So my question is, what about exposure of the at-risk by those who are not vaccinated? I get all of the boosters, because I do not want to expose my elderly parents to it. I’m not doing it for myself. Mom, especially, has some other major risk factors.
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There are ongoing studies everywhere. Hopefully in 5 years or so the world will settle on a consensus of what the best protocol might be and it might be a totally new approach than what is being used now. Although greatly reduced, new cases and deaths continue worldwide. Various countries are trying different things, but as far as I know there is no country that is claiming to have the definitive answer.
I think those who are at high risk or in close contact with those at high risk should undergo vaccination unless they have had confirmed infection within the last six months or so. Unfortunately, insurance does not cover testing for anti-N antibodies which would confirm prior infection because many have had infection without symptoms or with minimal symptoms that were passed of as a head cold.
Multiple studies have shown that circulating anti-spike protein antibody titers wane pretty quickly after vaccination with some studies showing that the protective effect has dropped to close to 50% by the end of three months and to very low levels by the end of six months.
An issue is what those individuals who are at high risk should undergo repeat vaccinations and how frequently. There is a very legitimate concern that repeated vaccination done twice a year, or even more frequently in an effort to maintain protective antibody titers may induce vaccine exhaustion. Some studies have suggested this phenomenon to occur with repeated vaccination against influenza virus
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14760584.2022.2071705
My German doctor in Munich (and his wife) think Americans are crazy for vaccinating their babies and
They have seen several American families over here with toddlers who have had multiple boosters.
Way too many unknowns for me. I caught it very early during the Boston spike and felt the unknown risks of mRNA were not worth it. I’ve probably read 200 papers and i have come to my own conclusions about the unknowns of immune escape, immune narrowing, and frame-shifting. I’m not taking the chance to have my T Cells suppressed when I have already demonstrated that my immune system is strong. It doesn’t prevent transmission so it’s not a public good what I do. We have learned over and over that Draconian measures like quarantine of the healthy fractures society. Decades of public health orthodoxy was stood on its head.
In terms of nursing and physician shortages, I know many retiring early over disagreements about what happened. I know I could never go along with masking two year olds and people dying alone over zoom calls. I found it all deeply unethical.
People can call us antivaxxers if they like, we have had many vaccines —yellow fever, anthrax, and worked all over the world but now we are done and wish everyone the best.
I play in musical groups w older than me folks. So even if l did not have a personal risk factor not vaxing is simply not an option.
I have encountered individuals who do not feel that their effect on others is worthy of consideration. They did not play or sing in any group l was in during the worst of it. We let them back in after it was over
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What about the deadly social contagions? (Anxiety, obesity, loneliness)
I worked in the ER through the HIV crisis before we had universal precautions and never ostracized people. The world has really changed.
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Musicians who refused to get vaxxed had the option of changing their minds and getting the shots. Like the 30 year old player who sent back an email talking about treading on his inalienable freedoms.
Give me a break. We play on a college campus and he knew damned well that the college required vax.
Shut ins due to loss of mobility or social networks, like all their friends have died, do not have choices. Like my 96 yr old stepmother.
The two situations are not even remotely close. It is not an appropriate charge to say performing groups requiring vax were doing irreparable harm.
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We have people in my area who harassed those who wore masks. I was one of the harassees, not that that stopped me from exercising my right to wear it.
I guess freedoms are only allowed to those who think and act the way you want them to. Whether about preventing disease, school curricula, peaceful demonstrations, or anything else.
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Wearing a mask (other than N95s, KN95s, etc) is more about helping to protect others than it is about protecting the wearer. What that says about those who refused to wear a mask when rates of transmission, hospitalization and mortality (esp. among the elderly and otherwise vulnerable) were high is another discussion.
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Aren’t the benefits about equal for the wearer and other people?
I was literally ejected from a campground by the irate owner for wearing a mask. The date was—you guessed it!—November 4, 2020. I guess he was unhappy about something. 
Aren’t we ALL in close contact with high-risk people? There are millions of people with high risks but many of their risks are invisible, like people who have had an organ transplant. We can’t ask them to stay home, can we?
Agree, but the state of our society (severe divisions, lack of education about what it means to live in society with others) and government (self-serving politicians in Congress who block truth-based governance and accountability) are even graver concerns. If we have another event like Covid, we will surely perish in even greater numbers, because we don’t have the social and political cohesion needed to overcome such a huge crisis. The last time we saw a united society was during World War II, when Americans made sacrifices and pulled together not only for their own good, but for the good of the world. Well, the “other event like Covid” is already present in the climate crisis. While we are distracted by wars in Ukraine and Israel, we are doing little about the death of our own habitat and half of the country, as with Covid, doesn’t even believe there is a crisis and is unwilling to discover or believe the facts even as they sit roasting to death on their balcony or are fleeing from wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, catastrophic snowstorms, etc. We are no longer a country. It’s just a matter of time before we disintegrate into total chaos.
Have I as an outdoor type have Covid? No, I have not, nor have I given Covid to another person. It’s really incredibly easy to avoid Covid by using all the knowledge and means we have at our disposal. But first you have to have the will to not get sick and to not make anyone else sick. (Caveat: it’s not easy for people in certain circumstances, like medical personnel, to avoid Covid. In my personal circumstances, all of the prescribed precautions are effective when practiced together, consistently.)
Protection is 2-way, for sure, but the virus can also gain entry thru any mucous membrane (eg eyes). So, while the mask reduces the wearer’s virus shedding by a lot, it’s offers incomplete protection (assuming no face shield) against the shedding of others.
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I am fairly certain that the increased likelihood of silent infection nearly outweighs the decrease in overall viral shedding which results from vaccination. In other words, because I am 3 or 4 dose vaccinated, I am less likely overall to contract covid , but more likely to have a mild case, and think it is a common cold, if I do. Since I have a few colds a year, skipping work every time I have a sniffle is not an option. Consequently, making my covid milder, by vaccinating, makes me more likely to expose others to covid during any single episode of infection. At the same time, the vaccine does likely reduce viral shedding (so lower innoculum per exposure), and may even reduce overall infection rate (so fewer total episodes), although this has not been proven. The effects are fairly close to balancing.
Good explanation. Thank you. I hadn’t thought of it that way.
I believe I follow your reasoning, but if I had a cold, I would get tested for Covid. I say with some confidence that I haven’t infected others because in addition to getting all possible vaccinations and boosters and wearing a mask, I practice social distancing and have had no symptoms at all of upper-respiratory illness since winter 2020.
Most people wouldn’t get a covid test for a cold, and most people either cannot or will not (and should not) practice social distancing. Silent infection, with viral shedding but no symptoms, is also more likely after vaccination. I am not saying don’t get vaccinated, I am saying don’t pretend that using various forms of ostracism to try to persuade people to get vaccinated is likely to substantially reduce transmission, other than by people leaving. Decreasing the size of the group you interact with is an effective way to reduce transmission, and if you get it down to zero you can be guaranteed exposure free.
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So true but they also must remember the social contagions of being around anxious people. There are many social contagions, obesity, anxiety, depression. People obsessed with death die earlier, this has all been studied thoroughly. I find the culture of safetyism to be avoided because masking (even if it was effective) is pointless with an ENDEMIC virus. At best, the effect size might allow you to time it by a few weeks but it does not change your immune destiny. A lot of the pediatric infections now are an immune debt. Humans are social creatures and meant to mix and utilize facial cues.
Trying to avoid SARS-2 at this point is pure folly.
Pbailey and MohaveFlyer
A check with someone who was actuallty involved in performing groups as we started out of CoVid would be worth your time. Granted during the worst of it no one was meeting, if for no other reason than that our rehearsal venues were not available. But most musical groups - choruses and orchestras - started meeting again in later 2021 when the risk of contagion was still quite present. For most amateur groups, if we did not start meeting and performing again we were not going to survive. The fiscal reality of amateur music is that our groups cannot last thru two full seasons of not getting donations.
My choral group rehearsed in a barn and sang with masks in summer of 2021. It was hot and unpleasant. But no one got CoVid from those moments.
My orchestra - about 50 people - rehearsed and performed on a college campus starting in September 2021. The college had a vax rule, which our players fully supported, and we imposed mask requirements (KN or N95) with remarkably good compliance from even the wind players. (Musicians will get the difficulty of that) Winds and brass used covers for the end of their instrument. We played at more of a distance from each other, no sharing of stands, adjusting the repertoire to make the challenges of that spacing for performance less daunting.
For most of the 2021-22 season, both professional and amateur orchestras all around us were losing a performance or having to pay thru the nose to replace players that came down with CoVid just ahead of a performance. In the Berkshires a cancellation because their entire brass section managed to share it, in most orchestras because they lost one or a few players to a surprise infection and had to hire pros.
My orchestra, with vaccination and mask requirements, never lost a single player to CoVid infection thru four performances in the 2021-22 season. We were the only such group in 100 miles that, as far as I know, was able to say that. Nine months of infection-free playing for 50 people is not just luck. The precautions worked.
More importantly to your point MohaveFlyer, those who were willing to accept the precautions like vaccination and masking had all that time where they WERE involved in a relatively normal musical life with others. It was those like the refusenik 30 year old and a few anti-vax old friends I had who isolated themselves. One of whom subsequently did the research to find a non-MRA
vaccine they could accept when they signed up for a tour in Europe that required vax. The solution was there if she really looked.
For our initial concert in Nov of 2021, the audience members had to show proof of vax for the College and wear masks. We had a record breaking audience of people more than happy to accept those terms to rejoin normal life. Literally ran out of chairs. Forget spacing, the audience themselves were grabbing more chairs off the racks along the walls.
At this point in time, with CoVid having mutated to a head cold, it does not bother me if I get it aside from imposing a week or so of having to stay away from others. But the window where things were more perilous had solutions that were available as well.
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This crosses over into disrespect. There are a number of older paddlers in this forum. Some members have mentioned chronic illnesses that put them at very high risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and death. I have a chronic upper-respiratory illness myself. (No, I’m not a smoker. I got it from over-exposure to sick people in my previous public-service career.) I’ve stayed healthier than ever since winter 2020 because finally it was socially acceptable for people like me to wear a mask in indoor public spaces and others were required to do the same in addition to other mandates to minimize transmission. And of course because I availed myself of vaccinations. If you’re young and healthy enough that you feel you can forego all of that, good for you. That doesn’t mean that hundreds of millions of people around the globe who take advantage of modern medicine to stay alive and to protect others are crazy.
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We will have to agree to disagree.
Signing off.
One positive outcome of the covid-19 pandemic is that people (at least in my area) are now more accepting of seeing people wearing masks on a day to day basis in public, and nobody comments or harasses them. People in Asia have worn masks in public for decades with complete acceptance. This is a reasonable general health practice that doesn’t hurt anyone . And I even think that there are a small number of people who are shy enough to find it easier to go out in public with a mask. A friend told me her teenaged daughter now uses a mask to conceal acne breakouts – her mom asked me to sew some “stylish” fabric ones for her so she coordinates her outfits.
I still carry them with me, both N95 and some of the home-made fabric ones I made hundreds of during 2020 for first responders and social service agencies, which are nicer looking, more comfortable and can be laundered and reused. I’ve had the sniffles a few times this year and I would don a mask when I would be around people, to contain my sneezes and coughs, and to remind myself to not touch my face and potentially contaminate my hands. I’ve also developed more of a regular habit of hand washing since it was stressed during the covid surge.
I do still have free Covid tests (my wonderful general practice med group has 4 packs free for pickup at their office for any patient) and have tested myself when I started having respiratory or flu-ish symptoms as well as after having attended any group functions (like the 4 days I was at kayak skills camp in October with 60 others and this week after I had 10 folks here for a holiday party.)
So far still no positives when I have tested. I have all the respiratory vaxes, including RSV and pneumonia, but am glad that there are ways I can protect others if I might be a vector as well as reducing my potential inhalation of others’ exhalations. And masks are a useful option to reduce my reactions to seasonal pollen and particulate air pollution when hiking on windy days. The flannel lined masks I made are nice for breath warming when it’s really cold.
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