8 ms·

It almost feels like we're feigning collective surprise that a big chunk of Americans decided to take a staunchly skeptical stance against big government and bi

It almost feels like we're feigning collective surprise that a big chunk of Americans decided to take a staunchly skeptical stance against big government and big media hysteria and fear-pumping and make their own decisions based on their personal risk tolerance and waiting to see how things actually play out. I don't know about most of us, but I saw this coming a mile away.

standardUser 5y ago
Around 99% of hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated, which means we are now seeing hundreds of deaths everyday from a preventable illness.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  There are hundreds of deaths everyday from many preventable causes, we generally don't force people to take medications or change their lifestyle to reduce them.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    "Preventable causes" are very different form "preventable illnesses". Avoiding a heart attack requires decades of actions and decisions. Avoiding polio requires one shot once. In the developed world, not many people die from diseases that are preventable by vaccine. Well, until now.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      One argument that got thrown around a lot was that people in the hospital with COVID are taking medical resources away from others. You could make the same argument for people who choose to drink, smoke, remain obese, sedentary, have untreated diabetes or other chronic conditions that will eventually put them in the hospital needing a lot of very expensive care.
      - Imnimo 5y ago
        Those conditions don't overwhelm hospital capacity because they don't produce exponential growth of illness, so I don't think you could make the same argument.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    I can name dozens of lifestyle choices you're forbidden from doing due to risk to yourself and others.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      Sadly my favorite past-time - driving tanks into office buildings - was outlawed by "big government". /s
  - objectivetruth 5y ago
    Heart disease, diabetes, and lung cancer aren't contagious. Kids can't catch coronary artery disease in the classroom.
  - zaptheimpaler 5y ago
    Yes because those causes usually dont affect others. With COVID, those unvaccinated people create a breeding ground for new even stronger variants of COVID that could kill millions more. Or force us to go back to quarantine even longer. If you are hell bent on risking your own life, fine, but your liberty ends where mine begins. These kind of hyper libertarian arguments always just conveniently ignore everyone except the person making them. We allow smoking because it's your choice but not in public places because that hurts others. We have speed limits because your liberty to drive at 120 ends when it endangers other drivers. We have no restrictions on how much fast food you can eat because it does not impact anyone else.
    - benmw333 5y ago
      Huh I didn't know the obese were no longer a heavy weight on the cost, availability and quality of healthcare. Good to know! Looking forward to my insurance premiums coming down once you pass that info to the insurance companies and socialized gov medicine!
      - zaptheimpaler 5y ago
        Wait so now you ARE in favor of restricting the liberty of those who eat fast food because it costs you???? Which is it liberty for all or just liberty as long it doesn't cost you a cent?
  - s5300 5y ago
    Letting a contagious pandemic rage in your country is not exactly good for national security reasons.
- GloriousKoji 5y ago
  It's actually 97% [1] and from anecdata from a friend there is at least one hospital where unvaccinated COVID hospitalizations is as low as 90% (and I want emphasize the obvious that it means 10% of hospitalized COVID patients are vaccinated). [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/1017012853/97-of-people-entering-hospitals-for-covid-19-are-unvaccinated https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/1017012853/97-of-people-enter...
  - bonzini 5y ago
    Why is that surprising? If 100% of the population were vaccinated, 100% of the hospitalized would be vaccinated too. More plausibly, suppose the vaccine is 90% effective against severe disease and 60% of the population is vaccinated. Then you'd have 6/46ths of the hospitalizations (15% roughly) coming from the vaccinated. Effectiveness against severe symptoms is what matters the most (and effectiveness against transmission comes second). As long as the maths confirm the effectiveness of the vaccination, having a number of vaccinated people in hospitals is expected. A 90% effectiveness corresponds to having your ICU beds magically multiplied by 10, which is nothing to sneeze about.
- a_conservative 5y ago
  That figure seems questionable. 1) high cycle PCR tests tend to produce false positives. [0] 2) recently (maybe now?) the CDC was recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals (break through cases). [1] If unvaccinated individuals are being tested to a different standard, that would seem to muddy the waters, wouldn't it? [0] https://medicine.yale.edu/labmed/sections/virology/COVID-19%20Ct%20values_YNHH%20Aug.%202020%20_395430_36854_v1.pdf https://medicine.yale.edu/labmed/sections/virology/COVID-19%... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210623005911/https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/downloads/Information-for-laboratories-COVID-vaccine-breakthrough-case-investigation.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210623005911/https://www.cdc.g...
  - a_conservative 5y ago
    I posted this comment in good faith. I would appreciate feedback rather than downvotes.
  - nullc 5y ago
    I'm not the downvoters but: I followed your link [1] and read the entire page multiple times and I can find no content which supports "recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals". It says that samples submitted for sequencing should be positive when CT<=28 or are detected as positive by another modality.
    - a_conservative 5y ago
      I wish I could find a "slam dunk" source that stated what the current threshold recommended by the CDC, but I can't quite find it. I've personally read many sources that talked about using cycle counts above 30 over the past year. Some more discussion on this topic was on HN yesterday [0] also, from last August: One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27972195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27972195 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
- umvi 5y ago
  And? Why aren't people allowed to take risks anymore? If the vaccine is available and I choose not to get it and then die... Well, that's my own prerogative. We are quickly moving into a corporate and government nanny state where citizens and users can't be trusted with their own agency so their agency is removed.
  - ev1 5y ago
    > Well, that's my own prerogative. Does this also imply that you will be responsible for the cost of your own choices, and that you will not infect anyone else and not interact with the public?
    - umvi 5y ago
      If I infect another unvaccinated person... so what? They made their choice as well. The vaccine is widely available enough now that anyone that doesn't have it chose not to get it (or they have an exceedingly rare medical reason)
      - ev1 5y ago
        The vast majority of the world does not have effective mRNA-type vaccines, and have outbreaks following mass vaccination of ineffective ones (and in some cases, fraudulent locals use saline). Kids cannot receive it yet, as much as they want to, and there are numerous parents explicitly refusing their kids the consent to be vaccinated. The more spread, the more dice get rolled on creating further deficiencies in vaccination success. Honestly, my opinion - if everyone could be vaccinated and the vaccine was always 100% effective 100% of the time without exception, I would not care at all about "individual choice" or "I don't want to take it", I would not care about the extra mutations being created, I would not care about being next to an unvaccinated individual at all.
        umvi 5y ago
        > Kids cannot receive it yet, as much as they want to Do kids even need it? I was under the impression that child covid deaths (or even just severe reactions to the disease) were incredibly rare.
- 13years 5y ago
  Are you aware of how that number is generated? Why is it exactly the opposite in other countries?
- nanis 5y ago
  > Around 99% of hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated "unvaccinated" includes people who have had one dose or people who had the second dose less than two weeks ago[1]: >> a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after receipt of all recommended doses of an FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.[1] >> ... A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, 2021. Among these cases, 6,446 (63%) occurred in females, and the median patient age was 58 years (interquartile range = 40–74 years). Based on preliminary data, 2,725 (27%) vaccine breakthrough infections were asymptomatic, 995 (10%) patients were known to be hospitalized, and 160 (2%) patients died.[1] >> ... As of April 30, 2021, approximately 101 million persons in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. [1] Now, let's look at a more recent report[2]: >>> As of July 19, 2021, more than 161 million people in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. >>> Hospitalizations* 5,601 (95%) >>> Deaths† 1,141 (19%) So, "fully vaccinated" increased by 60% over that period, but deaths among the fully vaccinated increased by 613%. That's curious. [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e3.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e3.htm [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre...
  - neogodless 5y ago
    Two minor adjustments: > Beginning May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections to investigating only those among patients who are hospitalized or die, thereby focusing on the cases of highest clinical and public health significance. This is just to keep in mind the % of cases that result in death will be higher based on the different focus of the monitoring. > 292 (26%) of 1,141 fatal cases reported as asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19. So you're saying 1,141 - 292 = 849 or 430% increase over 160 deaths recorded before. Still significant. This is at the same time that Delta is increasingly dominant[0][1]. So it does seem like this Delta variant may be more deadly, even to the vaccinated, though still massively less deadly when compared directly to the unvaccinated. From April 30th through about yesterday, there were about 35,000 total deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19[2]. That number dwarfs the total 850 or so that have died while vaccinated since the beginning of vaccination availability. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/17/us/delta-variant-us-growth.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/17/us/delta-vari... [1] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/07/15/us/delta-variant-us-growth-promo-1626401728082/delta-variant-us-growth-promo-1626401728082-superJumbo-v2.png https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/07/15/us/delta-variant-... [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
munk-a 5y ago
There are three things put forth in the declaration of independence: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - for some reason America has decided that #2 trumps 1 & 3 to an extreme degree - but in the rest of the world 1 & 3 are also viewed as fundamentally necessary freedoms.

standardUser 5y ago

Around 99% of hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated, which means we are now seeing hundreds of deaths everyday from a preventable illness.

throwawayboise 5y ago
There are hundreds of deaths everyday from many preventable causes, we generally don't force people to take medications or change their lifestyle to reduce them.
- standardUser 5y ago
  "Preventable causes" are very different form "preventable illnesses". Avoiding a heart attack requires decades of actions and decisions. Avoiding polio requires one shot once. In the developed world, not many people die from diseases that are preventable by vaccine. Well, until now.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    One argument that got thrown around a lot was that people in the hospital with COVID are taking medical resources away from others. You could make the same argument for people who choose to drink, smoke, remain obese, sedentary, have untreated diabetes or other chronic conditions that will eventually put them in the hospital needing a lot of very expensive care.
    - Imnimo 5y ago
      Those conditions don't overwhelm hospital capacity because they don't produce exponential growth of illness, so I don't think you could make the same argument.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I can name dozens of lifestyle choices you're forbidden from doing due to risk to yourself and others.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Sadly my favorite past-time - driving tanks into office buildings - was outlawed by "big government". /s
- objectivetruth 5y ago
  Heart disease, diabetes, and lung cancer aren't contagious. Kids can't catch coronary artery disease in the classroom.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  Yes because those causes usually dont affect others. With COVID, those unvaccinated people create a breeding ground for new even stronger variants of COVID that could kill millions more. Or force us to go back to quarantine even longer. If you are hell bent on risking your own life, fine, but your liberty ends where mine begins. These kind of hyper libertarian arguments always just conveniently ignore everyone except the person making them. We allow smoking because it's your choice but not in public places because that hurts others. We have speed limits because your liberty to drive at 120 ends when it endangers other drivers. We have no restrictions on how much fast food you can eat because it does not impact anyone else.
  - benmw333 5y ago
    Huh I didn't know the obese were no longer a heavy weight on the cost, availability and quality of healthcare. Good to know! Looking forward to my insurance premiums coming down once you pass that info to the insurance companies and socialized gov medicine!
    - zaptheimpaler 5y ago
      Wait so now you ARE in favor of restricting the liberty of those who eat fast food because it costs you???? Which is it liberty for all or just liberty as long it doesn't cost you a cent?
- s5300 5y ago
  Letting a contagious pandemic rage in your country is not exactly good for national security reasons.
GloriousKoji 5y ago
It's actually 97% [1] and from anecdata from a friend there is at least one hospital where unvaccinated COVID hospitalizations is as low as 90% (and I want emphasize the obvious that it means 10% of hospitalized COVID patients are vaccinated). [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/1017012853/97-of-people-entering-hospitals-for-covid-19-are-unvaccinated https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/1017012853/97-of-people-enter...
- bonzini 5y ago
  Why is that surprising? If 100% of the population were vaccinated, 100% of the hospitalized would be vaccinated too. More plausibly, suppose the vaccine is 90% effective against severe disease and 60% of the population is vaccinated. Then you'd have 6/46ths of the hospitalizations (15% roughly) coming from the vaccinated. Effectiveness against severe symptoms is what matters the most (and effectiveness against transmission comes second). As long as the maths confirm the effectiveness of the vaccination, having a number of vaccinated people in hospitals is expected. A 90% effectiveness corresponds to having your ICU beds magically multiplied by 10, which is nothing to sneeze about.
a_conservative 5y ago
That figure seems questionable. 1) high cycle PCR tests tend to produce false positives. [0] 2) recently (maybe now?) the CDC was recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals (break through cases). [1] If unvaccinated individuals are being tested to a different standard, that would seem to muddy the waters, wouldn't it? [0] https://medicine.yale.edu/labmed/sections/virology/COVID-19%20Ct%20values_YNHH%20Aug.%202020%20_395430_36854_v1.pdf https://medicine.yale.edu/labmed/sections/virology/COVID-19%... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210623005911/https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/downloads/Information-for-laboratories-COVID-vaccine-breakthrough-case-investigation.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210623005911/https://www.cdc.g...
- a_conservative 5y ago
  I posted this comment in good faith. I would appreciate feedback rather than downvotes.
- nullc 5y ago
  I'm not the downvoters but: I followed your link [1] and read the entire page multiple times and I can find no content which supports "recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals". It says that samples submitted for sequencing should be positive when CT<=28 or are detected as positive by another modality.
  - a_conservative 5y ago
    I wish I could find a "slam dunk" source that stated what the current threshold recommended by the CDC, but I can't quite find it. I've personally read many sources that talked about using cycle counts above 30 over the past year. Some more discussion on this topic was on HN yesterday [0] also, from last August: One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27972195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27972195 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
umvi 5y ago
And? Why aren't people allowed to take risks anymore? If the vaccine is available and I choose not to get it and then die... Well, that's my own prerogative. We are quickly moving into a corporate and government nanny state where citizens and users can't be trusted with their own agency so their agency is removed.
- ev1 5y ago
  > Well, that's my own prerogative. Does this also imply that you will be responsible for the cost of your own choices, and that you will not infect anyone else and not interact with the public?
  - umvi 5y ago
    If I infect another unvaccinated person... so what? They made their choice as well. The vaccine is widely available enough now that anyone that doesn't have it chose not to get it (or they have an exceedingly rare medical reason)
    - ev1 5y ago
      The vast majority of the world does not have effective mRNA-type vaccines, and have outbreaks following mass vaccination of ineffective ones (and in some cases, fraudulent locals use saline). Kids cannot receive it yet, as much as they want to, and there are numerous parents explicitly refusing their kids the consent to be vaccinated. The more spread, the more dice get rolled on creating further deficiencies in vaccination success. Honestly, my opinion - if everyone could be vaccinated and the vaccine was always 100% effective 100% of the time without exception, I would not care at all about "individual choice" or "I don't want to take it", I would not care about the extra mutations being created, I would not care about being next to an unvaccinated individual at all.
      - umvi 5y ago
        > Kids cannot receive it yet, as much as they want to Do kids even need it? I was under the impression that child covid deaths (or even just severe reactions to the disease) were incredibly rare.
13years 5y ago
Are you aware of how that number is generated? Why is it exactly the opposite in other countries?
nanis 5y ago
> Around 99% of hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated "unvaccinated" includes people who have had one dose or people who had the second dose less than two weeks ago[1]: >> a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after receipt of all recommended doses of an FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.[1] >> ... A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, 2021. Among these cases, 6,446 (63%) occurred in females, and the median patient age was 58 years (interquartile range = 40–74 years). Based on preliminary data, 2,725 (27%) vaccine breakthrough infections were asymptomatic, 995 (10%) patients were known to be hospitalized, and 160 (2%) patients died.[1] >> ... As of April 30, 2021, approximately 101 million persons in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. [1] Now, let's look at a more recent report[2]: >>> As of July 19, 2021, more than 161 million people in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. >>> Hospitalizations* 5,601 (95%) >>> Deaths† 1,141 (19%) So, "fully vaccinated" increased by 60% over that period, but deaths among the fully vaccinated increased by 613%. That's curious. [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e3.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e3.htm [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre...
- neogodless 5y ago
  Two minor adjustments: > Beginning May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections to investigating only those among patients who are hospitalized or die, thereby focusing on the cases of highest clinical and public health significance. This is just to keep in mind the % of cases that result in death will be higher based on the different focus of the monitoring. > 292 (26%) of 1,141 fatal cases reported as asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19. So you're saying 1,141 - 292 = 849 or 430% increase over 160 deaths recorded before. Still significant. This is at the same time that Delta is increasingly dominant[0][1]. So it does seem like this Delta variant may be more deadly, even to the vaccinated, though still massively less deadly when compared directly to the unvaccinated. From April 30th through about yesterday, there were about 35,000 total deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19[2]. That number dwarfs the total 850 or so that have died while vaccinated since the beginning of vaccination availability. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/17/us/delta-variant-us-growth.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/17/us/delta-vari... [1] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/07/15/us/delta-variant-us-growth-promo-1626401728082/delta-variant-us-growth-promo-1626401728082-superJumbo-v2.png https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/07/15/us/delta-variant-... [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

munk-a 5y ago

There are three things put forth in the declaration of independence: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - for some reason America has decided that #2 trumps 1 & 3 to an extreme degree - but in the rest of the world 1 & 3 are also viewed as fundamentally necessary freedoms.