bambinomartino

I wrote *this* summer as well. Testing numbers in Uttar Pradesh are decent. Sure you didn't accuse them directly of lying but suggested their numbers are bunk. Not much of a difference. By the way, in countries with very low testing numbers we still see spikes and waves, with the attendant high positivity rates. Not here. Unless they are testing the healthiest of healthy... to what end?

I really wish someone would come up with a cogent explanation of those numbers out of India other that "that just can't be!". So far it's been case after case of cognitive dissonance with a sprinkling of ad hominem attacks against Uttar Pradeshans(?) and Albertans.

shorthauldad

Flu survivors still immune after 90 years
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/s...after-90-years

and how many people do you know who've had chicken pox more than once?

Donsyb

me! Although the second time it’s shingles, not chicken pox

FlitBen

There are many good studies based on clinical outcomes and not just theoretical correlates.

cesco.g

Related article on vaccination after Covid recovery:

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2101

shorthauldad

Indeed, and I mention it not least because that virus is a great example of just how differently the US heathcare system deals with certain illnesses compared to other countries ...

For instance in the UK these are the bits of official advice:

So: don't worry about vaccinating healthy kids against chickenpox (full disclosure: we didn't, all three kids duly caught it and quickly recovered from it)...



So: vaccinate only the vulnerable (seniors in this case) against shingles.

exp

Those are different pathogens so the antibodies for those are different than those for covid.

GUWonder

UP has claimed to have vaccinated over 93 million of its people. Seroprevalence studies in India suggest about case numbers undercounting prior infections in the state and country by a factor of more than 20x. More like 26-27x according to someone the UP government doesn’t like.

UP is interesting:

https://www.thehindu.com/news/nation...le30993771.ece

chrisl137

Immune response is much more complicated than just having a bunch of disease-specific antibodies floating around. It's energetically expensive for an organism to keep cranking out antibodies for a pathogen it may not encounter again for years, or possibly ever again, so mammalian immune systems have developed "memory" systems that prime them to rapidly produce a strong immune response, including disease-specific antibodies, to things they've encountered and recovered from previously.

Memory B Cells
Memory T Cells

bambinomartino

You're grasping at straws.

If natural immunity to other coronaviruses like SARS CoV1 fizzled out, then you may have a point in there somewhere. But the exact opposite is actually the case.

By the way, the article you linked yesterday is such a bad faith effort. The author neglected to mention any of the many studies supporting the natural immunity proposition (and no, it's not just "some" that merely "seem" to), especially the biggest and probably best one out of Israel. It would be laughable if she wasn't so offensively dishonest while purporting to be balanced.

It may well be that natural immunity is hard to reliably measure or quantify and that there is variation among those who have had it (true for vaccine recipients to some extent by the way). The pertinent question is are those even on the lower range of (only) natural immunity protection better or worse off than the average (only) vaxxed? Data suggests the former. Why are they being made second-class citizens across the supposedly free Western world is another question to which I am yet to see a good answer.

The only fair point she made is that natural infection plus vaccination is better. Well duh. So bike helmet AND bubble wrap for my kid then. Genius!

corporate-wage-slave

I have also had chickenpox twice, the second time as an adult and it really wasn't much fun at all. I then got the vaccine as an adult, plus it was a requirement for me to work in labs. I am wholly unconvinced this is either a good argument or has anything to do with corona viruses, which have a different set of immunity processes to chickenpox and indeed flu. Anyone who is saying "natural infection is definitely better than vaccination" is usually recycling an anti-vaxxers' trope. The actual answer is that that no-one knows, the virus is still mutating into vast numbers of variants, still mainly under the cosh of Delta and perhaps Lambda. A few years down the line we will know a lot more and hopefully also have even better vaccnines.

For the 1918 strain, yes it's certainly the case that some aspect of the complex influenza immunity journey give lifetime immunity, unfortunately it's limited to those strains and their related lineages. Consequently someone surviviing the Spanish flu would be strongly advised to get vaccinated, not least because it gives both A and B virus protection. Spanish Flu was an H1N1 virus, so an A virus. Someone that caught an H1N1 strain would have very little protection against B influenza, just to give one of many examples. We know of a small number of people, unvaccinated, who have caught both Alpha and Delta, but we haven't seen many (any?) proven cases of vaccinated people getting both Alpha and Delta. Too little evidence to read much into that, but anyone not getting vaccinated at the moment, placing hope in natural immunity, would seemingly not be aware that hope is a pretty crummy strategy. There's no point taking bits and pieces of science in this area to overthrow what is a broad consensus, involving at least 99% of immunologists, that right now it's important to get every adult vaccinated, regardless of past infection. The arguments that immunologists have are on issues like vaccinating children (mostly they are now in favour) and/or whether to give out boosters to the general population or not, and upon what basis - not on whether natural infection is worth pursuing as an objective.

The B cell led immunity is still an evolving area of science, there is a lot more that we need to find out about that, and in the case of COVID this is critical to how the end game will play out. Just right now it is still very unclear how it will play out and there are few certainties.

bambinomartino

You are basically repeating yourself. Bunch of lying superstitious savages. Got it.

chrisl137

Statistically, given the number of infected people, the replication rate, and viral loads, every possible single-nucleotide variation is being generated anew and transmitted every single day.

There's still plenty of room and mutation capability for the virus to random-walk its way to some new multi-nucleotide versions that will be bad news.

shorthauldad

So we don't know...

...but one paragraph later, we do?

Sorry, but this is public health policy getting the better of actual science. Again!

There are countries ignoring the infected-and-recovered, and there countries where a confirmed Covid infection-and-recovery puts you on the exact same footing as being fully vaccinated. Including the one I'm currently in.

Are those places really seen as suffering from some kind of madness affecting government and policymakers? Governments who are deaf to 99% of immunologists, as it were?

nk15

These data is being collected right now, you are in the hope (your natural immunity is enough against other variants) group, vs. the better safe than sorry group (hope plus vaccination group).