20 June 2022

Not the best news

 It's a preprint.

Whether or not you are vaccinated, subsequent COVID infections add risk of harm, and the degree of risk increases with each subsequent infection.

The short, simple summary is not "COVID hurts you every time you get it" — quite factual, but insufficiently clear — but "Every time you are infected with COVID the way it harms you makes the next time more likely and worse."

No kind of population immunity is possible[1]. A strategy of accepting infection to build immunity is now known to be harmful, instead of just suspected to be harmful. There's a finite number of times you can catch COVID before it kills you; this number is not knowable ahead of time and might not have two digits.[2]

[1] Vaccine effectiveness is not where it started; currently it's a one third reduction in the risk of death at six months from infection — 1.3 % for the vaccinated instead of 2 % for the unvaccinated — and about a fifteen percent reduction in your PACS risk[4].  It's halving your infection risk on the current Ontario numbers, instead of the 90% reduction it started as.  Selection is not your friend.

[2] absent precautions[3], you can expect to catch COVID multiple times per year, and your immune system is less able to avoid infection each time you do.

[3] Use air filters, wear an elastomeric mask with P100 filters (and consider goggles), minimize contact with other humans, DO NOT treat "outside" as safe (there have been super-spreader events outside), and get stroppy about it.  Also recognize that the official numbers are generally highly questionable most places, with underreporting of COVID deaths and no reporting of life expectancy decreases.

[4] if you're under 60. Over sixty, no reduction.


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