8 ms·

A lot of comments here asking for specific numbers and making comparisons to other risks. That's exactly how one should be looking at this. What I don't underst

A lot of comments here asking for specific numbers and making comparisons to other risks. That's exactly how one should be looking at this. What I don't understand is why people don't apply this same critical thought process to the risks of Covid? For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated? If you said >50%, you would be in good company. It's the most common answer. But what's the actual risk? <1%. When vaccinated, the risk is even lower! Yet people are still more afraid of Covid than myriad other risks we accept on a daily basis and don't even think about, and certainly don't rearrange our lives around. For whatever reason, we are avoiding a basic cost benefit analysis and vastly overestimate the risks. "92% overstate the risk that unvaccinated people will be hospitalized, and 62% overstate the risk for vaccinated people" https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...

sergiotapia 5y ago
It's heretical to say such things and "anti-science" as branded by the media. The fact that California now wants kids to get the vaccine is bonkers to me. Kids don't even feel this shit if they catch it. Pharmaceutical companies must be paying big bucks to the politicians in that state.
- javagram 5y ago
  Covid is more dangerous to kids than chicken pox, we still vaccinate kids for chickenpox though. Hundreds of children have died of Covid-19. https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-on-Ages-0-18-Yea/nr4s-juj3 https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...
  - makomk 5y ago
    Not all countries vaccinate kids for chickenpox. The UK still doesn't for example. I'm pretty sure it's easily the least necessary of the childhood vaccinations.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Chickenpox vaccine lasts a lifetime, giving it to kids protects them as an adult as well.
  - rc2634 5y ago
    Thousands of kids die every year of the flu but we never mandated the flu vaccine for them but somehow hundreds of deaths over almost two years is supposed to prove COVID is more dangerous and experimental vaccines with no long term safety data should be mandated for kids? Give me a break!
- s5300 5y ago
  If kids "don't even feel this shit if they catch it" Why have pediatric ICU beds been near or at capacity and care as a whole on the brink of failure from months of completely fucked working conditions for the doctors and nurses? Along with other kids not dealing with COVID having life saving medical procedures/treatments indefinitely delayed until beds are back down below a certain fill for some amount of time? I've personally had to see effects this in my extended family. Seriously - what is wrong with you? What makes you have to say things/come to conclusions like this when you're very clearly factually incorrect? https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/pediatric-hospital-beds-icus-full-in-tarrant-county-health-director-says/2741699/ https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/pediatric-hospital-b... https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/number-of-us-children-hospitalized-with-covid-19-hits-record-dallas-out-of-pediatric-icu-beds.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/number-of... https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210816/u-s-reports-record-covid-hospitalizations-of-children https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210816/u-s-reports-record-... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kids-sick-covid-are-filling-children-s-hospitals-areas-seeing-n1276238 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kids-sick-covid-are-fil... https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/health/covid-hospitalizations-commentary/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/health/covid-hospitalizations... https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-pediatric-covid-20210818-qkruyn754nesbm3ghwgdlyixrq-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-pediatric-cov... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/02/picu-hospital-beds-children-covid/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/02/picu-hosp...
  - angelzen 5y ago
    There are 3006 counties in the USA. Given that the pandemic is not trivial, it is possible to find a couple counties with overwhelmed ICU beds on any given day. The catch is that the counties change as the pandemic waves come and go. The media chases around for the counties that get overwhelmed, and ignores the vast majority of counties that are not overwhelmed. That before taking in account that, for economic reasons, ICUs are not build for pandemics, with double digit occupancy rates even outside epidemic waves. For example, here's actual pedriatic ICU data from Seattle metro area with ~4M people. I bet this never made the news. MARY BRIDGE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, 55.5%, 6.1 of 11.0 beds used SEATTLE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, 83.0%, 71.4 of 86.0 beds used https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity Edit: Turns out that the KitsapSun app has county-level data for all of USA. For Tarrant county (your top 2 links), right now the pedriatic ICU data is: COOK CHILDRENS MEDICAL CENTER, 82.5%, 34.3 of 41.6 beds used Not great, but not months-long-near-capacity-brink-of-failure situation either. The adult ICU situation is much worse, hopefully it will retreat in the coming weeks. https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity/texas/48/tarrant-county/48439/ https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity...
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > Kids don't even feel this shit if they catch it. In general, sure, but that's a bit like arguing people should be able to drive drunk because drunks are more likely to survive a car accident. https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/odds-favor-drunk-trauma-victims-09-10-01/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/odds-favo... > A retrospective study of nearly 8,000 trauma patients found that seven percent of people who came in sober died of their injuries, while those who were hurt while drunk only died one percent of the time. A positive blood alcohol level seemed to increase the likelihood of survival, even after the researchers took into account the age of the patient and the severity of the injury. Trauma patients who came in to the hospital drunk were discharged sooner, too. The impact on others can be significant, and important.
  - pyronik19 5y ago
    Then the establishment should just be honest about it instead of trying to fear-porn parents into wanting to "protect your kids from the deadly disease".... Just say.... we are going to put your kids at risk from the vaccine because we think the ends justify the benefits for old people.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > instead of trying to fear-porn parents > we are going to put your kids at risk from the vaccine A bit on the nose, don't you think?
      - AndrewBissell 5y ago
        How else should it be stated except "on the nose," given what's at stake?
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        It's "a bit on the nose" that someone complaining about fear-porn uses the same post to push fear-porn about the vaccines.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Synaesthesia 5y ago
Covid has a death rate of around 2% globally. Not sure where you are getting your <1% chance of being hospitalized from.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  The parent comment is valuable, but the numbers do seem wrong. I think it is part of the argument for ending strict lockdowns once vaccination rates are high.
- gfodor 5y ago
  Death rate is highly misleading given the skew of outcomes based on a few factors we have known for a long time now such as age.
rohitb91 5y ago
Or the odds of dying of covid for young people vs a car accident. car accidents are significantly more dangerous. And before people bring up side effects or other long term damage, most people don’t die in car accidents and suffer from ptsd, whiplash, broken bones etc. Yet bring this up and you’re automatically an anti Vaxxer. People are absolutely terrible at evaluating personal risk. One of my coworkers drove across Canada to visit home at one point instead of taking a flight because of covid. Young people should be more concerned with staying away from opioids, social media, friends that are racing cars, and binge drinking at parties. Yet, the media has 14 year olds terrified of covid. Lunacy.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > Yet bring this up and you’re automatically an anti Vaxxer. I would only make that guess if you brought up car accidents and were opposed to driving test requirements, wearing seat belts, car safety regulations, etc.
- nojokes 5y ago
  Actually deaths because of car accidents are less frequent than dying because of COVID-19 for 25-45 year old in US this year. For 15-24 year old COVID-19 is third leading cause of nonviolent death after cancer and cardiovascular problems. Dying of flu is 10 times less likely and this year almost infinite times less likely so far. There is one very important difference - reducing risk of death because of COVID-19 can be done very easily. Not so with driving.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Do you have a source for "third leading cause of nonviolent death"? According to CDC, a 24yo female death has a 113 : 2416 = 4.7% chance of being caused by covid, and a 24yo male death has a 195 : 6756 = 2.9% chance of being caused by covid. Not trivial, but I wouldn't call something with < 5% prevalence 'leading cause'. More accurate: "for 15-24 year old covid is a minor cause of death". https://data.cdc.gov/resource/3apk-4u4f.csv https://data.cdc.gov/resource/3apk-4u4f.csv
mahogany 5y ago
I think I'm missing your point. This article is talking about the relative risk of developing myocarditis, but you are talking about the risk of hospitalization from COVID. Wouldn't the correct comparison be to look at the risk of myocarditis after catching COVID? Or going the other way, shouldn't we be comparing the risk of hospitalization due to COVID (if unvaccinated) to that of hospitalization after receiving the vaccine?
- marvin 5y ago
  The real ethical tradeoff is "what's your chance of contracting covid and getting complications in the one-week delay between cancelling your Moderna appointment and getting the Pfeizer vaccine instead" vs. "what's the chance of getting myocarditis from side effects of the Moderna vaccine". Seems like most people in this thread hear "Scandinavian authorities are stopping the vaccination program", when the recommendation is rather to switch vaccines for men under a certain age. The ethical consideration is not particularly complicated, and Scandinavian health authorities are not risk-averse idiots. They simply care about an equation that might lead to a couple of saved lives in total. I think this level of care speaks highly of the intentions of the healthcare systems in Scandinavia.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > Seems like most people in this thread hear "Scandinavian authorities are stopping the vaccination program", when the recommendation is rather to switch vaccines for men under a certain age. > The ethical consideration is not particularly complicated, and Scandinavian health authorities are not risk-averse idiots. They simply care about an equation that might lead to a couple of saved lives in total. I think this level of care speaks highly of the intentions of the healthcare systems in Scandinavia. In a vacuum, I agree. The unfortunate reality is that many will take this in the "Scandinavian authorities are stopping the vaccination program", as you're seeing already here, and that confusion is likely to be weaponized by antivax activists.
    - marvin 5y ago
      That's a subtle point. My stance is that their ethical obligation in that regard stops at the border, given that the reason it's a consideration is malicious actors rather than a direct consequence. Otherwise you're letting external, malicious actors hold your population hostage. I don't have numbers for Scandinavia as a whole, but 95% of Norway's population have stated that they will get vaccinated, and we're approaching that number. Antivaxxer disinformation is not a problem that has significant effect here. While it's a tragedy that the USA and others have large populations that are susceptible to propaganda from malignant forces, it's ultimately a matter of US interior politics. It's a whole separate question that not something other countries should shape their politics to conform to. There's very little the international community can do about US poverty, its ridiculously polarized political climate, education system, power imbalances and so on. It's not that I don't care at all; I can see the mathematics of it. But that kind of butterfly effect consideration will quickly lead you down a rabbit hole that prevents you from doing the right thing because someone is holding a gun to a stranger's head.
summerlight 5y ago
> But what's the actual risk? > <1%. Where did you get that number? As of Sep 29, 2021, US reported 43,289,203 cases where 3,047,033 of them are hospitalized, including vaccinated. This is nowhere close to <1%. I'm pretty sure the number could be much higher with saner medical insurance system.
- gorwell 5y ago
  From the page I linked: The correct answers to hospitalization risk can be calculated using data from the Department of Health and Human Services (via HealthData.gov) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One needs only the following figures: 1) the population of vaccinated and unvaccinated people 2) total hospitalizations resulting from COVID-19 3) hospitalizations of vaccinated people. We used data through August 9, 2021, one week before the survey was fielded. At that time, total hospitalizations from COVID-19 were estimated to be 2.6 million, with 7,608 vaccinations found among vaccinated people. The size of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations was nearly equal on August 9 (with 168 million vaccinated and 163 million unvaccinated). A simplistic analysis of these numbers would yield hospitalization rates of 0.005% for the vaccinated population (1 case in 22,118) and 1.6% for the unvaccinated population (1 case in 62), but those numbers exaggerate the benefits of the vaccine because the unvaccinated population confronted many more days of risk, since vaccination was gradually rolled out starting in December of 2020. For that reason, we take the average population totals over the relevant periods for each population (March 1, 2020-Aug. 9, 2021 for the unvaccinated population and Dec. 15, 2020,-Aug. 9, 2021, for the vaccinated population). The adjusted population of vaccinated people comes to 83 million and 295 million for the vaccinated population, since the entire U.S. population was unvaccinated -- except a small number of participants in clinical trials --up until December of 2020. Using these adjusted figures, we calculate that the hospitalization rate for the vaccinated population is 0.01% (or 1 in 10,914), and the rate for unvaccinated adults is 0.89% (or 1 case in 112 people). In both cases, therefore, the correct answer is less than one percent, but the implied efficacy rate of vaccination is 99% at preventing hospitalizations. This is calculated as the hospitalization rate for the unvaccinated minus the hospitalization rate for the vaccinated, divided by the unvaccinated rate. In other words, it is the percentage decrease in hospitalization risk. This high rate of protection -- even against Delta -- is consistent with a recent article published in the Lancet, which reviewed large-scale empirical data from the United States and around the world. Some may argue that patients may have been hospitalized as a result of COVID but not diagnosed as such. We think this is highly unlikely to result in significant downward bias in the rates of hospitalization risk since testing at hospitals became widespread after only a few weeks at the start of the pandemic, and the vast majority of hospitalizations would have occurred since May of 2020, given data on deaths, which are more comprehensively documented. Nonetheless, using various modeling assumptions, CDC epidemiologists estimate that the actual number of hospitalizations may be 1.8 times higher than the reported number. If these estimates are accurate, the true rate of hospitalization risk for the unvaccinated population is 1.6% and as high as 0.2% for the vaccinated population. In either case, the public's misunderstanding of risk is roughly just as inaccurate. One criticism of these inflated estimates is that they assume that many people were hospitalized while asymptomatically carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus, leading to an undetected case. The problem with this reasoning is that it would count people admitted to the hospital for non-COVID reasons who coincidentally had an asymptomatic infection. These cases were correctly omitted from official statistics since the absence of symptoms cannot cause hospitalization. A more serious limitation is that we count each admission from COVID-19 into a hospital as a unique person. In fact, we know from scholarly research that some patients are readmitted multiple times. One paper estimates that 9% of COVID-19 patients were readmitted to the hospital. This implies that, at minimum, our hospitalization estimates should be multiplied by 0.91 to capture only hospitalizations of unique individuals. Doing so would shrink both hospitalization risk estimates, and they would still both be well below 1%.
javagram 5y ago
“Yet people are still more afraid of Covid than myriad other risks we accept on a daily basis” keep in mind a lot of people are older than 40 or have treasured family members who are 65 or older. COVID’s risk isn’t symmetric across the population. It is definitely extremely dangerous though and killed 700,000 Americans, for instance.
Denvercoder9 5y ago
> For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated? > <1% Risk numbers are totally useless when not stating the time over which the risk is incurred. A 1% lifetime risk is very different from a 1% daily risk. For example, the 0.89% population hospitalization rate in the last 1.5 years for the unvaccinated from the article you linked corresponds to a 38% chance of hospitalization over a 80-year lifespan. (Note that this is just an example to point out the problem with GP's reasoning, in reality this is an overestimation as it neglects that you build immunity after an infection).
- packetlost 5y ago
  But that risk level of catching COVID is more or less a 1-time event. Once you've caught it and recovered (or gotten vaccinated) it's no longer a novel virus to your immune system and subsequent infections have an even lower risk for the vast majority of people. The real problem is when everyone in that 1% of hospitalizations catches it all at once, because we don't have nearly enough hospital beds to treat even a fraction of that many people.
  - Denvercoder9 5y ago
    > But that risk level of catching COVID is more or less a 1-time event No. You can treat the risk of being hospitalized from COVID as a one-time event, but the risk of catching COVID is a continuous event until you've either caught it or it has been eradicated.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  >> For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated? > Risk numbers are totally useless when not stating the time over which the risk is incurred. A 1% lifetime risk is very different from a 1% daily risk. In this specific case the timeframe is not relevant. The metric here was "probability that you will be hospitalized IF you are infected with COVID-19". That means the timeline is "however long it takes to get better from Covid". Adding "lifetime risk" to that doesn't make sense, and "daily risk" makes even less sense (for example, someone who is sick for 130 days, is admitted to a hospital, and dies, would be counted as adding 1 "positive day" and 129 "negative days", making it an awful metric).
nemothekid 5y ago
From a public health point of view, deciding whether you should take the vaccine or not is an undoubtedly selfish and short-sighted way to calculate risks. It assumes that hospitalization carries no second-order risks which simply is not the case. For any given area, the question that must be asked is if a COVID outbreak were to occur does that given area have the health resources to manage an outbreak. <1% risk is meaningless if you don't have an ICU bed. It becomes a public policy problem when someone in a car accident can not get adequate resources or if nurses are doing 18 hours shifts.
- pas 5y ago
  Plus hospital acquired infections love overcrowded hospitals! and if people think "oh man, long covid really sucks", I can't wait for them to pontificate about "short sepsis MRSA sucks" /s
zehnfischer 5y ago
There is actually a defined measure for the risk that may lead to an early death: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
tw04 5y ago
There isn't a medical system on planet earth that is prepared or capable of having 1% of their population in the hospital at the same time. So "<1%" means absolutely nothing without context. And the context is: if we do nothing, we run out of hospital beds. Period. Full stop. Ignoring the massive financial burden on hospitals who are also not financially setup to have the entire hospital full of people sick with COVID - they are bleeding cash without elective surgeries. They can only bleed for so long without significant government intervention. The piddly sums being handed out for COVID patients that all the conspiracy theorists think the hospital is making hay off of is not enough to keep the doors open.
- pyronik19 5y ago
  "Beds" is a meaningless figure... it really refers to staff. Now they are massively firing nurses who won't get vaxxed (which should be red flag in and of itself, wonder what they are seeing day to day) which in turn leads to less beds... which then in turn helps justify the "need" for mandates. All of those nurses have been getting daily boosters of covid from actual patients every day and we are pretending like they all don't have preexisting immunity.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > Now they are massively firing nurses who won't get vaxxed (which should be red flag in and of itself, wonder what they are seeing day to day) Single-digit percentages in most hospital systems. If you're evaluating vaccine safety based on the opinions of healthcare professionals, there's good news for you. https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-survey-shows-over-96-doctors-fully-vaccinated-against-covid-19 https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sur... > The American Medical Association (AMA) today released a new survey (PDF) among practicing physicians that shows more than 96 percent of surveyed U.S. physicians have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19, with no significant difference in vaccination rates across regions. Of the physicians who are not yet vaccinated, an additional 45 percent do plan to get vaccinated. (That one's pre-mandates, incidentally.) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/nyregion/vaccine-health-care-workers-mandate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/nyregion/vaccine-health-c... > As the vaccination mandate went into full effect on Monday, 92 percent of the state’s more than 650,000 hospital and nursing home workers had received at least one vaccine dose, state officials said. That was a significant increase from a week ago, when 82 percent of the state’s nursing home workers and at least 84 percent of hospital workers had received at least one dose. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/28/nc-hospital-175-unvaccinated-fired/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/28/nc-hospital... > Novant Health spokeswoman Megan Rivers told The Washington Post that more than 99 percent of the system’s roughly 35,000 employees have followed the mandatory vaccination program. She said in a statement that Novant Health was “thrilled” those who chose to be vaccinated have given patients and visitors “better protection against COVID-19 regardless of where they are in our health system.”
bsder 5y ago
As someone who had a "mild" (I only had a 103 fever for 3 weeks, swelling in all manner of weird places, and exhaustion) Covid Original Flavour(tm), I still have symptoms due to the aftermath even a year later. Research keeps increasing the percentage for people who have "long Covid" symptoms and the length of their duration. And I didn't have a symptom like losing my smell which seems to be very common. Losing your sense of smell for a very long time really sucks. People are vastly underestimating the risks of actual Covid and vastly overestimating any risks from the vaccine. And this is before we talk about the fact that people are dying of treatable, non-Covid diseases because Covid patients who won't get a vaccine are clogging the hospitals.
- angelzen 5y ago
  This is rough, sorry to hear that. Hopefully it will get better in the long run. You are absolutely correct: if the only reason for not getting the vaccine is concern over vaccine side effects, then take the vaccine.
npunt 5y ago
C’mon we’re almost two years into this, how is it we’re still under this idea that it’s about individual risk, and hospitalization (or death) is the only meaningful risk factor? A pandemic is a population-level problem, risk is dependent on how everyone acts collectively. This includes mutation rate and resource limitations. If it keeps spreading, it keeps mutating (see: Delta). If hospitals are overflowing, risk goes up for everyone - whether or not they even have covid. Things that were treatable with a visit to an ER before are now life threatening due to resource constraints. And there’s tons of people with postviral covid complications that weren’t hospitalized. You can’t do apples to apples with things like ‘getting bitten by sharks’ or whatever things get dragged out in typical risk comparisons. That’s why this is hard.
licyeus 5y ago
How is Gallup calculating risk? As far as I can tell from their appendix, they're using total hospitalizations / total US population. Ie, 2.6mm hospitalizations / 330mm population = ~0.8% risk of hospitalization. This is obviously misleading: the pandemic is still ongoing. We're now at 3.1mm hospitalizations, does this mean risk has grown from 0.8->1% between Aug 9 and today? Or that in May 2020 the risk was essentially nil? Once infected, risk of hospitalization (across all ages) is currently 7-8% (using 7-day rolling averages from CDC). Lower than people assume, but still concerning. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admis... https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases|New_case|select https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases|...
smrtinsert 5y ago
I wished this was a sarcastic comment but it wasn't. It's so sad we're years into this and people still have no sense of scale. Is it hubris? I'm not sure, but it's overwhelmingly sad.

sergiotapia 5y ago

It's heretical to say such things and "anti-science" as branded by the media. The fact that California now wants kids to get the vaccine is bonkers to me. Kids don't even feel this shit if they catch it. Pharmaceutical companies must be paying big bucks to the politicians in that state.

javagram 5y ago
Covid is more dangerous to kids than chicken pox, we still vaccinate kids for chickenpox though. Hundreds of children have died of Covid-19. https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-on-Ages-0-18-Yea/nr4s-juj3 https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...
- makomk 5y ago
  Not all countries vaccinate kids for chickenpox. The UK still doesn't for example. I'm pretty sure it's easily the least necessary of the childhood vaccinations.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Chickenpox vaccine lasts a lifetime, giving it to kids protects them as an adult as well.
- rc2634 5y ago
  Thousands of kids die every year of the flu but we never mandated the flu vaccine for them but somehow hundreds of deaths over almost two years is supposed to prove COVID is more dangerous and experimental vaccines with no long term safety data should be mandated for kids? Give me a break!
s5300 5y ago
If kids "don't even feel this shit if they catch it" Why have pediatric ICU beds been near or at capacity and care as a whole on the brink of failure from months of completely fucked working conditions for the doctors and nurses? Along with other kids not dealing with COVID having life saving medical procedures/treatments indefinitely delayed until beds are back down below a certain fill for some amount of time? I've personally had to see effects this in my extended family. Seriously - what is wrong with you? What makes you have to say things/come to conclusions like this when you're very clearly factually incorrect? https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/pediatric-hospital-beds-icus-full-in-tarrant-county-health-director-says/2741699/ https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/pediatric-hospital-b... https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/number-of-us-children-hospitalized-with-covid-19-hits-record-dallas-out-of-pediatric-icu-beds.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/number-of... https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210816/u-s-reports-record-covid-hospitalizations-of-children https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210816/u-s-reports-record-... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kids-sick-covid-are-filling-children-s-hospitals-areas-seeing-n1276238 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kids-sick-covid-are-fil... https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/health/covid-hospitalizations-commentary/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/health/covid-hospitalizations... https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-pediatric-covid-20210818-qkruyn754nesbm3ghwgdlyixrq-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-pediatric-cov... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/02/picu-hospital-beds-children-covid/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/02/picu-hosp...
- angelzen 5y ago
  There are 3006 counties in the USA. Given that the pandemic is not trivial, it is possible to find a couple counties with overwhelmed ICU beds on any given day. The catch is that the counties change as the pandemic waves come and go. The media chases around for the counties that get overwhelmed, and ignores the vast majority of counties that are not overwhelmed. That before taking in account that, for economic reasons, ICUs are not build for pandemics, with double digit occupancy rates even outside epidemic waves. For example, here's actual pedriatic ICU data from Seattle metro area with ~4M people. I bet this never made the news. MARY BRIDGE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, 55.5%, 6.1 of 11.0 beds used SEATTLE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, 83.0%, 71.4 of 86.0 beds used https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity Edit: Turns out that the KitsapSun app has county-level data for all of USA. For Tarrant county (your top 2 links), right now the pedriatic ICU data is: COOK CHILDRENS MEDICAL CENTER, 82.5%, 34.3 of 41.6 beds used Not great, but not months-long-near-capacity-brink-of-failure situation either. The adult ICU situation is much worse, hopefully it will retreat in the coming weeks. https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity/texas/48/tarrant-county/48439/ https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity...
ceejayoz 5y ago
> Kids don't even feel this shit if they catch it. In general, sure, but that's a bit like arguing people should be able to drive drunk because drunks are more likely to survive a car accident. https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/odds-favor-drunk-trauma-victims-09-10-01/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/odds-favo... > A retrospective study of nearly 8,000 trauma patients found that seven percent of people who came in sober died of their injuries, while those who were hurt while drunk only died one percent of the time. A positive blood alcohol level seemed to increase the likelihood of survival, even after the researchers took into account the age of the patient and the severity of the injury. Trauma patients who came in to the hospital drunk were discharged sooner, too. The impact on others can be significant, and important.
- pyronik19 5y ago
  Then the establishment should just be honest about it instead of trying to fear-porn parents into wanting to "protect your kids from the deadly disease".... Just say.... we are going to put your kids at risk from the vaccine because we think the ends justify the benefits for old people.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > instead of trying to fear-porn parents > we are going to put your kids at risk from the vaccine A bit on the nose, don't you think?
    - AndrewBissell 5y ago
      How else should it be stated except "on the nose," given what's at stake?
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        It's "a bit on the nose" that someone complaining about fear-porn uses the same post to push fear-porn about the vaccines.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Synaesthesia 5y ago

Covid has a death rate of around 2% globally. Not sure where you are getting your <1% chance of being hospitalized from.

ImaCake 5y ago
The parent comment is valuable, but the numbers do seem wrong. I think it is part of the argument for ending strict lockdowns once vaccination rates are high.
gfodor 5y ago
Death rate is highly misleading given the skew of outcomes based on a few factors we have known for a long time now such as age.

rohitb91 5y ago

Or the odds of dying of covid for young people vs a car accident. car accidents are significantly more dangerous. And before people bring up side effects or other long term damage, most people don’t die in car accidents and suffer from ptsd, whiplash, broken bones etc. Yet bring this up and you’re automatically an anti Vaxxer. People are absolutely terrible at evaluating personal risk. One of my coworkers drove across Canada to visit home at one point instead of taking a flight because of covid. Young people should be more concerned with staying away from opioids, social media, friends that are racing cars, and binge drinking at parties. Yet, the media has 14 year olds terrified of covid. Lunacy.

tshaddox 5y ago
> Yet bring this up and you’re automatically an anti Vaxxer. I would only make that guess if you brought up car accidents and were opposed to driving test requirements, wearing seat belts, car safety regulations, etc.
nojokes 5y ago
Actually deaths because of car accidents are less frequent than dying because of COVID-19 for 25-45 year old in US this year. For 15-24 year old COVID-19 is third leading cause of nonviolent death after cancer and cardiovascular problems. Dying of flu is 10 times less likely and this year almost infinite times less likely so far. There is one very important difference - reducing risk of death because of COVID-19 can be done very easily. Not so with driving.
- angelzen 5y ago
  Do you have a source for "third leading cause of nonviolent death"? According to CDC, a 24yo female death has a 113 : 2416 = 4.7% chance of being caused by covid, and a 24yo male death has a 195 : 6756 = 2.9% chance of being caused by covid. Not trivial, but I wouldn't call something with < 5% prevalence 'leading cause'. More accurate: "for 15-24 year old covid is a minor cause of death". https://data.cdc.gov/resource/3apk-4u4f.csv https://data.cdc.gov/resource/3apk-4u4f.csv

mahogany 5y ago

I think I'm missing your point. This article is talking about the relative risk of developing myocarditis, but you are talking about the risk of hospitalization from COVID. Wouldn't the correct comparison be to look at the risk of myocarditis after catching COVID? Or going the other way, shouldn't we be comparing the risk of hospitalization due to COVID (if unvaccinated) to that of hospitalization after receiving the vaccine?

marvin 5y ago
The real ethical tradeoff is "what's your chance of contracting covid and getting complications in the one-week delay between cancelling your Moderna appointment and getting the Pfeizer vaccine instead" vs. "what's the chance of getting myocarditis from side effects of the Moderna vaccine". Seems like most people in this thread hear "Scandinavian authorities are stopping the vaccination program", when the recommendation is rather to switch vaccines for men under a certain age. The ethical consideration is not particularly complicated, and Scandinavian health authorities are not risk-averse idiots. They simply care about an equation that might lead to a couple of saved lives in total. I think this level of care speaks highly of the intentions of the healthcare systems in Scandinavia.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > Seems like most people in this thread hear "Scandinavian authorities are stopping the vaccination program", when the recommendation is rather to switch vaccines for men under a certain age. > The ethical consideration is not particularly complicated, and Scandinavian health authorities are not risk-averse idiots. They simply care about an equation that might lead to a couple of saved lives in total. I think this level of care speaks highly of the intentions of the healthcare systems in Scandinavia. In a vacuum, I agree. The unfortunate reality is that many will take this in the "Scandinavian authorities are stopping the vaccination program", as you're seeing already here, and that confusion is likely to be weaponized by antivax activists.
  - marvin 5y ago
    That's a subtle point. My stance is that their ethical obligation in that regard stops at the border, given that the reason it's a consideration is malicious actors rather than a direct consequence. Otherwise you're letting external, malicious actors hold your population hostage. I don't have numbers for Scandinavia as a whole, but 95% of Norway's population have stated that they will get vaccinated, and we're approaching that number. Antivaxxer disinformation is not a problem that has significant effect here. While it's a tragedy that the USA and others have large populations that are susceptible to propaganda from malignant forces, it's ultimately a matter of US interior politics. It's a whole separate question that not something other countries should shape their politics to conform to. There's very little the international community can do about US poverty, its ridiculously polarized political climate, education system, power imbalances and so on. It's not that I don't care at all; I can see the mathematics of it. But that kind of butterfly effect consideration will quickly lead you down a rabbit hole that prevents you from doing the right thing because someone is holding a gun to a stranger's head.

summerlight 5y ago

> But what's the actual risk? > <1%. Where did you get that number? As of Sep 29, 2021, US reported 43,289,203 cases where 3,047,033 of them are hospitalized, including vaccinated. This is nowhere close to <1%. I'm pretty sure the number could be much higher with saner medical insurance system.

gorwell 5y ago
From the page I linked: The correct answers to hospitalization risk can be calculated using data from the Department of Health and Human Services (via HealthData.gov) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One needs only the following figures: 1) the population of vaccinated and unvaccinated people 2) total hospitalizations resulting from COVID-19 3) hospitalizations of vaccinated people. We used data through August 9, 2021, one week before the survey was fielded. At that time, total hospitalizations from COVID-19 were estimated to be 2.6 million, with 7,608 vaccinations found among vaccinated people. The size of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations was nearly equal on August 9 (with 168 million vaccinated and 163 million unvaccinated). A simplistic analysis of these numbers would yield hospitalization rates of 0.005% for the vaccinated population (1 case in 22,118) and 1.6% for the unvaccinated population (1 case in 62), but those numbers exaggerate the benefits of the vaccine because the unvaccinated population confronted many more days of risk, since vaccination was gradually rolled out starting in December of 2020. For that reason, we take the average population totals over the relevant periods for each population (March 1, 2020-Aug. 9, 2021 for the unvaccinated population and Dec. 15, 2020,-Aug. 9, 2021, for the vaccinated population). The adjusted population of vaccinated people comes to 83 million and 295 million for the vaccinated population, since the entire U.S. population was unvaccinated -- except a small number of participants in clinical trials --up until December of 2020. Using these adjusted figures, we calculate that the hospitalization rate for the vaccinated population is 0.01% (or 1 in 10,914), and the rate for unvaccinated adults is 0.89% (or 1 case in 112 people). In both cases, therefore, the correct answer is less than one percent, but the implied efficacy rate of vaccination is 99% at preventing hospitalizations. This is calculated as the hospitalization rate for the unvaccinated minus the hospitalization rate for the vaccinated, divided by the unvaccinated rate. In other words, it is the percentage decrease in hospitalization risk. This high rate of protection -- even against Delta -- is consistent with a recent article published in the Lancet, which reviewed large-scale empirical data from the United States and around the world. Some may argue that patients may have been hospitalized as a result of COVID but not diagnosed as such. We think this is highly unlikely to result in significant downward bias in the rates of hospitalization risk since testing at hospitals became widespread after only a few weeks at the start of the pandemic, and the vast majority of hospitalizations would have occurred since May of 2020, given data on deaths, which are more comprehensively documented. Nonetheless, using various modeling assumptions, CDC epidemiologists estimate that the actual number of hospitalizations may be 1.8 times higher than the reported number. If these estimates are accurate, the true rate of hospitalization risk for the unvaccinated population is 1.6% and as high as 0.2% for the vaccinated population. In either case, the public's misunderstanding of risk is roughly just as inaccurate. One criticism of these inflated estimates is that they assume that many people were hospitalized while asymptomatically carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus, leading to an undetected case. The problem with this reasoning is that it would count people admitted to the hospital for non-COVID reasons who coincidentally had an asymptomatic infection. These cases were correctly omitted from official statistics since the absence of symptoms cannot cause hospitalization. A more serious limitation is that we count each admission from COVID-19 into a hospital as a unique person. In fact, we know from scholarly research that some patients are readmitted multiple times. One paper estimates that 9% of COVID-19 patients were readmitted to the hospital. This implies that, at minimum, our hospitalization estimates should be multiplied by 0.91 to capture only hospitalizations of unique individuals. Doing so would shrink both hospitalization risk estimates, and they would still both be well below 1%.

javagram 5y ago

“Yet people are still more afraid of Covid than myriad other risks we accept on a daily basis” keep in mind a lot of people are older than 40 or have treasured family members who are 65 or older. COVID’s risk isn’t symmetric across the population. It is definitely extremely dangerous though and killed 700,000 Americans, for instance.

Denvercoder9 5y ago

> For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated? > <1% Risk numbers are totally useless when not stating the time over which the risk is incurred. A 1% lifetime risk is very different from a 1% daily risk. For example, the 0.89% population hospitalization rate in the last 1.5 years for the unvaccinated from the article you linked corresponds to a 38% chance of hospitalization over a 80-year lifespan. (Note that this is just an example to point out the problem with GP's reasoning, in reality this is an overestimation as it neglects that you build immunity after an infection).

packetlost 5y ago
But that risk level of catching COVID is more or less a 1-time event. Once you've caught it and recovered (or gotten vaccinated) it's no longer a novel virus to your immune system and subsequent infections have an even lower risk for the vast majority of people. The real problem is when everyone in that 1% of hospitalizations catches it all at once, because we don't have nearly enough hospital beds to treat even a fraction of that many people.
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  > But that risk level of catching COVID is more or less a 1-time event No. You can treat the risk of being hospitalized from COVID as a one-time event, but the risk of catching COVID is a continuous event until you've either caught it or it has been eradicated.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
baobabKoodaa 5y ago
>> For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated? > Risk numbers are totally useless when not stating the time over which the risk is incurred. A 1% lifetime risk is very different from a 1% daily risk. In this specific case the timeframe is not relevant. The metric here was "probability that you will be hospitalized IF you are infected with COVID-19". That means the timeline is "however long it takes to get better from Covid". Adding "lifetime risk" to that doesn't make sense, and "daily risk" makes even less sense (for example, someone who is sick for 130 days, is admitted to a hospital, and dies, would be counted as adding 1 "positive day" and 129 "negative days", making it an awful metric).

nemothekid 5y ago

From a public health point of view, deciding whether you should take the vaccine or not is an undoubtedly selfish and short-sighted way to calculate risks. It assumes that hospitalization carries no second-order risks which simply is not the case. For any given area, the question that must be asked is if a COVID outbreak were to occur does that given area have the health resources to manage an outbreak. <1% risk is meaningless if you don't have an ICU bed. It becomes a public policy problem when someone in a car accident can not get adequate resources or if nurses are doing 18 hours shifts.

pas 5y ago
Plus hospital acquired infections love overcrowded hospitals! and if people think "oh man, long covid really sucks", I can't wait for them to pontificate about "short sepsis MRSA sucks" /s

zehnfischer 5y ago

There is actually a defined measure for the risk that may lead to an early death: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

tw04 5y ago

There isn't a medical system on planet earth that is prepared or capable of having 1% of their population in the hospital at the same time. So "<1%" means absolutely nothing without context. And the context is: if we do nothing, we run out of hospital beds. Period. Full stop. Ignoring the massive financial burden on hospitals who are also not financially setup to have the entire hospital full of people sick with COVID - they are bleeding cash without elective surgeries. They can only bleed for so long without significant government intervention. The piddly sums being handed out for COVID patients that all the conspiracy theorists think the hospital is making hay off of is not enough to keep the doors open.

pyronik19 5y ago
"Beds" is a meaningless figure... it really refers to staff. Now they are massively firing nurses who won't get vaxxed (which should be red flag in and of itself, wonder what they are seeing day to day) which in turn leads to less beds... which then in turn helps justify the "need" for mandates. All of those nurses have been getting daily boosters of covid from actual patients every day and we are pretending like they all don't have preexisting immunity.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > Now they are massively firing nurses who won't get vaxxed (which should be red flag in and of itself, wonder what they are seeing day to day) Single-digit percentages in most hospital systems. If you're evaluating vaccine safety based on the opinions of healthcare professionals, there's good news for you. https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-survey-shows-over-96-doctors-fully-vaccinated-against-covid-19 https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sur... > The American Medical Association (AMA) today released a new survey (PDF) among practicing physicians that shows more than 96 percent of surveyed U.S. physicians have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19, with no significant difference in vaccination rates across regions. Of the physicians who are not yet vaccinated, an additional 45 percent do plan to get vaccinated. (That one's pre-mandates, incidentally.) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/nyregion/vaccine-health-care-workers-mandate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/nyregion/vaccine-health-c... > As the vaccination mandate went into full effect on Monday, 92 percent of the state’s more than 650,000 hospital and nursing home workers had received at least one vaccine dose, state officials said. That was a significant increase from a week ago, when 82 percent of the state’s nursing home workers and at least 84 percent of hospital workers had received at least one dose. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/28/nc-hospital-175-unvaccinated-fired/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/28/nc-hospital... > Novant Health spokeswoman Megan Rivers told The Washington Post that more than 99 percent of the system’s roughly 35,000 employees have followed the mandatory vaccination program. She said in a statement that Novant Health was “thrilled” those who chose to be vaccinated have given patients and visitors “better protection against COVID-19 regardless of where they are in our health system.”

bsder 5y ago

As someone who had a "mild" (I only had a 103 fever for 3 weeks, swelling in all manner of weird places, and exhaustion) Covid Original Flavour(tm), I still have symptoms due to the aftermath even a year later. Research keeps increasing the percentage for people who have "long Covid" symptoms and the length of their duration. And I didn't have a symptom like losing my smell which seems to be very common. Losing your sense of smell for a very long time really sucks. People are vastly underestimating the risks of actual Covid and vastly overestimating any risks from the vaccine. And this is before we talk about the fact that people are dying of treatable, non-Covid diseases because Covid patients who won't get a vaccine are clogging the hospitals.

angelzen 5y ago
This is rough, sorry to hear that. Hopefully it will get better in the long run. You are absolutely correct: if the only reason for not getting the vaccine is concern over vaccine side effects, then take the vaccine.

npunt 5y ago

C’mon we’re almost two years into this, how is it we’re still under this idea that it’s about individual risk, and hospitalization (or death) is the only meaningful risk factor? A pandemic is a population-level problem, risk is dependent on how everyone acts collectively. This includes mutation rate and resource limitations. If it keeps spreading, it keeps mutating (see: Delta). If hospitals are overflowing, risk goes up for everyone - whether or not they even have covid. Things that were treatable with a visit to an ER before are now life threatening due to resource constraints. And there’s tons of people with postviral covid complications that weren’t hospitalized. You can’t do apples to apples with things like ‘getting bitten by sharks’ or whatever things get dragged out in typical risk comparisons. That’s why this is hard.

licyeus 5y ago

How is Gallup calculating risk? As far as I can tell from their appendix, they're using total hospitalizations / total US population. Ie, 2.6mm hospitalizations / 330mm population = ~0.8% risk of hospitalization. This is obviously misleading: the pandemic is still ongoing. We're now at 3.1mm hospitalizations, does this mean risk has grown from 0.8->1% between Aug 9 and today? Or that in May 2020 the risk was essentially nil? Once infected, risk of hospitalization (across all ages) is currently 7-8% (using 7-day rolling averages from CDC). Lower than people assume, but still concerning. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admis... https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases|New_case|select https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases|...

smrtinsert 5y ago

I wished this was a sarcastic comment but it wasn't. It's so sad we're years into this and people still have no sense of scale. Is it hubris? I'm not sure, but it's overwhelmingly sad.