We're hearing 90% effective but to accurately calculate effectiveness, the you need to know how many people normally develop symptoms with covid-19. We don't truly have that data. I've read it is anywhere from 20-80% of people who catch it don't develop symptoms meaning it could be any number, no one knows.
That means no drug company truly knows how effective their vaccine is because the results of the vaccine might be the same results as among the normal population.
As a provider in an urgent care currently testing covid hypochondriacs, at least 40% of those are positive are 100% asymptomatic, 50% have symptoms no different than a common cold or bad allergies, maybe 5-10% have more flu like symptoms. I haven’t sent a single patient to the hospital since early April due to complications of covid.
With that said, this is also the natural path of the evolution and “mutation” of viruses. Over time, viruses become more virulent and contagious and less severe. Which makes sense, a virus wants to infect and reproduce as much as possible, if the virus kills the host, the virus dies with the host. The uptick in total cases is absolutely normal. We are also testing literally anyone and everyone that wants a test even with tertiary exposures, with the high false positive rates of these tests + the amount of legitimate infections so the numbers are skewed.
Additionally people testing positive on rapid antigen and again on PCR will BOTH get reported to the health department which will count as 2 cases as cannot tie to a name due to HIPPA. Also many people that are positive will get retested several times as their employer requires a negative test to return to work. The PCR test is highly sensitive and will detect the tiniest fragments of RNA so patients test positive for MONTHS afterwords despite not being contagious.
Long and the short of it, the numbers are bullshit, masks have never worked (besides medical grade n95 respirators to a certain degree) and the virus is so mild at this point the quarantine and lockdown repercussions have affected patients health so much worse than the actual virus.