And how do you arrive at that figure? You cannot possibly have arrived at it by any principled means, because...
> Disease spread is an exponential process
Indeed. And because it is an exponential process, decreasing the rate of spread will not result in a fixed delay for all infections, it will result in a decrease in the exponent. Some people will get it a week later than they otherwise would have, some two weeks later, some three weeks... and if you reduce the exponent enough, the result will be exponential decay rather than growth, and some people will never get it at all. And even if you don't get to that point, reducing the exponent can make the difference between hospitals having enough capacity, and being overloaded and having people dying in the streets and having to rent refrigerator trucks to store the bodies.
Furthermore, vaccines are dramatically effective at reducing the rate of severe illness and death, so even if everyone gets infected and even if they get infected as quickly as they otherwise would have, you still have fewer people dying from covid, and you also have fewer people dying from other causes because the hospitals are overloaded with covid patients. That seems like a win to me.
> > The rate of spread matters a lot.
> That is a different argument
Different from what? Your original claim was there is no societal benefit to vaccination, only an individual benefit, and that is just plainly false. One of the reasons it is false (but far from the only reason) is that lowering the rate of spread has societal benefits in and of itself, even if everyone eventually gets infected anyway, and even if there were no other benefits, like reducing the risk of serious disease and death.
BTW, there are more logical holes in your argument:
> Most people I talk to had COVID and caught it off a vaccinated individual.
Well, of course they did. That's because:
> it is impossible for it to be the vaccinated. There aren't enough of them and they've been locked out of a lot of places where superspreader events are happening
If you isolate all of your unvaccinated population, then of course all of the transmission is going to happen among the vaccinated. The vaccines aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they confer no public-policy benefits. They clearly do.
Honestly, the quality of your reasoning is comparable to a flat-earther.
> And how do you arrive at that figure? You cannot possibly have arrived at it by any principled means, because...
Trough to peak of the initial outbreak was 4 weeks, and the 2nd wave peaked after another 12 weeks. How quickly do you think the virus can spread? :p
Voila, the stats [0]. You need to ground-check your assumptions.
> You also have fewer people dying from other causes because the hospitals are overloaded with covid patients. That seems like a win to me.
We're two years in to this, we could have beefed up the hospital staff. I suppose strategies that are human-rights friendly are off the cards in Australia because they aren't exciting enough.
Frankly, the idea that this response was needed because COVID patients would overwhelm the hospital system is a bit of a reach. Ordinary flu season overwhelmed the hospital system. An ordinary day overwhelmed the hospital system. We do not go to extreme lengths to stop the hospital system getting overwhelmed. We certainly don't lock people in their houses, ban free association, ban people from working, or start forcing people to undergo what is effectively a medical procedure. Furthermore we had a lot of time to beef up the hospital system to cope as this pandemic has been a thing for more than a year by now. The argument is underdeveloped.
> lowering the rate of spread has societal benefits in and of itself
What are they and how are you measuring them? Because intuition hasn't been a good guide so far.
> BTW, there are more logical holes in your argument:
Point them out, I reckon I can patch them up with evidence.
> If you isolate all of your unvaccinated population, then of course all of the transmission is going to happen among the vaccinated. The vaccines aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they confer no public-policy benefits. They clearly do.
Well, they confer enormous benefits to people who get vaccinated. But Australia has been in human-rights-abuse mode for a while now and it makes me very uncomfortable. I'd rather people had been honest up front that the vaccine wasn't going to have any impact on the spread of COVID. A lot of people were saying they would and they've turned out to have ... charitably I might say an immeasurable ... impact on the spread.
> Frankly, the idea that this response was needed because COVID patients would overwhelm the hospital system is a bit of a reach.
It is hard for me to imagine that anyone with internet access could be so profoundly ignorant, but there were actually bodies being stored in refrigerator trucks [1] and critically ill patients housed in tents [2] in many parts of the world before vaccines became widely available. It's not a reach, it was the actual situation on the ground for months.
And how do you arrive at that figure? You cannot possibly have arrived at it by any principled means, because...
> Disease spread is an exponential process
Indeed. And because it is an exponential process, decreasing the rate of spread will not result in a fixed delay for all infections, it will result in a decrease in the exponent. Some people will get it a week later than they otherwise would have, some two weeks later, some three weeks... and if you reduce the exponent enough, the result will be exponential decay rather than growth, and some people will never get it at all. And even if you don't get to that point, reducing the exponent can make the difference between hospitals having enough capacity, and being overloaded and having people dying in the streets and having to rent refrigerator trucks to store the bodies.
Furthermore, vaccines are dramatically effective at reducing the rate of severe illness and death, so even if everyone gets infected and even if they get infected as quickly as they otherwise would have, you still have fewer people dying from covid, and you also have fewer people dying from other causes because the hospitals are overloaded with covid patients. That seems like a win to me.
> > The rate of spread matters a lot.
> That is a different argument
Different from what? Your original claim was there is no societal benefit to vaccination, only an individual benefit, and that is just plainly false. One of the reasons it is false (but far from the only reason) is that lowering the rate of spread has societal benefits in and of itself, even if everyone eventually gets infected anyway, and even if there were no other benefits, like reducing the risk of serious disease and death.
BTW, there are more logical holes in your argument:
> Most people I talk to had COVID and caught it off a vaccinated individual.
Well, of course they did. That's because:
> it is impossible for it to be the vaccinated. There aren't enough of them and they've been locked out of a lot of places where superspreader events are happening
If you isolate all of your unvaccinated population, then of course all of the transmission is going to happen among the vaccinated. The vaccines aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they confer no public-policy benefits. They clearly do.
Honestly, the quality of your reasoning is comparable to a flat-earther.