DuckQueue t1_j2wpnl4 wrote on January 4, 2023 at 2:04 PM

Reply to comment by SnooPuppers1978 in COVID-19 vaccines, prior infection reduce transmission of Omicron: Vaccination and boosting, especially when recent, helped to limit the spread of COVID-19 in prisons during the first Omicron wave, according to researchers that examined transmission between people living in the same prison cell. by lolfuys

> It's just few generations more.

Like... twice as many. Yes, not multiple orders of magnitude but still enough to make a huge difference, especially when you account for the other factors I mentioned.

And that still wouldn't account for how diseases actually spread in real populations, where not everyone has an equal chance of being exposed to any given other person. There's a reason actual models of the spread of disease are much more complex than the model you're providing. And a reason why observational estimates of the R0 for COVID haven't been appreciably declining over time.

SnooPuppers1978 t1_j2wqqe5 wrote on January 4, 2023 at 2:12 PM

Yes, but there's also factors to the other side. As the OP above mentioned people will adapt their behaviour depending on how they perceive the risk for themselves. If people have vaccinated and perceive the risk as lower, they will be more likely to go out. If there's a huge wave currently ongoing, people will be less likely to go out. If there's little threat, people will go out more likely, making the likelihood of new wave to start higher. Risk behaviour will be another balancing factor that will make the wave smooth out whether you have the intervention or not. If people see death around them, they get scared and start to avoid, if people see no danger, they will increase their risk behaviour. Behaviour will influence the R0 so much. Imagine being in contact with 50% fewer people than you were previously. That would be halving the R.

So in the end with all those factors together, unless the efficacy is enough to create herd immunity it's going to be waves with not much differing total amount of cases. Efficacy has to be enough for herd immunity or very close to that, otherwise yeah, it would just be something like that.

Main effect will be for risk groups for whom the risk of the disease will be much lower in terms of hospitalisations and death thanks to their immune systems being prepared from the vaccine. And in addition less overload on hospitals due to flattening the curve, but in the end total amount of infections are not going to be magnitudes away due to inherent characteristics of this virus.

DuckQueue t1_j2ws3t1 wrote on January 4, 2023 at 2:23 PM

> So in the end with all those factors together, unless the efficacy is enough to create herd immunity it's going to be waves with not much differing total amount of cases.

You seem to be assuming that the disease will exhaust itself and run out of people to infect, but as the real world shows, that isn't generally how infectious diseases - especially ones this effective at escaping the immune system - work.

It's only meaningful to talk about the total number of cases up to a given point in time - if you're trying to talk about the total where the number of new infections permamently drops to 0 you're talking about circumstances that might apply to some newly-arising zoonotic diseases but decidedly does not apply to the disease we're talking about.

SnooPuppers1978 t1_j2wsv97 wrote on January 4, 2023 at 2:28 PM

> You seem to be assuming that the disease will exhaust itself and run out of people to infect

For certain amount of time, hence the waves. There will be smaller amount of population still having the virus, until the virus mutates or immunity wanes enough after which it will start all over again.

After certain amount of time like a year or two years, the total cases amount would be similar in terms of magnitude. They won't be 10x based on 22% efficacy.

Because you were suggesting 7k vs 1 million which is different in magnitudes.

I'm suggesting that difference would probably be less than 2x after 2 years for example. And if I had to guess it would probably be something like 25% difference similarly, if we tried to make our model more comprehensive.