Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma | Hacker News Reader

Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma

theatlantic.com

7 pointsundefined15 comments

>Being a child aged 5 to 17 is 99.9 percent protective against the risk of death and 98 percent protective against hospitalization. For children 0 to 4, these numbers are 99.9 percent (death) and 96 percent (hospitalization).

I am genuinely curious what the raw numbers are behind this. Mainly to eliminate a data bias for rare events. I would assume parents of newborns and toddlers to be over cautious and hence might indicate a low exposure to people in general causing lower numbers showing up here.

From the series "articles that for some reason they had an economist write instead of someone with relevant qualifications".

Economics is about the behavior of people with respect to scarce resources. It has a lot of overlap with other fields, including public health and epidemiology. The main tools of economics are statistics and mathematical modeling.

Economics is often thought of as being about money, but money is just a proxy for scarcity. You can have an economics in a society without money. Money is a compelling tool for counting, but it's not the only one. It's really the resources, and how people behave about them, that economists really want to count.

To make good models an economist needs domain knowledge, either by themselves or with collaborators. This author's work is precisely about health economics. Her dissertation was a hypothesis that hepatitis B was responsible for sex ratio disparities in China. (Additional data proved her wrong, and she published on that.)

At this point she's as much of a public explainer as an actual economist, the type who does TED talks. But her background in the economics of health is real. That's what real economics is supposed to look like.

Please consider elaborating with your thoughts on the content of this author's writing instead of dismissing it for who they are.

While I don't necessarily agree with the dismissal over vocation, I do think it is problematic that this article completely ignores the fact that Vaccinated Grandma isn't going to spread the virus around, while Unvaccinated Kid very easily could.

Focusing solely on who gets sick and who doesn't completely misses the boat when it comes to the pandemic aspect of this virus.

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