a point in the pandemic, pre vaccines, where I knew 47 people who’d tested positive; 8 had died. Only one of those eight was over the age of 70, and only two had serious complicating factors. (Down Syndrome, a 15 year old, and one who was severely overweight and pre-diabetic.) Does that mean I should be skeptical of the fact that Johns Hopkins was publishing a case mortality rate of 1.2%, and start worrying about misinformation? Or that I should just understand that we were really unlucky, and personal experience can be very different than the reality of a population, and figure Johns Hopkins knows what they are talking about in terms of the case mortality? (Also, btw, know three people from that time period severely disabled by Covid. All caught it between March and June 2020. Two are nurses now on permanent disability; one was 58, one in her early 40s. The third was a 33 year old PT, formerly a marathon runner, who now works a max of 4 hours a day and still gets winded climbing the three flights of stairs to her apartment.) Obviously my personal experience is very different than yours; they can both be true, and the statistics can still be true as well.
How do we get people to understand what statistics mean? One thing I’ve learned is people aren’t very good at all with “more likely” and “less likely” and what that means for individuals. They want guaranteed, absolutes, and it doesn’t really exist when we are talking about matters of health, Covid or anything else.
I am in The same situation so I know how you feel. My dad passed in 2020, and I am executrix so I did his personal and estate taxes. I had to pay on the estate taxes but he gets a refund on the personal taxes. IRS quickly deposited the checks but haven’t heard a word about the refund. The accountant said this is typical and unfortunately it will all take even longer due to Covid. I cannot close out the estate account until I get the refund. So frustrating
My husband’s family is from upstate NY and his mom is a stickler for opening windows. By that I mean like the teeny tiniest crack, and she leaves it like that all day. You could feel a cool breeze, but just barely. That’s what I mean by opening windows at this time of year; we’re in a sort of cold, sort of warmer place, but I wouldn’t go all out with opening them this time of year either. I did this when I isolated in my MBR during a 4 day wait for a covid test to come back in Nov weather. It was actually refreshing to have the fresh air smell. If it got too cold I just closed it awhile.
It’s been below freezing here for most of January, at night into the teens and single digits. Right now, it is 17 degrees. It is bitterly cold. The heating bill has been higher and would be much worse even with a window cracked, especially since our thermostat is in the area of the bedrooms.
People’s perception is going to often be their reality. Think about all of the BS that has been thrown about by all parties. For example, 2 weeks to flatten the curve, vaccines will prevent you from getting covid, Ivermectin will cure you, etc. There is also a huge financial component layered into which muddies the water even further. When you combine this all together people are going to fall back on what they know for sure which is often their own personal experiences.
There isn’t a grand fix to this. Statistics in this case isn’t so easy to explain. There are far to many caveats to accurately depict the reality. I have trouble explaining data sets in an engineering field where there are absolutes due to the laws of physics. When trying to do that with the medical field it becomes all but impossible. The study you shared had caveats in a data set of only 26.
Social media platforms can try and censor content but content will still get out there. This is 2022 not 1990 (weird it’s 2022). The ability to access information, right or wrong, is to easy. At the end of the day maybe we just come to terms with we all are going to have different risk tolerances; and you know what that’s okay.
Edited to add: I forgot about drinking you’re own bodily fluids if you have covid! Although that might not be BS.
both sides of the debate are guilty of saying the other side is uneducated. Truth is there are some very intelligent people on both sides. Comments saying we just have to educate the other side don’t work and only piss of the party involved in the conversation.
