Re:First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK
by throwaway2245 on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @09:38AM
(#25345663)
As a standard, the UK makes medical decisions based on QALYs saved (quality-adjusted life years).
Although you can argue that keeping hospital beds free saves a lot of QALYs, it's harder to argue that care homes have a lot of QALYs to save.
And, it's not obvious that care home patients are the first to occupy hospital beds (I'm unsure about it); care home patients with COVID have tended to die in their care home.
Re:First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK
by hn_throwaway_99 on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @09:46AM
(#25345786)
> it's harder to argue that care homes have a lot of QALYs to save.
Not true at all. They may have fewer life years left, but they're orders of magnitude more likely to die from Covid, so preventing a Covid case in this population actually saves more QALYs than preventing a case in a younger healthy person, statistically speaking.
The uk is vaccinating according to risk of death, and risk of occupying a hospital bed first. Not the risk of catching or passing it.
THe big concern in this pandemic has been hospital usage. once your hospital is full everyone starts dying not just covid patients. We were about two/four weeks away from collapse in london in april.