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> I haven't seen any evidence anywhere that deciding against getting the vaccine puts anyone else's health at risk. How would you square this with unvaccinated

• claytongulick 5y ago
  That's a great question! My response is that, like everything, there's a ton of nuance. It requires a very careful reading of that article, paying attention to not just what they say, but what they explicitly fail to say. First, I couldn't find any reference in that article to people being denied care, did I miss it? But regardless, it's a really great example of what causes a lot of my deep suspicion. For example, the article details the low hospitalization rate amongst all vaccinated people, with lots of zeros after the decimal point, presenting it as evidence for the effectiveness of the vaccine - however, it doesn't mention anywhere the rate of hospitalization for the unvaccinated. Most likely because the numbers would look very similar to the reader. Another example, the article says that most of the vaccinated covid patients are elderly, or those with severe comorbidities. It doesn't mention, however, that that is also true for the unvaccinated. Another omission - the article doesn't discuss the difference between patients with covid, and patients admitted because of covid. That's an important variable, but until recently it's been a bit suppressed. Another thing the article fails to mention is confounding factors like age when considering vaccination rate and infection rate. It's a confounding factor because (according to what I've read) the most completely vaccinated are young, healthy people. Many cranky older people like myself are not. That's a pretty important confounding factor when you're looking at hospitalizations and comparing populations. The article is pretty heavy on hyperbole, but doesn't mention that hospitals (especially the ICU's) are designed to operate at or near capacity. Hospitals are sized based on the community they serve and must remain mostly utilized in order to remain profitable. One fun thing to do that demonstrates this is to go back and search for articles for years prior to Covid, where there would be hysterical articles about the flu "overwhelming hospitals" and "ICUs at 99%" etc... it's an old trick that the media plays, historically it was to garner ratings/clicks. Is that still the reason? Could be. That article is deeply misleading, at best, in my opinion. It goes to great lengths to paint a very distressing picture, without providing objective analysis. It's a great example of what I've been talking about. I could mislead in the opposite direction. I could say something along the lines of "Great news everyone! Covid is over. In Tarrant County, for the first week of January, there were only a total of 11 deaths out of 22,000 cases, and all of those had underlying conditions. In january, your total risk of dying from covid was .000005, and if you are healthy it's zero! So hug everyone, don't worry!". According to the Tarrant County, TX Covid 19 dashboard and tracker, everything I just wrote it 100% true, but it's highly misleading. It's completely understandable how someone could be mislead by an article like the one you referenced. I typically try to avoid the media reporting like that because the quality is so poor, to quote Thomas Jefferson "Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle." I typically go to reputable medical journals and critically evaluate the studies (to the best of my ability). It gives me a very different picture than articles like that paint.
  • skulk 5y ago
    Patients waiting in ERs for days (because you wanted an example): https://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/coronavirus/patients-wait-in-ers-for-days-as-covid-19-patients-overwhelm-st-louis-area-hospitals/article_e402c8ba-89fb-5942-9d32-d93ff7934bf2.html https://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/coronavir... For people aged 18-37, risk of getting hospitalized is 10x if unvaccinated: https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/data-tables/421-010-CasesInNotFullyVaccinated.pdf https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/... The case rate is not as much higher for young people, only 2x, but the hospitalization rate is 10x higher. This is the youngest age group as well, and the data is worse as the age increases. Putting the two together, the picture is clear: there are people in the ER (or ICU) that don't really need to be there, and because of how easy it was to avoid they are directly responsible for the suffering they cause in those who have to wait. I'm not sure how a layer of nuance beyond these facts can change that.
    • lovich 5y ago
      There is not a layer of nuance anymore. These guys have been consistently wrong on a daily/weekly basis for years at this point. The situation is that anti vaxxers are assumed not to be automatically wrong, but to be noise. There is zero useful information to be had from engaging with them. If they go against the scientific consensus it means nothing, if they don’t have an opinion on the scientific consensus, it means nothing, and if they agree with the scientific consensus it means nothing. There’s this implicit assumption that everyone in a conversation deserves to have their opinion heard or examined, but these guys have burned every shred of credibility they have
    • claytongulick 5y ago
      That's a pretty scary article, but doesn't seem to entirely square with the actual admissions data [1]. The largest hospital in the area, Barnes Jewish Hospital with over 1,100 beds had only roughly 10% of them filled with covid patients as of the last week in December. Most of the hospitals were no where close to capacity. Mercy hospital, the second largest after Barnes had an average of 102 of 959 beds filled with Covid patients, again somewhere around 10%. Also, these are patients with Covid, not necessarily patients admitted because of covid. If we take the article's statistic of 2/3 of the admissions being unvaccinated, then for Mercy, for example, 67 of their patients are unvaccinated Covid patients, possibly incidental to their admission reason. We're seeing 50-70% of "Covid admissions" in some places are actually "incidental", they were admitted for other reasons [2]. So the real number of unvaccinated sick covid patients at Mercy is probably somewhere between 30-50. St Louis has a population of almost 310,000. Doesn't really seem worth breaking out the pitchforks over, does it? [1]https://data.thespectrum.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity/missouri/29/st-louis-city/29510/ https://data.thespectrum.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity/miss... [2]https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcomes/hospitals-see-more-patients-with-covid-19-vs-for-covid-19.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcome...