8 ms·

> the risk is minuscule compared to COVID-19 itself You don't know this at all - we don't know what age groups are affected here, and COVID is pretty much negl

by tazjin 6y ago

> the risk is minuscule compared to COVID-19 itself You don't know this at all - we don't know what age groups are affected here, and COVID is pretty much negligible in many younger age groups. It's best to wait for more data to come in before drawing any conclusions.

draw_down 6y ago
There is such a discursive wall around the vaccines, there is no quarter for any idea that one of the vaccines could have risks that should give anyone pause. Covid will kill you, vaccines will save you, end of story.
blagie 6y ago
The risk *of death* from COVID is pretty negligible for some age groups. The biggest confusion of this whole situation is we've fixated on CFR numbers as a measure of risk. Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.
- tazjin 6y ago
  I haven't seen anything that indicates that the risk of long-term consequences is significantly elevated above other viral diseases. There is a condition (which we know too little about, and which - as one of the few good outcomes of the COVID situation - is now actually getting some attention) that can lead to fatigue and other symptoms after fighting off a viral infection, but it's not unique to COVID. A year ago there was a lot of noise about things like heart issues induced by COVID, which turned out to be mostly statistical errors in the papers that made the claims. A lot of people (often people who never actually had a positive test) also claim to suffer from various mental impairments after their COVID infections, and some newspaper ran an article saying that some of these symptoms were alleviated after the people were given anxiety medication. Go figure ...
  - DanielleMolloy 6y ago
    Mh, do you really want to play down the possibility of unknown long-term consequences? Check out this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1 The Spanish Flu has led to a „sleeping sickness“ epidemic years after it ceased.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      There is nothing to play down. More than a year into the pandemic are there is still no evidence of long-term damage except in rare cases. Evidence of inflammation in monkeys does not qualify, before you ask.
      - ptaipale 6y ago
        CDC reports many kind of long-lasting adverse effects. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....
        anoncake 6y ago
        That page is useless, it doesn't mention how frequent the effects are.
    - mapme 6y ago
      There is no evidence of the link between sleeping sickness, EL, and Spanish flu. > Since encephalitis lethargica’s (EL) prevalence in the 1920s, epidemiological and clinical debate has persisted over whether EL was caused by, potentiated by, or merely coincident with the Spanish influenza pandemic. Epidemiologic analyses generally suggest that the disorders were coincidental. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/
  - gdubs 6y ago
    Someone very close to me is a “long hauler” and the quality of life effects have been horrible. A young and healthy person, now dealing with fatigue, blood clotting, and a host of other uncomfortable and troubling issues. Throughout, medical professionals have been struggling to give people like this answers as to what exactly is happening to them — and the common refrain is “we don’t knew enough about it yet, but we’re seeing a lot of this.” I’ll let the eventual studies give the percentages. But my (personal, non professional) take on this is that long-hauler experiences are a LOT more common then people realize, have been fairly ignored while people have fixated on the death count, and have big possible implications for quality of life for younger, otherwise healthy people.
- estaseuropano 6y ago
  Agree fully, although even the mortality numbers far outweigh the thrombosis incidence! Long covid: > Estimates of the number of people with long COVID vary widely. In July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in five patients 18–34 years of age without chronic medical conditions and with a positive outpatient test had not fully recovered by 2–3 weeks after testing, and a research center in Rome found that 87% of 143 patients reported persistence of at least one symptom 60 days after onset of the disease. According to a preprint published in October that has not yet undergone peer review, 24% of 233 patients still had symptoms at 90 days after infection. Data from a smartphone app, as reported by the COVID Symptom Study, showed that one in ten patients with COVID-19 have symptoms after 3 weeks. Given the scale of the pandemic, if even only a small percentage of the tens of millions of infected people worldwide develop long COVID, a staggeringly large number of people would need long-term follow-up and treatment. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01177-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01177-6
mike_d 6y ago
> COVID is pretty much negligible in many younger age groups "Paediatricians in Israel, which has surged ahead in vaccinating its adult population, reported a sharp rise in covid-19 infections among young people, with more than 50 000 children and teens testing positive in January—more than Israel saw in any month during the first and second waves." https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n383 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n383
- tazjin 6y ago
  Susceptible to infection, absolutely, but are they suffering severe symptoms or dying in large numbers? No. A single metric (e.g. positive tests) is not enough to assess any severity here, and even those metrics come with caveats because all of our methods of determining them are imprecise.
  - mapme 6y ago
    A simulation from the economist gives ~2% chance of being hospitalized if you get COVID as a 29 yr old male with no comorbidities. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mortality-risk-estimator https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...
    - blub 6y ago
      i.e. if a very large number of young people get sick, there will be sufficient severe cases among their population to fill up intensive care beds and there will also be many people with sequelae. But in Germany and Europe children can't get vaccinated and by the time young adults can it will be September anyway.
    - tazjin 6y ago
      That's not what your link says, not specifically: > Moreover, the database is not a representative sample of the sars-cov-2-positive population. Because it only contains records from people who have interacted with a medical service provider, it excludes those who weather the disease at home without medical assistance. This will exclude the vast majority of people in younger age groups who were affected. Serology studies have shown us that in many densely populated places infection rates have been far into the double-digit percentages - if this statistic was true in the way you interpreted it, we would know that by now.
blueblimp 6y ago
No matter who you are, vaccination is safer than catching covid. The vaccines are designed and tested for safety; covid gains evolutionary fitness from making you sick. As a result, the risks from vaccination are orders of magnitude lower, no matter what the covid risk is. (Edit: Deleted second paragraph that wasn’t clearly worded.)
- ummonk 6y ago
  The chance of catching COVID between now and the other vaccines being made available is quite low.
- overboard2 6y ago
  Covid evolves to spread itself more effectively. The fewer symptoms it causes, the better it can spread.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    This is what 99% of the people don't understand. The virus needs the host in order to spread. The virus doesn't have any other ulterior mechanism that wants to kill humans. This is why spanish-flu virus got weaker over time because as it evolves, if it kills humans rapidly, it cannot evolve. So, nature sorts it self out.
    - blueblimp 6y ago
      This is a more disputed theory than you think. http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2007/08/26/rabbits-1-virus-1-evolution-of-viral-virulence/ http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2007/08/26/rabbits-1-virus...
  - GuB-42 6y ago
    It is somewhat true, but the virus doesn't know that, and there isn't a strong evolutionary pressure to make covid less lethal. Covid is transmitted mostly during its mild phase, it only becomes severe a week later, if you are unlucky. If you are lucky, you clear off the infection and gain relatively strong immunity. For the virus, both scenarios are similar. The only thing is that if it was just a cold, we wouldn't bother with preventive measures and the virus would spread more easily. However, when both the lethal and nonlethal variants are present, the nonlethal variant doesn't have an advantage since we treat everyone the same way, so it is unlikely for the nonlethal variant to take over on its own. At least not on a short timescale. The solution is to create our own nonlethal variant, also known as a vaccine. Well, vaccines don't spread, I guess we could make a vaccine that spreads but "what could possibly go wrong..."
finolex1 6y ago
Then why not temporarily suspend vaccinations only for those under 40? Or let people have a choice in determining whether the risk is worth it for them.
- ppf 6y ago
  I would love to have a choice in determining whether the various risks are worth it for me, but my government has insisted on shutting all "non-essential" businesses, and only lifted a 3-month "stay at home" order last week.
  - oivey 6y ago
    That’s not really the same thing since an individual who, for example, goes to large gatherings also endangers others by making essential activities like going to the grocery store more dangerous for everyone. Besides that, wider spread of the virus increases the odds of dangerous mutations that make the vaccine less effective or the illness more severe. More spread also risks hospital overloads, which will hurt the medical outcomes of everyone. Going out beyond essential needs hurts everyone. On the other hand, getting a potentially faulty vaccine would seem to mostly only be a risk to the individual, although I suppose there is some risk of overwhelming hospitals still. Please just stay home for a few more months so this shit can finally fucking end. It’s already been a year. Edit: an important factor, too, is that understanding the potential risks of the AZ vaccine is hard, and the average person may not expected to fully understand them. Right now, it seems like even the authorities don’t understand them.
    - ppf 6y ago
      How exactly will staying at home "for a few more months" stop a virus mutating forever? It's not that bad, we have to live with it. Viruses mutate all the time. I'm not sure what your point is with the apparent difficulty of understanding the risks of a new vaccine. Are you saying "it's hard, so just trust what the authorities tell you"?
      - 6y ago

by tazjin 6y ago

draw_down 6y ago

There is such a discursive wall around the vaccines, there is no quarter for any idea that one of the vaccines could have risks that should give anyone pause. Covid will kill you, vaccines will save you, end of story.

blagie 6y ago

The risk *of death* from COVID is pretty negligible for some age groups. The biggest confusion of this whole situation is we've fixated on CFR numbers as a measure of risk. Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.

tazjin 6y ago
I haven't seen anything that indicates that the risk of long-term consequences is significantly elevated above other viral diseases. There is a condition (which we know too little about, and which - as one of the few good outcomes of the COVID situation - is now actually getting some attention) that can lead to fatigue and other symptoms after fighting off a viral infection, but it's not unique to COVID. A year ago there was a lot of noise about things like heart issues induced by COVID, which turned out to be mostly statistical errors in the papers that made the claims. A lot of people (often people who never actually had a positive test) also claim to suffer from various mental impairments after their COVID infections, and some newspaper ran an article saying that some of these symptoms were alleviated after the people were given anxiety medication. Go figure ...
- DanielleMolloy 6y ago
  Mh, do you really want to play down the possibility of unknown long-term consequences? Check out this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1 The Spanish Flu has led to a „sleeping sickness“ epidemic years after it ceased.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    There is nothing to play down. More than a year into the pandemic are there is still no evidence of long-term damage except in rare cases. Evidence of inflammation in monkeys does not qualify, before you ask.
    - ptaipale 6y ago
      CDC reports many kind of long-lasting adverse effects. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....
      - anoncake 6y ago
        That page is useless, it doesn't mention how frequent the effects are.
  - mapme 6y ago
    There is no evidence of the link between sleeping sickness, EL, and Spanish flu. > Since encephalitis lethargica’s (EL) prevalence in the 1920s, epidemiological and clinical debate has persisted over whether EL was caused by, potentiated by, or merely coincident with the Spanish influenza pandemic. Epidemiologic analyses generally suggest that the disorders were coincidental. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/
- gdubs 6y ago
  Someone very close to me is a “long hauler” and the quality of life effects have been horrible. A young and healthy person, now dealing with fatigue, blood clotting, and a host of other uncomfortable and troubling issues. Throughout, medical professionals have been struggling to give people like this answers as to what exactly is happening to them — and the common refrain is “we don’t knew enough about it yet, but we’re seeing a lot of this.” I’ll let the eventual studies give the percentages. But my (personal, non professional) take on this is that long-hauler experiences are a LOT more common then people realize, have been fairly ignored while people have fixated on the death count, and have big possible implications for quality of life for younger, otherwise healthy people.
estaseuropano 6y ago
Agree fully, although even the mortality numbers far outweigh the thrombosis incidence! Long covid: > Estimates of the number of people with long COVID vary widely. In July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in five patients 18–34 years of age without chronic medical conditions and with a positive outpatient test had not fully recovered by 2–3 weeks after testing, and a research center in Rome found that 87% of 143 patients reported persistence of at least one symptom 60 days after onset of the disease. According to a preprint published in October that has not yet undergone peer review, 24% of 233 patients still had symptoms at 90 days after infection. Data from a smartphone app, as reported by the COVID Symptom Study, showed that one in ten patients with COVID-19 have symptoms after 3 weeks. Given the scale of the pandemic, if even only a small percentage of the tens of millions of infected people worldwide develop long COVID, a staggeringly large number of people would need long-term follow-up and treatment. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01177-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01177-6

mike_d 6y ago

> COVID is pretty much negligible in many younger age groups "Paediatricians in Israel, which has surged ahead in vaccinating its adult population, reported a sharp rise in covid-19 infections among young people, with more than 50 000 children and teens testing positive in January—more than Israel saw in any month during the first and second waves." https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n383 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n383

tazjin 6y ago
Susceptible to infection, absolutely, but are they suffering severe symptoms or dying in large numbers? No. A single metric (e.g. positive tests) is not enough to assess any severity here, and even those metrics come with caveats because all of our methods of determining them are imprecise.
- mapme 6y ago
  A simulation from the economist gives ~2% chance of being hospitalized if you get COVID as a 29 yr old male with no comorbidities. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mortality-risk-estimator https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...
  - blub 6y ago
    i.e. if a very large number of young people get sick, there will be sufficient severe cases among their population to fill up intensive care beds and there will also be many people with sequelae. But in Germany and Europe children can't get vaccinated and by the time young adults can it will be September anyway.
  - tazjin 6y ago
    That's not what your link says, not specifically: > Moreover, the database is not a representative sample of the sars-cov-2-positive population. Because it only contains records from people who have interacted with a medical service provider, it excludes those who weather the disease at home without medical assistance. This will exclude the vast majority of people in younger age groups who were affected. Serology studies have shown us that in many densely populated places infection rates have been far into the double-digit percentages - if this statistic was true in the way you interpreted it, we would know that by now.

blueblimp 6y ago

No matter who you are, vaccination is safer than catching covid. The vaccines are designed and tested for safety; covid gains evolutionary fitness from making you sick. As a result, the risks from vaccination are orders of magnitude lower, no matter what the covid risk is. (Edit: Deleted second paragraph that wasn’t clearly worded.)

ummonk 6y ago
The chance of catching COVID between now and the other vaccines being made available is quite low.
overboard2 6y ago
Covid evolves to spread itself more effectively. The fewer symptoms it causes, the better it can spread.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  This is what 99% of the people don't understand. The virus needs the host in order to spread. The virus doesn't have any other ulterior mechanism that wants to kill humans. This is why spanish-flu virus got weaker over time because as it evolves, if it kills humans rapidly, it cannot evolve. So, nature sorts it self out.
  - blueblimp 6y ago
    This is a more disputed theory than you think. http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2007/08/26/rabbits-1-virus-1-evolution-of-viral-virulence/ http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2007/08/26/rabbits-1-virus...
- GuB-42 6y ago
  It is somewhat true, but the virus doesn't know that, and there isn't a strong evolutionary pressure to make covid less lethal. Covid is transmitted mostly during its mild phase, it only becomes severe a week later, if you are unlucky. If you are lucky, you clear off the infection and gain relatively strong immunity. For the virus, both scenarios are similar. The only thing is that if it was just a cold, we wouldn't bother with preventive measures and the virus would spread more easily. However, when both the lethal and nonlethal variants are present, the nonlethal variant doesn't have an advantage since we treat everyone the same way, so it is unlikely for the nonlethal variant to take over on its own. At least not on a short timescale. The solution is to create our own nonlethal variant, also known as a vaccine. Well, vaccines don't spread, I guess we could make a vaccine that spreads but "what could possibly go wrong..."

finolex1 6y ago

Then why not temporarily suspend vaccinations only for those under 40? Or let people have a choice in determining whether the risk is worth it for them.

ppf 6y ago
I would love to have a choice in determining whether the various risks are worth it for me, but my government has insisted on shutting all "non-essential" businesses, and only lifted a 3-month "stay at home" order last week.
- oivey 6y ago
  That’s not really the same thing since an individual who, for example, goes to large gatherings also endangers others by making essential activities like going to the grocery store more dangerous for everyone. Besides that, wider spread of the virus increases the odds of dangerous mutations that make the vaccine less effective or the illness more severe. More spread also risks hospital overloads, which will hurt the medical outcomes of everyone. Going out beyond essential needs hurts everyone. On the other hand, getting a potentially faulty vaccine would seem to mostly only be a risk to the individual, although I suppose there is some risk of overwhelming hospitals still. Please just stay home for a few more months so this shit can finally fucking end. It’s already been a year. Edit: an important factor, too, is that understanding the potential risks of the AZ vaccine is hard, and the average person may not expected to fully understand them. Right now, it seems like even the authorities don’t understand them.
  - ppf 6y ago
    How exactly will staying at home "for a few more months" stop a virus mutating forever? It's not that bad, we have to live with it. Viruses mutate all the time. I'm not sure what your point is with the apparent difficulty of understanding the risks of a new vaccine. Are you saying "it's hard, so just trust what the authorities tell you"?
    - 6y ago