I continue to be highly skeptical of the idea that protection against infection declines by an order of magnitude, yet protection against hospitalization remains unchanged, which implies that the hospitalization rate for infections went down by an order of magnitude, and yes I’ve confirmed that such things are physically possible but it’s still downright bizarre.
I’m thinking of it like, vaccination builds you an awesome EMP gun to repel the invading robot army. But after a couple months if no robots have ever shown up at my fortress, c’mon, I’m not realistically gonna keep the anti-robot EMP gun charged and manned on my roof turret 24⁄7, instead I’m obviously going to bring it down to the basement armory for storage.
Then when the robots do come, it’ll take a few minutes for me to bring the gun back up to the roof and mount it to the turret. And in those few minutes, maybe the robots will zap their way through some of my defenses at the far periphery of the fortress, like maybe my first layer or two of barbed wire and landmines. But then once my EMP gun is mounted on the roof turret, oh man, those robots are toast.
Right, I get that, but this is saying that with the death robots you fend off the attack 97% of the time, but without the death robots you also fend off the attack 97% of the time, so there were no cases where not having the death robots ready to go mattered, you always either had enough time without the robots OR the robots wouldn’t have been enough anyway, and I’m kinda huh?
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.
More like—you have a bunch of autofactories that build swarms of your own death robots that can absolutely decimate the attackers, but you only keep the actual death robots around manning your trenches for a few months before you dismantle them for parts. But the templates are still on file, so when the enemy horde comes crashing in, it takes you a few hours to rebuild your own death robot army from the template and decimate the attackers.
I’m thinking of it like, vaccination builds you an awesome EMP gun to repel the invading robot army. But after a couple months if no robots have ever shown up at my fortress, c’mon, I’m not realistically gonna keep the anti-robot EMP gun charged and manned on my roof turret 24⁄7, instead I’m obviously going to bring it down to the basement armory for storage.
Then when the robots do come, it’ll take a few minutes for me to bring the gun back up to the roof and mount it to the turret. And in those few minutes, maybe the robots will zap their way through some of my defenses at the far periphery of the fortress, like maybe my first layer or two of barbed wire and landmines. But then once my EMP gun is mounted on the roof turret, oh man, those robots are toast.
Right, I get that, but this is saying that with the death robots you fend off the attack 97% of the time, but without the death robots you also fend off the attack 97% of the time, so there were no cases where not having the death robots ready to go mattered, you always either had enough time without the robots OR the robots wouldn’t have been enough anyway, and I’m kinda huh?
Um, maybe 3% of the time the defense deathbots have a design defect, and then it doesn’t matter whether they’re ready earlier vs later???
But yeah OK I get where you’re coming from now. (Not an expert.)
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.
More like—you have a bunch of autofactories that build swarms of your own death robots that can absolutely decimate the attackers, but you only keep the actual death robots around manning your trenches for a few months before you dismantle them for parts. But the templates are still on file, so when the enemy horde comes crashing in, it takes you a few hours to rebuild your own death robot army from the template and decimate the attackers.
OMG this blog needs more death robots. And xkcd needs to do a cartoon about this pleeeeeeeeez
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