I've heard of such stories, and also the "reverse".....i.e. people getting the vacc. and then getting sick anyways.....though it seems to be rare.

Well, the vaccines are said to be something like 90% effective, provided that there's been enough time for the body to generate enough antibodies (seems to be 2 weeks after the second dose).

Around a couple weeks ago, there was an incident where, out of around something like 500+ people, of whom I assume most got the vaccine already, 3 of them tested positive for COVID-19. (Being a bit vague here because the particular event is very political and any serious discussion of it would clearly violate the "no politics" rule.)

There are two prescribed shots. There's the first injection, and the second one which should be 21 days apart. You are more likely to get COVID if you don't go for your second shot. One of the many problems of medicine is people not taking their drugs as prescribed (or even at all). So this is an issue that is more common than it should be.

Hello, are you from the onion? US had concentration camps before, too, and they weren't OK. You don't make camps to lock citizens in and expect things to come out OK. Also, what about Viral load, the single greatest predictor of covid fatality? That's an absolutely great way to get people killed, by keeping them in high concentrations of each other with the bug.

Vaccine uses mRNA to simulate infection, sans the mRNA necessary to replecate the RNA that replecates anything other than the protein capsid (shell). Body targets the shell. Like the real infection, it'll take 2 weeks to "go active," and, also, like real life, it'll take another 2 weeks (so a month) from initial dose for the 70-75% chance of the first dose working (this is based on the leaked emails i stumbled on: which also imply there are a lot of bad doses with a failure rate over 30% of the Pfizer vaccine in particular, but the leak conspicuously left out over half the emails which would've told me how high this probability actually was). 4 weeks, which for most people it hasn't been, yet, and tha'ts not even the whole thing. To try to vaccinate more people, they've been pushing the second dose out to 3 weeks to a month, which works exactly the same way, but, using math, you take the 25-30% falure rate and it becomes 6.25%-9% failure rate (so 90-95% after rounding) to be effective. The reason for this is that it's difficult to create the vaccine without creating alot of "dud" mRNA, due to storage, processing, etc. I wouldn't take any numbers outside of a lab seriously until over 50% of a given country is vaccinated for over 2 months.

And, yes, I would argue that the government and media has been mishandling this information intentionally to result in a higher conspiracy theory rate, so that they can say "i told you so" later, when the vaccine actually proves to be effective.

4 weeks, these damn information pushers and "fact checkers" need to learn the correct information: this new technology makes our body produce the vaccine, rather than a traditional vaccine with mercury and such (which is what antivaxxers are afraid of, so these new vaccines are actually anti-vaxxer friendly, which is why i'm actually telling people to get it). They're creating the virus' outer shell, which is what the body targets, which is also what the tests are looking for, too, IIRC.

That's mostly a problem for antibiotics. And it doesn't help that the government regulations are forcing distributers to blunder and spoil the vaccines, because people aren't able to set up correctly.

EDIT: I was wrong on the tests: they check for the RNA, not the protein shell.

Thanks for explaining some things here.

I decided, for the neanderthals on both the left and the right of this post, as well as those neutral, to do a writeup on how this works, why it matters, based on 7th grade biology, because apparently 10th grade biology wasn't completely grasped by them, and their politics clearly clouds their understanding of how this works.

Normal Cell Operation

Normally, DNA within the cell is caused to split. The method of which is not often explained in highschool, but after much research and contact with microbiologists, I was able to find out that, well, the "unzipping" of DNA is caused by chemical "nodes" along the DNA that, when they come in contact with a protein that "fits" (like a key in a lock) it causes the chemical node to change shape as part of the chemical reaction, which in turn causes the unzipping of a section of DNA, due to it being connected in such a way. From the unzipping, "mRNA" floating around ends up sliding into place, due to opposite charges attracting, then binding to other little bits of mRNA to make a strand of mRNA which is complementary to the DNA of which it attatched to. The mRNA then feeds into "ribosomes" which latch onto the single strands of mRNA, and as minor proteins (which would bind to the mRNA make connections it further feeds into the ribosome (by breaking off the fed in end) until it comes off entirely (yeah, this is a very gross oversimplification, but we gotta keep it simple for some people). With the "code completing," the "finished protein" is then free to go on it's merry way, whether that's otu of the cell, back into the DNA to cause another reaction, or whatever (i imagine size would be the controlling factor, here).

Viruses

Viruses are small matter that "procreate" by hijacking the above process, much like a computer virus hijacks the RAM and CPU of a computer. They typically come as either DNA (as we know and love) or RNA (half the DNA so it never needs a protein to cause it to split, which is also the most common kind of virus) viruses, and their classification of life forms is hotly debated: which is how companies like Lysol can go around claiming to "kill" the "germs," which then falls under the legal term "puffery" rather than "false advertising" so that you cannot sue them. The "basic structure" is a "protein capsid" or "shell" that protects the genetic material (DNA or RNA) on it's way to a cell. The capsid is made up of several proteins, often reacting with the cell membranes which causes the cells to "pull" them in (which is how cells have semi-permiable membranes for "intercellular communication"). These reactable locations on the membrane are called "receptors," and are used by various drugs, like caffeine, to cause various effects on the body (at the cellular level en masse). Once pulled in, the DNA/RNA is released and treated just like the cell's natural DNA/RNA, and the "code" for a virus, to even replecate, must include code necessary to create the virus capcid as well as the genetic material that was injected in the first place, causing a chain reaction. Eventually, this chain reaction causes the cell to "lyce" or "explode" releasing all the created viruses to nearby cells for the process to begin again. A single process of this can be anywhere from 24 hours upwards of even a whole month, which is also what leads to the "incubation period" of a virus, because that's how long it takes for the body to notice "something's wrong, here."

However, in practice, only a certain percentage of these are actually effective. Virus particles can get squashed, targeted by the immune system's passive measures (mucus), digestive enzymes, etc. One particularly invasive virus known to man is the Norwalk Virus (aka Norovirus aka "Stomach Flu") which is a virus that targets receptors primarily in the lower digestive tract. As such, the virus primarily spreads through exposure to matter from the digestive tract (vomit, feces, the micro-fecal-particles of a flushed toilet spreading through the air, etc). Being one of the most infectious viruses known to man, each virus particle has a 5% chance to infect someone. Normally, when exposed, you get exposed by thousands of particles, where even 100 particles puts your chances of infection at 99.4% (failure% = pow(failure per particle, num of particles)).

Immune System

The immune system is made up of various types of cells, mostly, and, as large cells, are incapable of entering the cells to find hijackers. Instead, the immune system relies on "feeling out" entire cells for "irregularities" and then either engulfing them or causing them to lyce. HIV, in particular, targets these feeler cells' unique receptors, which is why the immune system has trouble fighting it off: trying to find and destroy the virus amounts to getting infected and replecating the virus. Eventually, after fighting it off and getting enough "samples" a certain feeler cell can then become converted to help promote the growth of "antibodies" which bind to the uniqueness of the virus' protein shell and make it harder, or impossible, to connect normally to the receptors it connects to.

The "symptoms" of a virus are actaully caused by the immune system in response to finding a virus, not by the virus itself (symptoms don't help the virus, it's not there to make your life miserable, just to continue to exist). The symptom's purpose is to help the body get rid of both active and "disabled" virus particles (and/or other infectious materials, since the body can't really tell a bacteria from a virus from a fungus). As such, as one would expect, the symptoms also help spread the virus. Since viruses target specific tissues, symptoms can thus be used to rudimentally identify a virus, however viruses that infect similar tissues become hard to separate from one another, because they result in similar symptoms.

Vaccines

The traditional method of creating a vaccine is by infecting a cell in a controlled environment (usually using fetal tissue, eggs, etc, not in a grown human being) and collecting the virus particles from the result and then "killing them" (destroying the DNA/RNA) with heavy metals such as mercury, but leaving the protein shells behind. This effectively acts as target practice for your immune system, as the virus particles are no longer infectious. The argument behind vaccines is, after the process of filtering out the heavy metals used to "deactivate" the particles, the risk of infection (due to the process being imperfect, but fairly reliable, resulting in negligible chance of infection [not 0 like the sophists would tell you, but far, far less than you would expect from a "live" virus]) and damage from the heavy metals is far lower than the dangers presented by a real infection (cancer from a failed infection that still manages to corrupt a cell's DNA, unwinnable chronic infection, permanent organ damage, etc). The heavy metals of vaccines do not cause autism, like many conspiracy theorists would suggest, as autism is likely the result of childhood neglect/abandonment, rather than brain damage. Generally, the amount of damage by these heavy metals is low, compared the the amount of damage from drinking water from lead pipes which our ancestors did for many, many years at a time without dying. That's not to say there isn't inherent risks (especially if filtration fails, which happens in rare cases), however this is not common and generally negligible (and i say this as an anti-vaxxer, myself). Normally, it takes the immune system about 2 weeks to create the antibodies, so your ability to prevent infection entirely is dependent upon getting the vaccine 2 weeks prior to exposure. Vaccines given after exposure are likely to be ineffective at best, and possibly making things worse at worst (due to giving the immune system more targets to "shoot at").

SARS-CoV-2

SARS-CoV-2 is a sequel to the 2003 outbreak of SARS-CoV(-1) which China was forced to admit fault for. It is special in that it infects via the ACE2 receptors, which are present in almost all cells of the human body, meaning that, unlike most viruses, this thing damages almost all tissues of the body (resulting in some of the more permanent symptoms we're seeing, including causes of death) and also makes it particularly good at spreading. The primary infection tissue for ACE2 would end up being lung tissue, which ends up, of course, being how it spreads (and, if you know then that that's where you'll see the most symptoms, lycing, etc, you also know that WHO was pretty negligent in suggesting that human-to-human transmission was not a factor early on, and that they knew better). Due to the nature of it infecting all tissues, the dose of the virus you get before your first cell lyces is easily the largeest predictor of mortality: that's how much damage is done before the immune system can start responding, as well as how much virus is going to be active after response). Due to the 2-week to 1-month incubation period, it's reasonable to assume the virus can (although this diminishes with time) kill you up to 2 months after infection (most cases appear after 2 weeks, not 2 days like the CDC keeps saying, which is the numbers for Influenza which is adding to conspiracy theories, but we know this is to protect corporate interests). For most healthy individuals, with limited organ damage, cause of death is likely to be ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrom) from which the virus is named (Sudden Acute Respiratory Synrdom - Coronavirus) which causes people to go from feeling fine to dead pretty quickly.

The SARS-CoV-2's vaccine by both moderna and Pfeizer use isolated mRNA to improve vaccine creation time as well as safety. Effective time is incubation period (the downside of the new technology) + antibody production time (do the math to check your own understanding [and i'm out of space]).

Masks, since i didn't have space to go into them in the previous post.

Masking is complex, because most poeple think it is for the purpose of protecting the wearer, like with goggles. The issue, however, is that eyes are exposed, and that which goes into your eyes gets washed into your sinuses, and then to your stomach or lungs. While masking is effective at protecting all but your eyes to a certain degree, it is far more useful at protecting everyone around the wearer from the wearer: the eyes are "input only" when it comes to respiratory viruses. Various masks offer various levels of protection. Your standard surgical mask is only effective at redirecting (often giving them time to "dry out" and become ineffective when they're redirected upwards) the majority of particles (which is pretty effective, actually, as it seems it the chance per infection of a SARS-CoV-2 particle is low). N95s, however, are much, much better, however they are often not fitted (which custom fitting is required to be compliant to the standards). Custom-fit n95s are necessary for properly protecting others from you to a degree tangent to (but not exactly) 100%. None of this is particularly effective at protecting the wearers, hence why the face shield and non-custom-fit n95 did not protect my girlfriend who was getting pretty close to suffering from ARDS. The only thing that potentially protects is an air-tight hazmat suit, which becomes ineffective if structural integrity fails (because they're generally cheap and rip easy). Given the regulations in the US, this measure is absolutely impractical for health care workers, and acquisition is impractical for the regular population.

Lockdowns are ineffective: the primary locations where people come into contact with each other are stores, family gatherings, and jobs, which are all the exceptions to these lockdowns. While one might include gyms and restaurants to this, these are often far more sparcely populated. Similarly, the choice of restricting travel to these areas actually causes an inverse issue: people are far more likely to go to these places,either due to cabin fever, or due to restricted hours, concentraiting infections thus increasing the risks.

This bit was well said, imo.....also there was some interesting info in both posts.

Thanks for posting this, once again.

The goal of lockdowns isn't to eliminate every single contact between humans, but to reduce them. By closing gyms and restaurants (closed spaces, where lots of people talk loudly or breathe heavily) and restricting people's movement, you're "buying" some margin to keep the rest of your industry going.

And lockdowns aren't ineffective. They're basically the only measure that got the number of infections anywhere down. Look at any country you want: lockdown -> freedom -> some restrictios -> some more restrictions -> heavy restrictions -> lockdown -> less restrictions -> more restrictions -> lockdown...

The problem with all these rules and restrictions is humanity. We're totally incapable of following some basic, simple rules. When I leave the house, I see people ignoring distances and protection all the time. Kids sticking their heads together to watch some stupid video on a smartphone, people ignoring distances in wating lines (it doesn't go faster just because you're closer -.-), people having a distance of less than half a meter while smoking and blowing the smoke into each others faces... I see a total lack of awareness everywhere. And this is exactly why there isn't a single rule or restriction that has any effect. If you don't BAN social life, infections won't go down. Sad but true.

Sure, it'd be more effective to shut down EVERYTHING for two or three weeks, so you could say that those lockdowns are kinda "ineffective". But this'd cost way more than to just compensate some restaurants.

That's something I never understood. If you're going to close shopping centers (for example), simply do it! But don't tell people that they have two days left to go there! Guess where everyone here went when they did this two weeks or so ago... It's so goddamn stupid to announce this a few days before it takes effect.

And you find that what people do is compensate. Humans are the most adaptive creatures that we're aware of, and when you say you can't "go to to the gym and hang out with your gym buddies," they're now "going to the park to hang out with their gym buddies." Closing the restaurant? Oh, hey, your dinner date can come over to your house (less safe for those tinder dates, but hey, do you really expect people to quit having recreational sex? Don't worry, my governor, Wolfe of Pennsylvania, actually ordered people to wear masks while having sex).

You know what limited the amount of people around me? Actual cases, which scared people. We have this problem where everything that happens is "over there" until it's "here," and we act completely differently. It's like Christians who "believe" in God, but don't act as if He is around (there is no "realization"). Bombs are being dropped on middle-eastern countries, children, pets, old people, innocent lovers, etc were all dying, and "that's sad" or "what a shame." There were cases in China as early as November 2019, and people were dropping dead, but, hey, stopping flights from China during a major outbreak there is "racist." Oh no, there's a major outbreak in a city near you (maybe within your city, but at the other side of your city), but, hey, we always knew that was "the bad district." Terrorist attacks in Paris france? Unless you live in Paris, that's "over there," so let's show our support with some french flags and make no attempts to pressure lawmakers to improve security. Antifa "peacefully protesting" in stores? Nope, it's not my store, not my city. How about AIDS in the LGBTQIA+ community? Nah, I'm not gay. School shootings! Oh wait, we love each other and support each other in our community, and even our outcasts aren't that bad. Oh, hey, there's this crazy guy called Adolf Hitler putting "undesirables" in giant prisons and offing them. No way Russians would build Gulags or that americans would mass imprison Japanese people! Why don't we also ignore his crazy rants about a better world under Germany's rule, 'cause he could never come over here. Oh, hey, that crazy ideology where a country straight up orders a bunch of farmers to farm their fields without getting a single bite of their crop, thus they starve to death 'cause they don't want shot, yeah, that crazy thing called "socialism" could never come here. Syphilis in the native american community? Turns out, this is not a new phenomenon to humanity, but we were the same way over a hundred years ago. No way any of this can happen here, until it does. If you want real results, you need to show humanity how likely "over there" is somehow going to turn into "over here" without warning, and good luck with that task. I'd love to see you somehow pull that off, just as an exercise. I've actually had people argue they shouldn't wear masks, because masks didn't keep them from getting the virus when they wore one all the time while surrounded by people who didn't. Imagine how ignorant people could be, but, hey, I bet that part about masks protecting the people around the wearer, not the wearer, is actually new information for most people. And, i'd bet most of the people reading it actually think i'm full of shit. You see, instead of teaching people basic biology, economics (my god, people don't even know how to write a damn check), etc, we're busy teaching them the same history and math every year (the argument is a "retention problem," but i'd argue that this is easily mitigated by focusing on that which makes the lessons appear practical), activism (how many times we going to give the same useless "abstinence" speeches and expect kids with hormones, porn, free condoms, tinder, etc not to take advantage of it, or the ever famous anti-bullying campaigns that don't work, or the anti-drug campaigns, etc), and, rumor has it, gender pronouns! Look, if we could have all this other crap in addition to teaching what is practical, rather than replacing what is practical, I wouldn't care. Lessons need to be tangible to students, too, of course. In 12th grade, no one cares how many cookies sally has anymore: they're worried about how far they can stretch their Ramen noodles for the next 4-8 years to go through the same thing they've been going through for the past 13 or 14 years. Absolutely, but what we're doing is just costing us. At the end of the day, the things that are most dangerous are either exceptions or blatently flouted (like mask wearing). In my area, on October 31st, there was a massive "halloween parade" where "nobody was wearing masks" from what I was told. Then there was a small outbreak about a month later (surprise, it's not 2-days to 2-weeks 'cause it's not a flu, despite what our CDCs tell us) right around Thanksgiving, another major holiday where families travel all over the country to be together! Imagine another 2-weeks to a month later for Christmas! Hey, everyone, how my fellow americans feeling right now? Kicker? Republicans were largely saying it's all a hoax (big surprise, for reasons stated a few pages ago regarding politicization of the issue), and democrates were joining in, too, just not explaining why they made exceptions. At the end of the day, everyone is still treating it as "over there" not "over here," just different people have different excuses. I'd love for someone to properly explain why they can't breath through a surgical mask, but, hey, every one who told me such was not wearing one and i didn't want to stick around long enough to find out. It's alot safer over the internet.

But, hey, i predicted this all years ago back during the Ebola scare. I said "well, if anything that was ever actually high contagious got out, we'd be in real trouble." When i worked at this one nursing home, i was told that if I didn't get the influenza vaccine, i would have to wear a mask all winter. I was told this after i got the jab (thought it was mandatory to prevent getting fired), so i wore a mask all winter, anyway. Next year i didn't get the shot, and wore surgical masks all "flu season." The real kicker, when the flu vaccines were announced to be ineffective that year (which regularly happens, because they gotta guess the strain), surprisingly I was still the only one who had to wear a mask. Oh, and then there was a norovirus outbreak, and they put up signs saying that wearing a mask was useless, that it's just "some unknown stomach bug that only spreads by failure to wash your hands." Yeah, all these kitchen staff members, administrators, etc were all just in there digging in the dirty diapers of the residents, i'm sure, oh and failing to wash their hands afterwards. I was one of the precious few people in the facility that didn't get it: the others all wore masks like me. I don't know what it's like in Spain, but most people around the world don't have more than, maybe, two week's worth of food in storage, at the most. Some people only have maybe a day or two. For factories, arrangements must be made to attempt to either compensate or close. A lockdown isn't simply: Ok, you can stay home for a few days. Depending on the nature of the lockdown, it can have heavy consequences for a particular industry. Not only that, but "warning" offers a grace period for people who might not have things like internet access to find out that a lock down is even occuring (yes, these people actually do exist, and i know a few: we can discuss the problems with this in another topic, because it sure as hell isn't simple).

By restricting people, it usually gathers them closer together in fewer places(stores/etc), which would more likely than not increase chances of people getting sick.

(of course this is likely due in part to people not being made to wear masks or distance if they were "at certain events" in those cities)

Actually, according to official data(cdc and such) a good number of the places with some of the strictest lockdowns had the some of the highest case totals.

=-=-=

Sidenote: I believe in masks and distancing and hand washing and etc......just not a fan of lockdowns.
(in large part due to the financial issues....permanent business closings, etc)

The virus does not spread as well outside as it does inside. Therefore, hanging out with your buddies at the park is less risky than doing so at the gym.

Tell that to some people in some countries, where the parks have the seats saran wrapped and/or people are told to mask up while alone in larger ones(parks).

edit: btw I heard sunlight kylls this sickness easily.....knowing this it makes it even more odd to see LONE people masking up in large outdoor spaces.

second edit: in some places they were even telling lone hikers/etc to mask up in national forests/parks

absolutely. Except, well, wasn't the social distancing rules based on outside? inside it's more like 12 feet or more, not 6. I mean, sure, it helps, but, common, it's like the difference between jumping in at the 12 foot end of the pool vs the 3 foot end. Either way, you're probably going to get wet.
That's just funny. Sad the people have to pay for it, though, but at least they have some good memes for it. yes and no. First off, the word "kill" is pretty loaded with viruses (see my long post above in detail instead of skimming it). It does increase the evaporation rate of the liquid particles, which the viruses rely on to maintain structural integrity of their protein capcids. You see, when we make rules, we don't care about this thing called context. See above, where there was a suggestion not to warn people before locking down for several weeks.

Yeah, like the ones where stores would close off certain aisles of "non essentials" like: clothing/etc
(again, sometimes with saran wrap and etc)

Or the silly arrows in some shops(as if people wouldn't, say, have to sometimes pass slower people when following such arrows and etc).

Yeah, that's more or less what I meant. :)