Quote:
Originally Posted by Vicky.
This bit is very interesting to me actually..as am now wondering if this is the case for other vaccines or not? Like, could you still spread chickenpox like this, if you had the vaccine? Honestly (and maybe naively too) I kind of assumed that 'the norm' for vaccinations was..that you cannot get it, nor pass it to anyone high risk who cannot have the vaccine for whatever reason.
|
It depends on the virus - some can survive without a host (on objects) for a prolonged time, some die within minutes or even seconds outside of a host so can only spread directly from person to person. Also the "amount of exposure" needed to infect varies so for example some could spread just with that's transferred on someone's hands... some would need there to be an actual gob of spit or something (bleh...) so you could catch it from, say, someone's used tissues but not from someone's coat.
I can't say I know the answer specifically for chicken pox
. It does seem to be surprisingly still quite unknown for MANY regular vaccines, and I cas see lots of studies that suggest large reductions but not "complete" halting e.g. a vaccine giving 95% individual protection in a population but only stopping spread by about 70%... which would suggest that 70% of people gain full immunity, and then a further 25% gain a level of immunity that stops them developing symptoms but the virus is still replicating asymptomatically in them.
In theory... it SHOULDN'T be a problem so long as all of the vulnerable categories are vaccinated, and assuming that the vaccine effects are long-term... as it should mean that even if it continues to spread, anything more than mild cases will become very rare.
I do agree with you above though; the scale of spread at this point means it's a complete fantasy that we'll ever live in a 100% covid-free world, viruses like this that are "out of the bag" so to speak can't just be eradicated... if they could, we would have eradicated chicken pox, measles, glandular fever etc. years ago but they still go around.
Covid will HOPEFULLY be rendered "not really a problem" by vaccination and then life can go back to normal. People get seriously ill and die of viruses all the time and always have, we carry on. The key is in bringing the scale of them problem WAY down so that we can treat it as we do those viruses. And I agree that it will most likely be a "minor ailment of the future", one of a multitude of minor viruses that circulate, but we're likely talking a century or more for that to happen really. Essentially, it's possible or even likely that the existing circulating coronaviruses were pretty nasty in humans when they first appeared... but they've been around for a LONG time.