No, sorry. I guess that was unclear. I'm talking about human resistance. Not vaccine tolerance/avoidance on the part of the virus.

I'm talking about basic psychology and how it plays out socially and politically, particularly in our rebellious, anti-authoritarian culture.

The second they started mandating vaccines, they threatened the whole damn business of vaccines long-term. And the payments/bribes that preceded the mandates were hardly better. Public trust in health experts is cratering, if you haven't noticed. Your suggestions will make them worse.

And if you haven't noticed, there's not an epidemiologist left out there who believes we can eliminate covid or even reach a herd immunity where it will functionally be absent (like measles). That ship has long sailed. Covid is endemic. It's going to circulate perpetually as another seasonal respiratory virus, sadly joining the flu as an annual killer of tens of thousands (or more) elderly. Bad news, yeah, but them's the facts at this point. Getting more authoritarian and draconian is not only futile, but is and will be *EXTREMELY COSTLY* to public health. Look around, covid transits the globe rapidly, and the vaccines are not durable enough to stop transmission. Even if they were, we can't even get sufficient vaccination levels in most western countries at this point, never mind Africa and SE Asia and more.
Even Australia is starting to talk about giving up its fanciful notion of zero covid.

We need to start undoing the damage done to public trust in health experts and vaccines, not double down on the policies driving that distrust.

A significant portion of ICU visits are accidents though, so your "depending on prior health" qualifier is prescient.

Serious COVID leading to ICU preselects a subset of ICU patients who have serious comorbidities (obesity, diabetes, CVD, etc). These struggle with recovery much more. I would not be terribly surprised to find that ICU patients in the cohort are typically closer to the 52%. Serious covid without poor prior health happens, yes, but it is quite rare.

The real question is whether COVID is worse for equally unhealthy patients than other respiratory diseases, not is it worse than accidents or negative covid patients or the like. What matters is whether COVID is worse than it's comparable diseases (flu, other coronaviruses, etc) for unhealthy people.

That said, i would not be surprised if it is. Especially when it becomes much more of an endothelial infection than an upper respiratory one, covid can turn nasty on some people.

That headline implies to readers "most". It's a word you have got to distrust in journalism.
It's a meaningless subjective word that pretends to mathematical/statistical relevance.
This could be 5 people or 500,000 or 50% and readers will interpret it according to their irrational fears.

I despise this kind of headline. The author should be ashamed.

Such immune-compromised people absolutely need protection. But they always do. From every damn flu and coronavirus already out there for years.

One of my mother's good friends is immune-compromised, basically permanently. She always had to take precautions in public before covid and avoid sick people and make sure people in her life knew to be extra-cautious themselves. Someone in my mom's house is sick? Ok, she cancels plans with her friend. That's just how it's done. And you know what? That's all she asks or wants. She doesn't expect or even want everyone else to upend their normal lives just so she live exactly like everyone else does.

This exactly. Covid is not going away. You will get infected eventually. Choose how you want to face it. And leave everyone else the same choice.

We're not in an emergency anymore. This is an endemic virus. Time to get your jab and get on with life. We have much improved treatments and even more crucial medications imminent. The hospitals are not overwhelmed, and with all the mandate-firings from them in my area, i will no longer put chief blame on the virus or the unvaccinated if they start to get stressed. They've had time to prepare and largely done the opposite of that. So much stupid policy going on and it's just chasing people away from the vaccines even faster...

Time to shut up. Stop mandating masks and jabs. Just educate and offer the jabs free.

Bullshit. Mandates are a short term fix that cause long-term problems. You're not doing the cost benefit analysis on this. If this virus lacked good treatments, still killed more than .5% of people, or at least more than 0.01% of healthy/young people, then maybe force would be justified.

But covid-19? At this point? No. Not even close. These mandates are breeding resistance, spreading misinformation far faster than it would otherwise, and setting back the whole fucking progress of public trust in vaccines and health officials. And don't even get me started on the fact that mandates aren't making exemptions for covid recovered people. Short-sighted idiocy! Oh, and firing healthcare workers in an already overstressed system during a pandemic? Mad. Just bonkers. Y'all can't do math or science if you're backing these vaccine mandates.

"It wrecks you"? Not always, sorry. Statistics are that 80% of unvaccinated covid infections are mild to moderate. A bad cold. That actually fits pretty well among friends and family who've had it, even discounting the huge influence of age. I tracked people i knew out of curiosity. I have a sample size of about 35 people now. But they match the stats pretty well. About 3 out of 5 were totally normal again in a week or two. About 1 out of 5 would hardly have noticed their mild sniffles but for testing (including my 72 yr old mother in law), About 4 in 5 were fine in a few weeks, save maybe a slow recovery of smell/taste. And about 1 in 5 of my friends/family had a really rough go, one had weird covid bruising and all sorts of unpleasantness, one had 6+ weeks to feeling normal, and one nearly died, having to be on respirator and all.

But i absolutely agree that you need to be healthy to deal well. Of the 3 nasty cases, only one has anything like a healthy body/lifestyle, save for her autoimmune issues, which i think is why she got weird covid symptoms. And my not-overweight, not-vit-d-insufficient, cancer-patient mother in law wouldn't have known she got covid if not for the multiple positive PCR tests.

It can't be said enough:
Sleep 7-9 hrs nightly.
Exercise 30+ minutes, 3-6 times a week.
Easy on the alcohol and sugar.
Supplement Vit D and consider getting your levels tested.

Covid is endemic. It's not going away. Vaccinated or not, you are eventually going to get a sufficient exposure to give it a foothold in your system. Get yourself damn ready for it. If you haven't already had covid and especially if you have any high risk factors (elderly or obese) get vaccinated. Boosters optional, honestly. This is a part of life now. Get jabbed, get healthy, and stop freaking out. That's unhealthy too.

Not to mention that to get severe covid as someone under 65, you pretty much have to have higher susceptibility to it in the first place, whether due to your chronic health issues, or just do to some genetic weakness to it that you have.

Bottom line, if this study doesn't compare apples to apples (same age to same age, same comorbidities to same comorbidities), then it's telling us nothing useful.

Sure, and if you want to quibble, you can quibble about the govt changing their definitions of "vaccine" or whether the covid vaccines are technically vaccines or gene therapies or some pedantic semantic argument like that.

The public (and media) in America use "flu shot" and "covid vaccine" right now. And the distinction is meaningful to us, because "vaccines" here are infrequent and mostly childhood, long-term effective, but we all know the flu shots are annual (necessarily). So with the covid "vaccines" needing to be regular, not long-term, i think it's appropriate to adapt the common parlance to match.

All of the variants are minimally effective to most humans once you've been exposed to one of them either naturally or via a "covid shot". And yeah, they no longer deserve the long-term implications of the title 'vaccine'.

Elderly and other frail folks need to accept that they'll need annual (at least) "covid shots" to go with their "flu shot". The rest of us can get our covid shots too if we want to avoid the hassle of the mild re-infection symptoms, or be like those who avoid flu shots too.

Time to stop freaking out folks. Covid is with us for good, and once you get a jab or a case of it, it's no longer a notable threat to the healthy. Covid shots are too, and no, they do not need to be mandated any more heavily than flu shots are.

It could not be more clear that these are "covid shots" just like we have "flu shots". Because even if they are in principle like a vaccine, they do not give lasting immunity that can be expected to hold up for years against natural variations of this coronavirus. If you want to prevent infection, you will need updated shots at least annually.

"still only impacted 5% of the human race"

Eh... not likely. There's over 262 million cases documented. Last time i looked at estimates from seroprevalence studies, they indicated actual cases are 3 to 20 times the number of documented cases. And those studies were in Western countries. I would expect even higher seroprevalence in Africa, SE Asia, and S. America. But even if we take that range, that's 10% to 66% who were directly impacted. Then you have to add in the vaccinated, as that definitely counts as impact for the point i was making, even if it's indirect. At nearly 8 billion doses administered, we're doing well. To be generous, we can count just the "fully vaccinated", which are now nearly 43% of the planet. Assuming even distribution of cases between vaccinated and unvaccinated (again, very generous, since the unvaccinated are typically prone to behaviors that put them at higher risk of exposure too), and we can say with 43% vaccinated and 10-66% infected overall, there are at least 51% who have "been impacted", with the real number probably being under 20% who have no immune exposure to SARS-Cov-2 at this point (that's with 20x seroprevalence among the unvaccinated).

And since a substantial portion of the unvaccinated are quite young (especially children) and most of the lower-vaccination countries also have fewer elderly, much lower obesity, and spend more time active and outdoors (and thus more sufficient Vit D levels), the rates of severe disease amongst them have been and should continue to be much lower than amongst the indoor, sedentary, fat, elderly rich countries. And that's not even to mention how much our treatment protocols have improved (death rate for the hospitalized is half what it was a year ago), nor all the new medicines and treatments in the pipeline.

I don't wonder if we're as ignorant either. I know we're not. Covid-19 was never even close to the Spanish Flu in threat. Our vaccine game is far, far better than a century ago. Our ability to treat disease and develop medicines is far, far better too. Stop scaring people needlessly.

We truly do have this nasty bug well in hand. And i'll add that we also now have massive amounts of data showing that travel bans, lockdowns, and even mask mandates (not masks, but the mandating of them) are problematic and dubious. They can have short term benefits, but they also have long term costs, and the use of them is coming up in the deficit repeatedly as it's being studied now. I think one of the things we've learned, is that the only reliable, one-size-fits-all pandemic tools (especially for respiratory viruses) are cheap/fast/convenient/widespread testing, rapid vaccine development, and calm public education. Panic and fear are unhealthy for people and economies. Blanket lockdowns and travel bans and mask mandates are merely delaying the inevitable, arguably useful before you have widespread testing ready, but pointless after that. In fact, they can be counter-productive as they work best with the willing. The unwilling will find ways to subvert them, and overuse of them creates more of the unwilling and undermines trust in health experts.

Actually, it's pretty tired of most of us. The levels of natural and/or vaccine immunity out there are never going to be enough to stop circulation and mild breakthrough/re-infections, but there's less people every day for it to get really excited about.

Boy would that make my day!

76% of Americans already have one shot. Estimates are that 50% of Americans have been infected and have natural immunity. If you assume the unvaccinated and vaccinated are equally likely to have had COVID (which is easily seen to be false), then we have 88% who are to have sufficient immunity to be statistically protected from severe COVID.

Of the remaining totally unprotected 12%, we will for now assume an even age distribution (false, seniors have far, far higher vaccination rates) so that we can use the rough estimate that 1% of COVID patients are actually hospitalized for COVID. This number is probably lower due to lack of distinction between hospitalized-for-covid and hospitalized-with-covid, but let's run with it. We will also run with the notion that every one of them will be exposed to COVID in the next couple years, since most epidemiologists agree COVID is absolutely not going away.

That leaves us with about 0.12% of America who are unprotected from COVID hospitalization. 1 in 800 people, or about 436,000 people in a country with over 700,000 hospital beds. Now, right now we are at 75% utilization of our hospital beds nationally, with obvious dramatic regional differences. But let's assume a tenth of those unprotected Americans are additionally hospitalized for six weeks (a generous and too-high estimate) each for the next year and a half, and we would still only use an addition 7% of our beds. But COVID patient protocols are really strict right now, so let's call that 12% of capacity to be generous again.

That means we'll run about 87% hospital capacity for the next year or so, with dramatic regional differences as our ever-lower covid spikes continue every 4-6 months from here on. And that's being generous on hospitalization use, length-of-stays, past-case rate of the unvaccinated, and more. The only place i underestimated instead of overestimated was on breakthrough COVID hospitalizations. Which is not a favorite thing of the vaccine mandate fans to admit, so i left it out.

So my point in all this math, quite simply, is to demonstrate that we don't need to wait for 100% vaccination to open up. That's dumb. We can handle what damage COVID can do now, and overwhelmingly the ones who will suffer from opening up made their choice to refuse the clear protection of vaccination. So be it. We have the resources to treat them from here out.

Delta is the end. Time to stop mandates, stop lockdowns, stop forcing people to comply. The compliant have done the right thing. Making them wait for the non-compliant to change their behavior is utterly unfair. And forcing the non-compliant to change will only become increasingly costly and morally dubious. Let them have their way. No more mask mandates (wise people will still wear them in high-risk situations). No more vaccine mandates (don't get me started on the stupidity of firing unvaccinated healthcare workers who were essential thru the pandemic). No more.

The pandemic is over. Yes, many will still die. That's on them, and it's not more than we can handle anymore. COVID is now endemic. The numbers are very clear on this.