Hacker News Reader

Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

Let say I'm a healthy 20 years old. What are the odds of me getting infected from covid and suffering bad consequences (death or chronically ill). How does it compare with a "bad" vaccine in recent history? I'm curious about the order of magnitude of risks involved.

View on HN

A recent study by Ohio State University found that nearly 50% of athletes who'd had mild covid showed some evidence of heart damage (specifically myocardial inflammation) afterwards. It's a small study and so shouldn't be taken as conclusive, but it's worth considering. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

Chances of you getting Covid are very hard to estimate because there are so many factors (where you live, your personal health history, your behaviour, your workplace...), but contingent on getting it, you can estimate IFR (fatality rate for all infections, approximate, as it tries to account for conversion rate to known cases) or CFR (fatality for known detected cases) from many sources. Here is one [1].

Probability of chronically illness - I do not think anyone has enough data yet.

[1] https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ep...

The CDC's best estimate of infection fatality rate in the 20 – 49 age group is 0.02%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

For an individual patient in that group there is still a lot of variance based on age and co-morbid conditions. For a 49 year old with hypertension, diabetes, and morbid obesity then their risk will be significantly higher. For a 20 year old with no co-morbid conditions then their fatality risk is virtually zero.

That's only for fatalities. We don't have solid data on long term symptoms (those that last more than a few months), but those appear to be very rare among healthy 20 year olds.

I was talking to 20 year old person who said that her sense of smell didn't come back perfectly even after 6 months. I'm not so sure that long term effects are very rare.

According to this [0] recent (Dec 8) meta-analysis, infection fatality rate at 20 years is around 0.01%, with prediction interval about 0.003% to 0.03%. See Fig. 3 (note logarithmic scaling).

That is only fatality rate.

I don't see a good way to aggregate vaccination harm, especially with qualifiers such as "bad" and given the priors we have about the particular vaccines in question. However, let's take the narcolepsy issue that has been mentioned multiple times in this thread. According to [1]:

> During the first year after vaccination, the relative risk of narcolepsy was increased 5 to 14-fold in children and adolescents and 2 to 7-fold in adults. The vaccine attributable risk in children and adolescents was around 1 per 18,400 vaccine doses.

That puts the rate at 0.005% for a prominent "bad" vaccine. I will note that this disease is not exactly comparable to death.

Considering that ~70% of e.g. the US population are older than 20 (with COVID-19 infection fatality rate increasing exponentially with age, e.g. 1% at age 60) and that you are expected to pass it to about one person, you may want to include the assessment of risks not only to yourself but to everyone around you in your considerations.

[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847694/

Worst vaccine we know, developed more than 200 years ago, has a chance of severe adverse effects of 15 per million and one in a million chance of killing you.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-most-dangerous-vaccine/#app

Getting sick with Coronavirus for a person of your age can kill you in at least 30 cases per million. Chance of severe long term effects is way higher.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/10/06/what-i...

It seems that even the worst vaccine we use has orders of magnitude lower probability of causing harm then just getting sick with covid.

Thanks, this is the type of information I was looking for.

People get very defensive when we ask questions like this as they think it has an anti-vaxxer agenda. But I think having this order of magnitude in mind is the best way to argue with people who don't want to get vaccinated. Just trying to ridicule them isn't the solution.

> chronically ill

Science is predominantly occupied with death due to COVID, not long COVID. We'll probably hear more information about it after we have widespread vaccination, after more studies regarding it, and after people recover from long COVID (assuming that they ever do).

Currently it looks like it could be anywhere from 1 to 10 percent of people who have recovered from COVID.

[1]: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/long-covid-just-how-common...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com