Main point: The leaked CDC documents should not be inducing a panic, and the Provincetown MA study about transmissibility and spread among vaccinated people are being interpreted extremely irresponsibly by mainstream press.

Recently there was a New York Times report covering an internal CDC document that the Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and spreads just as easily in the vaccinated as the unvaccinated. The NYT's tweet was extremely misleading and harmful, and even the Biden White House has forcefully called them out for spreading misinformation. The internal CDC document is unpublished and is not peer reviewed. It's not meant to be taken as scientific fact, and promoting it because it confirms your priors is bad science.

Debunking "Vaccinated People can Transmit the Virus just as Easily as Unvaccinated People.

The vaccine is 75-80% effective at stopping Delta infections. Just from that a vaccinated person is going to be 1/4-1/5 as likely to transmit the virus as an unvaccinated person. If vaccinated people were as likely as unvaccinated people to get and spread COVID, the vaccine efficacy would be zero. While there is some evidence that vaccinated and unvaccinated people carry similar viral loads, that would only mean vaccinated and unvaccinated people transmit the virus at the same rates CONDITIONAL ON INFECTION. It's also important to point out that "viral load" and "transmission" are not the same thing. I don't know enough about them (not a virologist) to say one way or the other, but that's irrelevant. What matters is the vaccine makes you far less likely to get infected in the first place!

It's possible that infected vaccinated and infected unvaccinated people transmit the virus equally. We don't know. This is one study, and there are other studies of Delta suggesting that the vaccine does halve transmission rate among infected people. It's unquestionable that being vaccinated makes you much, much less likely to be infected.

If you'd like a more thorough debunking of the misinformation about vaccinated/unvaccinated transmission, I'd recommend this thread.

The Massachusetts Study is an extremely biased sample and is not remotely generalizable to the general population. You'll laugh at how un-generalizable is after reading this paragraph.

The Provincetown, Massachusetts study had a sample that was 85% male during Bear Week party weekend. No, I'm not fucking kidding. If you think that's an unbiased sample of the general vaccinated population then you think this country has a lot more fun than I do. This would be the equivalent of measuring the winter wave based on a sample taken on Miami Beach during Spring Break. Provincetown, MA also has a vaccination rate of nearly 100%. It's one of the most vaccinated places in one of the most vaccinated states in the US. That fact that only 74% of the infections were vaccinated is surprising. You think it'd be more!

If you want a deeper dive, then check out this thread: The fact that there was a massive party weekend that sent only 4 people to the hospital with 0 deaths should feel reassuring, not panic-inducing.

Much of the current panic about Delta is being driven by liberal media hounding for clicks, while Actual Experts (TM) haven't seriously updated their priors. I don't think anything has changed in the last month that should make you think differently about Delta. It's important to remember that the fight isn't over, that you should get vaccinated and get your community vaccinated. It's important to remember that there is overwhelming scientific consensus in how great these vaccines are. The delta variant is scary and things aren't looking great right now, but the recent report should not send you into a panic.

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Both are just as likely if not inevitable if you know anything about how quickly viruses mutate. The only way to stop this is a hard lockdown until it's completely gone.

    • Pezevenk [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The only way to stop this is a hard lockdown until it’s completely gone.

      There is practically no way you can do that. You can only protect countries which are mostly uninfected that way, there is no practical way to make delta disappear just by virtue of "hard lockdown" in places where it is already rampant everywhere. Maybe you can in theory, but enjoy your year long lockdown where at multiple points people flip their shit and completely negate it anyways. The only, ONLY practical solution is vaccinating as many people as possible, starting from the countries that are still waiting for their vaccines, and opening up patents so that this can happen easier. "But what if it mutates and becomes vaccine resistant" well that's not inconceivable at this point but it's most likely gonna be some time before that happens if it does, and at least 3 companies to my knowledge are already developing or testing vaccines tailored for the new variants that have emerged. The main thing people should focus on is preventing massive superspreader events, better care in hospitals, and vaccines for everyone and especially the developing world. Give vaccines to every country and then when it slows down give people massive incentives to get vaccinated. The lockdown won't work nearly fast enough, people will flip their shit because they're tired of being hermits or because they need to make a living somehow in places where there isn't adequate financial support for them any more, and start violating it, and then all you will have managed to do is piss off everyone to slow delta by, like, 5 days. I know because it's sort of what happened here with alpha, and that wasn't nearly as transmissible as delta.

        • Pezevenk [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Yeah it could have been over real soon. Australia did alright at first tho. So did Greece tbh, the first lockdown worked. The second didn't. If there is a third one, there is no way it's gonna work, at all, and at this point people will simply ignore it anyways after the first couple of weeks. Lockdowns work for the countries which are mostly uninfected, they can just control who enters and leaves the country, as well as do regional lockdowns for limited time frame when a few cases spring up. The kind of hard, country wide lockdown required to eliminate delta from a country where it is already basically everywhere is just unfeasible. A lockdown to buy some time until more people can be vaccinated in some countries however makes sense.

          Either way, we've been saying the "if only we did x when covid first started spreading" thing for more than a year now. It is what it is now. Next step is patents and international cooperation to make sure we can make new vaccines fast enough in case we get a more resistant strain in the future. It feels very stupid that every government is dragging their feet about that.