9 ms·

It really seems like it's safe to say that a fully vaccinated person's risk of dying from covid is low enough where based on the pre-2020 accepted societal stan

• erehweb 5y ago
  Death is not the only bad outcome from COVID, though, so some behavior modification could be justifiable based on risk tolerance.
  • steviedotboston 5y ago
    The vast majority of cases for someone who is fully vaccinated are asymptomatic or mild. The risk of having a severe enough case to require any sort of medical attention is quite low, and for those people who do need it the new antivirals seem to be working very well.
    • Godel_unicode 5y ago
      I believe gp is talking about long COVID, I'm not aware of any studies into how well the vaccines protect against those effects. Edit: this study in the lancet says 50% reduction in long COVID according to the summary. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00460-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
  • sorenn111 5y ago
    This point 100x times. I am more paranoid about COVID than most people are because I have an autoimmune disease (which is mild and seems to not really affect outcomes). While my autoimmune caveat can be written off, I see most people seeing death as the only bad outcome and framing their risk tolerance and mitigation based on that. What has given me extra concern from the start is the damage done by COVID for patients who survive and even have a mild case. The rates of Long COVID (potentially overdiagnosed because of similarities with pandemic restriction related depression) are sufficiently high that it more concern than is given.
  • xboxnolifes 5y ago
    Death is not the only bad outcome for most viruses/diseases, but we only really track death so that's what we compare.
• rob74 5y ago
  The problem is that vaccination protects you from having a bad case of Covid, but it doesn't protect you from getting infected and infecting others. So, if the vaccinated carry on as if it's 2019, the disease will jump from one vaccinated person to the next until it finds an unvaccinated person.
  • moosey 5y ago
    I believe that the proper response to this is to limit the percentage of hospital wards that can be devoted to COVID 19 cases, as the main effect of low vaccination rates is that the hospitals get too full. And suddenly, I'm not worried anymore, unlike now where the regional hospitals are massively backed up or closed due to low vaccination rates. My compassion is completely fatigued. All I can think about now is getting back to the gym when my youngest is fully vaccinated.
    • rsynnott 5y ago
      > limit the percentage of hospital wards that can be devoted to COVID 19 cases That's really not going to fly from a political, legal, or medical ethics standpoint. Like, just letting the unvaccinated die and shielding the health system would be an option if societies worked completely differently than they actually do, but given how societies actually are, this is simply not an option.
  • nradov 5y ago
    I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but since the virus is now endemic everyone will eventually be exposed. You can't seriously expect people to tolerate restrictions indefinitely.
    • BoxOfRain 5y ago
      >You can't seriously expect people to tolerate restrictions indefinitely. I honestly think there's a small percentage of society which would, we've all come across people out there with the personality trait of being utterly unable to resist wagging their fingers at their fellow human beings. Whatever your opinion on the restrictions and their effectiveness, nobody with eyes can deny that this social finger-wagging has been a huge part of the zeitgeist of the last two years. I'm hoping that this attitude starts to die off as covid becomes endemic because aggressive moral authoritarianism rarely ends well for people who have a less black-and-white view of the world.
• Tempest1981 5y ago
  If I can modify my behavior and save an elderly grandparent's life, I will happily do so.
• Teever 5y ago
  You'd think so, but where I'm from there are rural areas where hardly anyone has vaccinated and those who get sick from COVID are filling all of the hospitals in the cities while many other people were actually protesting at hospitals. It's really disconcerting to think all those amazing life-saving but time-critical techniques and technologies that we have developed in the 20th century don't mean a thing if you're screaming in agony in the back of an ambulance after a car accident while the ambulance is stuck in a protest 200 feet from the ER entrance.
• Bud 5y ago
  Sigh. How many times does this have to be explained before everyone gets it? It is not all about you. There are other people in the world. Masks and social distancing protect them, too. In addition, as others have noted in this thread, death is not the only bad result, here. Long covid is horrific, and even milder cases can have permanent health effects that are extremely undesirable.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    Honest question: do you expect that humans will wear masks and stay afraid of each other for the next decade? I do not (and certainly hope we do not).
  • nradov 5y ago
    Nonsense. The virus is now endemic and will never go away. You can't seriously expect people to continue with masks and social distancing indefinitely. Fortunately vaccines and other treatments reduce the risk to a very low level.
  • tqi 5y ago
    > Sigh. How many times does this have to be explained before everyone gets it? I don't know, but maybe if you're condescending and self satisfied enough you'll be the one who finally breaks through?
  • BoxOfRain 5y ago
    This is an unnecessarily sanctimonious post in my opinion. If you're in favour of fresh restrictions then for how long? To what extent? How much collateral damage in terms of mental health, education, the economy, social cohesion etc are you willing to accept? Implying people are selfish after two years of sacrifice is a rather churlish angle, in my opinion people advocating for continuing restrictions need to put numbers and cost/benefit analyses forward rather than cheap appeals to emotion. Some people talk about these things as though they're inconsequential but the fact of the matter is that indefinite social distancing means effectively admitting we're going to permanently shutter swathes of the economy along with many cultural institutions that depend on high footfall. Indefinite masks means unprecedented levels of plastic pollution and difficulties for those with various disabilities. It's easy for us on HN who largely work remotely and earn high salaries to claim these measures are inconsequential but to many in other industries they are absolutely devestating.
• fragmede 5y ago
  Is it? 0.2 percent of American's have already died from this. Or put another way, 99.98% is the current best real live actual number of how survivable Covid-19 is. Not some made up number with a bunch more 9's or 0's, but 99.98%. Three nines would be pathetic for a website's uptime. (I might be biased on that one, I do that professionally.) This puts it 3rd on the list of health reasons Americans die, behind cancer and heart disease and we sure as shit do a ton of things to prevent cancer in a large population (see also: Why we don't have more nuclear power plants. Hey guess what you get when you get exposed to poisonous radiation?).
  • ipspam 5y ago
    Pretty bad comparison. Covid is massively front loaded. Almost every single person in the US has a much higher chance of dying from heart disease or whatever over a legitimate period of time.
  • alibarber 5y ago
    Reasonably sure that more people get cancer from things like smoking than their desire to build their own nuclear power plants. People can still and will keep on buying cigarettes and smoke and give themselves cancer. Governments still permit their sale in a lot of places. I think the ship has sailed on support for the 'give up freedoms such as traveling to see your friends and family and engaging in social activities' preventative measure.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    I set our target uptime at 99.95% believing that to be the most reasonable balance of availability and willingness to take risks to increase the pace of developing the product. > 0.2 percent of American's have already died from this. Or put another way, 99.98% is the current best real live actual number of how survivable Covid-19 is. Side note: 1 - 0.2% is 99.8%, not 99.98%.
  • lgbfjb 5y ago
    Actually that number is made up too - CDC themselves said less than 10k deaths from covid alone. The rest were from comorbidities such as getting shot in the head or ran over by a car or being a fat fucking piece of shit that already had terminal cancer. Fuck covidians. They should be the ones getting rounded up.
• DanHulton 5y ago
  I have friends and family who have had to delay lifesaving medical procedures because hospitals are still swamped and medical personnel are still overworked from dealing with the COVID cases we currently have. Societal standards for risk still need to take into account far, far more than just "Am I, personally, going to die from exactly this one risk factor?"
  • oceanplexian 5y ago
    I agree, however the obvious answer is that society should then build more hospitals and train more nurses, the same way that China did in 2020. Not plunge the economy into debt and force millions of people to change their behavior because of a broken system.
    • throwaway946513 5y ago
      > obvious answer is that society should then build more hospitals and train more nurses The number of hard to get nurses? Or say - funding for building hospitals that operate on profit? System still and likely seems to perpetually be broken.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      > the obvious answer is that society [ ... ] Nobody could even get society to do basic pandemic stuff like wear masks or take vaccines. How would they ever coordinate "build more hospitals and train more nurses" ? Also, what is this "society" you speak of? There are very very few hospital facilities in the USA built as public institutions, or even with (much) public funding. That's now how things work in capitalism.
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        >Nobody could even get society to do basic pandemic stuff like wear masks or take vaccines. How would they ever coordinate "build more hospitals and train more nurses" The answer is pretty simple. You don't need mass coordination to build more hospitals. It requires 1 person (the president) to agree to build emergency hospitals, or at worst 51% of 535 people in congress. Compare this to requiring 330 million people to continually agree and coordinate basic pandemic behavior like masks and vaccines. There are less than 1000 covid ICU patients in California today and 12,000 in the entire country. China built a 1000 bed covid hospital in 10 days and staffed it with army nurses.
• rsynnott 5y ago
  > there should be next to no behavior modification expected. So, there are a few things here. Purely from an individual point of view, for the average vaccinated (and especially the average boosted person), this is probably largely true. And indeed if the whole population was vaccinated then this would probably largely be true for everyone. But the elephant in the room is the hospitals. If rates are high enough that the ICUs are full (typically, in heavily vaccinated countries, mostly of unvaccinated people and severely immunocompromised people) then that is a big, big problem. If you're in a nasty car accident, say, you may, under normal circumstances, end up in ICU. However, if ICU is full of covid patients, you won't, even if you need it. And, less dramatically, overcrowded hospitals mean a lot of routine stuff gets cancelled. Many countries' hospital systems have, in practice, been in a reduced normal capacity for the last two years, and there are significant backlogs; it can't go on forever. But yes, if you, personally, are vaccinated and boosted (and not immunocompromised), then you, personally, are unlikely to die regardless of how bad your behaviour is. Not of covid, anyway. Perhaps avoid ending up in a situation where you need to go to hospital for something else, indefinitely, though.
  • spurgu 5y ago
    Why haven't governments been working hard at increasing capacity in terms of ventilators and hospital beds and other needed equipment, since March 2020? Back then governments actually did that, and set up emergency beds. I know that there's a shortage of personnel, but it just seems that this would've been something to work towards since the beginning. I don't know what is practically needed from the personnel to nurse <60 year old Covid patients (couldn't less trained staff, 6 month quick course do the bulk of it?), the vast majority of which who go home, while it's the older ones who won't return home, and will likely require constant and/or prolonged care. Solve the equation for the younger patients and boom, you can increase hospital capacity (or setup new "Covid ICU:s") and just let the wave hit. Seems it would be such a better solution than whatever we're doing now (prolonging the backlogs forever).
    • rsynnott 5y ago
      > Why haven't governments been working hard at increasing capacity in terms of ventilators and hospital beds and other needed equipment, since March 2020? Back then governments actually did that, and set up emergency beds. Many of them have. In general, equipment isn't the problem today in rich countries; it's staffing. > I don't know what is practically needed from the personnel to nurse <60 year old Covid patients (couldn't less trained staff, 6 month quick course do the bulk of it?) If they're in ICU (which is the main concern), multiple specially trained nurses per bed, plus various doctors and other support staff. I'm not quite following the distinction you're making here between young and old; the main relevant distinction is ICU (mostly either unvaccinated or immunocompromised) or non-ICU (most vaccinated patients of all ages who require hospitalization land here; also lots of unvaccinated). Many countries are seeing fall-offs in the numbers of elderly people in ICU as the boosters go down the list, but ICU numbers are still growing.