People are very, very badly misinformed about their risks for covid. This makes it almost impossible to have rational, grounded discussion of public policy. If everybody is walking around thinking covid is a death sentence, of course they will beg of all the crap we are doing right now.
The fear is way, way worse than the virus.
This seems to be by design though.
If you are someone intelligent who wants to know about covid for real, you should read the conspiracy subreddit on reddit and also turn off the TV news. That's the actual truth, but people can't take it.
I could conclude that the latter camp was correct. Or that when you have competing versions of conspiracy theories, predicting different outcomes, one of them will always appear to be prescient after the fact. Then you can ignore the others that didn't pan out, and say that everything that's happened so far has been predicted by the conspiracy guys.
But even within the nuance the statistics are being used to support narratives that aren't always honest. Just look at the news that apparently 40-45% of COVID hospitalizations are actually people who were admitted for another reason and just so happened to test positive upon admission.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos...
This data changes the hospitalization narrative quite a bit.
> The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.
> The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
> This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.
Knowing that almost 50% of the hospitalizations in both children and adults that are classified as COVID hospitalizations aren't really for COVID totally obliterates the narrative in the media about how (mostly unvaccinated) COVID patients are overwhelming the hospitals.
What I've been looking for for a long time now is data on infection, hospitalization rates and mortality by vaccination status and age. They all get mixed and it's never really clear to me what the risk for, say, a vaccinated 40 year old or an unvaccinated 1 year old really is.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Of those children who died, the majority had serious underlying health conditions such as obesity or asthma.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7023e1.htm
This paper has some good recent data on vaccine effectiveness.
We can't know that. You are assuming. For all we know, if everyone got vaccinated the virus could have mutated around it faster, leaving us at square one.
Even if you don't feel you owe the people you're disagreeing with better, you owe this community better if you're posting here.
By all means though, let this guy keep posting:
Picking two random points to contrast is the extreme of sample bias. You can make anything look like anything that way. As it happens, though, we've moderated that other commenter in exactly the same way as this one.
Could you please stop creating accounts to troll HN with? It's tedious.
Perhaps, but you also don't get what I am saying. If we vaccinated everyone, the virus wouldn't be eradicated because animals can be hosts. Because of that, the evolutionary pressure put on the virus by everyone being vaccinated could result in the virus mutating enough to evade immunity. The same thing happens with flu every year.
You're having an argument with someone who isn't me.
If you vaccinate everyone then the near perfect VE against severe disease and hospitalization keeps people out of the hospitals and keeps them from falling over. And that is sufficient.
I never said anything about eradicating the virus or eliminating all infection and transmission. But at that point THEN you have hit the point where "its just a flu" arguments can kick in and the virus can do whatever the hell it wants to and the hospital system won't fall over.
And due to T-cells and cross-reactive T-cells (and the persistence and lack of waning of T-cells as shown by the SARS-CoV-1 17+ year T-cell persistence) then any future mutation which achieves immune escape from Nabs should still just be "flu" rather than "COVID-22" or whatever.
Get everyone vaccinated first, then we're basically done with it as a pandemic. Then you get what you want, which is living with an endemic virus, but one which will have much less disease burden than it currently has in the unvaccinated population.
Or put simply, to stop the waves of nearly 100% unvaccinated people dying in hospitals, just vaccinate everyone. No unvaccinated people, no hospitals falling over.
Half of the people getting hospitalized are not getting hospitalized for COVID. They are just testing positive for COVID.
And hospitals nearly always run near capacity. And their capacity is also determined by staffing, which is going down because nurses don't want to get vaccinated against a virus they are probably immune to.
All factors matter. You can't just claim vaccination would be a panacea, even if it appears that way.
Yeah this myth again.
You're not "doing your own research" you're just regurgitating talking points.
I'm entirely done here.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos...
Do you have a button in the admin panel that will save the next person who believed that they're part of the "overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk?"
I've noticed that when people use phrases like "the spread of false and manipulative information and opinions", they generally just seem to mean "I think X is wrong and I feel strongly about it" (because such comments generally contain no information to disambiguate what they're saying from the latter). In other words, phrases like "manipulative information", "dis/misinformation", and so on, are generally pejoratives that express an intensified feeling. If we take such statements at the level of their components, i.e. "X is false" and "I feel strongly", it's easier to see how to deal with them in the intended spirit of this site:
X is false – patiently provide better information and explain how it is correct;
I feel strongly – take responsibility for regulating one's own feelings rather than venting them into language that blasts the opposing side.
There's nothing wrong with strong feelings, but it's important not to let them morph into aggression towards the perceived source of the feeling, such as by calling people who disagree with you stupid, and so on. We can't have that here because it destroys conversation. When other people who also feel strongly get hit with that, they respond in kind—where "in kind" means escalating, because it always feels like the other person is doing worse. That's how we get a downward spiral and we're trying to avoid that here (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&da...).
You've done this kind of thing repeatedly before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28192074 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26744307). Even if you feel like you're nobly defending society by addressing others that way, it's seriously against HN's rules and we ban accounts that keep doing it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
We basically have a best-case scenario today and an awful lot of people don't care and still think it's doomsday. Vaccines are fantastic at reducing COVID to a cold, kids are at no risk, the overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk, vaccines are available, natural immunity is great, and ironically, vaccines DONT stop transmission. So, we're all gonna get it, anyone who wants to be protected can be, and unvaccinated people don't matter because COVID is already endemic and we're all gonna get it so we have a clear path towards herd immunity. This is great!
And here we are, instead making illogical and probably illegal rules that accomplish literally nothing, make everything worse, perpetuate irrational fear, etc. We scapegoat "the unvaccinated" and start this medical class warfare and just ramp up unnecessary hatred of each other. And worst of all, it doesn't protect anyone and probably will make COVID worse.
Are we having fun yet?!