LogFAQs > #956618655

streamofthesky posted...

BTW, everyone talks about the masks, ie airborne transmission. It's been a year and a half now, any update on the danger of surfaces?

Recent research has been suggesting that surface transmission is far less significant than airborne. There's still enough that disinfecting surfaces and washing your hands and whatnot are good ideas, but it's not nearly as dangerous as people were previously worried it might be.

OhhhJa posted...

With over 50 percent of the country being vaccinated, I find it hard to believe the vaccine is really all that effective with the recent surge we've had. Herd immunity has historically been around 70% vaccination and we're not that far from that figure

First of all, by no metric is over 50% of the country vaccinated. As of yesterday, 49.9% has two shots, but they won't be fully vaccinated for another two weeks. Two weeks ago, that figure was 48.9%. It's very, very close to 50%, such that rounding and saying "half the country" would be fine, but it's definitely not "over 50%."

Second, only being at 50% and not 70% means there are 67% more unvaccinated people than there should be for herd immunity to be achieved (50% unvaccinated is 2/3 larger than 30% unvaccinated). That is "far from that figure," even if we presume that the threshold is indeed 70% for Covid (some estimates are suggesting that it is, so I'm fine with that, but it may be quite a bit higher). When you're trying to reduce what's left, you see augmenting returns on each additional percentage point of reduction you apply.

You'll see that incorporated into video game mechanics sometimes. The armour stat in WoW, for example, provides less damage reduction with each additional point, leading to the belief that it has diminishing returns. In practice, however, if you calculate its impact on the final damage you take, you find that those apparent diminishing returns are just counteracting the augmenting returns inherent in any multiplicative reduction in damage, so damage reduction ultimately scales linearly per armour point. This is most obvious if you consider the difference a 1% increase makes if you're going from 99% to 100% reduction, which is why so many games implement a hard cap (75%, in WoW's case) to prevent anyone from ever reaching such levels.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.