Matador
Well-known member
Yes, this is exactly it. People don't like dealing with probabilistic scenarios, and like to speak in terms of absolutes like "not completely effective" or "just as effective as nothing", but it is far more nuanced than that.
This isn't specific to COVID, but rather any transmissible agent. Setting aside the outcome after infection, in simplistic terms, everyone carries around with them two dice, one green and one red. The green one indicates your likelihood of receiving enough viral load to become sick, and the red one indicates your likelihood of transmitting any infection to another. Two people each rolling a 1 on their respective red and green dice indicates that a transmission event happened.
So if you are infected, and you go into a room of unvaccinated people with no social distancing or mask wearing, you are not only constantly rolling your red die, but forcing everyone around you to roll their green dies. The longer you stay there, the more rolling everyone does. Eventually your red will come up 1 and someone's green will roll a 1, and you'll have a transmission event.
Mask wearing, social distancing, and vaccines all add sides to the green dice that vaccinated, mask wearing, and socially distant people carry with them. So if the green die starts off with 10 sides, wearing a mask perhaps adds 10, socially distancing adds another 10, and vaccinations add 100 sides. So if you do all three, instead of a 1 in 10 chance, it becomes a 1/120 chance (these numbers are approximations, and ever changing, but they illustrate the point). Even if you are vaccinated and are forced to constantly roll your green dice by infected people, the probability of a transmission event (both a 1 on a red and a 1 on your green) goes down by orders of magnitude. The number of sides of these dice (and how many rolls there are) eventually distill down to the R-value of the disease. Again, this isn't a COVID thing: all transmissible diseases like mumps, AIDS, ebola, follow these principles.
As an aside, even reproduction follows this, in that a male has a red die and a female has a green die to see if a pregnancy occurs. Based on data across millions of pregnancies, all other things being equal, a male red die has 2 sides, and a female green die also has two sides, meaning that if no other mitigations take place, the chance of rolling two 1's is about 1 in 4 (matching the data across millions of pregnancies which shows an aggregate pregnancy rate of about 22% per event). The use of a condom adds between 50 to 100 sides to a male's red die, and if the female takes contraception, it adds approximately 100 sides to her green die. In other words, the combination of the two makes the event of a pregnancy quite unlikely: stated differently...Duh?
In addition, wearing masks and socially distancing ALSO add sides to people red dice, further reducing the probability that both dice end up 1's. There is a growing body of evidence that vaccinated people who do end up testing positive for COVID (meaning they have enough virus in their systems for screening to pick it up) also have additional sides added to their red die.
None of this means any of these scenarios are IMPOSSIBLE. Nobody is arguing that they are.
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