If the vaccine is available and I choose not to get it and then die... Well, that's my own prerogative.
We are quickly moving into a corporate and government nanny state where citizens and users can't be trusted with their own agency so their agency is removed.
Sure if you got sick and crawled into a ditch and died then more power to you.
Instead you would end up going to a hospital and wasting a bunch of peoples time, and in the event your dumbass dies from it - some poor man/woman has to hold your hand while you gurgle out your deathrattle.
Being selfish with your own life in a society never just affects you. That's why it's a society. Someone will always have to clean up your shit when you make poor decisions with your life.
That is physically harm you to make sure you die in a safe place, not in my yard
Sounds fair.
("you" of course means "the unvaccinated who use their freedom to hurt others")
There are all kind of possible accidents, DUI is the kind where someone decides that they take the risk of other lives. Similar to the recent accident in Italy where a ski lift was purposely not maintained to avoid stopping it. They knew that they are risking someone's life.
With this said there are two cases:
- the one when someone drives under DUI and I have to kill him to avoid a possible direct accident towards me or my family (by pushing his car from a cliff or something). I would nit hesitate.
- after the accident. I am for a death sentence for specific cases where it is a matter of getting rid of human trash (rapes, murders with premeditation, paedophilia, ...). In that case it is a matter of social hygiene. In the case of DUI I am at the edge, with the possibility of someone to spend years helping the society to try to redeem
So getting a vaccine does not make the vaccinated isolated from the risks the unvaccinated choose. Your choices affect what I can do and the risks to my health.
What do you mean "anymore"? Collective rule to fight contagious disease is literally as old as civilization. There are rules for it in the Old Testament.
Does this also imply that you will be responsible for the cost of your own choices, and that you will not infect anyone else and not interact with the public?
Honestly, my opinion - if everyone could be vaccinated and the vaccine was always 100% effective 100% of the time without exception, I would not care at all about "individual choice" or "I don't want to take it", I would not care about the extra mutations being created, I would not care about being next to an unvaccinated individual at all.
Do kids even need it? I was under the impression that child covid deaths (or even just severe reactions to the disease) were incredibly rare.
I'll point out that when we talk about how "oh it'll only be bad if you have comorbidities too", I'm pretty sure more than 75% of the US qualifies as having those. I'm not paranoid by any means, and I don't want vaccine apps or centralised databases to exist (anonymously signed timestamped attestations maybe), but the vaccines are not 100%, and my risk model dislikes being stuck next to someone dumping out virions for over 8 hours a day with recirculating air.
[side note: I've also worked retail in the past and that taught me to never trust the general public, and that some idiot parent absolutely will bring a kid in with measles, norovirus, and smallpox in at the same time while lying about how they're healthy so they don't get charged a $10 cancellation fee.]
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-covid-risk-to-...
Because we're going to run out of room in the hospitals and we all carry the cost of treating the problem. And the doctors and nurses that we have are going to be pushed to the breaking point.
In other words because "we live in a society".
Your right to do whatever the hell you want with your life, no matter how stupid, ends once the health care system starts to fall over (again).
It wasn't "debunked", it was avoided.
And our current status:
"As COVID surge escalates in Louisiana, hospitals shut down elective surgeries"
https://www.nola.com/news/coronavirus/article_bb29717a-ee58-...
"How Louisiana's 4th COVID wave has hospitals 'past burnout': not enough equipment, staff or time"
https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_d53b6fc...
"13 hospitals in Mississippi have no ICU beds available due to COVID-19 Delta variant spike"
https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/local/13-hospitals-mississ...
"Florida Hospital Admissions Break Covid Record Set in January"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-28/florida-h...
Look at places like Sweden (fewest ICU beds in the EU, not overloaded), or Switzerland (one of the best staffed systems, also not overloaded). There are problems when bad management makes problems, as in any enterprise, which newspapers love to find, and sometimes they invent problems that don't really exist (finding a doctor who will say they're tired/burnt out/need money is the easiest thing in the world).
That's why it's better to look at the stats and dig into the system level causes of load issues, as you would with any IT system.
As for avoided: no, none of the measures implemented have had any impact. You can find proof of this in many forms, but the simplest is to look at places like the UK. They just removed a whole boatload of restrictions in the form of "freedom day" and cases fell off a cliff. Experts were left baffled because they had all been predicting a huge surge, although people who were actually looking at the data weren't baffled at all: the fall was predictable given the shape of the same wave in other countries + the assumption that restrictions were having no effect.
Since you're making an argument from statistics, it would be helpful to provide some numbers for your claims and their provenance.
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total
As you can see, it never got above ~80% utilization, even though Switzerland's second wave peaked many weeks before restrictions were re-imposed. The Swiss system is well funded, but it's not an alien planet. If they can do it any developed country can. Also remember that lots of places built emergency hospitals. They were invariably never used.
Or look at Swedish data.
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/4b4dd8c7e1...
Sweden started the pandemic with the lowest ICU capacity in the EU yet their age adjusted mortality only reached the same level as in 2012 - not even a "once in a decade" level problem.
https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...
That isn't factual.
Half of COVID hospitalizations were diagnosed with COVID after admission.
The shitty newspaper article then spread the impression that people were going into the hospital for a broken leg and contracting COVID and counted as COVID hospitalizations with exactly zero proof.
The alternative explanation is that people show up at the hospital with strokes and heart attacks and are tested and show COVID positive and probably really are COVID hospital admissions due to COVID-caused thrombosis Particularly since thrombosis affects more younger people who are now making up the majority of unvaccinated hospital admissions. 40 year olds who get the sniffles and think its just a cold, then throw a clot and get admitted or just die has been happening from the very start of this.
Not even going to waste my time on your WhatAboutTheSwissHospitalDataism, I have work to do and don't have hours to spend today to figure out why you're wrong.
Regardless, I can see you already have your conclusion and will stick to it. So be it.
ETA: not all unvaccinated are by choice. This is not now and never has been purely an issue of choice.
Because they are taking risks with other people's lives, if they spread it. I'm not sure why this is so hard to factor in - if you get Covid, you are more likely to give it to someone else.
If people take the risk, they should also be responsible (collectively, since we apparently can't do tracing very well) for the results. That means they cover the financial costs, and (in my more extreme moments), I think they should face charges of negligence where we can directly attribute to a source.
To me, it’s a pretty clear choice. Making the choice to remain unvaccinated adds to the rest of our risk. Some people cannot be vaccinated safely, but for all others - own, and pay for, the negative consequences.
That’s not how the world works, unfortunately. We can’t buy the lives back for people who died. Even if it was unnecessary.
This is basic social contract stuff. It's disappointing to see so many people unwilling to undergo minimal sacrifices to help safeguard the health and welfare of others.
If you do it at home sure, but if you all get together and clog up hospitals, now it's my problem.
These kind of hyper libertarian arguments always just conveniently ignore everyone except the person making them. We allow smoking because it's your choice but not in public places because that hurts others. We have speed limits because your liberty to drive at 120 ends when it endangers other drivers. We have no restrictions on how much fast food you can eat because it does not impact anyone else.
In the developed world, not many people die from diseases that are preventable by vaccine. Well, until now.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/1017012853/97-of-people-enter...
More plausibly, suppose the vaccine is 90% effective against severe disease and 60% of the population is vaccinated. Then you'd have 6/46ths of the hospitalizations (15% roughly) coming from the vaccinated.
Effectiveness against severe symptoms is what matters the most (and effectiveness against transmission comes second). As long as the maths confirm the effectiveness of the vaccination, having a number of vaccinated people in hospitals is expected. A 90% effectiveness corresponds to having your ICU beds magically multiplied by 10, which is nothing to sneeze about.
1) high cycle PCR tests tend to produce false positives. [0]
2) recently (maybe now?) the CDC was recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals (break through cases). [1]
If unvaccinated individuals are being tested to a different standard, that would seem to muddy the waters, wouldn't it?
[0] https://medicine.yale.edu/labmed/sections/virology/COVID-19%...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210623005911/https://www.cdc.g...
I followed your link [1] and read the entire page multiple times and I can find no content which supports "recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals".
It says that samples submitted for sequencing should be positive when CT<=28 or are detected as positive by another modality.
Some more discussion on this topic was on HN yesterday [0]
also, from last August:
One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
"unvaccinated" includes people who have had one dose or people who had the second dose less than two weeks ago[1]:
>> a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after receipt of all recommended doses of an FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.[1]
>> ... A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, 2021. Among these cases, 6,446 (63%) occurred in females, and the median patient age was 58 years (interquartile range = 40–74 years). Based on preliminary data, 2,725 (27%) vaccine breakthrough infections were asymptomatic, 995 (10%) patients were known to be hospitalized, and 160 (2%) patients died.[1]
>> ... As of April 30, 2021, approximately 101 million persons in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. [1]
Now, let's look at a more recent report[2]:
>>> As of July 19, 2021, more than 161 million people in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
>>> Hospitalizations* 5,601 (95%)
>>> Deaths† 1,141 (19%)
So, "fully vaccinated" increased by 60% over that period, but deaths among the fully vaccinated increased by 613%.
That's curious.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e3.htm
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre...
> Beginning May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections to investigating only those among patients who are hospitalized or die, thereby focusing on the cases of highest clinical and public health significance.
This is just to keep in mind the % of cases that result in death will be higher based on the different focus of the monitoring.
> 292 (26%) of 1,141 fatal cases reported as asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19.
So you're saying 1,141 - 292 = 849 or 430% increase over 160 deaths recorded before.
Still significant. This is at the same time that Delta is increasingly dominant[0][1]. So it does seem like this Delta variant may be more deadly, even to the vaccinated, though still massively less deadly when compared directly to the unvaccinated. From April 30th through about yesterday, there were about 35,000 total deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19[2]. That number dwarfs the total 850 or so that have died while vaccinated since the beginning of vaccination availability.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/17/us/delta-vari...
[1] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/07/15/us/delta-variant-...
> So you're saying 1,141 - 292 = 849 or 430% increase over 160 deaths recorded before.
No, I was comparing apples to apples. If you want to do it this way, you need to also note:
> 28 (18%) decedents were asymptomatic or died from a cause unrelated to COVID-19.[1]
Therefore, (1,141 - 292)/(160 - 28) corresponding to 543% increase.
Either way, the baseline went from 100 million fully vaccinated to 160 million fully vaccinated meaning a 60% increase in the population in question resulted in either 543% or 713% more deaths after breakthrough infections.
Further,
>> Beginning May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections
this is only relevant insofar as we now have no measure of how many fully vaccinated individuals get infected, don't feel sick, and walk around with high viral loads.
Right - the only logical variable to account for the increase would be Delta. Unless you're implying some other cause for the increase?
I am not particularly interested in the cause ... but, the Bayesian in me combines the fact that CDC stopped reporting number of breakthrough infections combined with the facts that chances of dying from Covid19 are low to being with and supposedly lowered by the vaccine gives me the gut feeling that breakthrough infection rates are now probably around 2-3% which means there are a whole lot of typhoid Marys walking around with high viral loads.
> Among 1497 fully vaccinated health care workers for whom RT-PCR data were available, 39 SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections were documented. Neutralizing antibody titers in case patients during the peri-infection period were lower than those in matched uninfected controls ...
For the record, that's 2.6% breakthrough infection among fully vaccinated people who are healthier and more careful than the general population.