This doesn’t address the exact question you asked, but I think it’s important to say. (But it’s 1 AM, so I’m not going to say it very well.)
(I’m largely using the general ‘you’ here rather than specifically calling out OP.)
COVID has put us in a state of fear that doesn’t always respond appropriately to new data. It has always been true that you can get sick from being around other people. In fact, it’s always been true that you can contract an as-yet-uncurable chronic disease from being around other people.
Is your post-vaccination risk of contracting long COVID significantly higher than that baseline risk? For that matter, what actions do you take every day that have a higher risk of death than contracting COVID does? Do you drive?
How much do you value activities like indoor dining, or concerts? If you didn’t really care about going to restaurants or concerts in the first place, then sure, maybe it’s costless to continue avoiding them. But if concerts are one of the things you enjoy most in the world, that’s a magnitude of sacrifice to your fear that I don’t think it makes sense to continue making post-vaccination.
My model is that risk of getting seriously ill from COVID for someone in my demographic, after full vaccination, is zero for all practical purposes. And my point here is, there have always been viscerally terrifying tail risks, like splitting your lip and having your face devoured by flesh-eating bacteria, but fear of flesh-eating bacteria doesn’t control your life. You might get seriously injured in a car accident, but if you live somewhere where cars are an everyday necessity, you still drive.
So yes, maybe there is some not-exactly-zero probability of contracting COVID and becoming chronically ill post-vaccination. But going by all of the quantitative models I’ve internalized over the past 15 months, that probability is still very close to zero, and in any case nowhere near high enough that you should continue avoiding activities because of it.
You’re probably just avoiding activities because you’ve become so used to it, and now you’re putting an unreasonably high burden of proof on the question of whether you should do things that used to seem normal to you. Like, you used to do certain things, then you stopped doing them because of COVID. Now the threat of COVID has been neutralized by the vaccine, so logically you should go back to your Before Times state. But your system 1 doesn’t really get this, because it’s settled into a new normal where every activity is by default unsafe until proven otherwise. Consider that probably, now that you’re vaccinated, all activities are almost exactly as safe as they were before COVID.
As I said this was not particularly well-argued. But I hope I got across the general point.
This doesn’t address the exact question you asked, but I think it’s important to say. (But it’s 1 AM, so I’m not going to say it very well.)
(I’m largely using the general ‘you’ here rather than specifically calling out OP.)
COVID has put us in a state of fear that doesn’t always respond appropriately to new data. It has always been true that you can get sick from being around other people. In fact, it’s always been true that you can contract an as-yet-uncurable chronic disease from being around other people.
Is your post-vaccination risk of contracting long COVID significantly higher than that baseline risk? For that matter, what actions do you take every day that have a higher risk of death than contracting COVID does? Do you drive?
How much do you value activities like indoor dining, or concerts? If you didn’t really care about going to restaurants or concerts in the first place, then sure, maybe it’s costless to continue avoiding them. But if concerts are one of the things you enjoy most in the world, that’s a magnitude of sacrifice to your fear that I don’t think it makes sense to continue making post-vaccination.
My model is that risk of getting seriously ill from COVID for someone in my demographic, after full vaccination, is zero for all practical purposes. And my point here is, there have always been viscerally terrifying tail risks, like splitting your lip and having your face devoured by flesh-eating bacteria, but fear of flesh-eating bacteria doesn’t control your life. You might get seriously injured in a car accident, but if you live somewhere where cars are an everyday necessity, you still drive.
So yes, maybe there is some not-exactly-zero probability of contracting COVID and becoming chronically ill post-vaccination. But going by all of the quantitative models I’ve internalized over the past 15 months, that probability is still very close to zero, and in any case nowhere near high enough that you should continue avoiding activities because of it.
You’re probably just avoiding activities because you’ve become so used to it, and now you’re putting an unreasonably high burden of proof on the question of whether you should do things that used to seem normal to you. Like, you used to do certain things, then you stopped doing them because of COVID. Now the threat of COVID has been neutralized by the vaccine, so logically you should go back to your Before Times state. But your system 1 doesn’t really get this, because it’s settled into a new normal where every activity is by default unsafe until proven otherwise. Consider that probably, now that you’re vaccinated, all activities are almost exactly as safe as they were before COVID.
As I said this was not particularly well-argued. But I hope I got across the general point.