Vaccination does reduce the proportion of people that need ICU beds, but there are pretty rapid diminishing returns on just vaccinating more; countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination. Also, vaccinating younger lower-risk people doesn't help because they're at substantially lower risk of needing the ICU even unvaccinated than someone older or higher-risk who is vaccinated and because the vaccines aren't really useful to stop the spread of the disease either. Countries have generally had significantly higher vaccine acceptance amongst older people who need it more. (Though I think one of the big problems Germany has is their vaccine uptake amongst the elderly is somewhat low compared to other countries.)

Right now in my province, unvaccinated individuals make up 11.2% of 12+ population but more than 66% of hospitalizations. I don't expect the ICU rates to be more favourable to the unvaccianted than total hospitalization rates. If there is a point of rapid diminishing returns, it is not at ~90% yet.

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

Your missing the vaccine injured in those stats because they define unvaccinated as anyone less than two weeks after vaccinated.

What do you mean? The immunity doesn't kick in the second the vaccine is injected into your arm. How else should they count vaccinated vs unvaccinated? (Also note that there is a category of partially vaccinated in the stats that is people who have only received the first dose of a two-dose vaccine).

These stats do not show the difference between taking a shot but still being infected within two weeks after it, and not taking any shots at all and being infected. If you're going to blame the second group for filling up ICUs, you cannot lump them together.

It means the stats aren't as useful.

Its probably just time delayed. Give it a few months. The vaccine protection seems to wear off rather quickly, based on data from UK and Israel.

Protection from hospitalization and death, particularly in under-65 or so, does not wear off. Neutralizing antibody levels naturally wane and can allow infection, T-cell and B-cell populations don't (unless you get infected with measles or have some other conditions, and assuming you form a robust T-cell response to begin with and aren't immunocompromised or just quite old).

I think the vaccine is probably as effective as two doses of a laxative. Any 75+ year olds that survived the two doses of the laxative, will now have better outcomes against covid.

Keep in mind the effectiveness is measured in tens/100,000. An there are some very sick people given the vaccine, that die before the 14 days of the second dose.

> I think the vaccine is probably as effective as two doses of a laxative.

Well at least people know how much weight to give your opinions.

My views are based on science

https://mobile.twitter.com/MartinNeil9/status/14668143477626...

Are they hospitalized for Covid or all reasons?

These are only COVID stats.

Correlation does not imply causation.

> countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination.

Which countries are you talking about? It's certainly not the case for Germany, and I don't know any other European country for which this would be the case.

You make a good point re vaccinating lower risk patients. In the UK, not only the population has a high vaccination rate, but the rate is particularly high among the population at risk (~95% for the >70yo [1]). As a result, hospital cases and deaths are a fraction of the Jan 2021 peak, even though infection levels are high.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55274833

> countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination

Which countries? I find it hard to get data at vaccination prevalence in ICU population specifically, but in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated).

> in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated)

For the 80+ group the latest data for hospitalisations is 47% vaccinated, 31% non-vaccinated, 22% unkown.

https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/vaccination/status

Well yeah, for 80+ with a vaccination rate of 92 %.

If you look at the total value, it appears that only 11 % of hospitalized are double vaccinated, though the latest seven day average puts that number at 27 %.

I was just giving a number consistent with the 80+ vaccination rate quoted.

For the broad population is 28% vaccinated vs 57% non-vaccinated. The remaining 15% is "unknown". But Switzerland has a relatively low vaccination rate at 67%.

Edit: looking at deaths instead of hospitalisations in the broad population:

  Fully-vaccinated 46%, partially-vaccinated 2%
  Non-vaccinated 41%
  Unknown 12%

Yes, those are the numbers for _hospitalizations_ in general, but the higher percentages I've been seeing (and for which I've been unsuccessful finding official documentation) are for _ICU_ patients specifically.

But they were not for 80+ patients specifically, or were they?

Edit: I can't find ICU numbers but the latest death stats for 80+ are 46% vaccinated, 33% non-vaccinated, 21% unknown.

Right now, young people take the "booster shots" that should be given to the elderly, first. Politicians will be very proud that "XY percent of the population are already boostered". The dying will continue.

I dropped in to a local clinic this week to get my booster (no appointment, even) and was given the shot in about 15 minutes. Most of the other people there waiting looked relatively young. Seems that we're doing a terrible job of reaching out to the elderly to get them their boosters. Or they just don't want it.

Yes, and this is another example of the really bad management skills of our government. If you announce the wrong KPIs (XY percent vaccination regardless of personal risks) you might be performing great according to them and still fail miserably on your actual goals.

Which country is that ? Here in Czech Republic there is clear priority for 60+ years for the third doses. Also a big vaccination drive based on volunteers to vaccinate ideally up to a milion eligible people with the third dose till Christmas.

Here in Berlin for example, in the first week of september my 85 year old grandparents received a booster shot invite letter from the Berlin senate. It said something like starting 20th september you can get the 3rd shot from any doctor or you can go without an appointment to a vaccination centre across the city.

what did they do? nothing because case numbers were low, I did push and push to finally get my grandpa to get is 3rd shot mid november while go to the doctor for something else... by coincident the rush to get the booster started 1 day after that.

I bet this happened a lot.... As far as I know just like for the 1st shot sverybody above 70 got that same letter. Meaning they had more than 2 months head start to get the boostershot.

So at least in Berlin I wont have sympathy anymore for taking away the shot from somebody else (got my appointment in january)

Its never unreasonable to blame the victim, just bad taste.

Also consider its their tax dollars being squandered and mismanaged.

It is not totally unreasonable but there is a component of blind blame to it. It will become a discussion after the pandemic and I don't think this will be too beneficial for our public health care system and health insurance.

Yes because no effort was made to increase ICU capacity which was continues to be the biggest issue

No, that isn't the biggest issue. The ICU is the last resort, it's the point where we throw incredible amounts of effort and hardware at the problem to gain a chance of still saving them. And even then 50% still die, and others likely will have permanent damage from the severe course of the disease.

The biggest issue is that not enough people got vaccinated.

ICU itself causes massive damage too. Side effect like died of hands and feet are not uncommon.

Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Vaccines reduce severe courses of the disease by about 90%. The number vary depending on what you look at exactly, and for elderly people boosters are really mandatory to keep the vaccine effective.

Reducing the number of severe cases by a factor of 10 is very from from not working.

>Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.

What "narrative"? What are you even talking about?

No-one, including the person you responded to, has claimed that vaccinated people can't get sick. The claim (backed by statistics) is that the unvaccinated are being hospitalized at a much higher rate and for a much longer duration.

You're arguing a point that no-one is disagreeing with.

Please do not take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It just makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

True, unvaccinated people are being hospitalized at a higher rate and for a longer duration.

However, we are not talking about "the unvaccinated", rather about "a tiny unfortunate fraction of unvaccinated people". There are 4,690 covid patients in ICU beds and 25M unvaccinated people. Assuming all covid ICU patients are unvaccinated, the covid ICU incidence rate within the unvaccinated population is 0.02%.

For an analogy, we could reason that because the prison population skews 90/10 male/female, all males should either undergo a vasectomy, or pay a recurring 10k euro fine. I hope this is obviously unethical.

Your prison thing is widely weird and not sure at all how you relate those two.things.

Yes the point is to make sure that those ICU capacity which is very small and normally enough would and is struggling due to covid and vaccination helps.

What is so hard to understand?

Vaccine mandates enforced by heavy fines and/or prison are criminalizing being unvaccinated with the number of "boosters" the authorities deem necessary. Justified by group "crime" statistic differentials. We may argue that it is done in service of a good cause, but it is still criminalizing. Our weird reality.

We are allowed to enforce a lot of things as a society.

We banned toxic paint, we enforce certain vaccines (polio, measles)

It's only logical to enforce a vaccine on people.

Same as you will get reanimated when you have an accident.

We formed and created rules around our society for a long time and those limitations are here for the good of all of us.

A society can't be forced to have a medical oath and in parallel has to watch when people don't play along.

You expect us to do the best to help you in an emergency and in parallel expect total freedom?

Not how our society works. Srsly get over it.

Could you please not post flamewar comments to HN? I'm afraid you've already broken the site guidelines more than once with this account.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Sure, but how many vaccinated people are ending up in the ICU, compared to unvaccinated? How many are dying?

Also consider that a population of 100, and 90 of those people are vaccinated. Uf 15 vaccinated people end up in the hospital, and 5 unvaccinated people also end up in the hospital, vaccination is still clearly better for you. But people will still say "75% of the people in the hospital were vaccinated; clearly the vaccines aren't working!" Yeah, well, out of vaccinated people, only 16% ended up hospitalized, while 50% of unvaccinated people ended up hospitalized. Those are the real numbers that matter. Percent of cohort hospitalized, not percent of total hospitalized.

That's like saying, people are still hospitalized after car crashes so seatbelts and airbags are useless.

The safety of modern cars has been shown to lead to more aggressive driving, so this metaphor may track on more levels than you realize.

When all houses have sprinklers only sprinkler equipped houses will burn down. Still in absolute numbers there should be much less fires.

Right, but the point is you still need more ICU capacity.

The analogy is “every house has sprinklers so no need for a fire department any more”.

Do you, though? I see lots of numbers around hospitalizations, but how many (vaccinated) people hospitalized end up in the ICU?

Singapore does a great job of testing and the vaccination rate is >95% for the eligible population. Despite that, they have introduced restrictions due to ICU overload.

https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics

Look at "Proportion (%) of cases ever critically ill in ICU or died, by age and vaccination status"

Looking at the high risk group of 80+ year old (43% of all ICU cases and/or deaths), the numbers are: unvaccinated (24%), partially vaccinated (16%) and fully vaccinated (3.2%).

They don't define partially vaccinated (typically 14 days after 2nd dose). So clearly the vaccine reduces the risk of ICU/death, but the "truly" unvaccinated make up only 50% of ICU cases in that age group.

From all the local reporting the overwhelming majority of people in Czech ICU are not vaccinated. A few examples - listing from a hard-case ICU in Ostrava for a week in November:

https://mobile.twitter.com/VojtechGibis/status/1463608271378...

NEOČKOVÁN - not vaccinated OČKOVÁN - vaccinated

The last 5 patients are those that have been released from the unit in that week. The first two were move to less severe case ICU. The last three died...

One more: https://mobile.twitter.com/VojtechGibis/status/1465783542982...

Czech ICU occupancy - blue unvaccinated, orange vaccinated. And yes, we had several cases <30 years old and unfortunately even children on ICU.

People wearing seatbelts still die in car crashes. When will you stop buying into the narrative that seatbelts saves lives?

Training an ICU nurse takes about 5 years. The only realistic option during the pandemic would be to encourage immigration of ICU nurses from poorer countries, but that just moves the problem elsewhere.

How long does it take the army to train a field medic? (Serious question, I don't know if there's some extended training involved, I just assume it's far less than, say, a nursing degree.)

I think that training people to handle 90% of the issues you see in Covid-related illnesses could be done relatively quickly, if we wanted to do that. The ICU bed shortage really refers to a ICU-staff shortage, and anything we could do to relieve that burden would be a good thing.

The US Army takes 16 weeks to train a field medic. However most of that training isn't applicable to treating COVID-19 patients.

So does developing a vaccine usually. We should be taking extraordinary measure not saying "oh that will take too long don't even start"

Assigning ten teachers to a student won't make the student learn ten times as fast.

Modifying the procedures and allowing people to work before they're through arbitrary redtape does. The EUA the vaccine received is the same concept. The reason the vaccine was developed faster wasn't just the number of scientists working on it, but the amount of funding directed towards it. Increasing money to education programs would increase the amount of people they can train, allow for further optimizations to be developed etc.

Thousands of ICU nurses quit on the past few years. They are still trained and would just have to be convinced to return.

I have a suspicion that ICU training for a COVID specific nurse could be much shorter - if there were any will or basic common fucking sense among policy makers, and if there were fewer people making excuses for those who ghoulishly and cynically privatized healthcare for profit across the Western world.

A "COVID specific nurse" still needs the entire slate of training that goes with respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, etc, and all the secondary complications that come from those.

Then train 3 nurses in respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, and secondary complications separately. Put them under an experienced nurse, and incentivize them to add to their skills when they're not working.

Look at the sheer difference in numbers of healthcare professionals between America and Cuba. If they can do it even after decades of cruel and unusual sanctions, we sure as fuck can too.

Well, mistakes by ICU personnel can easily kill - and that's on top of a significant, often >50% death chance for covid ICU patients. Better make sure the people don't get as far as getting intensive care in the first place.