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Well, it's being done for all the wrong reasons, but I'd gladly take a relaxing of safety measures to be done with COVID, depending on the vaccine and the risks
by wegs 6y ago
Well, it's being done for all the wrong reasons, but I'd gladly take a relaxing of safety measures to be done with COVID, depending on the vaccine and the risks.
The relatively known risks of some types of a vaccine seem a lot better than the unknown ones of COVID.
I would want to wait for full phase III before we had a mandatory vaccine, relied on this fully, or otherwise did too much with it. But we can't ramp up production that quickly regardless. A pilot with a few million volunteers seems as good as any phase III. And with the right few million, it could potentially really curb spread.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoReally? The risks of COVID are pretty well known at this point, and for the vast majority of people they seem quite low.
- jonnypotty 6y agoWow.
- andybak 6y agoI still get the feeling there's still a lot to discover about this disease. And some will quibble over the precise definitions of "vast" and "low" in that statement.
- henrikschroder 6y agoIf you're below 40 your risk of dying of the regular influenza is higher than the risk of dying of covid-19. If your fear of the flu doesn't motivate you to take the flu vaccine every year, rationally, you shouldn't want to take the covid-19 vaccine either.
- macintux 6y agoDeath is not the only metric that matters.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoAre you trying to ambiguously perpetuate the myth that Covid-19 is likely to cause strange and unknown medical issues even in people that it only causes a minor acute illness in? If you're not trying to spread that falsehood, could you clarify what you mean?
- wegs 6y agoIndeed. In that case, BMJ publishes myths. https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2815 https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2815 Plus, there's common sense. I live in an area hit by COVID hard. About half of the people who I've heard of catching COVID19 through friend networks have some sort of long-term effects. Most are minor, but a few are not. I think the question is what happens a few years out.
- andybak 6y agoWhat makes you think it's a myth? Myth is an extremely strong word that implies this is something that has been thoroughly debunked. I would expect that would leave a trail in literature if it were the case.
- rjtavares 6y ago> If you're below 40 your risk of dying of the regular influenza is higher than the risk of dying of covid-19. Do you have a source for that? As far as I'm aware they're both pretty low, but we haven't had a study that concluded what you're saying.
- henrikschroder 6y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2
- LarvaFX 6y agoThat does not compare flu to covid19.
- henrikschroder 6y agoGood thing you posted a comparison graph then, too bad that the covid-19 numbers in your graph are old and outdated. The Nature article has risk of death for 0-19yo at about 0%, while your graph has flu deaths at 0.01% for that group. Which means the flu is more dangerous for kids than covid-19. The Nature article has risk of death for 20-40yo at ~0.02%, same as your graph, so it's probably on par in that age group. Which means that my original point stands, if you're not scared of dying of the flu, you should not be scared of dying of covid-19. Unfortunately, humans have some crazy biases when it comes to evaluating risk. We're very bad at weighing the risk of rare events (<1% probability), we tend to overestimate them, and we're extremely bad at weighing new and previously not encountered risks, we severely overestimate them. The same bias also causes us to underestimate known risks, which is why some people are afraid of flying, but not of driving to the airport, even though risk analysis says it should be the other way around. And this is why people think covid-19 is super-duper scary, while no-one cares about the flu, even though for most of us we should value them about the same.
- jonnypotty 6y agoYou think taking the vaccine is just be to protect yourself? It's not.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- andybak 6y agoIt might be worth elaborating on your point. I can think of multiple interpretations that differ significantly.
- LarvaFX 6y agoNot true. Covid 19 is about 10x as likely to kill you even in that age group. See: https://i.insider.com/5ef234caf34d051bc821d0d8?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/5ef234caf34d051bc821d0d8?width=1000&fo...
- _-___________-_ 6y agoHave you got a more compelling source than that? Because that disagrees not only with the common sense of seeing what is happening in front of us, but also with all the other evidence I've seen.
- wegs 6y agoFrom your other comments in this thread, I assume the evidence you refer to is the President's twitter feed, rather than scientific journals?
- _-___________-_ 6y agoI've never looked at that idiot's Twitter feed. How on earth did we get from debate about the effects of COVID-19 to US politics?
- wegs 6y agoWelps, let's look over the evidence. You say: "Because that disagrees not only with the common sense of seeing what is happening in front of us, but also with all the other evidence I've seen" This statement suggests you haven't looked at (m)any scientific articles. I've read dozens of scientific articles about long COVID. If you posted a reasonable rebuttal to some of these, it'd be one thing. But simply stating you've never seen any evidence? That's a statement about your own level of knowledge, not about COVID19. Aside from that, I do look at "that idiot's Twitter feed" from time to time. Your comments mirror the things he posts downplaying COVID19. Perhaps you look at secondary sources based on his Twitter feed? Or the same sources he does? I'm not quite sure. As an aside, I'd advise everyone to read "that idiot's Twitter feed," much as I advise everyone to read international news source, left-wing news sources, and right-wing ones. You don't need to agree with someone to read what they write.
- andybak 6y agoPlease provide data to back this up. I keep hearing this and all the sources I've seen contradict it fairly strongly.
- henrikschroder 6y agoI think the most important thing to remember is that the risk profile of covid-19 is vastly different for different people. I'm sure as fuck not getting an untested vaccine, because I'm not in a risk group. If I catch the virus, my risk of death is in lightning strike territory. For my 70+ dad, he's in a bunch of risk groups, which means the risk equation looks very different for him, and for him it might be worth the risk of an untested vaccine. Everyone has to do the risk calculation for themselves, and everyone is going to come to different conclusions. That's how it's supposed to work, and that's how it works for pretty much every other non-childhood vaccine.
- chii 6y ago> If I catch the virus, my risk of death is in lightning strike territory. there's two wrong concepts here - you don't know how the virus will affect you medically. May be you will only suffer minor symptoms, or may be you will almost die with fluids in your lungs. But that's not important. The most important aspect of you catching the virus is you become a transmission vector. And you cause infection in other people who _do_ suffer from the symptoms. And you cause economic damage because people will need to lock down, or reduce economic activity. Therefore, it's not a matter of just risk to themselves that is important in the calculus of vaccines. It's the over-all health risk of the society.
- _-___________-_ 6y ago> there's two wrong concepts here - you don't know how the virus will affect you medically. May be you will only suffer minor symptoms, or may be you will almost die with fluids in your lungs. We do know the probabilities of those things, and for healthy non-elderly people the latter outcome is very unlikely. I'm curious why you decided to bring up the fact that we can't predict, with certainty, in advance which will happen. We can't do that for any disease, many of which are as bad or much worse than Covid-19.
- mantap 6y agoIf the risks are quite low for the vast majority of people, then how come COVID-19 can be seen "from space" i.e. as excess deaths in death statistics.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoHow does the existence of some excess death (mostly among at-risk people) disagree with the risk being quite low for the vast majority of people? I don't see how these things cannot coexist.
- henrikschroder 6y agoThere is excess death due to influenza every year. The number of dead due to covid-19 is not some kind of crazy anomaly that's going to stick out in the statistics. In no-good zombie-apocalypse Sweden, the total deaths/capita for 2020 is probably going to be above the 5-year average, but below the 10-year average and below the death rate of 2012. Here's how the excess mortality of 2020 compares to the last 40 years of mortality in Germany, Sweden, France, and Belgium: https://medium.com/@FrankfurtZack/unprecedented-overall-mortality-in-sweden-and-other-european-countries-cd8fcdd6174a https://medium.com/@FrankfurtZack/unprecedented-overall-mort... If you didn't know about it, you wouldn't think anything special at all happened in 2020, just by looking at the statistics.
- WalterGR 6y agoThere is excess death due to influenza every year. Right. And the flu deaths will be on top of the COVID deaths. The number of dead due to covid-19 is not some kind of crazy anomaly that's going to stick out in the statistics. Yes it is. I don't know who @FrankfurtZack is beyond how he describes himself: "armchair virologist. hobbyvirologe, hobbystaatsepidemiologe". He has one post on Medium and that's it. Here are some information sources that are more trustworthy. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deaths-us.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deat... https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/03/measuring-excess-mortality-gives-clearer-picture-pandemics-true-burden/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/03/measuring-excess-mortali... (Boston Globe) https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... The CDC link in particular is good because the first graph you come across when you scroll down shows deaths going back to 2017, so you can compare COVID excess deaths with H1N1 excess deaths.
- wegs 6y agoOkay, if they're known, describe them to me. * What portion of the population will have reduced lung capacity post-COVID? How long will it last? * What about other long-term effects, such as chronic fatigue? What puts me at risk? What causes it? How long does it last? * What about other organ damage? Please give me some semblance of an idea of what portion of the population will have long-term disability due to COVID?
- boudin 6y agoWithout the time to properly test the vaccine, you're as much in the unknown as with COVID-19. Maybe even more. This is really high risk that can backfire a lot. If the vaccine is ineffective, or worse, cause health issues, how would you convince a population (with already a portion being anti-vaccine) to get vaccinated to the point it requires to stop the spread once a good vaccine is available? Taking this risk for a political campaign is insane...
- wegs 6y agoI wouldn't. I would offer it to selectively to narrow segments of the population who have extremely high exposure to other people (for example, a huge number of NYC mass transit drivers came down with COVID19). That's where the risk-balance benefit swings.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- derbOac 6y agoI think you might have your knowns and unknowns backwards.
- rsynnott 6y ago> But we can't ramp up production that quickly regardless. That is, arguably, what makes this such a bonkers decision. Given that, around the world, production has started on phase 3 candidates, with no guarantee they'll ever be usable, skipping phase 3 doesn't really bring forward the time that a vaccine would see significant penetration. Doing so seems like a lot of risk for negligible benefit; it won't lead to saturation any quicker. And if anything goes wrong, the consequences, both immediate and in long-term damage to trust in the institutions, are potentially dramatic. In fact, even if there are no negative medical effects, this could _still_ damage trust significantly. And raise significant ethical issues for medical professionals.