One thing that occurred to me is that the difference might be smaller than it looks. “Infected” really means “infected enough that it spreads to the nasal mucosa, OR spraying enough virus from the lungs to leave some lying around there, so that we can catch it on a swab.” In reality, “infection” is probably not a sharp line the way we try to draw it; the sharp line is “infected enough that we can see it.”
Separate from that, this also seems to line up somewhat with my understanding about antibodies vs T-cells—that antibodies respond faster but also fade faster, and so the results we see would be consistent with T-cell immunity being ~perfect, antibody immunity fading with time, and a 3% rate of nonresponse to the vaccine which doesn’t successfully produce either kind of immunity.
This model would seem to imply that antibodies are redundant, if T-cells always catch things that slip through. I could imagine some explanations for that: perhaps covid is unusual in that; or perhaps the extra evolutionary benefit of being sick for less time is sufficient to “pay for it”; or the benefit of reducing the rate of passing diseases on to close relatives.
One thing that occurred to me is that the difference might be smaller than it looks. “Infected” really means “infected enough that it spreads to the nasal mucosa, OR spraying enough virus from the lungs to leave some lying around there, so that we can catch it on a swab.” In reality, “infection” is probably not a sharp line the way we try to draw it; the sharp line is “infected enough that we can see it.”
Separate from that, this also seems to line up somewhat with my understanding about antibodies vs T-cells—that antibodies respond faster but also fade faster, and so the results we see would be consistent with T-cell immunity being ~perfect, antibody immunity fading with time, and a 3% rate of nonresponse to the vaccine which doesn’t successfully produce either kind of immunity.
This model would seem to imply that antibodies are redundant, if T-cells always catch things that slip through. I could imagine some explanations for that: perhaps covid is unusual in that; or perhaps the extra evolutionary benefit of being sick for less time is sufficient to “pay for it”; or the benefit of reducing the rate of passing diseases on to close relatives.