I saw the news this week and the first stories were not about Covid. That is the first time I can remember, in a while.
The pandemic is clearly coming to an end. Herd immunity or not, the systemic risk is going away in the US and other rich countries, leaving only the personal risk.
If anything I wish the communication between the difference in systemic risk and individual risk had been better. People on Facebook have been talking about the 98% survivability for a long time. That sure sounds like a high number even though, a lottery with a 2% chance of winning sounds amazingly plausible. But the real risk has always been systemic.
An exponential growth that overwhelms the healthcare system and leads to people dying, even those unaffected by Covid itself. Because they "chose" a day with an overwhelmed health care system, they may die when they have a heart attack or a traffic accident.
With vaccination rates north of 60%, the systemic risk is gonna become smaller and smaller. As the article says, vaccinated people and people who have had it before will act as control rods for the reaction.
Since Covid will not go away, the number of vaccinated will grow with vaccination efforts and the number who had it before will grow by itself.
I strongly believe that most people on this planet are gonna be exposed to the spike protein, either through vaccination or Covid itself, herd immunity or no her immunity.
I fell that makes an incredibly convincing case for vaccination, but I have not been able to convince any anti-vaxer with it, so there's that.
> If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.
(We're at well over 500k now.)
His estimates last April from Santa Clara, California were wildly inaccurate as well.
> Skeptics have noted that the conclusions seem at odds with some basic math. In New York City, where more than 10,000 people, or about 0.1 percent of the population, have already died from Covid-19, this estimated fatality rate would mean nearly everyone in the city has already been infected.
> And in May, Ioannidis presented a picture of the virus’s deadliness based on antibody study data from around the world, including his Stanford study. This preprint was roundly criticized for including groups of patients who don’t reflect the general public and, in earlier versions, omitting data from large groups with higher fatality rates, among other errors.
If you have specific evidence that the numbers in that article are wrong then I recommend you contact the editors of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization and let them know.
"Better" is gonna take time to determine. I'm not hitching my wagon to Ioannidis as the winner in the end, though, given his track record thus far on failed predictions/modeling.
> Using these age-specific estimates, we estimate the overall IFR in a typical low-income country, with a population structure skewed towards younger individuals, to be 0.23% (0.14-0.42 95% prediction interval range). In contrast, in a typical high income country, with a greater concentration of elderly individuals, we estimate the overall IFR to be 1.15% (0.78-1.79 95% prediction interval range).
Confounding matters: any currently published estimate is likely to lack data from the current large spike in India.
I don't disagree with you, just want to mention that people on Facebook are very dumb if they think 98% survivability is a good rate, given how easily this disease is transmitted without stringent measures.
Luckily, the estimated fatality rate with modern medical care is much lower.
Well I just did a test with a tool for lung cancer risk. Assuming I smoked half a pack a day for 25 years and stopped at 40, my risk would be 1 in 1000.
Yet noone would say it's "good" to smoke. Even if the risk is 10% of the risk of dying of COVID.
A 2% death chance may look small on its face, but Covid is not the only thing you can die from. If you accept a 2% death chance ten separate times, your death chance overall is 18.3%. I bet those are numbers which a lot of people won't be comfortable with anymore.
I got the vaccine, but in retrospect, I should have waited. I should have gotten antibody tests first.
A few things: my odds of dying from COVID in a given year are about the same as me dying in a car crash— and that is given the admittedly liberal COVID death stats.
My very strong reaction to the first dose (the only one I took, in the end) suggests that I already had COVID and didn’t know it. It probably makes sense to test for antibodies before taking the vaccine. If you’re in a low risk category and have antibodies, I’d pass on the vaccine.
The vaccine was rushed by all accounts, and I have personally participated in drugs that are now banned due to side effects not detected during more rigorous trials. It may take a long time before we know of serious side effects from the vaccines. On the other hand, it will take a long time before we can be confident the vaccines have no serious side effects (whose manifestations are delayed). No one knows at this point because due process was tossed (for good reasons).
I think the rational thing to do is to look at what statistical group you are in. If you are high risk, get the vaccine. If not, wait.
All of that to say, folks who are hesitating are not illogical antivaxers. I’ve got good friends with PHDs in microbiology and bioinformatics who are informed, intelligent, and divided on the topic. It’s plainly not black and white.
I mean I get it that there is some hesitation. I probably shouldn't have used anti-vaxer as that would indicate that every person who is against getting a COVID vaccine is against vaccines in general which is not true.
But that is beyond the point. My point is, that you will get exposed to COVID either way, through vaccine or naturally.
Looking at the numbers I'd rather take my chances with the vaccine. It sure seems a lot less risky.
Say a new variant emerges that has a 90% mortality rate. Would you still wait to get the vaccine because it was "rushed" and not fully tested? Would you rely on antibodies from the current variants?
In that situation I would do whatever it took to get the vaccine. And I would feel extremely silly and irresponsible for doubting the science.
> I fell that makes an incredibly convincing case for vaccination, but I have not been able to convince any anti-vaxer with it, so there's that.
People who don't want to be vaccinated with the new vaccines are not necessarily anti-vaxers tho. You didn't spell it out, but you speak about COVID in the previous sentence. Vaccination is also not meant to be some cult rite where you need to believe in it. It needs to be tested and that did not yet happen properly, so it is actually more sane to wait. This becomes even more important because even the basic mechanism is not studied for vaccinations long-term at all.
In Germany they push for vaccinating kids which is especially cynical given they have a COVID death rate which is lower than the death rate of some established vaccines. And COVID vaccines have way higher death rates even by official numbers (which are the lower bound).
Just to make it more obvious: In Germany in total 21 people died with/because COVID in the age of 0-19 (~15M pop in that age). Do you not see the insanity of this?
vaccines are supposed to have years of testing to prove they are truly safe in the long term.
your own link says pfizer is trying to extend the emergency use authorization to apply to younger people, nothing about completing approvals. true FDA approval is still years away.
That is not strictly speaking true. There have been no long term studies for the most recent mRNA vaccines, but mRNA technology has been in development for many years with much of the effort going into studies of human safety. This long period of development and testing is how the method of packaging the mRNA in a precisely engineered blob of fat came about.
Yes, though that might depend on your definitions of both long term and vaccine. There is actually a quite interesting body of literature surrounding these developments, so it might be worth doing some searches and some reading.
If the drug breaks down rapidly in the body, yes, we can indeed know that. Then there can be no mechanism by which it can have long term effects. That's what happens with the delivered mRNA.
But out of interest, what about the people who have long-haul COVID, do we know the mechanism how they experience long term effects from the actual disease.
Would it be possible that vaccines created long-term effects in the same way?
What is the "mechanism" from the vaccine which has caused some people to get thrombocytopenia, bells palsy, temporary deafness, and other such side effects in just the short term?
Don't we need to vaccinnate kids to reach herd immunity? Sure it doesn't make sense when you look at young people in isolation but that is beside the point.
The mRNA vaccines are sterile; there's no active virus or bacteria in them. It's also conclusively determined they reduce transmission.
(The sterility of a vaccine has no impact on its ability to reduce transmission, anyways; they're not linked. Live-virus vaccines like the flu nasal spray vaccine can still prevent disease.)
You did not understand the difference between systemic and individual risk the parent mentioned. Of course, 12+ year olds are not vaccinated for their own safety, but to supress infection chains that might reach someone more vulnerable. I don't see any insanity in this as testing HAS happened properly.
The pandemic is clearly coming to an end. Herd immunity or not, the systemic risk is going away in the US and other rich countries, leaving only the personal risk.
If anything I wish the communication between the difference in systemic risk and individual risk had been better. People on Facebook have been talking about the 98% survivability for a long time. That sure sounds like a high number even though, a lottery with a 2% chance of winning sounds amazingly plausible. But the real risk has always been systemic. An exponential growth that overwhelms the healthcare system and leads to people dying, even those unaffected by Covid itself. Because they "chose" a day with an overwhelmed health care system, they may die when they have a heart attack or a traffic accident.
With vaccination rates north of 60%, the systemic risk is gonna become smaller and smaller. As the article says, vaccinated people and people who have had it before will act as control rods for the reaction.
Since Covid will not go away, the number of vaccinated will grow with vaccination efforts and the number who had it before will grow by itself.
I strongly believe that most people on this planet are gonna be exposed to the spike protein, either through vaccination or Covid itself, herd immunity or no her immunity.
I fell that makes an incredibly convincing case for vaccination, but I have not been able to convince any anti-vaxer with it, so there's that.