Haven’t finished reading this yet, but in reaction to the opening section… there’s this claim that “One meal at a crowded restaurant is enough to give even a vaccinated person hundreds of microCovids”. Which, regardless of whether it’s true, sounds like it’s probably the wrong way to think about things.
A core part of the microcovid model is that microcovids roughly add. You do a ten-microcovid activity, then a twenty microcovid activity, your total risk is roughly thirty microcovids. Put on a mask, and it cuts microcovids in half.
But with a vaccine, I’d expect the risk to be highly correlated—i.e. how-well-the-vaccine-worked varies from person to person, but it’s fixed for a given person. If that’s true, then eating in a crowded restaurant a hundred times is a lot less than 100x the risk of eating in a crowded restaurant once. My first million not-vaccine-adjusted microcovids are effectively an experiment to find out how well the vaccine worked for me specifically. If it worked well (i.e. I don’t get covid), then the next million exposures are actually much-less-risky.
John and I chatted about this for a bit. We agreed that this is technically true but only of practical significance if you expect to get very large number of microCovids anyway. If you’re someone who can control your exposure, it might not be worth the price of information to find out whether your vaccine worked 100%.
Neat analogy: you’re playing 100-chamber Russian roulette while wearing head armor that is either impervious to bullets or not. If you’re definitely going to pull the trigger 70 times, then you might as well pull more now. You’ll either die or find out you’re impervious either way. If you have a choice of how many pulls, you might still want to keep it to a minimum, say <10, and never be sure whether your armor works or not.
Seems to be of great practical significance to me. If there’s a decent chance that I could return completely to unlimited degrees of interpersonal close contact and have only a 1⁄20 − 1⁄100 chance of getting symptomatic Covid with unlimited amounts of exposure, even if I would get covid many times over while unvaccinated, I’d be quite tempted to do it. If returning to that level of exposure would mean that I’d almost inevitably get Covid eventually, I’d be much more likely to play it safe for at least a few months more and see where things go with infection rates and new variants.
Haven’t finished reading this yet, but in reaction to the opening section… there’s this claim that “One meal at a crowded restaurant is enough to give even a vaccinated person hundreds of microCovids”. Which, regardless of whether it’s true, sounds like it’s probably the wrong way to think about things.
A core part of the microcovid model is that microcovids roughly add. You do a ten-microcovid activity, then a twenty microcovid activity, your total risk is roughly thirty microcovids. Put on a mask, and it cuts microcovids in half.
But with a vaccine, I’d expect the risk to be highly correlated—i.e. how-well-the-vaccine-worked varies from person to person, but it’s fixed for a given person. If that’s true, then eating in a crowded restaurant a hundred times is a lot less than 100x the risk of eating in a crowded restaurant once. My first million not-vaccine-adjusted microcovids are effectively an experiment to find out how well the vaccine worked for me specifically. If it worked well (i.e. I don’t get covid), then the next million exposures are actually much-less-risky.
John and I chatted about this for a bit. We agreed that this is technically true but only of practical significance if you expect to get very large number of microCovids anyway. If you’re someone who can control your exposure, it might not be worth the price of information to find out whether your vaccine worked 100%.
Neat analogy: you’re playing 100-chamber Russian roulette while wearing head armor that is either impervious to bullets or not. If you’re definitely going to pull the trigger 70 times, then you might as well pull more now. You’ll either die or find out you’re impervious either way. If you have a choice of how many pulls, you might still want to keep it to a minimum, say <10, and never be sure whether your armor works or not.
Seems to be of great practical significance to me. If there’s a decent chance that I could return completely to unlimited degrees of interpersonal close contact and have only a 1⁄20 − 1⁄100 chance of getting symptomatic Covid with unlimited amounts of exposure, even if I would get covid many times over while unvaccinated, I’d be quite tempted to do it. If returning to that level of exposure would mean that I’d almost inevitably get Covid eventually, I’d be much more likely to play it safe for at least a few months more and see where things go with infection rates and new variants.