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> 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

> 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).
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  > The metric here was "probability that you will be hospitalized IF you are infected with COVID-19". That's a good metric, but it's not the metric the numbers GP quoted were for. Those numbers were for the metric "probability that you would catch COVID-19 and be hospitalized with it over the past 1.5 years". That's fundamentally something different. What's your alluding to is also known as infection hospitalization rate, and while numbers differ (it's hard to accurately count infections), in the unvaccinated population it's generally somewhere around 5%.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    > That's a good metric, but it's not the metric the numbers GP quoted were for. Those numbers were for the metric "probability that you would catch COVID-19 and be hospitalized with it over the past 1.5 years". That's fundamentally something different. Where did you see that? I looked up GP and didn't find that 1.5 year time anywhere. Furthermore, it makes no sense in the context of GP, where they said: > > 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. I don't believe there is any place on earth where you can poll people and reach an average response of >50% to the question "what is the probability that you would catch covid AND be hospitalized for it over the next 1.5 years, if you don't get the vaccine". Let's think for a moment what that would require: first off, it would require a large proportion of the unvaccinated population to get COVID. Second, a large proportion of those unvaccinated infected people would need to be hospitalized. So basically, it would require a place on earth that doesn't yet have significant natural immunity due to previous infections, and doesn't have anywhere close to herd immunity due to vaccinations, and somehow, a place like that would need to be ravaged by COVID in the future. Furthermore, it would need a strain of COVID that hospitalizes something like 70% of those infected, compared to current strains of COVID, which hospitalize something like 1% of infected (remember, most COVID infections do not cause symptoms and thus are not counted in infected counts). This scenario is so outlandish it is very very clearly impossible. It's so outlandish that you will not be able to find a population where most people would believe such a scenario. Instead, what GP was likely referring to, was the "risk that you are hospitalized IF you catch COVID" (where, again, people overestimate the risks, but it's less outlandish).
tshaddox 5y ago
My interpretation of that phrasing is that it refers to the risk of hospitalization from a single infection of COVID-19, so I don't think the time frame matters all that much (other than perhaps much later hospitalizations from long-term effects that we still don't know a lot about yet).
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  > My interpretation of that phrasing is that it refers to the risk of hospitalization from a single infection of COVID-19 That interpretation is not supported by the source linked by GP. The risk you allude to (infection hospitalization rate) was generally reported as ~5% (it's probably halved now that half the population is vaccinated). See for example [0], the first Google hit I got, or the CDC COVID tracker [1], where reported hospitalizations divided by reported infections gives 3.6%. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7895685/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7895685/ [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...
  - shusaku 5y ago
    I don’t blame him for misinterpreting it though, Gallup basically made a trick question and then write an article about how stupid Americans were for getting it wrong.
- nojokes 5y ago
  It is also possible that people who answered got the interpretation wrong.

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).

Denvercoder9 5y ago
> The metric here was "probability that you will be hospitalized IF you are infected with COVID-19". That's a good metric, but it's not the metric the numbers GP quoted were for. Those numbers were for the metric "probability that you would catch COVID-19 and be hospitalized with it over the past 1.5 years". That's fundamentally something different. What's your alluding to is also known as infection hospitalization rate, and while numbers differ (it's hard to accurately count infections), in the unvaccinated population it's generally somewhere around 5%.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  > That's a good metric, but it's not the metric the numbers GP quoted were for. Those numbers were for the metric "probability that you would catch COVID-19 and be hospitalized with it over the past 1.5 years". That's fundamentally something different. Where did you see that? I looked up GP and didn't find that 1.5 year time anywhere. Furthermore, it makes no sense in the context of GP, where they said: > > 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. I don't believe there is any place on earth where you can poll people and reach an average response of >50% to the question "what is the probability that you would catch covid AND be hospitalized for it over the next 1.5 years, if you don't get the vaccine". Let's think for a moment what that would require: first off, it would require a large proportion of the unvaccinated population to get COVID. Second, a large proportion of those unvaccinated infected people would need to be hospitalized. So basically, it would require a place on earth that doesn't yet have significant natural immunity due to previous infections, and doesn't have anywhere close to herd immunity due to vaccinations, and somehow, a place like that would need to be ravaged by COVID in the future. Furthermore, it would need a strain of COVID that hospitalizes something like 70% of those infected, compared to current strains of COVID, which hospitalize something like 1% of infected (remember, most COVID infections do not cause symptoms and thus are not counted in infected counts). This scenario is so outlandish it is very very clearly impossible. It's so outlandish that you will not be able to find a population where most people would believe such a scenario. Instead, what GP was likely referring to, was the "risk that you are hospitalized IF you catch COVID" (where, again, people overestimate the risks, but it's less outlandish).

tshaddox 5y ago

My interpretation of that phrasing is that it refers to the risk of hospitalization from a single infection of COVID-19, so I don't think the time frame matters all that much (other than perhaps much later hospitalizations from long-term effects that we still don't know a lot about yet).

Denvercoder9 5y ago
> My interpretation of that phrasing is that it refers to the risk of hospitalization from a single infection of COVID-19 That interpretation is not supported by the source linked by GP. The risk you allude to (infection hospitalization rate) was generally reported as ~5% (it's probably halved now that half the population is vaccinated). See for example [0], the first Google hit I got, or the CDC COVID tracker [1], where reported hospitalizations divided by reported infections gives 3.6%. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7895685/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7895685/ [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...
- shusaku 5y ago
  I don’t blame him for misinterpreting it though, Gallup basically made a trick question and then write an article about how stupid Americans were for getting it wrong.
nojokes 5y ago
It is also possible that people who answered got the interpretation wrong.