https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/03/16/wh...
> "...they say that is indeed “much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size“. It also appears to be similar to what’s been seen with the other coronavirus vaccines..."
Until we know the methods and expectations behind numbers provided, naively taking them at face value suggests that this vaccine reduces the risk of these blood clots in the general pre-covid population. In the absence of statistically robust information about these alerts, we're stuck assuming that the experts know what they're doing until the detailed work is available and recognizing that (as Derek pointed out months ago) public attention is going to find focus on the inevitable mortality and illness rates without accomodating that people also die and have health issues for other reasons. Watch a random selection of 17 million people for a month, a five digit number of them will die. More if they're predominantly on the elder end of the scale...
> "The number of these cases after vaccination with COVID-19 AstraZeneca is statistically significantly higher than the number of cerebral venous thromboses that normally occur in the unvaccinated population. For this purpose, an observed-versus-expected analysis was performed, comparing the number of cases expected without vaccination in a 14-day time window with the number of cases reported after approximately 1.6 million AstraZeneca vaccinations in Germany. About one case would have been expected, and seven cases had been reported.
1 expected vs 7 observed seems significant. Of course, with tiny rates like that it's challenging to draw a clear conclusion.
Their whole FAQ is very concise and informative: [1] https://www.pei.de/EN/service/faq/coronavirus/faq-coronaviru...
Governments banning their citizens from taking Astrazeneca should use accurate language "it's banned" instead of the language "pause rollout".
Taking a COVID vaccine is a choice individuals make and governments have denied them during a pandemic.
Pausing is exactly what is happening here in Norway. And the government is not involved, all these decisions her in Norway have been made by the relevant medical institutions.
Norway has also had at least three serious cases with 130.000 people vaccinated, so the incidence is certainly higher than 1 per 2.3 million.
At this point, with a plausible mechanism of action being discovered, it's either that or a "bad batch". But this doesn't seem like the kind of problem that would likely be caused by contamination or bad ingredients, and there's been enough time by now that the batch numbers behind the cases will have been thoroughly checked.
This will be a very tricky ethical consideration, with not only weighing different risks between different age groups, but also the public's trust in vaccines and the advice provided by health authorities.
My money says that AZ will be pulled from countries with few Covid deaths and/or other vaccine options available in the near term. And some controversy in countries that do not meet these criteria.
That's not how numbers work. You can't look at California, for example, and conclude that because 63% of voters chose Biden, his national vote share is certainly higher than 52%.
Source: https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/x32Xyl/tyskland-31-tilf...
If there were only one case in Norway (i.e. 1 in 130,000) it would still be orders of magnitude difference. But that's not meaningful.
p = 1/2,300,000
N = 130,000
Prob(0 cases) = (1 - p)*N = 0.9450...
Prob(1 case) ~= p * N * (1 - p)*N = 0.0534...
Prob(2 cases) ~= p*2 * (N*2 / 2) * (1 - p)*N = 0.0015...
Prob(3 cases or more) = 1 - P(0) - P(1) - P(2) ~= 2.886e-05
Which is small enough to refute you comment, yes?
Prob(0 cases) = (1 - p)^N = 0.9450...
Prob(1 case) ~= p * N * (1 - p)^N = 0.0534...
Prob(2 cases) ~= (p^2) * (N^2 / 2) * (1 - p)^N = 0.0015...
My apologies for that.
You can't take a subset of the population, find that that subset is out of step with the rate in the total population, and then conclude that the rate in the total population is wrong. The number of cases isn't necessarily evenly distributed, and your model is one that applies to independent random events. But the fact that a case occurred in Norway rather than in another country doesn't dramatically change the overall rate.
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/86OmPr/drama-i-kulisse...
Of course, Norwegian health authorities point out in the interview that the ethical consideration will be different between countries, depending on expected vaccine delivery and local incidence of covid.
Source: https://www.fhi.no/sv/smittsomme-sykdommer/corona/dags--og-u...
Source (Norwegian): https://legemiddelverket.no/nyheter/legemiddelverket-har-mot...
[1]: <warning, contains images of heavy bruising> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombotic_thrombocytopenic_pu...
The British tool for calculating covid risk puts risk of death as 1 in 500.000 for a healthy 25-year old, and risk of hospital admission as 1 in 13.000.
Must also add to this the public's willingness to vaccinate in the face of these numbers, both now and in the future. It's a shifting of risk from high-risk groups to low-risk groups.
It's more like 1 in 500,000.
On top of that we can speculate that healthcare workers are more likely to seek treatment than the average vaccine recipient and they are healthy adults of average age.
If you had children and one of them died as a result of a vaccine, you would not say is a small population affected.
There are other vaccines that can be used. I believe Oxford will license Sputnik and manufacture it.
This is just a smart way of saying "Won't someone think of the children?" It's not genuine for you to speak of general-population statistical percentages in one sentence then evoke the emotional response from someone's specific loved-one in the next.
>> There are other vaccines that can be used
We need to get needles in arms NOW to save the most lives; any delay or alternative approach is actively killing people.
If we are full of concern about this, maybe we should be focusing more on a drug that is used by millions of women year over year to improve its safety.
https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/birth-control-method...
This is an exaggeration, at best. There may have been countries that grew in the latter part of 2020, but to characterize these as "booming" is misleading.
Japan had its first economic contraction since 2009 (down 4.8% over 2019). They've been flirting with deflation throughout 2020. And they're one of the countries with the lightest responses.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56066065#:~:text=Japan's%2....
Developing countries in Asia are no better off:
"ADB said GDP in developing Asia will contract 0.7% this year and three-fourths of the region’s economies are set to register negative growth for 2020. That includes countries like Singapore, Thailand, India and the Philippines. China, where the coronavirus outbreak was first reported in late-December, is the only country that is expected to register a positive growth, albeit far below normal levels of growth."
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/15/adb-2020-outlook-most-asian-...
Countries that failed to contain the virus like Europe and the US had negative GDP growth and racked up large amounts of debt.
You're certainly welcome to do the work to prove the (extraordinary) claim that you're making.
As I said, even if you can find a few examples of growth amidst the broader disaster, most are nowhere near what they would have been.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/02/01/tai...
“ Taiwan's economy grew 2.98% in 2020 compared to a year ago, advance estimates by the island's statistics office showed on Friday — the growth outpaced China's 2.3% expansion”
I'll give you Taiwan. Now tell me about the rest of Asia.
The biggest "Asian" countries excluding China, Japan and Korea, didn't have hard lockdowns like in New York or California (Japan's constitution didn't even allow it), just voluntary social distancing and early closure recommendations, and effective contact tracing. China had lockdowns but it's economic numbers are extremely unreliable.
538K confirmed deaths in 328 million (the US population)
They really aren't comparable.
EDIT: see replies below for details about deaths connected to the clots. I take that back. But my general point still stands, COVID is far, far more dangerous than the vaccine.
https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/hp-news/2021/210315-pei-infor...
https://www.pei.de/EN/service/faq/coronavirus/faq-coronaviru...
“confirmed” might seem like nitpicking but it’s widely speculated that the actual death count for COVID is much higher than the confirmed number too.
It is worth breaking that down by age, sex, and other risk factors.
For an 80 year old male obese smoker, who lives in a country with high COVID-19 rates, I have no problem believing that COVID-19 is more dangerous than the AstraZeneca vaccine.
For a 25 year old female with no comorbidities, who lives in a country with low COVID-19 rates, this is much less clear and will now have to be determined statistically.
Source (in English): https://www.fhi.no/en/id/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/dai...
That is a hugely inflated numbers. For example, people who died in motorcycle accidents who tested positive for COVID at the time are counted in that total. It may be useful to the CDC to count that way but it is not an accurate number to show how dangerous COVID actually is.
Flu death statistics are way down this year. Did the flu magically disappear this year? I doubt it. Almost all respiratory infections were counted as COVID out of an abundance of caution.
Yes, COVID is dangerous. However, the count that is published is way over stated.
In the case of the motorcycle accident: the man was in a crash and hospitalized for over a week where he died of COVID related respiratory failure. While he would not have been in the hospital had it not been for the accident, had it not been for COVID he very well may have survived his time there.
Regarding the Flu, it is way down this year precisely because of the measures that have been taken for COVID. It is less transmissible than COVID, so it stands to reason that it would die out during a time when most people are taking precautions to prevent the spread of a more transmissible virus.
Excess death counts are available, and they are even higher than the COVID death counts, suggesting that the official count may actually be an underestimate of total fatalities. However, the claim that that it is "way over stated" is not borne out by the actual statistics.
I'd rather our society not be directed based on easily manipulated statistics. It cloaks hidden agendas behind the guise of science and math which is dishonest.
[0]: https://www.denverpost.com/2020/05/15/colorado-covid-coronav... [1]: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/fox-35-investigates-questi...
Sure, but do you really believe everyone was so hygienic that the flu was entirely eliminated in some areas? Most of the trips I have taken out involve at least a couple encounters with people wearing their masks improperly, touching their face, sneezing, coughing, etc. We should see at least some small amount of flu. Zero is suspicious IMHO.
There will always be a small number of people wearing masks incorrectly but that doesn’t invalidate everyone that does. And it’s not just masks etc, it’s also the lengthy lockdown, working from home instead of commuting on public transit, etc etc. It does seem strange that a hospital would report absolutely zero but we have no idea of the context. Maybe the OP lives in a sparsely populated area.
That Reuters article is speculation from nearly a year ago.
When thousands are sick, and hospitals are full, medical personnel is stretched to their limits, nobody can get intensive care, regardless of age. Poverty is a serious issue that needs to be tackled, but ignoring direct and indirect deaths due to Covid is simply wrong.
No, enough of the moral take. We didn’t approach this pragmatically, and we need to stand up against the grandstanding that fervently uses emotional hostage taking as a talking point.
FUD was at maximum from the start. Toilet paper shortages. What else can I say.
Hysteria got everyone going to the hospital. That’s it. You know how I’m sure? Because it’s the same phenomenon that got everyone to stock up on toilet paper.
It was the fucking FLU. What a shame.
Anyone that disagrees with this better fucking provide the Covid numbers in comparison to previous year flu numbers.
Today, hospitals in France at 83% capacity, in the region around Paris at 104%. During the first wave, the situation in Italy was so bad doctors had to choose who had a higher chance of survival and only admit them, and leave others to die on the streets.
I cannot believe there are still people in an alternative reality.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=home...?
Here are some numbers. Do check when was the last time a "flu" killed ( confirmed) 2.7m people. Not to mention it's still ongoing, mutating, and new variants are more easy to spread and heavier, especially among younger (<50 years) people. Please educate yourself and stop spewing nonsense that was debunked a month in the pandemic.
HN Quick Capsule Review:
* a user named "logicchains" begins a nationwide campaign to lock up the set of people who a) love their octogenarian grandparents and b) advocated for a lockdown.
HN Quick Capsule Review Future Edition:
* bored adtech recounts uncle's harrowing run in with a union job