Vaccines
The vaccines are good, but not perfect. In the US (which has had much greater levels of the virus), they had a
- 0.008% chance of getting COVID (out of 66 million fully vaccinated)
- 0.00056% chance of being hospitalized (7% of these infections)
- 0.00001% chance of dying from COVID(7 in 66 million vaccinees)
(Chance of getting hit by lightning: 0.0002%.)
Stanford has started working on a clinical trial for Pfizer to test the COVID vax in children. The first phase is for kids 5-12, but they hope to go down to kids as young as six months if thing go well with the older kids.
Transmission
There has been an ongoing struggle between people who think that COVID-19 is transmitted by droplets and those who think it is transmitted by aerosols. Here’s a paper which argues for aerosols. Meanwhile, most public health outfits claim that it’s droplets.
My own belief is that it’s not an either-or. I’m sure that there are some COVID-19 germs in droplets and some in aerosols. The question is how much?
I have the sense that the aerosol people imagine that all of an infected person’s exhaled COVID-19 germs form an invisible cloud that hangs around in the air for minutes, just waiting to attack random people. I think that if that were the case, COVID-19 would be way more transmissible than it is. I believe that measles does in fact transmit this way, and that you can catch measles from someone who walked through a room an hour before you did.
Now, there are some behaviours — like singing — which do seem to be extremely transmissible. So I think that there’s a spectrum: that probably breathing doesn’t make many aerosols, while singing, chanting, yelling, and/or laughing make a bunch of aerosol.
This is why I don’t fret too much about grocery shopping, but I forbid my husband to do any sort of in-person singing indoors.