6 ms·

Facts like these don't matter to the COVID-obsessed. Turns out that screaming 24/7 for 18 months at people they're going to die messes with their cognitive abil

Facts like these don't matter to the COVID-obsessed. Turns out that screaming 24/7 for 18 months at people they're going to die messes with their cognitive abilities. Go figure! And here I thought doing this would keep us calm and rational. We basically have a best-case scenario today and an awful lot of people don't care and still think it's doomsday. Vaccines are fantastic at reducing COVID to a cold, kids are at no risk, the overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk, vaccines are available, natural immunity is great, and ironically, vaccines DONT stop transmission. So, we're all gonna get it, anyone who wants to be protected can be, and unvaccinated people don't matter because COVID is already endemic and we're all gonna get it so we have a clear path towards herd immunity. This is great! And here we are, instead making illogical and probably illegal rules that accomplish literally nothing, make everything worse, perpetuate irrational fear, etc. We scapegoat "the unvaccinated" and start this medical class warfare and just ramp up unnecessary hatred of each other. And worst of all, it doesn't protect anyone and probably will make COVID worse. Are we having fun yet?!

spookthesunset 5y ago
Linked is a fascinating dataset showing exactly what you are talking about. The average american thinks if they get covid, their odds of dying from it around 10%. In younger age brackets this is almost 1000x wrong. People are very, very badly misinformed about their risks for covid. This makes it almost impossible to have rational, grounded discussion of public policy. If everybody is walking around thinking covid is a death sentence, of course they will beg of all the crap we are doing right now. https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/ https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
- tehwebguy 5y ago
  Line of reasoning doesn't seem to account for ICU occupancy levels & reduces outcomes to simply "lived" vs "died" without looking at sub-outcomes under "lived" category.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    You're right. There is more nuance. For instance, many of the concerns about "long COVID" are legitimate. But even within the nuance the statistics are being used to support narratives that aren't always honest. Just look at the news that apparently 40-45% of COVID hospitalizations are actually people who were admitted for another reason and just so happened to test positive upon admission. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hospitalization-numbers-can-be-misleading/620062/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos... This data changes the hospitalization narrative quite a bit.
    - tehwebguy 5y ago
      Perhaps, but FYI the article and its source are talking about pediatric hospitalizations in particular.
      - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
        The article references two studies. One was looking at pediatric populations and the other adult populations: > The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic. > The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease. > This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past. Knowing that almost 50% of the hospitalizations in both children and adults that are classified as COVID hospitalizations aren't really for COVID totally obliterates the narrative in the media about how (mostly unvaccinated) COVID patients are overwhelming the hospitals.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  > People are very, very badly misinformed about their risks for covid. This seems to be by design though.
  - peakaboo 5y ago
    Of course. The conspiracy guys has been the ones who have been correct through this pandemic, predicting every escalation, and the coming response. If you are someone intelligent who wants to know about covid for real, you should read the conspiracy subreddit on reddit and also turn off the TV news. That's the actual truth, but people can't take it.
    - rspeele 5y ago
      I remember last year, before the US elections, some of the conspiracy guys said "Just watch, after the election COVID will magically go away. This was all a ploy to make Trump look bad.". Others said "COVID will be around forever, the government will never give up emergency powers". I could conclude that the latter camp was correct. Or that when you have competing versions of conspiracy theories, predicting different outcomes, one of them will always appear to be prescient after the fact. Then you can ignore the others that didn't pan out, and say that everything that's happened so far has been predicted by the conspiracy guys.
- bedhead 5y ago
  There have been a bunch of surveys similar to this that are all strong evidence of how disgraceful the messaging has been from politicians, health departments, media, etc. But the real problem with surveys like this are asking people what the "average" chance of death or hospitalizations are. We know that the risk from COVID are highly stratified by things like age and obesity and pre-existing conditions, so "average" is wildly inadequate as a measure to describe the real world. A statistics course explaining the difference between normal and Pareto distributions would go a long way in bringing many people back to reality. Alas...
- listless 5y ago
  I just recently recovered from a breakthrough case (double jab Moderna) and the fear was absolutely the worst part. You scrutinize every breath. Check your oxygen constantly. Sit around wondering if tomorrow is the day you go to the ER. Or maybe it’s day 10. Sit around completely isolated from friends and family wracked with a fever and try not to lose your mind. The fear is way, way worse than the virus.
barbazoo 5y ago
> kids are at no risk, the overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk What I've been looking for for a long time now is data on infection, hospitalization rates and mortality by vaccination status and age. They all get mixed and it's never really clear to me what the risk for, say, a vaccinated 40 year old or an unvaccinated 1 year old really is.
- nradov 5y ago
  The CDC estimated an infection fatality rate of 0.001% for ages 0-17. The risk rises exponentially with age. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm Of those children who died, the majority had serious underlying health conditions such as obesity or asthma. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7023e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7023e1.htm This paper has some good recent data on vaccine effectiveness. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2108891 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2108891
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    Thank you, that does have some of the data I'm looking for, appreciate it very much!
sto_hristo 5y ago
Dear Facebook Karen, What is ironic is how people like you talk with such confidence and self-assurance, but don't know the meaning and can't use simple words like endemic. Kids from 4th grade know more stuff about viruses, the immune system, and what vaccines are supposed to do. But those kids actually went to biology class and opened a real textbook. Textbooks. Not facebook posts. Difference of mere 4 letters, but with such significance. And even though those 4th graders are surely big fans of sci-fi like Star Wars, they sure as hell aren't so clueless to expect vaccines to create force fields around people that stop particles. In the age of unlimited information and internet, being stupid is not an option - it's a medical condition. Society may tolerate you, but natural selection won't. Yours, Me
- dang 5y ago
  Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've done it repeatedly lately (e.g. this comment, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28514075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28514075). It has the effect of destroying curious conversation, which is what we're trying for here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - sto_hristo 5y ago
    Tolerating the spread of false and manipulative information and opinions does much worse things than destroying "curious conversation." As i said - society is sitting on a high horse with its choice to tolerate nonsense for the sake of "guidelines" and inclusion and that has proven detrimental for everyone but the undertakers. Do you have a button in the admin panel that will save the next person who believed that they're part of the "overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk?"
    - dang 5y ago
      Maybe so, but that doesn't make it ok to post name-calling rants on divisive topics, which is directly against HN's rules. If you want to do something about false information, there are ways to do that which don't break the HN guidelines. As a bonus, they're also more likely to be persuasive (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). I've noticed that when people use phrases like "the spread of false and manipulative information and opinions", they generally just seem to mean "I think X is wrong and I feel strongly about it" (because such comments generally contain no information to disambiguate what they're saying from the latter). In other words, phrases like "manipulative information", "dis/misinformation", and so on, are generally pejoratives that express an intensified feeling. If we take such statements at the level of their components, i.e. "X is false" and "I feel strongly", it's easier to see how to deal with them in the intended spirit of this site: X is false – patiently provide better information and explain how it is correct; I feel strongly – take responsibility for regulating one's own feelings rather than venting them into language that blasts the opposing side. There's nothing wrong with strong feelings, but it's important not to let them morph into aggression towards the perceived source of the feeling, such as by calling people who disagree with you stupid, and so on. We can't have that here because it destroys conversation. When other people who also feel strongly get hit with that, they respond in kind—where "in kind" means escalating, because it always feels like the other person is doing worse. That's how we get a downward spiral and we're trying to avoid that here (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&da...). You've done this kind of thing repeatedly before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28192074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28192074 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26744307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26744307). Even if you feel like you're nobly defending society by addressing others that way, it's seriously against HN's rules and we ban accounts that keep doing it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
lamontcg 5y ago
There's a reason we "scapegoat" the unvaccinated. The hospitals in places like Florida and Idaho are being knocked over by the unvaccinated winding up on ventilators and dying. In the process they're denying medical care to other people. It looks like we're going to have to burn through senselessly burying another hundred thousand or so americans to get to the end of this. We're back to "flatten the curve" in order to hopefully make sure that when you get into a traffic accident that you don't die for lack of medical care. AND IF EVERYONE HAD JUST GOTTEN VACCINATED NONE OF THIS WOULD BE HAPPENING AND WE WOULD BE BACK TO NORMAL. Why is this so fucking hard.
- ghoward 5y ago
  > AND IF EVERYONE HAD JUST GOTTEN VACCINATED NONE OF THIS WOULD BE HAPPENING AND WE WOULD BE BACK TO NORMAL. We can't know that. You are assuming. For all we know, if everyone got vaccinated the virus could have mutated around it faster, leaving us at square one.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    The vaccines are something around 98% effective against severe disease. If people were vaccinated they'd stay out of the hospitals. The hospitals are the problem. I feel like I'm explaining arithmetic to an idiot. And if you vaccinate everyone there will be less infections overall. For all of the worst-casing about VE and waning against infection it still isn't 0% VE. And breakthrough infections have less culturable virus and decline faster since the primed immune system defeats the disease faster. That means less chance for mutations. We need to stop assuming that up could really be down. It isn't. Vaccines work. They prevent disease. They keep people out of the hospital. They reduce the chances of mutation. If everyone was vaccinated all this stupid shit would be over. Antivaxxers are dragging this shit out because they're afraid of needles and they are the ones causing all this suffering.
    - ghoward 5y ago
      > They reduce the chances of mutation. Perhaps, but you also don't get what I am saying. If we vaccinated everyone, the virus wouldn't be eradicated because animals can be hosts. Because of that, the evolutionary pressure put on the virus by everyone being vaccinated could result in the virus mutating enough to evade immunity. The same thing happens with flu every year.

spookthesunset 5y ago

Linked is a fascinating dataset showing exactly what you are talking about. The average american thinks if they get covid, their odds of dying from it around 10%. In younger age brackets this is almost 1000x wrong. People are very, very badly misinformed about their risks for covid. This makes it almost impossible to have rational, grounded discussion of public policy. If everybody is walking around thinking covid is a death sentence, of course they will beg of all the crap we are doing right now. https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/ https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/

tehwebguy 5y ago
Line of reasoning doesn't seem to account for ICU occupancy levels & reduces outcomes to simply "lived" vs "died" without looking at sub-outcomes under "lived" category.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  You're right. There is more nuance. For instance, many of the concerns about "long COVID" are legitimate. But even within the nuance the statistics are being used to support narratives that aren't always honest. Just look at the news that apparently 40-45% of COVID hospitalizations are actually people who were admitted for another reason and just so happened to test positive upon admission. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hospitalization-numbers-can-be-misleading/620062/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos... This data changes the hospitalization narrative quite a bit.
  - tehwebguy 5y ago
    Perhaps, but FYI the article and its source are talking about pediatric hospitalizations in particular.
    - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
      The article references two studies. One was looking at pediatric populations and the other adult populations: > The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic. > The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease. > This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past. Knowing that almost 50% of the hospitalizations in both children and adults that are classified as COVID hospitalizations aren't really for COVID totally obliterates the narrative in the media about how (mostly unvaccinated) COVID patients are overwhelming the hospitals.
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
> People are very, very badly misinformed about their risks for covid. This seems to be by design though.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  Of course. The conspiracy guys has been the ones who have been correct through this pandemic, predicting every escalation, and the coming response. If you are someone intelligent who wants to know about covid for real, you should read the conspiracy subreddit on reddit and also turn off the TV news. That's the actual truth, but people can't take it.
  - rspeele 5y ago
    I remember last year, before the US elections, some of the conspiracy guys said "Just watch, after the election COVID will magically go away. This was all a ploy to make Trump look bad.". Others said "COVID will be around forever, the government will never give up emergency powers". I could conclude that the latter camp was correct. Or that when you have competing versions of conspiracy theories, predicting different outcomes, one of them will always appear to be prescient after the fact. Then you can ignore the others that didn't pan out, and say that everything that's happened so far has been predicted by the conspiracy guys.
bedhead 5y ago
There have been a bunch of surveys similar to this that are all strong evidence of how disgraceful the messaging has been from politicians, health departments, media, etc. But the real problem with surveys like this are asking people what the "average" chance of death or hospitalizations are. We know that the risk from COVID are highly stratified by things like age and obesity and pre-existing conditions, so "average" is wildly inadequate as a measure to describe the real world. A statistics course explaining the difference between normal and Pareto distributions would go a long way in bringing many people back to reality. Alas...
listless 5y ago
I just recently recovered from a breakthrough case (double jab Moderna) and the fear was absolutely the worst part. You scrutinize every breath. Check your oxygen constantly. Sit around wondering if tomorrow is the day you go to the ER. Or maybe it’s day 10. Sit around completely isolated from friends and family wracked with a fever and try not to lose your mind. The fear is way, way worse than the virus.

barbazoo 5y ago

> kids are at no risk, the overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk What I've been looking for for a long time now is data on infection, hospitalization rates and mortality by vaccination status and age. They all get mixed and it's never really clear to me what the risk for, say, a vaccinated 40 year old or an unvaccinated 1 year old really is.

nradov 5y ago
The CDC estimated an infection fatality rate of 0.001% for ages 0-17. The risk rises exponentially with age. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm Of those children who died, the majority had serious underlying health conditions such as obesity or asthma. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7023e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7023e1.htm This paper has some good recent data on vaccine effectiveness. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2108891 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2108891
- barbazoo 5y ago
  Thank you, that does have some of the data I'm looking for, appreciate it very much!

sto_hristo 5y ago

Dear Facebook Karen, What is ironic is how people like you talk with such confidence and self-assurance, but don't know the meaning and can't use simple words like endemic. Kids from 4th grade know more stuff about viruses, the immune system, and what vaccines are supposed to do. But those kids actually went to biology class and opened a real textbook. Textbooks. Not facebook posts. Difference of mere 4 letters, but with such significance. And even though those 4th graders are surely big fans of sci-fi like Star Wars, they sure as hell aren't so clueless to expect vaccines to create force fields around people that stop particles. In the age of unlimited information and internet, being stupid is not an option - it's a medical condition. Society may tolerate you, but natural selection won't. Yours, Me

dang 5y ago
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've done it repeatedly lately (e.g. this comment, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28514075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28514075). It has the effect of destroying curious conversation, which is what we're trying for here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sto_hristo 5y ago
  Tolerating the spread of false and manipulative information and opinions does much worse things than destroying "curious conversation." As i said - society is sitting on a high horse with its choice to tolerate nonsense for the sake of "guidelines" and inclusion and that has proven detrimental for everyone but the undertakers. Do you have a button in the admin panel that will save the next person who believed that they're part of the "overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk?"
  - dang 5y ago
    Maybe so, but that doesn't make it ok to post name-calling rants on divisive topics, which is directly against HN's rules. If you want to do something about false information, there are ways to do that which don't break the HN guidelines. As a bonus, they're also more likely to be persuasive (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). I've noticed that when people use phrases like "the spread of false and manipulative information and opinions", they generally just seem to mean "I think X is wrong and I feel strongly about it" (because such comments generally contain no information to disambiguate what they're saying from the latter). In other words, phrases like "manipulative information", "dis/misinformation", and so on, are generally pejoratives that express an intensified feeling. If we take such statements at the level of their components, i.e. "X is false" and "I feel strongly", it's easier to see how to deal with them in the intended spirit of this site: X is false – patiently provide better information and explain how it is correct; I feel strongly – take responsibility for regulating one's own feelings rather than venting them into language that blasts the opposing side. There's nothing wrong with strong feelings, but it's important not to let them morph into aggression towards the perceived source of the feeling, such as by calling people who disagree with you stupid, and so on. We can't have that here because it destroys conversation. When other people who also feel strongly get hit with that, they respond in kind—where "in kind" means escalating, because it always feels like the other person is doing worse. That's how we get a downward spiral and we're trying to avoid that here (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&da...). You've done this kind of thing repeatedly before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28192074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28192074 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26744307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26744307). Even if you feel like you're nobly defending society by addressing others that way, it's seriously against HN's rules and we ban accounts that keep doing it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

lamontcg 5y ago

There's a reason we "scapegoat" the unvaccinated. The hospitals in places like Florida and Idaho are being knocked over by the unvaccinated winding up on ventilators and dying. In the process they're denying medical care to other people. It looks like we're going to have to burn through senselessly burying another hundred thousand or so americans to get to the end of this. We're back to "flatten the curve" in order to hopefully make sure that when you get into a traffic accident that you don't die for lack of medical care. AND IF EVERYONE HAD JUST GOTTEN VACCINATED NONE OF THIS WOULD BE HAPPENING AND WE WOULD BE BACK TO NORMAL. Why is this so fucking hard.

ghoward 5y ago
> AND IF EVERYONE HAD JUST GOTTEN VACCINATED NONE OF THIS WOULD BE HAPPENING AND WE WOULD BE BACK TO NORMAL. We can't know that. You are assuming. For all we know, if everyone got vaccinated the virus could have mutated around it faster, leaving us at square one.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  The vaccines are something around 98% effective against severe disease. If people were vaccinated they'd stay out of the hospitals. The hospitals are the problem. I feel like I'm explaining arithmetic to an idiot. And if you vaccinate everyone there will be less infections overall. For all of the worst-casing about VE and waning against infection it still isn't 0% VE. And breakthrough infections have less culturable virus and decline faster since the primed immune system defeats the disease faster. That means less chance for mutations. We need to stop assuming that up could really be down. It isn't. Vaccines work. They prevent disease. They keep people out of the hospital. They reduce the chances of mutation. If everyone was vaccinated all this stupid shit would be over. Antivaxxers are dragging this shit out because they're afraid of needles and they are the ones causing all this suffering.
  - ghoward 5y ago
    > They reduce the chances of mutation. Perhaps, but you also don't get what I am saying. If we vaccinated everyone, the virus wouldn't be eradicated because animals can be hosts. Because of that, the evolutionary pressure put on the virus by everyone being vaccinated could result in the virus mutating enough to evade immunity. The same thing happens with flu every year.