If you can't get enough qualified nurses to safely treat patients during a pandemic, get plague rats to at least take their temperatures and pulse rates while they risk killing them in their beds.
In defense of Trausti's defense of free-dumb, I gotta ask; is there evidence that COVID transmitted to a patient by a vaccinated plague rat is any less severe than COVID transmitted by an un-vaccinated plague rat?
I have seen it implied that the viral load might be less, but haven't seen or heard of any studies that reached that definitive conclusion.
(If I were a conservo, I would take the fact that I haven't seen such a thing as strong evidence that no such thing exists. But here, I am really asking the question - does it exist?)
The viral load for a vaccinated person with Covid is typically markedly less than for an unvaccinated person, so the probability of the vaccinated person transmitting the virus to another person (ceteris paribus) is much lower. However, the severity of the disease if contracted is a function of the vaccination status of the new host.
The Covid vaccine does a very good (but not perfect) job of preventing severe disease in vaccinated individuals; And a fair job in reducing the rate of transmission (R
e) between vaccinated hosts and the susceptible community.
From an epidemiological perspective, any reduction in R
e is a good thing; R
e is simply the number of people who, on average, are infected by the disease by each infectious person. Where an unprotected population is exposed to Covid delta by an unvaccinated host:
R
e = R
0 = between 6 and 8
The objective is to get R
e < 1, as at that point the disease ceases to propagate in the community.
Vaccination reduces R
e; Wearing masks reduces R
e; Distancing reduces R
e; Quarantines and isolation (even for oy a part of the infectious period) reduces R
e.
And the effect on R
e of various measures accumulates. With vaccination alone, you need 1-(1/R
e) of the population to be vaccinated in order to prevent spread, so for an R
0 of 8, you need 7/8 (87.5%) of the vector population to have the jab. By also applying other measures, such as those listed above, you can reduce R
e below 1 with a smaller vaccination takeup amongst the vector population.
In the case of Covid, the vector population is the entire population, and may include persons ineligible for the vaccine; For example, in Australia vaccination is only approved for people 16 years of age and above, so to achieve an 87.5% vaccination rate would be impossible, as around 14% of Australians are currently too young to vaccinate. Obviously it would therefore be necessary to also vaccinate some of this age cohort to prevent outbreaks if all other restrictions were removed.
Effective use of non-vaccination measures
alongside widespread vaccination will likely be the way in which Covid is defeated; The higher the vaccination rate in a population, the fewer and less stringent those additional measures will need to be.
And that's why, as the covidiots keep asking, "If the vaccines work, why are they saying we still need to wear masks?"
