Coronavirus - the new pandemic

[TGLS]

But when vaccination is mandatory for schoolchildren

It's a public health measure. The goal is to manage hospitalizations. Perfect immunity and/or transmissibility prevention, while desirable, not having them doesn't mean a vaccination is useless.

[Frustration]

Kids have problems with the virus only extraordinarily rarely. What was the point of vaccinating them, again?

[sayla0079]

Because they can still be carriers and pass it to other people.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

It's actually not ineffective against the spread.

Before Omicron the vaccine rendered you 4x less likely to get the virus. After Omicron it became 3x.

It even says so on the wikipedia page:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracke ... ine-status

[Frustration]

Because they can still be carriers and pass it to other people.

The vaccines don't change that. People everywhere I go act and speak as though the vaccines prevented, or at least meaningfully reduced, transmission rates. THEY DO NOT.

[sayla0079]

I didn't say they did. What I meant is let's say for example a kid gets vaccinated then they have fewer/weaker symptoms if they catch it, which means fewer or weaker symptoms transfer to other people.

Note I am not a medical student so I am going by the assumption. If someone in here is trained medically feel free to correct me.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I'm not sure what's difficult to understand about this:

[Madner Kami]

I didn't say they did. What I meant is let's say for example a kid gets vaccinated then they have fewer/weaker symptoms if they catch it, which means fewer or weaker symptoms transfer to other people.

Note I am not a medical student so I am going by the assumption. If someone in here is trained medically feel free to correct me.

That's not how it works. Symptoms are the expression of the damage caused by the viral matter appropriating your body's cells for replication and the immune response of your body (e.g. inflammation, coughing, increased mucus production and so on). You do not "transmit symptoms", what you transmit is the virus itself, which is basically just a strand of RNA wrapped in a protein shell (which you, for example, cough or sneeze out, along with the side-products of the replication and immuno-reaction).

The trick with vaccination is, that your body is much more effective at recognizing and reacting to an infection before it spreads far in your body, which means less damage to your body, which results in less symptoms. You can still be infected, will still be infected, but thanks to the quick reaction of the immune-system, you'll not suffer much or any noticible damage, have no symptoms, not be sick.
In some cases the immune-reaction is so effective, that you are not going to transmit any viral matter or only extremely weakened viral matter and thus be not infectious. In other cases, the immune-reaction is effective enough that you are not going to be sick, yet still transmit effective viral matter.

But, and that's the thing, even if you are still infectious, if your body is much more effective at combating the disease, it means you'll be sick for less time and thus have less opportunity to spread effective viral matter. You'll also produce less viral matter that can be transmitted in the first place and thanks to the absence of some symptoms, the viral matter will have less means to transmit. You'll spread much more viral matter by coughing and sneezing, for example, than you do by simply inhaling and exhaling.
So, overall, if you are vaccinated and you get reinfected and still end up being infectious, everyone is better off, because you spread less infectious matter, than that unvaccinated twat who runs through the store coughing, sneezing and touching everything.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Right. It's a big sliding scale where every personal circumstance tends to matter.

I was under the impression that a lot of people testing positive weren't cognizant of anyone coughing/sneezing on them. A lot of the understanding of how one got infected seemed to be simply knowing that you had contact with someone who turned out to be sick, thus explaining your own positive test result. After all, I'm sure people got the memo pretty immediately that you should stay tf away from anybody coughing, especially if they don't know why they're coughing.

[Madner Kami]

I was under the impression that a lot of people testing positive weren't cognizant of anyone coughing/sneezing on them.

How many people coughed and sneezed on you, when you last had a common cold? Coughing and sneezing increases the amount of infected bodily fluid execreted into the air and spreads it further than the simple ever-present water droplets we exhale, due to the usually considerably more violent way of expelling that matter from your body. Just breathing the same air in can be enough to get infected. Touching a surface that someone exhaled into the vague direction of can be enough to get infected.