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Factorium | 4 years ago

Nurses have to wear burdensome levels of PPE, and are forced to get vaccinated (despite many of them already getting COVID during the initial outbreak, and their natural immunity providing broader and longer-lasting protection than vaccines).

Go back to complete normal and this shortage will resolve.

discuss

order

somewhereoutth|4 years ago

My understanding is that disease induced immunity is a bit more unreliable compared to vaccine induced immunity - perhaps antibodies may be generated that target a part of the virus that is not highly conserved or important for infection, so leaving the individual vulnerable to slight variations, whereas vaccines produce highly targeted antibodies. Also, the virus contains components that interfere with the immune response, perhaps degrading the immune memory?

Vaccination after infection does appear to provide excellent protection though.

We are still doing the science on all this of course.

esyir|4 years ago

I'd expect the opposite, and from what I understand, this is particularly so for delta. Consistency is an issue though, as natural immunity is more variable in it's response.

> https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

This report on an Israeli study seems to imply that natural immunity was superior to the vaccine for protection against delta, though a combination of vaccination and infection provided the best response. This, to me is intuitive.

Note: 1, educated conjecture ahead

It seems intuitive to me that the natural immune response would provide greater protection against variants like delta, stemming from the nature of their targets. The vaccine is highly tuned for a specific target: the spike protein. Conversely, natural immunity performs multiple "training" runs in parallel, targeting a wider variety of antigens. If you'd take a ML perspective, this is somewhat analogous to an overfit model vs a more generalized model.

Note 2: Alas, you still have to get Covid to begin with to get natural immunity, so you probably don't want to go out of your way to get it if you haven't already.

liveoneggs|4 years ago

my sister (a nurse) got covid, was fine, got it again, got sick, and now got vaccinated

coolso|4 years ago

My friend’s entire family got fully vaccinated, and all got as sick with COVID as my ex who was not vaccinated.

detaro|4 years ago

Except countries that don't require vaccinations for healthcare workers have exactly the same burnout issues. And the problems also affect workers that are vaccinated. Having to do the job right now is quite enough apparently.