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A comment on First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK. Parent comment

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.

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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.

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