It’s way more. The UK especially is testing like crazy. But that means a lot more cases appear in the statistics than before, even if the R rate is only marginally higher.
We simply don’t know what the actual r rate of all the different variants are because we had different test velocities as well. And this is crucial in whether we should be hysterical about Delta or not.
Also, wtf happened to cases in India? It’s not exactly all that catastrophic any more. In fact by the time the media had their 2 week India is dying narrative, cases declined. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/
We are definitely doing more testing in the UK than a year ago and it’s likely reflected in the case stats, but at the same time the rate of case growth during the last few weeks looks like a straight line up and that’s not a good thing.
We will likely see fewer hospitalisations than before due to a fairly successful vaccination effort, particularly with the edlerly, but as cases go up so does the number of people who may not die but end up with long covid. Also, the more people infected, the better breeding ground for the virus to develop new variants, and a higher chance of vaccine escape due to evolutionary pressure.
It all depended on the availability of tests.
R is an exponent. Small changes in an exponent lead to huge differences in the result.
That’s a big claim with no data.
And thanks I understand how exponential works.
Media may cry wolf, whether there is one or isn't. But trust me it was a tough time for India this time. I live in Bangalore. And for the "2 weeks" you mention, there was severe Oxygen shortage in hospitals in most cities. Patients could not get beds in time. There were queues outside funeral homes and graveyards. It was hell.
I am not the one to panic easily. And kept on going for my runs during the first wave in 2020, when Alpha was there. As the curve was so flat. Please note case numbers can't be compared, but you can compare positivity rate (positives/tested) and fatality chart[1].
The 2021 Delta wave in India was approximately 4 times severe by all measures. Because of the shortage of Hospital beds and Oxygen, many more people ended up dying than what normally would have.
I know several of my relatives including a 42 year old strong built man who died (his O2 count was 30 unfortunately by the time he got to the Hospital). There are numerous fund raisers going on for people who died. In few cases both the parents dying.
Yeah it was a short wave mercifully. But did a lot of damage. If you just search you can see images of bodies floating in rivers, as the people didn't have means to do last rites etc.
Also the actual span felt like 6 weeks. There was panic as the curve was so steep, and it was spreading like wild fire from the the west (Maharastra/Gujarat) etc to the east. And the peaks at different places were at different times. So the period starting April beginning to May 20th or so was pure nightmare.
Even if one was not affected by the virus. As thankfully in my family's case, there was this fear of not getting a hospital bed/Oxygen cylinder should there be a need.
Overall, I agree UK looks much better thanks to being vaccinated. Although I would say, one needs to keep observing for another month, before making a call, and if by then the fatality curve remains flat, then we can call it a big success.
PS: I got vaccinated after the wave. Only dose 1 yet. And ended up catching delta variant 2 weeks after that. Thankfully, a mild one. But I still wonder how I got it, as I remained very cautious through out. N=1, delta is very very contagious. But yes, if you are vaccinated, no need to worry too much.
[1] https://www.covid19india.org/ (Look at the bottom most curve on the right hand side for positivity chart of the two waves)
Edit: A point regarding fatality numbers in India in the 2nd wave. They were under reported by some multiple. There are various articles comparing total registered deaths during months of the 2nd wave in 2021 with previous years. And there is a sharp bump in the figures, which shows that fatality was severely under reported.
Edit2: Now the same playbook is playing out in un-vaccinated Indonesia unfortunately, with Oxygen shortages and everything. I think, in another month when we compare how delta plays out in UK and Indonesia, we would have several answers to questions of effectiveness of vaccines etc.
so basically like the last 15 months
there is a clear separation of critical thinkers on this planet such that we are almost two different species if it wasnt for the viable offspring
Yup. It started with conflating CFR and IFR (picking CFR of course because it is the bigger number). Comparing raw numbers between two regions that report their data completely different, etc.
Worse is when you show public data and get called "dangerous" because it doesn't fit the narrative that this all is the worst thing ever.
And it changed over time. You remember hearing news media 3% at the beginning of the pandemic?
When did you hear them update it to <1%? Nope by that point they had moved to raw case counts, which by then then the higher statistic.
Selective reporting all day long.
“Well that is what the experts say” is what their source is.
It’s disgusting how this whole thing is nothing but raw appeals to authority the entire way down. Thinking for yourself, expressing doubt or skepticism or having hope and optimism gets met with scorn, shame and ridicule.
I think there's a simple difference in scale between this other events, that makes it hard to assimilate - COVID was, statistically, the most deadly single natural disaster to happen to my country (the UK) in a century. That's hard to relate to, hard to make policy about, hard to put in perspective. Bear in mind the last pandemic (Spanish Flu) was before antibiotics, before oxygen, before all of the techniques that made COVID something you can treat to some degree of success in a hospital.
Technically true because of the "natural disaster" qualifier, but the world wars killed 890k and 450k Brits.
And smoking killed 750k in the last decade. And now that's been overtaken by obesity.
COVID won't even come close to touching that.
Manmade disasters have fearful consequences too. Perhaps that makes it easier to "relate to."
Now, I don't think casualty figures alone provoke the kind of reassessment and realignment that made WW2 such a watershed, but honestly, I think they probably should.
The optimal strategy for all people unable to determine if they're critical thinkers is to either go with the weight of opinion or to attempt to exploit their edge. The middle where you try to convince people is just free labour.
Bottom-line: If you’re 2x vaccinated, hospitalization is highly unlikely for Alpha and Delta variants.
See this report, page 44 bottom: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1413537810296950786
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It is quite clear that for a vaccinated population, it isn't a threat. These are facts that simply aren't being reported by the news media. It's unfortunately quite common for talking heads to prefix "the highly infectious Delta variant" to any discussion, and never offer any context or nuance.
Most media (except, of course, certain anti vaccine organs, which unfortunately seem to have infected an entire section of the mainstream US media) is reporting the significantly better outcomes for the vaccinated.
That being said, considering how small a percentage of people are vaccinated, it’s still a massive threat we cannot simply ignore.
We need to double down on vaccination even more. Delta only underscores that need that already existed.
It is definitely a massive threat to people who cannot get vaccinated if they want to. In my country, we passed that threshold months ago, so the vast majority of deaths are people who simply chose to not get vaccinated.
Vaccination still continues apace, but nowadays it's mostly people under 25, who are much less likely to be hospitalized. When the vaccinations per day start falling below the max we can physically vaccinate, that'll be the point where everyone who wants a vaccine has gotten one.
Unfortunately for the people who have legitimate reasons to not get vaccinated, there are enough people who distrust vaccines that we'll never be truly free of COVID.
> That being said, considering how small a percentage of people are vaccinated, it’s still a massive threat we cannot simply ignore.
OK, so your issue is that I've critiqued the media for sensationalism.
You think the media is not being sensational, because There Is a Major Threat. That's fine. We can disagree. The facts are still the facts, and people can interpret threats in light of those facts. You've now triple-responded to my comment with essentially the same thing. Maybe you're seeing this through an emotional lens?
(FWIW, I haven't seen any major news outlet report that the latest data for secondary transmission of "the Delta variant" indicates that it is not more contagious in the UK. That's a pretty big change, and it's new information. Even if you can find a single news source that has reported it, it's not widely known.)
> We need to double down on vaccination even more
I'm not sure what "double down" means, but I never said that people should not get vaccinated.
So they are all clearly reporting this. And the reality is that there are tens of millions of people who are not vaccinated who are extremely susceptible to the Delta variant.
It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t being made by every news outlet and government agency that I have been following.
Hospital admissions are also skewing a lot younger. Fortunately even if they do get hospitalised younger people are still less likely to die.
Still, deaths are happening. My wife is in health care and she hears stories of people swearing blind Coronavirus doesn't exist and that vaccines are a conspiracy, while dying of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/13/world/covid-variant-...
Besides the headline, here are some other phrases in it pointing out the difference in impact on the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
> the recommendations of health experts, even as the virus’s Delta variant and other mutations fuel outbreaks in areas where vaccination rates are below the national average.
> Public health experts have said that a strong vaccination effort is critical for the United States to outrun the virus
The (apparent) reality that Delta appears to have a lower IFR and that hospitalization rate for vaccinated people for Alpha or Delta is extremely low do not seem to get the same level of coverage as context for the click/view-generating reporting.
Let's be clear: the good data so far is coming from a country with a high vaccination rate. I'm not willing to extrapolate from the UK data to countries who haven't vaccinated their vulnerable populations.
> By far, the most widely studied trade-off involves transmission and virulence (Anderson and May, 1982; Frank, 1996; Alizon et al. 2009). Transmission and virulence are linked by within-host replication: increasing parasite abundance increases the likelihood of transmission, but also increases the likelihood of host death; mathematically, this assumption can be formalized by making transmission rate β an increasing function of parasite-induced mortality rate ν. Nearly all of the literature we summarize below assumes this trade-off.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/parasitology/article...
And also all of:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1420-9101....
The trade-off hypothesis should apply in this case specifically because the proposed mechanism is via improved spike binding to ACE2 and that it has been claimed that increased viral loads have been observed.
This wouldn't be a worry for anyone vaccinated, of course, but for still immunologically naive people (antivaxxers in the first world, and those without access to vaccination elsewhere) then Delta should be of greater concern.
Maybe they do this five paragraphs down. I almost never see this mentioned within the same paragraph as the "highly infectious" claim, which is always at the very top of the story.
> It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t being made by every news outlet and government agency that I have been following.
Two things:
1) I am not "insisting"...I'm providing data. Nobody should believe me blindly. I am nobody.
2) If you already know these facts, great! Most people don't.
ok, three things:
3) I'm not sure why you're so prickly about the fact that I'm sharing factual information.
What you say you’ve never seen is literally what they’ve done.
I haven't found that latter part to be true in general. We can disagree on that.
Not everywhere. See here, for example: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/netherland...
The Netherlands went from 550 cases/day at the end of June to 10,000 cases/day now. The Delta variant took less than two weeks to spread as much as the EU variant did in two months (Sep 1st - Nov 1st). Of course, it was helped a lot by the government deciding to open up bars, dancings and nights clubs on June 26th so it's not a fair comparison :/
Point is, we'll have to wait two weeks to see what effect this will have on the death rate. I expect the death rate to be a lot lower than in November, partly because of vaccinations but also because the age group that flocked to the bars and night clubs is a lot younger than the earlier wave victims.
Still, I don't expect our death rate to remain in the single digits as it has been since the beginning of June.
> As of 4th July, 2,118,096 (93.8%) of the clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) population have been vaccinated with at least one dose. This includes all CEV individuals, even if they were vaccinated as part of a higher priority cohort. Of those, more than 9 in 10 (2,046,244, 96.6%) have received a 2nd dose (90.7% of all CEV individuals).
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sit...
It is a bigger issue in countries like the US where vulnerable populations are refusing the vaccine.
I'd expect something closer to a 4-6 week delay in the statistics.
https://github.com/ctesta01/animated_covid_rates/blob/master...
I'd be curious whether we're detecting noticeably earlier than symptoms now, in countries like Australia with very proactive testing and contact tracing.
The first table is for non-medical personnel without high-risk indication. People under 30 have only been able to book their first shot since a month (but they were able to choose the J&J vaccine, which only needs one shot).
What if my main reason for getting vaccinated is to lower my chance of infecting an immunocompromised person I care about? Even if I could somehow be 100% certain that if I were to be infected it'd be fully asymptomatic, the vaccine still helps me avoid spreading COVID-19 further.
Do you imagine young people who get flu shots do so only because they're worried about dying from influenza at 20?
That 6,000 figure you use is 0.0018% percent of people that got the vaccine, and that's only people that died after getting it, not people whose death was caused by the vaccine. [0]
Vaccination seems sensible from any concern for personal health (again, unless you have access to some data I've not seen). Even for very healthy individuals at low rist of death from COVID-19, you're taking on not only higher personal risk but also exposing other people to much larger risk, as well.
Also, I've gotten the flu shot every year I could since age 16 primarily to avoid infecting others. (There was no family or peer pressure to get the flu shot, at least where I'm from.) I'll grant that I'm a bit more invested in public health / disease spread than the average individual, but I doubt my motivations are that uncommon.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
The CDC investigates these report and say they have only established a causal link to a handful of blood clotting cases as a result of the J&J vaccine. All the other deaths were unrelated to vaccination.
We have a similar reporting system in the UK. Their investigation of deaths following vaccination says that “review of individual reports and patterns of reporting does not suggest the vaccine played a role in the death”, again with the caveat that a small number of deaths are associated with blood clotting.
> Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem. A review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records, has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines. However, recent reports indicate a plausible causal relationship between the J&J/Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine and TTS, a rare and serious adverse event—blood clots with low platelets—which has caused deaths.[0][emphasis mine]
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
Either the US health care system is a reliable source or it’s not. Unless you have an actual informed reason that isn’t post-hoc construction, based on reliable information about both processes, for believing the VAERS reports but not the clinical review process?
Yes of course I’m choosing to trust both. I believe in the checks and balances in the system, that these organisations contain people with a variety of political beliefs, that freedom of speech and the press is an effective counter to deception. But at least I’m applying that trust consistently. If you distrust them then fine, I’m sure you have your reasons, but please at least be consistent about it.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 itself also causes heart problems with higher severity and on a much larger scale. In children, this usually is multisystem inflammatory syndrome that can cause severe damage and death. In adults, severe heart attacks are a known (albeit rare) side-effect of COVID-19. [1] There is also early, but not conclusive, evidence that the coronavirus can cause longer-term heart damage in some cases, such as scarring.
You're welcome to make your own medical decisions such as whether you'd like to get vaccinated, but all of the data I'm aware of suggests that by any measure, vaccination is probably a good choice for the vast majority of people (barring those with allergies to the vaccine, or other known issues).
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
For the COVID-19 U.S. vaccines in particular:
> Preliminary data from the clinical trials among adults ≥18 years old suggest COVID-19 vaccination may also protect against asymptomatic infection.[0]
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
The main issue is that there are still plenty of people with your same mindset. See the measles resurgence as less people got vaccinated: Even if you accept the personal effects of getting major illnesses, it comes with an increase in danger to the immunocompromised, people who medically cannot be vaccinated, and people whose vaccines don't protect them 100% of the time.
You're free to choose whether or not to get a vaccine, but the consequences of your decision affect more than just you.
[Edit: Additional note - while it seems preferable that everyone who can get vaccinated do so, I suppose if you're sticking with the face masks, hand washing, and social distancing you could still protect others without getting vaccinated. I'd respect that as a viable alternative. However, based on anecdata, the overlap of "people who won't get vaccinated" and "people careful about preventing disease spread" doesn't seem to be a huge section.]
* There are reports of dangerous side effects after taking it.
* It's a new vaccine and the effects of the spike proteins it forces your body to produce have been found in places we were told they wouldn't be found.
* No long term studies have been done, even though lipids from the vaccine have been found in reproductive tissues (we don't know what this means yet).
* The vaccine is still only under emergency use authorization.
* I'm not in a high risk category, high risk people should be vaccinated if they're the ones primarily at risk?
* People are being pressured and coerced into taking it even though they are scared to do so. This is wrong, people should feel comfortable to take it, not as if it's their duty to mankind to protect elderly people (who could just take the vaccine).
As far as I can tell, any variables about the vaccines seem extremely safe compared to the unknown variables incurred by those with symptomatic infections.
I agree that people in high risk categories who can be vaccinated should do so. However, the vaccine is only mostly effective, not 100% effective, so to some extent their health is still influenced by the health of those around them.
As far as social pressure, pushing (but not forcing) people toward decisions that benefit everyone seems like the entire point of social pressure. People should be given all of the relevant information and should be free to make their own medical decisions. However, there should be some expectation that one tries not to spread deadly diseases to vulnerable populations, and schools / businesses / etc. should absolutely feel free to require vaccination (of those capable of being vaccinated).
But re: your other comment about wearing a mask, if you're one of the rare people who won't be vaccinated but still keep your mask on in all public places, wash your hands frequently, and stay 6 feet apart from everyone not in your household, you not getting vaccinated isn't a major concern. But the people who use these justifications (disclaimer: anecdata) aren't usually taking those precautions.
> “It’s ok to make a choice, but here’s the consequences asshole”
> It’s exactly what I’m opposed too.
You're opposed to... people pointing out the consequences of your actions? Social pressure to protect the well-being of others?
I got all vaccinations and took basic safety precautions (washing hands regularly during flu season, etc) pre-COVID. I have always balanced the health of others with pragmatic limitations on my ability to take precautions. Now is no different; there's just extra weight on the "caution" side of the scale while a novel and dangerous pathogen spread around. I will continue to take as many precautions as are practical and necessary given world events.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. But I don't see how it's unfair to have a social standard of caring for others.
If you talk to hesitant people, and there are a lot of them, the reason is a mistrust of the people leading the effort and managing the pandemic. Why mistrust? Many reasons, but the most challenging one is because of numbers that don't pass a smell test coupled with apopleptic ad-hominim aggression directed against anyone who questions them. This all but guarantees a 20%+ rejection rate from people who just dig in because they do not make health or other decisions based on fear and shame. There will be a defiant group of about 5-10% who you just can't reach at all, so if your plan needs them, you will need a new plan.
Calling people hesitant is patronizing and was probably the stupidest PR move of all time and the committee responsible for it will have to live with those consequences.
But instead of arming people with a litany of whataboutisms, I would say this to an unvaxed person: given your objections, how does getting the shot prevent you from resisting or even fighting a battle you percieve you need to fight against these authorities you do not trust? Polite euphemisms aside, let's call it what it is, because that's the crux of it.
If it does, you need to just act now and literally overthrow your governments in the next few weeks, but if you aren't going to act today and do that, then get a shot, and use the time to figure out how to depose these people that you do not trust in good time. If, as many hesitant people believe, there might be long term harm to them, your long term still involves a conflict to replace these people, but risk from hypothetical side effects still nets out of that equation.
My rationale to the so-called hesitant would be this: get the shot, and then use the time to organize and support your revolts against untrustworthy leaders and institutions, because once you are vaccinated, you can draw from the ranks of others who were also forced into it. Use this to unite people to your causes against untrustworthy authorities, because your skepticism comes directly from people using this to divide you. Take that from them, and then commit to organizing and scaling the change that has to come. Having the shot gives you skin in the game with the people you are going to need on your side.
This issue isn't the main battle, but I will absolutely support efforts to ensure trustworthy people get into positions of authority after this.
I happen to have some rare professional insight into how evil this all may get, but if it's as bad as I suspect, a small risk of rare side effects is really the least of your worries on that time horizon, and you can't do anything about it if you are on the target list.
If that's on your radar you need to know that doing nothing is not fighting evil. If you are going to fight, get out there and do it, but if you aren't going to do that now, then I'm recommending you take the benefits of a vaccine with some known risks and some unknown ones, keep your family and social connections who will otherwise write you off and isolate you when it counts, and then fight or continue to do nothing when you are ready.
Dismissing someones beliefs as conspiracy theories has never once convinced anyone of anything, so addressing how to effectively navigate a world with a belief is much more logical.
I don't think the reason to take it is scientific. Literally nobody who didn't invent it has taken it as the result of their own emperical research and discovery. I'm saying this vaccine is not the hill to die on. There will be plenty of other opportunity for that.
The main authority on this, the FDA has not even officially approved the vaccine and likely won't for quite awhile. For some people it is logical to ask why other vaccines require 10year+ trials and for this a few months was sufficient.
While personally, I think the risk of the virus greatly outweighs the risk of getting the vaccine, I do not think we should force that choice on everyone. Either the FDA is ridiculously over-conservative in their other trials, or this one is extremely rushed. Can't have it both ways.
My premise is that the facts we choose for our opinions are for support of an underlying belief, and that this underlying belief is that the people running things are full of shit, if not deceptive. I can't change someones mind about that (and wouldn't try), but I'm addressing that concern directly vs. getting a shot.
I'd note that the FDA didn't do the first thalidomide. Thalidomide is one of the first big FDA success stories; it was rejected, despite being approved by numerous other countries and pressure from the manufacturer and politicians at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey
The FDA process took a long time, but wasn't all that effective at guaranteeing safety either. There was a ton of process.
I think you're attributing far too much rationality to an administrative government process.
To answer your question:
(1) Most vaccines don't have 10+ year trials. A year is not even the fastest; the flu on 1957-1958 has a vaccine developed in 4 months.
(2) Most medical trials are slower since everything is done sequentially, since there is no rush. You can do an animal trial, a first-in-man, a small group, then a medium group, and so on. It's a better way to go.
(3) This vaccine has had over 3 billion doses administered. It's far better studied and validated at this point than the vast, vast majority of medical trials.
If you believe "the risk of the vaccine greatly outweighs the risk of getting the virus," can you provide any back-of-the-envelope numbers to back up that statement? From my perspective, the virus already killed half a million Americans, and likely brain-damaged millions. We have enough data on the vaccine to know it doesn't do that.
I cannot trust the institutions pushing this vaccine at all. At worst, I trust the opposite of what they say about anything politicized. But let's just say I don't trust them. In the absence of a trusted authority, I can only make this decision based on my own research. Unfortunately I am not qualified to interpret the data meaningfully, and I truly believe that if there was data suggesting that the vaccine was equally dangerous to the virus, it would be suppressed.
What remains is essentially a total vacuum of information. I then have to make decisions based on intuition and the error bars I perceive. What I expect is that the publicized covid numbers are better or equal to the reality, and the vaccine danger is worse or equal. The publicized numbers for covid give me essentially a zero risk of any problems, because I am young, fit and healthy. The real numbers are going to be even better. Meanwhile, the vaccine problems don't seem to be fewer for young people, but just kind of random. I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times. I have no idea what to expect from a MRNA vaccine, whether there could be problems that appear years later, etc, and I cannot trust any authority that says there is no risk.
There is also the aspect of direct action. If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life. If I get some bad side effects from an untrusted injection, I did that to myself and it will feel mentally much worse. All of this is to say, I don't care at all if I get covid, because I'll be fine. I won't inject myself with an untrusted medicine to avoid that.
"I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times."
No one whom I know who has had COVID describes it like any normal respiratory virus, and it attacks multiple systems. I'm terrified of brain damage, and before-and-after MRIs shows brain damage in >10% of people who contract COVID19.
"If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life"
And if you kill a loved one by sharing COVID19? Or give them brain fog? That's not something I could live with.
The deeper argument, though, is about herd immunity. If we don't stop the spread, really bad things happen.
I'll mention: Do you use proper masks? N95 and proper nanofiber masks are widely available, and appear to do more to stop the spread than the vaccine. They're also risk-free.
The odds of this are far less than the odds of me killing my wife by taking a drive with her. In the same way that I can live with the risk of driving a car with her in it, I can live with this risk. Of course if that actually happened I would feel terrible, in both cases. But life is about weighing risks, and for now I'm comfortable with the risk of remaining unvaccinated.
No, I don't wear masks. That's a different ethical discussion. I don't feel or accept a moral burden for potentially spreading a virus in any case. I wouldn't walk about while sick of course, or have uninformed sex if I had an STD, but if I'm asymptomatic and end up accidentally giving someone an illness in the course of normal life, sorry, but that's just life. People who spread the flu accidentally are not immoral people, whether they get the flu shot or not. Likewise here.
As a baseline number, about a half-million Americans died of COVID already. For comparison, there were about 40k car deaths in the US. For someone like yourself, taking no precautions, the odds of catching COVID19 are way more than 10x of a fatal car accident.
The more critical problem is a systemic one. If no one takes precautions, nearly 10 million people in the US will die. If everyone does, virtually no ones needs to die. It's like polluting or littering.
And COVID19 isn't flu. The flu doesn't leave a quarter of people with brain fog 9 months later.
>I can only make this decision based on my own research.
>Unfortunately I am not qualified to interpret the data meaningfully,
You do your own research but admit that you are unqualified to do that research.
> and I truly believe that if there was data suggesting that the vaccine was equally dangerous to the virus, it would be suppressed.
You believe institutions are untrustworthy yet somehow all of them are able to perfectly coordinate to suppress data.
>The publicized numbers for covid give me essentially a zero risk of any problems, because I am young, fit and healthy.
Nothing about your youth or fitness reduces your risk of transmitting this virus.
>I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times.
It's clear you either do not know nor desire to know how to protect yourself and others from respiratory viruses. This is a new virus that seems like it jumped to us from bats.
>There is also the aspect of direct action. If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life. If I get some bad side effects from an untrusted injection, I did that to myself and it will feel mentally much worse. All of this is to say, I don't care at all if I get covid, because I'll be fine.
You live in a society. Delta is looking to have an R0 of 4-9, that means if you are infected, on average, you will infect 4-9 new people with the virus. If you are infected and suffer long-term damage to your brain and lungs that makes you unable to work, you will qualify for disability, which is paid for by everyone.
This one surprised me. Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic, and the viral load you're carrying, affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others? That was my understanding, along with young fit people having shorter, milder bouts.
> Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic... affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others?
Infected people transmit the virus for a number of days prior to when they first (or ever) show systems.
Edit: following up, I found a recent study[1] that used a pretty extensive contact tracing effort to find
> Most transmission events occurred during the pre-symptomatic phase (59.2%). SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility to infection increases with age, while transmissibility is not significantly different between age groups and between symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals.
Your likelihood to become infected does depend on your age, but once you are infected your likelihood to transmit the virus is the same as everyone else's.
On the contrary, publications would salivate at the prospect of dropping a bombshell like this. People love reading and watching salacious, outrageous coverups and how they unravel.
You would need a multi-national conspiracy with various state and private actors coordinating and suppressing information about negative effects of the vaccine for it to be at a scale "equally dangerous" to the extent of the deaths and injuries caused by actual infection.
And it's not like we have no data about negative side effects. We have data on side effects: getting them is literally a handful in a million chance and they're manageable when they occur[1].
1. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/07/13/mo...
- less than 18 years old. For everyone older, all countries in the world have come to the conclusion that vaccination is safer than staying without vaccination.
- only considering yourself and not the risk that you are part of the reason it spreads.
What lies at the foundation of all this is your distrust and I would suggest you consider how to deal with that. If you can't trust the media and governments (and you actually should trust them to a large part), how about following role-models or friends? Or best how about following data and science? If a whole nation such as Israel goes for a vaccine such as Pfizer don't you think they do their homework?
Up until December we had the Pres/VP candidates saying they would not take any vaccine that Trump endorsed. Then they won, and were faced with convincing everyone to take those very vaccines. Do you believe them now, or then?
It’s perfectly reasonable to agree or disagree with rushing vaccine deployment even further, but don’t attack a straw man.
We humans certainly suffer from omission bias, it was probably safer in our selection environment.
Our everyday life is full of cases where we do dangerous stuff which we don't feel as dangerous because, everybody is doing that, since forever, so yeah you know some things may be dangerous but c'mon, it's not that bad, you don't want to miss out on life by being the only crazy person who doesn't get in a car or something.
When something totally new happens like covid vaccines, it's hard to get the right intuitions, and probably each will have their own, using their own biases.
My personal rules of thumb are:
1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).
2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy
3. I don't trust journalists to obey to the conspiracy; money in media is about attention grabbing, if there were serious side effects they would have ridden the tide (and probably even inflated it)
4. I personally know a few people who died of covid; I don't know anybody that had serious side effects of vaccines. Even if the media is hiding the problem, I would expect it to be visible in my direct experience (as it was for covid)
> 1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).
I do trust the authorities to be incompetent enough not to collect such data.
> 2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy
I do trust governments to engage in groupthink. That's kind of like the idiot's version of coordinating a conspiracy.
In the process, I trust authorities to "message" and dishonestly manipulate information going out in ways which appear coordinated.
I mean, sure. Governments have been and will be dishonest and lying and have been and will be again caught red handed. They also have been and will be accidentally right about various things.
If whatever a government says is always the opposite of true, then it would be super easy to have certainties! I wish that were true. Unfortunately I don't think that works that way.
Without vaccines, at present, my risk of COVID19 would be marginal at best:
- I live in an area with a high vaccination rate, and a low incidence rate
- I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks (which are probably more effective than vaccines), and pretty strong social distancing, which I can do working from home.
I'm vaccinated, but if I wasn't, my odds of catching COVID19 would be nominal at best.
That's different than, for example, a retail worker.
If I didn't believe vaccines were perfectly safe, OP's decision wouldn't be crazy. I am a general-purpose nerd, and I know enough biology to make an informed decision without relying on political authority figures. If that wasn't the case, I might make the same decision as OP.
Now, I can do the math on why, if many people make the same decision as OP, we'll have a serious problem, but again, most people (not OP specifically) can't do math.
You can have empathy without agreement.
Will you take this strong precautions forever?
I may be wrong (because what do I know?), but my assumption is that COVID will become endemic and sooner or later we'll all get it. I don't know that for sure, I didn't spend a lot of time following the numbers and reading right and left about this topic. I just can't devote significant time into doing a "proper study" of the matter. So, instead I'm going to apply my personal heuristic, like everybody else.
In my previous comment I shared my personal heuristics about "can the government effectively hide the dangers of the vaccine?"
Here I'll respond to whether I believe it's rational to not get vaccinated because other people will be vaccinated and the problem will go away without me risking it:
From what I could see, COVID seemed to be very transmissible; despite strong social distancing and lockdowns the contagions kept going. The only way to stop it would be to either doing a prolonged and airtight global lockdown (hard to implement) or to have a vaccination rate that exceeds the herd immunity threshold.
And this vaccination level has to be maintained throughout the world, or else we have to lock down travel in perpetuity, which is again, IMO hard to implement.
Currently we do observe regional variation in covid spread; my intuition is that a lot that can be attributed to the "reverse tinkerbell effect": we're avoiding travel, in some cases forbidding travel, testing people who travels; we cannot reach the conclusion that if you live in an area where vaccination level is high you're going to be fine; as soon as travel resumes you'll encounter unvaccinated people more often.
As I said, I don't know; it's just a heuristic. I think it's possible that I'll catch covid in the next few years. Let's put a generously low probability of 0.1%. Then let's attach a generously low probability of having serious problems if I do catch it, again 0.1% (probably higher than that, but lets be generious). With those number I'd have a chance of one in a million to get severe problems of covid in the near future.
There have been 3.4 billion doses of vaccine administered so far; if 1 in a million of them had severe side effects, that would mean 3.4 million people would be affected; I think somebody would have noticed. This is why I was focusing on addressing whether the governments can actively hiding this problem. That's the main counterarguments I hear to my heuristic about pros/cons of getting the vaccine now, namely that there are indeed million of people who're suffering from the vaccine but we don't know about them because the government is lying (I find this hard to believe; I cannot rule that out logically, but my credence in that proposition is quite low)
I think COVID19 spread because, at every point, people said "It can't be that bad," and it turned out it was. Our response was characterized by wishful thinking.
People can and do catch COVID19 multiple times, and that will only increase as it mutates. Let's start with your assumptions and go one level deeper:
1. COVID19 is highly transmissible
2. COVID19 will become endemic
3. You'll be exposed to COVID19 multiple times
With vaccine breakthrough rates of 5% for the original, and perhaps 20% for delta, and more with growing mutations, you'll catch COVID19 multiple times. Each time, you'll lose a little bit of gray matter in the brain, and sustain other damage. By the time you're old, you'll be a drooling, exhausted zombie idiot.
This makes a lot of additional assumptions, a key one being that breakthrough and brain damage are random events (as opposed to e.g. at-risk individuals), but it is a plausible scenario. We can argue about whether it's 20% odds or 80% odds, but it's definitely not 5% or 95%.
From my perspective, social distancing, masking, and similar just aren't that bad relative to even a moderate risk of the alternative. Proper masks are $2 (ones that filter down to <300nm), mildly uncomfortable, and more effective than vaccines. If we assume independence, proper mask+vaccine+modest social distancing reduces odds of infection to be infinitesimal. I don't believe in independence, but they certainly reduce R0 below 1. Why not?
Now, regarding long term side effects, there are a lot of "alternative news" sources, and random internet anecdotes, which claim relatively common heart problems following vaccination, and some stories of healthy people dying a few days later, though these deaths can't be explicitly linked to a vaccine necessarily. These sources are not more trustworthy than the mainstream media, but if the 2020 election has shown anything, it's that the media is willing to die on the hill for their narrative. These alternative sources are the same sort that were correct about Russiagate and other such media nonsense. So I can trust neither side, and there is at least some fringe evidence that the vaccines are worse than we know.
About long term effects appearing, I can't know if this is possible, and I can't trust anyone who says they do know, since it has been so politicized. There are actually medical doctors who say it could be dangerous in this way, so again, I can't know whether they're crackpots or if a large number aren't just fearful for their jobs and such. If you were a researcher right now and you had some evidence to believe this vaccine could be dangerous long after the injection, I find it hard to believe you could get your message out to any credible mouthpieces at this point.
If, in a couple of years, everything is still fine, then I may relent and get the jab. But right now there is just no way to trust it without trusting institutions which have proven themselves liars.
1) I know enough about molecular biology to tell you the vaccine is safe. You pick up novel stuff all the time. In abstract, we don't know a pebble in your backyard doesn't have some odd chemical which will end humanity, but the odds of that are astronomically low. There just isn't any voodoo in the vaccine.
2) In this case, the claims from "alternative news" are nonsense. With hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine administered, there will be instances of virtually everything happening after the vaccine. That's not to say they're always nonsense -- I read a variety of media -- but in this case, they are.
3) Doctors who fear vaccines are crackpots.
4) You're absolutely right about institutions lying. You're not only right about researchers not being able to get a message out contradicting the party line, but worse, their career would be destroyed. It's the story of the boy who cried wolf.
I agree the CDC has done a terrible job of representing science and establishing trust, but the virus is less politicized in other countries. Look at what those health institutions with better track-records are recommending.
The problem with that calculation though is that it doesn't take into account the increased risk to other people. If you do catch it you'll become a vector for infecting other people, some of which might be a lot more vulnerable or less lucky than yourself. Even if you only pass it on to other younger people, the odds of someone having a bad reaction still go up with infections.
It has not passed the testing that a vaccine needs to have, to be FDA approved. Especially long-term effects testing, which I guess is us now. I doubt the tests will ever be completed now since the makers can already sell every dose they can make.
That said, I'm not too worried about the safety of the vaccine, but I certainly understand people who are.
1) Did that 1957-58 vaccine use existing tech? My understanding is that other RNA vaccines and therapies were already under FDA trials with ~10 year time-frames since the method is new.
2) Why is sequential better, because it is considered safer?
3) Yes, short-term we know it is extremely safe. But there are zero people that have had the vaccine much over 1 year. Long-term effects are unlikely but it's just not scientifically correct to say that this vaccine is better studied than any other just because of the number of doses administered. Duration matters a lot.
Our scientific knowledge in 1957 was limited at best. The double-helix was discovered just a half-decade before. Today, we understand in-depth most of the mechanisms of action involved. There just isn't a comparison here. The COVID19 vaccine is far safer than what we put together in 1957, no question.
> 2) Why is sequential better, because it is considered safer?
It's safer to the original research subjects, but not to the general public. For general safety, you don't find out more by going slowly. You generally learn strictly more from a human study than an animal one, and you learn more from a large study than from a small one.
The point of an animal study before first-in-man is to not endanger a human subject. Small groups come before big ones to pick off things which might e.g. harm 10% of subjects. And so on. The decision was made to skip that step, slightly raising the risk of the subjects, in order to save millions of lives.
Part of that is we had pretty darned good reason to believe the vaccine was safe, and part of that was the grave risk.
> 3) Yes, short-term we know it is extremely safe. But there are zero people that have had the vaccine much over 1 year. Long-term effects are unlikely but it's just not scientifically correct to say that this vaccine is better studied than any other just because of the number of doses administered. Duration matters a lot.
Not so much:
- We have historical evidence. Do you know of any vaccine in the history of mankind which had long-term effects not visible the first few months? I don't.
- We understand mechanisms of action pretty well at this point. Your body gets all sorts of junk thrown at it all the time -- random polens, plastics from your water bottle, randomly mutating cold viruses, and so on. There just isn't any reason to believe a new vaccine is any more dangerous than a random bug bite. Indeed, we understand the stuff going into the vaccine a lot better than we do a random bug.
If you do get exposed to Covid, your cells will be exposed to those very same spike proteins and more. Thus the vaccine should theoretically be much safer than being exposed to Covid itself.
I didn’t downvote you. I do wish we had a longer trial period, and I don’t like taking something that hasn’t been through the full duration trials. Here is what convinced me:
- we now have more than a billion vaccinations done globally, with no mass surge of negative side effects.
- virtually every politician in every party has gotten vaccinated. Including most of the people telling you not to get vaccinated.
- the vaccine produces way fewer antibody targets than the actual virus, so I would expect that if there was a long term negative effect from the spike produced by the vaccine, we would get that or worse from the virus.
- the virus is really contagious and seems to be mutating toward being more contagious over time.
- thus, you’re probably going to get it, which means one way or the other you’re probably going to make a lot of antibodies to spike protein no matter how you slice it.
This is not necessarily true. It depends. People in my family who took the vaccine and had visible side efects (headaches, fever) for a day or two have more antibodies than other acquaintances who got hospitalized with the disease.
The mRNA vaccines cause one protein from the virus to be present, so you get antibodies against that specific protein. More traditional vaccines use dead/weakened virus, which will trigger production of antibodies against multiple parts of the virus.
Saying someone speaks to right wing people means nothing to me.
Fuck off, you’re what’s wrong with society.
He seems to give plenty of time to people who don't seem to have any money to offer. I don't know what evidence you have to support any of your claims. For all you know he is a really good, concerned person, why assassinate someone's character like that?
If one can't attack the arguments, it's easier to attack the person I guess?
The stuff in vaccines gets broken down or excreted by the body; it doesn't linger in your system for years. mRNA, for example, breaks down in minutes/hours.
When we know more about the long term, then people will be more happy to take it?
If you think I’m really against vaccines you’re wrong.
What you're actually doing is completely discounting possible long term effects from the choice to do nothing. Nobody has been a Covid-19 survivor for 3, 5 or 10 years, nor do we know the big picture epidemiological impact of unchecked Covid for 3, 5, or 10 years.
The only data we have is necessarily from the present. And here and now, it seems to indicate that getting vaccinated is a prudent thing to do.
It's funny because your post really offers nothing new, just another opinion of your own.
I've said before, I'm not an anti-vaxxer, I've taken vaccines before and if the Pfizer vaccine proves safe longer term, we know more about reported heart problems in younger males, I won't need to mix and match vaccines and have booster shots and all that type of rot, then yeah, I'll likely participate.
I'm just not prepared to jump right in because Internets tell me they feel it's safe to do so.
What's actually wrong with that? I don't see the issue?
My post is pointing out that your previous framing is discounting the possible effects from doing nothing, while emphasizing the possible effects from doing something. This is not scientific.
In general you seem to be attaching a high weighting to not taking the vaccine, including repeating common logical fallacies. Most likely you've gotten that from the "Internets", so it's fallacious to invoke it as if it's some singular party instructing you to do something. The Internet is generally malicious noise, it's up to you to pull signal out of it.
At the basic level, there is no "all that type of rot". I got two shots, had cold symptoms for a day on the first one, and was otherwise fine. It has allowed me to reduce my Covid precautions substantially, and has drastically increased my quality of life. If there end up being variants that require boosters, then I can make another decision to get those or not.
I wasn't chomping at the bit for the vaccine since it was announced, rather I too figured I'd wait and see what the larger scale effects were. But by the time spring rolled around I had considered 6 months enough time to shake out most unknown unknowns at scale.
Where I live, what I do for work has really made no impact on my quality of life, so I don't give a fish about the virus or the vaccine.
It's funny to me that you say you deliberated, then you took it, and now I'm being "unscientific" for deliberating in the same way. But somehow you've made the scientific choice because you felt 6 months was long enough to wait. Not very scientific ?
I respect people's right to make their own informed decisions, but not to repeat disinformation. I've pointed out exactly how your framing is unscientific for privileging one option ("do nothing") above the rest, but you keep brushing past that.
I shared my story in the hopes that you would see there are deliberate decisions by the people getting vaccinated as well, not just the "Internets". Six months of time felt like a reasonable period of caution to me. If you wanted to wait a year or a "little longer", I wouldn't say we disagree. But rather you're putting forth reasoning that implies needing to wait 10 years which might as well be forever.
If you yourself really don't come into contact with other people - ie you live alone, work at home, get groceries delivered, and don't visit friends - then sure, continue on isolating. But for the vast majority of people this path is inapplicable, and for them your incorrect framing is actively harmful.
I’ve read good things about Ivermectin for example, where’s the rushed controlled clinical trial of that ? A drug we do know is safe, cheap and widely available ?
Also if you look into it, there are actually valid questions being asked such as, what causes heart inflammation and attacks? Why isn’t that more understood. How was it missed in initial trials ? What is the mechanism causing that? [1]
Doesn’t seem right we should give young otherwise healthy men heart troubles ?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/heart-inflammation-after-co...
I think Covid19 escaped from a lab and is probably engineered (to some degree), so I imagine it's also insanely messed up stuff.
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-...
There's clearly inconsistency by the FDA here.
Seriously, what other course of events do you propose should have happened? Vaccines couldn't have been developed before Covid-19 existed. Should we have just pretended that mRNA technology didn't exist, in favor of traditional approaches of making vaccines, and then rushed approval on those? It seems like that alternative has actually been explored by other countries and they're nowhere near as effective.
It's criminal that the FDA has effectively sat on mRNA tech for decades while watching people who could have benefit from it die. The FDA deemed mRNA tech unsafe to give to much smaller groups of people already directly affected with various mRNA treatable diseases yet now after a few months of testing they have amazingly deemed it safe to give to to the entire world. The risk calculus just isn't consistent.
The way you worded your proceeding comment made it sound as if you would have preferred the FDA to not approve the Covid mRNA vaccines, as opposed to preferring easier approvals for other mRNA tech in general.
To extend my quip, the people who could benefit from it each have their own little fire and are being systematically ignored.
1. https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/comment/evolution-mrna-v...
It was not rushed.
We have 250 years of experience with vaccinations and when their side effects happen. And longer with viruses and their autoimmune effects.
After a day or three the vaccine is completely gone from your system, all that remains is the immune effects, the possible side effects are all autoimmune conditions. Those autoimmune conditions will either manifest in 90 days or they will not. There's nothing that hangs around in your body for 3 years and then randomly pops up. By running a trail for 6 months post-injection you will be guaranteed to capture all the side effects from a vaccine study. This is the same with virus triggered autoimmune effects which either pop up in 3 months or they don't (and I've actually had viral pericarditis that affected me about 4-6 weeks after I recovered from a bad cold).
Most of them will run longer, because they don't have a massive worldwide pandemic and they need to prove efficacy so they need enough people in the control group to get infected and that takes time. They were able to speed run the efficacy side of things because so many people were getting infected (we were worried at one point that the virus would largely disappear in Summer 2020 and negatively affect the vaccine trials).
https://www.uab.edu/reporter/resources/be-healthy/item/9544-...
Traditional vaccines: Expose the immune system to an inactivated pathogen. The immune system stochastically learns to target a number of proteins specific to the pathogen.
Genetic vector vaccines: Expose a small number of cells to genetic material that instructs them to create a specific protein chosen by the vaccine developer. The immune system then learns to target this specific protein. The pathogen is under no obligation to continues to produce this specific protein, especially in face of the selection pressure produced by the genetic vector vaccines themselves. We are already talking of booster shots to tackle mutations, 6 month since we started large scale deployment. It's only going to get worse.
Open questions:
* Which protein(s) to chose.
* Why a single protein, rather than a mosaic.
* Is the protein(s) choice generic, or should it be personalized to a specific individual protein spectrum.
* What is the long term prognosis for world scale populations.
Cold fact: We have <1 years of world scale experience with genetic vector vaccines.
The mRNA vaccines are just a single protein not the whole virus and it never gets assembled so its using considerably less cellular machinery than a real virus would.
We've literally studied this shit for hundreds of years, and we're using less moving parts that would happen with a real infectious virus.
Cold fact: this is not unknown territory at all.
Source? For the long term autoimmune effects of these vaccines, that is.
No? Well that's because that information is unavailable because it hasn't been studied long term hence it can't be known.
There are no long term studies. Hence the reluctance of many to get vaccinated. So that quoted statement can probably be banished to the world of pseudoscience for now. Or post your sources from subjects unrelated to the COVID vaccine that make you think that.
The link I supplied was literally a source:
https://www.uab.edu/reporter/resources/be-healthy/item/9544-...
> 2. Vaccine side effects show up within weeks if at all
> That is not to say that there have never been safety issues with vaccines. But in each instance, these have appeared soon after widespread use of the vaccine began. "The side effects that we see occur early on and that's it," Goepfert said. In virtually all cases, vaccine side effects are seen within the first two months after rollout.
That is citing the director of the University's Vaccine Research Clinic.
There is something quite amazing about your link however. The piece (about long term side effects from vaccines) notes the polio vaccine from the 1950s. It somehow omits mentioning Simian Virus 40, the cancer causing virus that was found in the polio vaccine. This vaccine was given to 100 million children and its estimated that 10% to 30% of those doses were contaminated.
I'm sure the doctors assured their parents back then that there were no side effects and certainly laughed off any mention of long term side effects. The price to be paid for trust in these vaccines? Their children growing up to develop brain cancer in their 50s and 60s, decades after they were assured how safe they were.
And nice whataboutism to switch the topic to a vaccine incident from the 1950s, combined with a brand new account, I'm pretty sure I'm arguing with a bot. Have a nice life.
In the What About You section he doesnt even mention those that have had covid, only vaccinated and unvaccinated.
The only area where he says deaths are getting worse are for the unvaccinated: that fatality rates may be significantly higher for unvaccinated individuals due to a faster replication rate of the virus and therefore a much higher viral load.
But then shows infections growth (not deaths) to prove the point, so yeah it's conflating infections with deaths.
> So Delta, like Alpha before it, is both more transmissible and more fatal. Both of these effects have the same root: the virus is much better at binding to human cells, so it reproduces much faster.
> Are people dying more then? Not in Britain.
> But Delta is very hard in developing countries, especially in dense urban areas where the poor are forced to work but live in close quarters with many others. India, Argentina, Tunisia, South Africa, and Indonesia are very sad examples of this.
The first part of the article is an exposé of the evolution of the epidemic, transmissibility and fatality rates. Fine, but at this point, I haven't read any thesis, question, point, claim or argument he would like to answer or prove. It's just a wall of data.
Halfway through, he finally asks the million dollar question "How good are vaccines against Delta?"
That's where he has to retreat to the fact that any data about large populations available is limited:
> The best data we have is from Israel, which used Pfizer.
He then mentions percentages from an article from marketwatch.com and a briefing from technical briefing from the UK government, and goes on to extrapolate several claims based on those sources.
The takeaways in the latter part of his article are generic and have been repeated at nauseam by the medical community and health policy experts at large.
Thomas Pueyo isn't a medical or policy expert. He's a data analyst / publicist. Sure, he's entitled to write musings on his blog. But I don't regard him as an authoritative source because he's able to compile online graphs and stats into an piece which seems to be easily digestible on the surface level.
It does seem a narrative is being spun.
Please forward the discussion by showing how you would present the data.
> COVID deaths [...] And if you think Europe or the US will be spared
This is not reflected at all with the current numbers and the author is mixing deaths in one country with infections in another. There hasn't been even a single uptick of deaths in EU so far that I've seen, and we are past the potential 2+ week delay from cases to deaths so if it was of importance for EU, we'd see a massive climb in death graphs. That is just not happening, so regarding deaths this seems, so far, not to be a concern at all for highly vaccinated countries.
Yes there are many other concerns for which we want to avoid more infections (saturation of hospitals, potential for more mutations, etc.) which are worth discussing, but this article is instead just conflating numbers. See a comparison taken 2 days ago of "infections" vs "deaths" in Spain, which includes this delta wave:
https://imgur.com/a/A9VFS4G