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The current vaccines are leaky enough that any reductions in social restrictions below strict lockdown mean pretty much everyone is going to get Covid, generall

by makomk 5y ago

The current vaccines are leaky enough that any reductions in social restrictions below strict lockdown mean pretty much everyone is going to get Covid, generally over a very short time period. There doesn't seem to be any way around this. Also, the feasibility of putting lesser restrictions in place to try and spread the hospital load out is damaged by the fact that protection from vaccination fades relatively quickly - and that doesn't just seem to affect protection against infection, but also hospitalization and death. They're effective at reducing the number of deaths but just aren't the way out people like to claim they are.

sokoloff 5y ago
“Pretty much everyone is going to get COVID” is how I feel as well, just like pretty much everyone is going to get the flu across any given 50 year span. Some will die from it, most will not. (C19 is obviously worse than a typical flu, but by less than a decimal order of magnitude.) Then the interesting question is what to do about it. You can give up a lot of life’s freedoms and enjoyment to maybe cut that 50-year risk in half. Is that worth it? To my reckoning: Not to me, not to my elderly parents, and not to my kids. I’m thankful that my kids are at least pre-teen and not (yet) teen or college age where our choices are hitting much harder.
maxerickson 5y ago
There's basically no boosted folks spending time in the hospital in this dataset, and very few vaccinated: https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1479528897259712513 https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1479528897259712513 US data has a similar separation between vaccinated and not: https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1480184928054779905 https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1480184928054779905 I guess if people are making their decisions based on a belief that significant reductions in hospitalization aren't beneficial, that explains something.
- makomk 5y ago
  That graph is from the UK, where most of the people spending time in hospital due to Covid are vaccinated. The thing is that as you can see from the graph, there's a huge difference in hospitalisation rates between age groups, and in the UK there's not that many unvaccinated people amongst the high-risk age groups. (Actually, I'd be interested what the error bars on that are because they're subtracting vaccinations from the population estimate to get the denominator of total unvaccinated people and it seems like that'd be very sensitive to errors in their population estimate.) So there is a signficant reduction in the risk of hospitalisation from vaccination right now, but we're seeing close to all the benefit that we're likely to at least from a society-wide perspective. There's no way to stop the hospital system from collapsing just by rounding up the remaining unvaccinated and getting them vaccinated. (Individual unvaccinated people might of course get a lot of personal benefit from getting jabbed, depending on age and health.)

by makomk 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago

“Pretty much everyone is going to get COVID” is how I feel as well, just like pretty much everyone is going to get the flu across any given 50 year span. Some will die from it, most will not. (C19 is obviously worse than a typical flu, but by less than a decimal order of magnitude.) Then the interesting question is what to do about it. You can give up a lot of life’s freedoms and enjoyment to maybe cut that 50-year risk in half. Is that worth it? To my reckoning: Not to me, not to my elderly parents, and not to my kids. I’m thankful that my kids are at least pre-teen and not (yet) teen or college age where our choices are hitting much harder.

maxerickson 5y ago

There's basically no boosted folks spending time in the hospital in this dataset, and very few vaccinated: https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1479528897259712513 https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1479528897259712513 US data has a similar separation between vaccinated and not: https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1480184928054779905 https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1480184928054779905 I guess if people are making their decisions based on a belief that significant reductions in hospitalization aren't beneficial, that explains something.

makomk 5y ago
That graph is from the UK, where most of the people spending time in hospital due to Covid are vaccinated. The thing is that as you can see from the graph, there's a huge difference in hospitalisation rates between age groups, and in the UK there's not that many unvaccinated people amongst the high-risk age groups. (Actually, I'd be interested what the error bars on that are because they're subtracting vaccinations from the population estimate to get the denominator of total unvaccinated people and it seems like that'd be very sensitive to errors in their population estimate.) So there is a signficant reduction in the risk of hospitalisation from vaccination right now, but we're seeing close to all the benefit that we're likely to at least from a society-wide perspective. There's no way to stop the hospital system from collapsing just by rounding up the remaining unvaccinated and getting them vaccinated. (Individual unvaccinated people might of course get a lot of personal benefit from getting jabbed, depending on age and health.)