Comments by "" (@timogul) on "Bloomberg Technology"
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@BWolf00 Well it's not a huge concern if someone tests positive for covid but has no serious illness from it. 20,000 Americans died last month alone because they were unvaccinated. If we could get more people vaccinated and prevent those deaths, there's no reason not to. The purpose of the vaccine is to prevent serious illness and death.
And of course the unvaccinated have a bearing on the effectiveness of a vaccine. Again, herd immunity is a vital component.
The more unvaccinated people are in a community, the more the virus can spread within it. NO vaccine is 100% effective at preventing spread of a virus on an individual level. It is only due to the multiplicative effect of the entire community being vaccinated that the effectiveness becomes significant. This is why vaccine mandates exist, because there is no way that one single person can "do what's right for them" and become immune to viruses, it takes an entire community effort.
And yes, it is possible for herd immunity to be achieve without a vaccine, but with a disease like covid that process would involve millions of dead Americans. There is ABSOLUTELY NO POINT to taking that long and deadly route when we ALREADY have a vaccine. It's like your house is on fire, and only one room is burning, and the fire department shows up ready to put it out, and you say "no, no, let's just let the fire burn itself out. I prefer the natural solution to your 'water.'" Yes, the fire will go out eventually, but only after a LOT of completely avoidable destruction.
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@BWolf00 Ok, overly simplified example. You have a room with 20 people in it, and over the course of an evening, people will move around the room, talking with different people, such that not everyone talked to everyone else directly, but most of them talk to someone who has. And let's also imagine that we have a very rapidly acting virus that is communicable almost instantly after infection, and has a fairly high infection rate on its own, since this is just a simulation.
Now if none of them are vaccinated and one of them enters the room with an infection, he talks to a few groups of people directly over the course of the night, those people talk to others, and very quickly almost everyone in that room has been infected.
Now in a second attempt,half of the people have been vaccinated with a vaccine that is maybe 50% effective at preventing spread, one infected person enters. He talks to the same people, but of those, only 75% of them get infected (half of the vaccinated population). They mingle with other guests, but still in each group only 75% get infected, so only 75% of them spread to others. The chances are higher of at least a few people in that group never interacting with anyone who had been infected, so their own immunity is irrelevant.
Now in a third attempt, everyone is vaccinated. He talks to that first group, only half of them get infected, so when they split up to mingle, half the groups they talk to don't get any infected people. By the end of the night, a large portion of the room would never encounter a person who had the infection, because each time it "bounced" from one group to the next, there would be fewer people infected.
And now let's add "time" to the mix, let's say that since this virus is so rapidly infecting, it's also rapidly killed off, it only lasts in each person for half an hour, so people who were infectious early in the evening have long since stopped being infectious by the end. But let's also say that you can get reinfected by two hours later if you encounter the virus again. In this scenario, Group A would all be infected, same as normal, because the virus would just keep bouncing around. Group B would also likely see a lot of bouncing, less, but still a lot. Group C would see significantly less though, because each "bounce" would have less people in it, and by the time people from earlier in the night met up with people who were infected in the middle, it would have worn off from them. It's highly likely that by the end of the night, nobody in that group would have the virus active.
Of course this is a sped up version of how a virus moves around within a community, but the basic rules apply, they would just happen over months rather than hours. Worst case, the more vaccinated people you have, the less of them die. Medium and highly likely case, the higher percentage of the population is vaccinated, the less the virus bounces around, and the more people in the group never come into contact with it. Best case, this happens often enough that the virus dies out completely, with a period of no matching pairs of "actively infectious" and "able to be infected" people coming together.
This is how herd immunity functions. The more immunized people exist within a community, the less a virus spreads within it, beyond just each individual member's personal immunity.
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