How would you square this with unvaccinated people filling up hospitals preventing those with unpreventable health issues from getting care?
https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/covid-hospitaliz...
My response is that, like everything, there's a ton of nuance.
It requires a very careful reading of that article, paying attention to not just what they say, but what they explicitly fail to say.
First, I couldn't find any reference in that article to people being denied care, did I miss it?
But regardless, it's a really great example of what causes a lot of my deep suspicion. For example, the article details the low hospitalization rate amongst all vaccinated people, with lots of zeros after the decimal point, presenting it as evidence for the effectiveness of the vaccine - however, it doesn't mention anywhere the rate of hospitalization for the unvaccinated. Most likely because the numbers would look very similar to the reader.
Another example, the article says that most of the vaccinated covid patients are elderly, or those with severe comorbidities. It doesn't mention, however, that that is also true for the unvaccinated.
Another omission - the article doesn't discuss the difference between patients with covid, and patients admitted because of covid. That's an important variable, but until recently it's been a bit suppressed.
Another thing the article fails to mention is confounding factors like age when considering vaccination rate and infection rate. It's a confounding factor because (according to what I've read) the most completely vaccinated are young, healthy people. Many cranky older people like myself are not. That's a pretty important confounding factor when you're looking at hospitalizations and comparing populations.
The article is pretty heavy on hyperbole, but doesn't mention that hospitals (especially the ICU's) are designed to operate at or near capacity. Hospitals are sized based on the community they serve and must remain mostly utilized in order to remain profitable.
One fun thing to do that demonstrates this is to go back and search for articles for years prior to Covid, where there would be hysterical articles about the flu "overwhelming hospitals" and "ICUs at 99%" etc... it's an old trick that the media plays, historically it was to garner ratings/clicks. Is that still the reason? Could be.
That article is deeply misleading, at best, in my opinion. It goes to great lengths to paint a very distressing picture, without providing objective analysis. It's a great example of what I've been talking about.
I could mislead in the opposite direction. I could say something along the lines of "Great news everyone! Covid is over. In Tarrant County, for the first week of January, there were only a total of 11 deaths out of 22,000 cases, and all of those had underlying conditions. In january, your total risk of dying from covid was .000005, and if you are healthy it's zero! So hug everyone, don't worry!". According to the Tarrant County, TX Covid 19 dashboard and tracker, everything I just wrote it 100% true, but it's highly misleading.
It's completely understandable how someone could be mislead by an article like the one you referenced. I typically try to avoid the media reporting like that because the quality is so poor, to quote Thomas Jefferson "Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."
I typically go to reputable medical journals and critically evaluate the studies (to the best of my ability). It gives me a very different picture than articles like that paint.
https://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/coronavir...
For people aged 18-37, risk of getting hospitalized is 10x if unvaccinated: https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...
The case rate is not as much higher for young people, only 2x, but the hospitalization rate is 10x higher. This is the youngest age group as well, and the data is worse as the age increases.
Putting the two together, the picture is clear: there are people in the ER (or ICU) that don't really need to be there, and because of how easy it was to avoid they are directly responsible for the suffering they cause in those who have to wait. I'm not sure how a layer of nuance beyond these facts can change that.
The situation is that anti vaxxers are assumed not to be automatically wrong, but to be noise. There is zero useful information to be had from engaging with them.
If they go against the scientific consensus it means nothing, if they don’t have an opinion on the scientific consensus, it means nothing, and if they agree with the scientific consensus it means nothing.
There’s this implicit assumption that everyone in a conversation deserves to have their opinion heard or examined, but these guys have burned every shred of credibility they have
I'm sorry, I had to sort of chortle at this one.
According to that doc, the chance of hospitalization is 0.00037 instead of 0.000036 in the age group you mentioned for the unvaccinated.
Sure sounds a lot more scary to say "10 times the chance!" though.
The largest hospital in the area, Barnes Jewish Hospital with over 1,100 beds had only roughly 10% of them filled with covid patients as of the last week in December. Most of the hospitals were no where close to capacity.
Mercy hospital, the second largest after Barnes had an average of 102 of 959 beds filled with Covid patients, again somewhere around 10%.
Also, these are patients with Covid, not necessarily patients admitted because of covid.
If we take the article's statistic of 2/3 of the admissions being unvaccinated, then for Mercy, for example, 67 of their patients are unvaccinated Covid patients, possibly incidental to their admission reason.
We're seeing 50-70% of "Covid admissions" in some places are actually "incidental", they were admitted for other reasons [2]. So the real number of unvaccinated sick covid patients at Mercy is probably somewhere between 30-50.
St Louis has a population of almost 310,000.
Doesn't really seem worth breaking out the pitchforks over, does it?
[1]https://data.thespectrum.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity/miss...
[2]https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcome...
Full disclosure: I am one of these people.
As it is, I view not getting the vaccine as anti social because the rate the unvaccinated are getting hospitalized at is tipping over our healthcare system. I might not feel this way if the unvaccinated were consistent and laid in the bed they made but it seems like a rare occurrence. What I am seeing is the unvaccinated being up all these claims about adverse affects and the rushed nature of the vaccine development combined with “possible” long term side effects. The same people then end up rushing to the hospital and taking all sorts of medical treatments that were also rushed or filling themselves with the random chemical of the week to stop covid(ivermectin and the hydrochloro something one).
It’s a negative externality that’s gotten too big to bear and I view the behavior as the same level of anti socialness as major polluters
Do you have data to prove that the healthcare system is "tipping over"? Not articles from media outlets, but hard data.
ICU and inpatient bed utilization has been remarkably consistent throughout the entire pandemic (roughly 70-80%).
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend
I’ve looked at hard data for discussions around these issues for nearly 2 years. Every time the anti vaxx crowd has been wildly incorrect, but claim that where they moved the goalposts to is a reasonable position that I will need to do hours and hours of research to even question.
I ran out of energy to deal with the firehouse of bullshit they spew constantly and at this point the anti vaxxers need to convince _me_ if they want anything they’ve said to be even considered.
If that upsets them because I’m not considering their “freedom” to limit my freedom and safety then were at an impasse, and it looks like my side has most of the power so good luck
Liberty is the result of those who hold power willfully divesting themselves of it, and using what remains to protect the inalienable rights of the individual.
This idea that power itself is a justification for action - it is anathema to any form of liberty. It carries the stink of tyranny and oppression - those that believe it share in dark and disturbing company.
Edit: removed some questions that while not intended to be negative, could have been interpreted as directed personally to the parent poster.
Do you think your a good person? I literally cannot empathize with someone who believes they should not get a vaccine because of freedom issues and thinks they are a good person. I do not submit to your position that I need to defend my way of life. I, and many other americans, are done with acting like the sane option in life needs to be defended against an insane group.
And yes, I understand how both sides think this way about each other. This is probably why we are going towards violence/revolution because thats the normal course of action whenever 2 groups in a country can no longer find a common ground. I am still not willing to cede the idea that your point of view is the standard and mine needs to be defended
> Do you believe in a liberal, civil society?
Do you believe in a liberal, civil society where people are allowed to fire rounds in the air or near your head because it didn't immediately directly kill you? Is it ok for you to take some action that is spreading a disease that's in the top 3 causes of death in our society because you don't feel like it?
>I wonder because I see a lot of people who do, but then say things like this, and I wonder how they justify it internally.
I justify it because the current path you and your ilk is suggesting leads us to a complete breakdown of society and economic regression. Your side is incapable of operating in a system where your actions can generate negative externalities that can break down society, and unfortunately reality is a system where that is true.
>The idea that power itself is the final justification for any action, is anathema to any sort of concept of liberty. It carries the stink of tyranny and oppression - those that believe it are in some dark and disturbing company.
Power isn't the justification. Power is your problem to deal with because we have no sympathy for your side when you are advocating what sounds like social suicide.
If you want a tl;dr, the vaccinated group is warming up to the idea that the unvaccinated group is no longer part of the same society. This is a line in the sand and where you stand is the group you are part of. The "othering" you mentioned in other comments is the act of people implicitly realizing that this reordering of tribes is occuring
> Society is generally hostile to behavior it views as being in the latter level of seriousness and talking about it over beers doesn’t generally make people more open to the idea that you are risking their lives
That's what's so strange about this, isn't it? I haven't seen any evidence anywhere that deciding against getting the vaccine puts anyone else's health at risk. I've certainly heard some politicians say this, but I haven't seen it backed by any reputable studies. The phrase "pandemic of the unvaccinated" has been bandied about quite a bit, without any supporting evidence that I'm aware of.
From what I've seen, omicron is spread by fully vaccinated folks without much inhibition. Apparently, being vaccinated reduces the severity of an already (relatively) mild variant. So why all the hyperbole? Why the draconian mandates? Why ignore the demographics of vulnerable populations and insist on mandates for everyone? Even children?
Risking lives? Unless you have severe comorbidities or are very elderly, there's asymptotically approaching zero risk of a severe outcome from any Covid infection, especially not with omicron.
You've struck to the heart of the matter. Somehow, many people have been convinced, against all reason and science, that deciding against getting vaccinated is somehow antisocial. Why? What are the motivations involved? Who is doing this? There's a reasonable argument that skipping that vaccine isn't smart, but antisocial? That's a very different and aggressive narrative.
It all comes across as very scary to those of us who don't necessarily agree with the prevailing interventions of the past couple years. They don't appear, on the surface, to be evidence based.
Lockdowns certainly were not, and now that we have retrospective data, we know that they were ineffective and in most cases quite harmful.
Universal masking wasn't effective, but some states and companies are still requiring it. Why?
Shutting down schools was a societal nightmare, with no demonstrated benefit. Yet we see some places doing it again. Why?
At each step of the way with these interventions, those who argued against them were also considered to be "antisocial" and were silenced, ridiculed, and othered.
Now we have mandated vaccination, ignoring immunity status and demographics. Even for children, who have a much higher risk from the flu than they do Covid. Doesn't it seem strange? School districts don't mandate the flu vaccine, but several have proposed mandatory Covid vaccines? Doesn't it make you wonder why?
What could possibly justify Austria's extreme measures, police brutality and draconian mandates? In Australia, a grandmother was just put in jail for not wearing a mask. I've seen videos of similar things happening in the U.S. How can we even pretend to be a civil society and tolerate this?
Why have we allowed ourselves to believe that "othering" anyone is ok? These are the first steps down an extraordinarily dangerous path, history shows us.
It's been so sad and disheartening to me to watch our society progress from "free hugs" towards a dystopian nightmare. Were we always so fragile? Were our liberal beliefs always just a beautiful lie waiting to be exposed at the first test?