4 ms·

> I'll take a 90% lower mortality rate any day. Really? Any day? Read the part you quoted carefully: the death rate in the control group is 3 per 100,000. And

by timr 5y ago

> I'll take a 90% lower mortality rate any day. Really? Any day? Read the part you quoted carefully: the death rate in the control group is 3 per 100,000. And if you read the rest of the paper, you'll see that the study population was entirely over age 50. Remember that the risk of death from Covid-19 goes up exponentially with age -- something like 90% of all fatalities are over age 50 [1]. If you're in the typical HN demographic (<30 yo), your risk of mortality from Covid-19 is much lower than what is reported for baseline here. I want to put this in perspective. Per The Book of Risks (chapter 8; annual risks) [2], your overall chance of dying in a typical year is 1 in 115 (~870 per 100,000) Your chance of being murdered is 1 in 11,000 (9 per 100,000). The chance you'll die of an accident is 1 in 2,900 (34 per 100,000). From a fall: 1 in 20,000 (5 per 100,000). By getting hit by a car while walking: 1 in 40,000 (2.5 per 100,000). In other words, your all-ages chance of dying from Covid-19 after two doses is somewhere between your annual chance of dying from a fall, and dying after being hit by a car -- and it's much lower than that if you're under age 50! Divide that number by ten, and you're in the realm of risks that any sane person wouldn't even consider: the annual chance of dying by freezing, for example (1 in 3,000,000). Point being: dividing a very small number by 10 is indeed a 90% risk reduction, but you have to weigh it against the costs very carefully. There are tons of reasons why I wouldn't take a 90% relative risk reduction, if the baseline risk were quite small (as it is here). [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-total-covid-deaths-by-age-group/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-tota... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Book-Risks-Fascinating-Facts-Chances/dp/0471310344 https://www.amazon.com/Book-Risks-Fascinating-Facts-Chances/...

actually_a_dog 5y ago
Yes. Any day, and twice on Sunday. If 90% of COVID deaths in the US could have been prevented (in fact, many could have been)[0][1], that cuts this whole thing down to a very bad flu season, comparable to the 1957 flu pandemic [3]. Would you rather not cut your risk by 90%? Edit: Incidentally, I have been hit by cars while walking 3 times. No injuries, luckily, since they were very low speed impacts. Why are you seemingly advocating against something (getting a booster shot) that's also extremely unlikely to harm you? --- [0]: https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/coronavirus/new-study-finds-that-40-of-covid-19-deaths-could-have-been-prevented https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/coronavirus/n... [1]: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/covid-19-continues-to-be-a-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s/ https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/covid-1... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pandemic#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa...
- timr 5y ago
  > Would you rather not cut your risk by 90%? Depends entirely on the cost vs. the benefit. As I said, a 90% relative reduction is meaningless without knowledge of the baseline risk. And once you know the baseline risk, you can do the math instead of just reacting emotionally.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Well, let's see: cost, $0, and a few minutes. Extremely tiny risk of serious side effects. Benefit... better immune response to the nasty virus going around. Let's also not forget this doesn't benefit just you; it benefits everybody you probably won't infect if you get exposed to the virus. No emotion involved, at least not from me. Seems clear enough to me. You seem to be the one having an emotional response here.
    - timr 5y ago
      > Extremely tiny risk of serious side effects. How tiny? It matters. Your risk of a bad outcome from Covid-19 is extremely tiny. (Also, by the way: the costs are greater than what you pay for the shot. Miss a day of work? Spend a day in bed? That's a cost.) > it benefits everybody you probably won't infect if you get exposed to the virus. We have no evidence of this, nor do we have any reason to believe elevated antibody levels will continue indefinitely. Antibodies from the third shot will wane, just as the antibodies from the second shot waned, and antibodies always wane after antigen exposure. It's how our immune systems work.
      - actually_a_dog 5y ago
        I'm really starting to wonder what your issue is. Clearly, with the amount of effort you're putting in to obscure the issue, you've got to have some sort of emotion-driven agenda. And your attempts are so plainly transparent, I'll just come out and say it: I don't think you know what you're talking about. People who know what they're talking about don't obfuscate the way you are. Turn your calculator off, and close your spreadsheet. I'll break it down in even simpler terms. The vaccine has been approved by the FDA. They approved it because the costs and benefits of getting the vaccine outweigh the costs and benefits of not getting it. Same with the booster, if you're currently over 16. As for missing work, spending a day in bed, that's not particularly relevant. We're discussing the booster, which means the only people who are relevant are those who have already had 2 doses of the vaccine. These are people for whom that cost is clearly not that significant, because they've already paid it twice. But, if you're making this decision for yourself, this isn't a thought you're going to have, because you already know that. Regarding not infecting people, again, we know the vaccine is effective. It's effective in reducing hospitalization, severe disease, and against getting the disease in the first place. Again, this is why the vaccine got approved. If you don't get the disease, how many people do you think you'll infect, hmm? And, if you have a lower probability of getting the disease if exposed, if you get the shot, does it or does it not mean you will infect fewer people if you get the shot? Simple logic. The rest of what you've written is just some straw man bullshit I didn't say, which, again, I believe you wrote because you have some emotionally driven agenda here. There's no other logical explanation for why you'd want to obscure the issue, when it's so dead simple. It doesn't take 30 minutes of googling and plugging numbers into an Excel sheet to figure out that getting the shot is the best option on a cost/benefit basis. Any questions?
nkurz 5y ago
Your comparison points are great, but I think you are misreading the quote: "Death due to Covid-19 occurred in 65 participants in the booster group (0.16 per 100,000 persons per day) and in 137 participants in the nonbooster group (2.98 per 100,000 persons per day)." The death rate of the control group is .16 vs 2.98 per 100,000 people per day. If you annualize this by multiplying by 365 to make it comparable to your other figures, I think this means you get 65 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the booster group versus over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted. Which is to say, the Covid risk is higher than all of the specific risks you mentioned with or without a booster. This might (or might not) suggest a different conclusion of the relative benefit of taking the booster. Or am I the one who is misreading the numbers?
- timr 5y ago
  That's fair. You can't annualize a daily risk by multiplying by 365 (volatility must be taken into account), but the broader point that annual vs. daily risks are different orders of magnitude is well-taken. Unfortunately, I don't have any examples of risks that low measured on a daily basis. > over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted. We know this isn't even close to true by looking at aggregate numbers. For example, a truly conservative back-of-the-napkin calculation: 800k deaths in the US @ 50M reported cases (which we know is low by a factor of at least 2...) -> 1600 per 100,000. And many of those (half?) happened prior to vaccines; many now happen in the unvaccinated population. It's fairly obvious that 1000 per 100,000 is much too high an estimate. (...and this isn't even the correct number to compare...what you really want is absolute risk per person, which will be far lower than the risk if you get infected, which is what I've estimated above. If you do that calculation, you get ~240 per 100,000 in the US over the entire pandemic. That's somewhere between the annual risk of dying in an accident (1 in 700) and the annual risk of dying from cancer (1 in 500). Generalizing from the sample in the study is problematic for a bunch of different reasons -- not the least of which is that it's an older group of people -- but I didn't want to get caught up in a debate about IFR estimates.
  - nkurz 5y ago
    > You can't annualize a daily risk by multiplying by 365 (volatility must be taken into account) Could you expand on this, or suggest the right search terms? My intuition is that it will be a little bit lower than straight multiplication, but that this a low enough probability that we can get a pretty good approximation by ignoring the "impossibility" of an individual dying multiple times during that year. Is there another complicating factor? >> over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted. > We know this isn't even close to true by looking at aggregate numbers. I agree it seems extremely high, but I think this is the clear claim of the paper. There were 85,000 people who were never vaccinated, and over the 54 day period of the study, 137 of them died. Thus if you were to extend the study to a year, you should expect more than 1000 deaths. As I see it, the possibilities are a) the paper is lying, b) I'm grossly misinterpreting what it says, or c) the current death rate in Israel for those older than 50 is about 1% even among the doubly vaccinated. If you have time to read it more closely, I'd love to hear what your thoughts on the discrepancy. Edit: I realize I should've added another option d) the statistics are hopelessly confounded and the results don't mean anything. My current suspicion is that if people who contract Covid early are no longer eligible for receiving a booster, the apparent Covid incidence in the not-boosted arm may be drastically inflated, but I'm not sure if this is a large enough effect to negate the result.

by timr 5y ago

actually_a_dog 5y ago

Yes. Any day, and twice on Sunday. If 90% of COVID deaths in the US could have been prevented (in fact, many could have been)[0][1], that cuts this whole thing down to a very bad flu season, comparable to the 1957 flu pandemic [3]. Would you rather not cut your risk by 90%? Edit: Incidentally, I have been hit by cars while walking 3 times. No injuries, luckily, since they were very low speed impacts. Why are you seemingly advocating against something (getting a booster shot) that's also extremely unlikely to harm you? --- [0]: https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/coronavirus/new-study-finds-that-40-of-covid-19-deaths-could-have-been-prevented https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/coronavirus/n... [1]: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/covid-19-continues-to-be-a-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s/ https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/covid-1... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pandemic#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa...

timr 5y ago
> Would you rather not cut your risk by 90%? Depends entirely on the cost vs. the benefit. As I said, a 90% relative reduction is meaningless without knowledge of the baseline risk. And once you know the baseline risk, you can do the math instead of just reacting emotionally.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Well, let's see: cost, $0, and a few minutes. Extremely tiny risk of serious side effects. Benefit... better immune response to the nasty virus going around. Let's also not forget this doesn't benefit just you; it benefits everybody you probably won't infect if you get exposed to the virus. No emotion involved, at least not from me. Seems clear enough to me. You seem to be the one having an emotional response here.
  - timr 5y ago
    > Extremely tiny risk of serious side effects. How tiny? It matters. Your risk of a bad outcome from Covid-19 is extremely tiny. (Also, by the way: the costs are greater than what you pay for the shot. Miss a day of work? Spend a day in bed? That's a cost.) > it benefits everybody you probably won't infect if you get exposed to the virus. We have no evidence of this, nor do we have any reason to believe elevated antibody levels will continue indefinitely. Antibodies from the third shot will wane, just as the antibodies from the second shot waned, and antibodies always wane after antigen exposure. It's how our immune systems work.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      I'm really starting to wonder what your issue is. Clearly, with the amount of effort you're putting in to obscure the issue, you've got to have some sort of emotion-driven agenda. And your attempts are so plainly transparent, I'll just come out and say it: I don't think you know what you're talking about. People who know what they're talking about don't obfuscate the way you are. Turn your calculator off, and close your spreadsheet. I'll break it down in even simpler terms. The vaccine has been approved by the FDA. They approved it because the costs and benefits of getting the vaccine outweigh the costs and benefits of not getting it. Same with the booster, if you're currently over 16. As for missing work, spending a day in bed, that's not particularly relevant. We're discussing the booster, which means the only people who are relevant are those who have already had 2 doses of the vaccine. These are people for whom that cost is clearly not that significant, because they've already paid it twice. But, if you're making this decision for yourself, this isn't a thought you're going to have, because you already know that. Regarding not infecting people, again, we know the vaccine is effective. It's effective in reducing hospitalization, severe disease, and against getting the disease in the first place. Again, this is why the vaccine got approved. If you don't get the disease, how many people do you think you'll infect, hmm? And, if you have a lower probability of getting the disease if exposed, if you get the shot, does it or does it not mean you will infect fewer people if you get the shot? Simple logic. The rest of what you've written is just some straw man bullshit I didn't say, which, again, I believe you wrote because you have some emotionally driven agenda here. There's no other logical explanation for why you'd want to obscure the issue, when it's so dead simple. It doesn't take 30 minutes of googling and plugging numbers into an Excel sheet to figure out that getting the shot is the best option on a cost/benefit basis. Any questions?

nkurz 5y ago

Your comparison points are great, but I think you are misreading the quote: "Death due to Covid-19 occurred in 65 participants in the booster group (0.16 per 100,000 persons per day) and in 137 participants in the nonbooster group (2.98 per 100,000 persons per day)." The death rate of the control group is .16 vs 2.98 per 100,000 people per day. If you annualize this by multiplying by 365 to make it comparable to your other figures, I think this means you get 65 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the booster group versus over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted. Which is to say, the Covid risk is higher than all of the specific risks you mentioned with or without a booster. This might (or might not) suggest a different conclusion of the relative benefit of taking the booster. Or am I the one who is misreading the numbers?

timr 5y ago
That's fair. You can't annualize a daily risk by multiplying by 365 (volatility must be taken into account), but the broader point that annual vs. daily risks are different orders of magnitude is well-taken. Unfortunately, I don't have any examples of risks that low measured on a daily basis. > over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted. We know this isn't even close to true by looking at aggregate numbers. For example, a truly conservative back-of-the-napkin calculation: 800k deaths in the US @ 50M reported cases (which we know is low by a factor of at least 2...) -> 1600 per 100,000. And many of those (half?) happened prior to vaccines; many now happen in the unvaccinated population. It's fairly obvious that 1000 per 100,000 is much too high an estimate. (...and this isn't even the correct number to compare...what you really want is absolute risk per person, which will be far lower than the risk if you get infected, which is what I've estimated above. If you do that calculation, you get ~240 per 100,000 in the US over the entire pandemic. That's somewhere between the annual risk of dying in an accident (1 in 700) and the annual risk of dying from cancer (1 in 500). Generalizing from the sample in the study is problematic for a bunch of different reasons -- not the least of which is that it's an older group of people -- but I didn't want to get caught up in a debate about IFR estimates.
- nkurz 5y ago
  > You can't annualize a daily risk by multiplying by 365 (volatility must be taken into account) Could you expand on this, or suggest the right search terms? My intuition is that it will be a little bit lower than straight multiplication, but that this a low enough probability that we can get a pretty good approximation by ignoring the "impossibility" of an individual dying multiple times during that year. Is there another complicating factor? >> over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted. > We know this isn't even close to true by looking at aggregate numbers. I agree it seems extremely high, but I think this is the clear claim of the paper. There were 85,000 people who were never vaccinated, and over the 54 day period of the study, 137 of them died. Thus if you were to extend the study to a year, you should expect more than 1000 deaths. As I see it, the possibilities are a) the paper is lying, b) I'm grossly misinterpreting what it says, or c) the current death rate in Israel for those older than 50 is about 1% even among the doubly vaccinated. If you have time to read it more closely, I'd love to hear what your thoughts on the discrepancy. Edit: I realize I should've added another option d) the statistics are hopelessly confounded and the results don't mean anything. My current suspicion is that if people who contract Covid early are no longer eligible for receiving a booster, the apparent Covid incidence in the not-boosted arm may be drastically inflated, but I'm not sure if this is a large enough effect to negate the result.