You don't know this at all - we don't know what age groups are affected here, and COVID is pretty much negligible in many younger age groups. It's best to wait for more data to come in before drawing any conclusions.
Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.
A year ago there was a lot of noise about things like heart issues induced by COVID, which turned out to be mostly statistical errors in the papers that made the claims.
A lot of people (often people who never actually had a positive test) also claim to suffer from various mental impairments after their COVID infections, and some newspaper ran an article saying that some of these symptoms were alleviated after the people were given anxiety medication. Go figure ...
Check out this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1
The Spanish Flu has led to a „sleeping sickness“ epidemic years after it ceased.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....
> Since encephalitis lethargica’s (EL) prevalence in the 1920s, epidemiological and clinical debate has persisted over whether EL was caused by, potentiated by, or merely coincident with the Spanish influenza pandemic. Epidemiologic analyses generally suggest that the disorders were coincidental.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/
I’ll let the eventual studies give the percentages. But my (personal, non professional) take on this is that long-hauler experiences are a LOT more common then people realize, have been fairly ignored while people have fixated on the death count, and have big possible implications for quality of life for younger, otherwise healthy people.
Long covid:
> Estimates of the number of people with long COVID vary widely. In July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in five patients 18–34 years of age without chronic medical conditions and with a positive outpatient test had not fully recovered by 2–3 weeks after testing, and a research center in Rome found that 87% of 143 patients reported persistence of at least one symptom 60 days after onset of the disease. According to a preprint published in October that has not yet undergone peer review, 24% of 233 patients still had symptoms at 90 days after infection. Data from a smartphone app, as reported by the COVID Symptom Study, showed that one in ten patients with COVID-19 have symptoms after 3 weeks. Given the scale of the pandemic, if even only a small percentage of the tens of millions of infected people worldwide develop long COVID, a staggeringly large number of people would need long-term follow-up and treatment.
"Paediatricians in Israel, which has surged ahead in vaccinating its adult population, reported a sharp rise in covid-19 infections among young people, with more than 50 000 children and teens testing positive in January—more than Israel saw in any month during the first and second waves."
A single metric (e.g. positive tests) is not enough to assess any severity here, and even those metrics come with caveats because all of our methods of determining them are imprecise.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...
But in Germany and Europe children can't get vaccinated and by the time young adults can it will be September anyway.
> Moreover, the database is not a representative sample of the sars-cov-2-positive population. Because it only contains records from people who have interacted with a medical service provider, it excludes those who weather the disease at home without medical assistance.
This will exclude the vast majority of people in younger age groups who were affected. Serology studies have shown us that in many densely populated places infection rates have been far into the double-digit percentages - if this statistic was true in the way you interpreted it, we would know that by now.
On the other hand, getting a potentially faulty vaccine would seem to mostly only be a risk to the individual, although I suppose there is some risk of overwhelming hospitals still.
Please just stay home for a few more months so this shit can finally fucking end. It’s already been a year.
Edit: an important factor, too, is that understanding the potential risks of the AZ vaccine is hard, and the average person may not expected to fully understand them. Right now, it seems like even the authorities don’t understand them.
I'm not sure what your point is with the apparent difficulty of understanding the risks of a new vaccine. Are you saying "it's hard, so just trust what the authorities tell you"?
To be clear, we’re talking about the risk of the AZ vaccine specifically. It seems like there might be something specifically wrong with it. Ceding approval authority to bodies like the FDA is how medicine is regulated all over the world. That’s how literal snake oil is blocked from sale. Among other things, it prevents desperate patients from making uninformed, dangerous, and expensive treatment decisions. The average person really isn’t equipped to read a medical study and adequately interpret the results. This information isn’t even at the maturity level of a study, and the risk is that people hurt themselves and undermine the confidence in this vaccine and others.
As for your comments on regulation - yes, that is correct, which is why I was surprised when I got so much flak for pointing out that, at least in the UK, regulatory shortcuts were taken to rush the approval of Covid vaccines.
There were shortcuts taken in all countries to get the vaccines out. In the US, there is no FDA approved COVID vaccine. Every “approved” vaccine is actually under an emergency use authorization.
FWIW, the LCD of most relevant studies show that maybe banning large gatherings is useful, whereas all other measures we've invented in the meantime have dubious efficacy at best - and extremely high costs.
There are plenty of places in the world that didn't implement the "fight COVID at any cost" policies and they're doing just fine. Trust me on that, I live in one of them.
>Or let people have a choice in determining whether the risk is worth it for them.
Are there any countries where the vaccine is mandatory? That choice already exists doesn't it?
(Edit: Deleted second paragraph that wasn’t clearly worded.)
The virus needs the host in order to spread. The virus doesn't have any other ulterior mechanism that wants to kill humans.
This is why spanish-flu virus got weaker over time because as it evolves, if it kills humans rapidly, it cannot evolve. So, nature sorts it self out.
http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2007/08/26/rabbits-1-virus...
Covid is transmitted mostly during its mild phase, it only becomes severe a week later, if you are unlucky. If you are lucky, you clear off the infection and gain relatively strong immunity. For the virus, both scenarios are similar.
The only thing is that if it was just a cold, we wouldn't bother with preventive measures and the virus would spread more easily. However, when both the lethal and nonlethal variants are present, the nonlethal variant doesn't have an advantage since we treat everyone the same way, so it is unlikely for the nonlethal variant to take over on its own. At least not on a short timescale.
The solution is to create our own nonlethal variant, also known as a vaccine. Well, vaccines don't spread, I guess we could make a vaccine that spreads but "what could possibly go wrong..."