If you die of Covid, your loved ones will not care if the chance of that happening was low. You won't care either, you'll be dead. All it really takes is that one previously-undiagnosed comorbidity to put you in the front of a the line for a casket-fitting even if you're young(-ish).
If you survive but get permanent damage e.g. due to the blood clots that a lot of COVID patients develop, or due to the side effects of medications and treatment e.g. (partial) blindness from high-dose steroids or reduced mobility up to no use in your limbs especially your legs due to ECMO, then I am pretty sure you won't be running around (in the latter example because you physically cannot anymore) telling people how COVID only kills so-and-so tiny percent of the population.
Even if you escape realtively unscathed, spending a month or two in the hospital followed by some weeks of recovery or in a rehab facility (e.g. to learn how to walk again after a few weeks of coma and maybe some ECMO hoses in your legs), then that probably still would be an experience you'd like to avoid.
And that isn't even yet considering what effects you may experience in the future, "long covid" and all that.
My teenage athlete nephew mysteriously developed heart problems right around after he got vaccinated, and now he can barely walk up a flight of stairs. No one is going to say the vaccine caused it, but the timing seems pretty damning. Meanwhile, if you look at the CDC stats, the risk of injury from covid for his demographic is at least an order of magnitude lower than his risk from riding in a car.
Personally I don't believe that we are living in a rational society right now. For the fun of it, maybe I'll figure out one of those browser plugins to replace the word "science" with "propaganda".
> Meanwhile, if you look at the CDC stats, the risk of injury from covid for his demographic is at least an order of magnitude lower than his risk from riding in a car
You have to look at the CDC stats and the vehicle fatalities to make this claim. "Risk from riding in a car" is extremely low. 0.008% of teens die annually (2400 out of 30 million, age 13-19) in car accidents.
Case fatality rates from COVID are an order of magnitude higher for that age group -- 0.04-0.06%, depending on your source -- so you'd have to believe case underreporting by 100x (impossible, since cases are > 1% of population everywhere) in order for risk from "riding in a car" to be "at least an order of magnitude" higher.
Since the start of 2020, there have been 576 "All Deaths involving COVID-19" among people under 18 in the US. Compared to 60,811 deaths from all causes, that's slightly less than 1% of all child deaths.
The 576 covers almost two years, so let's call it 300 deaths/year. Not accounting for the slight difference in age ranges, that's 1/8 your number of 2400 deaths/year from car accidents. I'd call that roughly one order of magnitude lower. If you clump in children under 13 in your car accident statistic, I suspect it would fall below 1/10.
Is my math wrong or is your math wrong? If my math is wrong I would love to understand why.
I think your math doesn't distinguish between rates and amounts: indeed, if every kid in the US got COVID and only 600 died, then sure, you could make the claim that it's less risky than driving. (Also, the pandemic would be over, rendering this whole conversation moot.)
The truth is we don't know how many kids in the US have had COVID, but I'm pretty sure it's not 100% of them -- which is why the number I cite is the estimated case fatality rate and not just the total number of cases.
If you throw in an unknown scaler and fudge it, then yes you can make the statistic do whatever you want. I'd argue it's not a relevant or useful statistic, though. It's analogous to you telling me my risk of dying from a bullet to the head is near 100%. It's technically true, but I'm not going to super glue a kevlar helmet to my head.
Oh, my apologies, I originally misinterpreted one of your earlier messages when you brought up underreporting.
I understand where the 0.05% case rate number comes from (reported deaths divided by reported cases). I do personally think the reported deaths number is probably slightly over-reported and the reported cases is significantly underreported.
Even if the case fatality rate is accurate, I just don't think it's useful when assessing personal risk unless you routinely go out of your way to catch covid. If you start getting into that level of detail, you at least need to correct for comorbidities as well.
Specifically, when I say that it's an order of magnitude less likely for a teenager to die from covid than a car accident, I don't mean a teenager that caught covid or a teenager that was in a car accident. I mean a randomly sampled teenager out of the 60 million or so in the US.
I was thinking about it a bit more. Apparently the fatality rate of car accidents is 0.7%, so comparing that to a covid case rate of 0.06%, it seems like it's still an order of magnitude less fatal for a teenager to get into a car accident than to catch covid. It's been an interesting discussion, and I've enjoyed diving into the numbers more. Thanks!
Perhaps he got the vaccine in the bloodstream as opposed to muscle tissue as intended.
There are reports now of injections done without pulling back to see whether the injection site is a blood vessel. How the drug performs is seriously different in blood stream vs muscle tissue.
The primary impact of blood stream doses appears to be heart related problems.
I mean come on, if the administration of the vaccine caused it, the vaccine caused it. If he hadn't gotten the vaccine, it would not have been (as conjectured) injected into his bloodstream.
Fact is, how it gets injected appears to have a very significant influence on it's impact to the patient.
There is a clear distinction here; namely, whether the vaccine was improperly used.
Taking too much Tylonol can cause liver failure. Too much Ibuprofen can cause renal failure...
In those cases, the drug was improperly used, but the cause analysis centers on improper use, because doing that multiplies the risk and symptom severity.
See how that all works?
Saying the "vaccine caused it" simply is not enough information, which is why I linked what I did.
It is important that we get these discussions right.
Edit:
In the interest of accuracy, note I did not say the vaccine did not cause the trouble. I said it probably did not cause it, and I said improper injection probably did.
Neither is an absolute. I did not intend, nor mean to imply otherwise. What I did intend was to improve on the clarity, scope and accuracy of the discussion.
Why bother?
Better discussion means more informed people taking fewer risks and or making more good choices, all of which will improve law, costs, outcomes.
Getting back to the matter at hand, when we factor the elements down, we see one thing we can do right away, and that is we make damn sure we are administering vaccines properly.
There are risks with the vaccine. They are small by percentage, but they are there. No argument from me.
Those risks go up dramatically with improper injection; namely, it being delivered directly to the blood stream, which is entirely avoidable.
That's a fair point. It seems to me like the government is pressuring people into taking a vaccine that isn't being properly administered en masse, and all the parties involved are both protected from liability and aren't being transparent about it, all to mitigate a trivial amount of risk.
I just saw an article yesterday talking about Pfizer making $36 billion on vaccines this year.
The damn Covid is novel, meaning we get our education together, the hard way and that sucks.
And that means being smart about probabilities and potential cost and risk outcomes matters a lot! Doing that is harder than necessary too.
A small investment in proper injection can seriously reduce vaccine risks, for example. That is real news as far as I am concerned and that should be acted on STAT. And you just gotta know the optics on all that complicate and likely bias action away from optimal too.
My own first injection was not done properly. (By that I mean the person doing it did not do a blood vessel check.)
I made sure the second one was done properly.
I very seriously oppose the blanket immunity myself for similar reasons.
The profit drive on this is pretty ugly too, and it is a complicated discussion. Very generally, I must say the problem is global and allowing profit to drive policy is not doing humanity any favors.
There is a whole lot to be said... but, maybe another day.
Frankly, our current body politic is very seriously ill.
Trust is low.
Because of all that, I personally am paying close attention to how I handle my part in it and am reluctant to judge anyone else.
I am usually reluctant anyway, because what I feel should be obvious reasons! But yeah, extra care is indicated right now.
Best move, in my view as a normie out there wanting to be a good human, is to try and understand one another better, avoid judgement and the usual fear, blame and shame, talk more and hopefully more of us make smarter choices and see lower risks and better outcomes more of the time as this all plays out.
Pretty sure that is as good as it all gets right now.
That's actually the theory I developed the first time myocarditis in skinny teenagers was reported many months ago. It just makes sense that spike protein mRNA is getting shotgunned into their heart muscle cells. So, I was rather disillusioned when I saw that theory finally pop up in the news in the last month.
Saying the vaccine didn't cause the myocarditis because it was "injected wrong" isn't a compelling argument to me, or likely to anyone that's thinking rationally.
A 2% chance of death is actually very high risk for most people. Obviously with a name like dontcare007 I'm sure you've a huge appetite for risk that others don't.
If 2% of domestic flights in the US crashed, that would be about 100 plane crashes. Per day.
An accident rate of less than 1% grounded the Boeing 737 MAX. In a study of the aircraft, the FAA estimated there would have been 15 crashes over 30 years. This was seen as unacceptable.
It's much higher than that for easily identifiable subgroups -- elderly people and obese people being trivial examples.
The control arm of this study had a rate of "hospitalization or death" of 7% because they selected for subgroups at high risk.
It's fine to acknowledge that aggregate risk of Covid is low (and indeed, more people should acknowledge that fact), but we must also acknowledge that it is a serious risk for a large group of people.
That may be true, but it doesn't automatically mean that 42% of Americans are high risk. This is reflected in the aggregate statistics. Mild obesity is probably not a significant risk factor, whereas severe obesity is a big problem.
The BMI-based definition of "obesity" is a crude qualifier, and the vast majority of the affected will be in the smaller group that is both elderly and obese (esp. considering that age is, by far, the more important factor for serious outcomes.)
The trouble is that the new medications probably don't work by the time you're in the ICU with Covid. I'm not sure it was tested with this one specifically, but at least one of the recently-approved medications was previously trialled on ICU patients and showed no benefit - they had to do another study giving it to people who hadn't been hospitalized yet to get any useful reduction in deaths, and there's some reason to think this is an inherent limitation of drugs that try and reduce viral replication. This study only seems to cover patients who haven't been hospitalized at the point when they start the treatment.
I know that people can have difficulty interpreting probabilities, but given the outcome, you don't think those are really terrible odds? Of course the medicine also has a risk profile but it's clearly much, much lower.
Also it should noted that even when covid doesn't kill you it can have debilitating effects that linger or are permanent.
> Fortunately vaccination cuts that pretty close to zero.
Unfortunately as can be seen in table 5 from the link below, vaccination does not bring the fatality rate close to zero. It brings it closer to zero depending on your age. Bearing in mind this applies to hospitalized patients only(therefore not exactly IFR), the rate of death was reduced by vaccination in people over the age of 50, but not in people under the age of 50. Vaccination helps in certain cohorts.
At the start of pandemic we could have hoped that it will pass in half a year, in a year or so. Now we know that it is probably here to stay.
So eventually you will get COVID.
Depending on how long has passed after your vaccine, what variation of virus you will get, how old you are and etc will depend if it is more like 5% or 1% or so.
In my office I have 200 or so colleagues. Imagine having 4-5 funerals at the company because of this illness.
> Depending on how long has passed after your vaccine, what variation of virus you will get, how old you are and etc will depend if it is more like 5% or 1% or so.
This is fear-mongering. There is no example of a risk of death post-vaccination that gets this high. The few studies that document a decline in efficacy show a modest decline, against symptomatic illness. The vaccines remain highly effective against severe disease and death.
The article also shows that deaths-per-100k is highly dependent on age. "“Age is our top risk factor for vaccine breakthrough deaths,” said Theresa Sokol, the state epidemiologist in Louisiana, one of the jurisdictions that contributed to the C.D.C. data.". In 12-17 and 18-29, deaths-per-100k are essentially 0 for both vaccinated and unvaccinated. This is fantastic news for kids of grade school age: they can live their lives for the next 20 years without having to worry about covid medical risks.
This is meaningless without context. What percentage of the population is vaccinated? How old are the patients? What percentage of the hospitalized are extremely old/frail/comprosmised?
Remember: if 100% of your population is vaccinated, then 100% of your hospitalizations and deaths will be in vaccinated people.
When both the risks and vaccination rates are significantly different across demographic groups statistics for the whole population are often nearly useless due to Simpson's paradox.
Depending on how we define severe COVID you link is showing between 36% and 44% of the severe COVID patients at the hospital are vaccinated.
That's similar to what they have seen in Israel. As of about a month ago they were seeing about 60% of their severe cases were in vaccinated people.
Sounds pretty bad for vaccines, right? It does until you remember Simpson's paradox and take a finer look at the data [1]. It turns out that the Israel data showed in each age group efficacy against severe COVID ranging from 81.1% to 100%, with above 92% in all the 10 year age groups under 60 and still above 88% is the 10 years groups through 80.
It is very likely a similar thing is going on at the hospital whose data you linked to. That's been the case for every place I've come across in the US that published breakdowns of the stats by age group.
There is no doubt about vaccine efficacy. However it all depends. On your age, on your illnesses, on strains of virus. Who knows what you will get in 2 years.
So people who say that "pfft it is only 2% chance and only if you get" are just denying it.
You will get COVID. Hopefully you get it after a few years when there are not only vaccines but drugs widely available.
A death rate of 4-5 per 200 workers is highly unlikely. According to CDC data the infection fatality rate in a mostly unvaccinated population was 0.06% for the 18-49 age group and 0.6% for the 50-64 age group. The majority of deaths have been among older age groups, who are mostly not working at companies.
Unless you have a significant number of people working in your office over 70 years old, or if half of your colleagues are at least 60, it's more likely that nobody will die than 4-5.
