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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Delta variant should not be taken lightly; there's evidence it is infecting even vaccinated adults.  To wit, Israel recently reinstated an indoor mask mandate due to a wave of new infections.  Apparently some 70% of those new infections were caused by the Delta variant, and about half of those cases affected people believed to have been fully vaccinated with Pfizer.  Sure, the vaccine may prevent hospitalization and death, but infection still is quite possible, and there are long-haul symptoms that may endure for those who are.  It seems likely that the rush to return to normalcy will bring about another waive, which could very well affect the vaccinated as well as unvaccinated.  At this point, probably best to proceed with caution, as it's clear (in this country, anyways) each of us is on our own.

[url]https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccinated-people-account-for-half-of-new-covid-19-delta-cases-in-israeli-outbreak-11624624326[/url]

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You'll note that WSJ had to correct this story because it was half of the adults who tested positive, not half of the cases. And adults were only one-half of cases overall. So 25% of people who tested positive had been vaccinated. Most were asymptomatic, and none of them developed severe disease.

If you are concerned by Israel's statistics about vaccinated people getting infected you are suffering from what's known as the "base rate fallacy". Since the Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective at preventing symptomatic infection, if you have a pool of people that is 95% vaccinated, and 5% not, you would expect [b]the same number of people[/b] to become infected in both groups. That does not mean that the vaccine does not work.

Israel's adult population isn't 95% vaccinated (more like 80%), but the 95% figure was for symptomatic infection; Pfizer did not perform routine PCR testing on vaccinated individuals in an attempt to catch asymptomatic infections. In fact, the CDC recommends against testing vaccinated people who show no symptoms either on a routine basis or in response to an exposure. The reason is that PCR tests are extremely sensitive; they want to catch infections when the viral loads are low, so that people can quarantine. But in breakthrough infections of vaccinated people, the viral loads are usually too low to transmit, and will almost always stay that low.

So if you are vaccinated, you really don't have anything to be concerned about. Breakthrough infections for fully vaccinated people aren't going to cause "long covid" except in the rarest of rare cases. You're more likely to get hit by a car or suffer any of dozens of other calamities; that's how low the risk is.

And note, that while the original tone of the coverage was that Israel was going back into lockdown in response to Delta, now the message is a bit different: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-delta-vaccine-shield-holding/2021/06/28/1ba865b2-d7e1-11eb-8c87-ad6f27918c78_story.html[/quote]

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