Nearly all Covid deaths in US are now among unvaccinated | Hacker News Reader

Nearly all Covid deaths in US are now among unvaccinated

apnews.com

21 pointsbryan031 comments

>An Associated Press analysis of available government data from May shows

It really irritates me how news organizations think this is appropriate. I can't even share this because I can't validate that it isn't a complete lie. I refuse to accept a secret analysis of data as credible.

Sources buried, no breakdown of how the analysis was done, worthless article, yet this is routine for journalism.

I mean, I agree with you, but it's journalism, not a research paper. This article states uncategorically, front and center, that the source of the information, CDC, won't publish this stat themselves due to "limitations in the data". The "analysis" is pretty obvious how AP did it, from the text.

Again, I feel your pain every day, but this particular article seems fine to me! They aren't pretending to possess secret information and thus be able to have secretly derived insights. It's designed to be read in the course of 2 minutes, tops. Within that category, it's far far better than the 99% of drivel out there. It's a shame to fit it into that class of junk journalism.

No, but they're presenting it alongside current-day data, "breaking news" etc.

That's a choice.

OTOH, if you look at the numbers of deaths only, 150 died out of 1200 who got COVID after vaccination, for a death rate of 12.5%, compared to 2% non-vaccinated (18k out of 852k).

This would suggest that the main benefit of a vaccine is in not getting infected in the first place, because you are worse off once you do.

Or more likely, that there is so much data missing that it's useless to look at it this way.

Generally, I still believe the problem with pro-vax movement is that they try to massage data in a way to show off bigger benefits than the data actually show, and then people see through it. Exactly like the no-vax people.

Basically, I am vaccinated, but that's because I made my own risk assessment and despite the bullshit coming from both sides.

Please, stop with the bullshit if you want people to be vaccinated!

> 150 died out of 1200 who got COVID after vaccination

You’re misinterpreting a key stat from the article: those 1200 were hospitalized for Covid, not simply infected.

> This would suggest that the main benefit of a vaccine is in not getting infected in the first place, because you are worse off once you do.

Replace “infected” with “hospitalized” and your point is valid. As is though, it’s off by several orders of magnitude.

Right, my bad: but the same holds true for non-vaccinated: it's 18k out of 853k hospitalized, so it's still apples to apples. The missing factor is, indeed, hospitalization rates for vaccinated and for non-vaccinated.

Except that your main point is wrong. The data shows that if you are infected with covid, then you are much better off being vaccinated. You stated the opposite. It's not a subtle point, it's one of the main purposes of the vaccine.

But the article never states what the hospitalization rates are for both populations, which is where we'd hope vaccines work. Without it, we can only assume them to be the same (they could be worse, for all we know: I don't believe they are, just stating that we are not given data for it), and then we get the rough 3x lower chances of death for vaccinated people.

The point is that based on the article alone, we can't say anything else about the benefits of the vaccine.

Basically, either share complete, verifiable data, or don't share cherry-picked data is my point.

I'm not sure why I'm bothering, but here are the relevant data points from the article to determine order-of-magnitude hospitalization rates for the 2 groups:

> fully vaccinated people accounted for fewer than 1,200 of more than 853,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations. That’s about 0.1%.

> About 63% of all vaccine-eligible Americans — those 12 and older — have received at least one dose, and 53% are fully vaccinated

Thanks for bothering :) And sure, I agree it's implied that people are getting equal exposure to the virus but vaccinated are getting infected less often, but that's hard to quantify. And you are right, my initial take was completely off mark because of this.

Still, I am guessing there's at list a single digit multiplier (2-3x) for risky behaviour of the unvaccinated group: they are more likely to also shun masks, mingle with more people, etc. But it's a guess only.

So again, my problem is with ignoring all of that and spouting some numbers out — they are always going to be misleading. CDC did not do an analysis for a reason.

This is a very strange and misleading way of looking at the data. For one, what you call infections are actually hospitalizations. Your analysis also neglects to consider the differences between the vaccinated and un-vaccinated populations; specifically, older Americans are more likely to be vaccinated than younger ones, which already puts these percentages on uneven footing.

Just like claiming 150 vs 1200 total deaths is: that's my point, people are coming up with guesses as to what explains the numbers, but the numbers are out there.

Basically, lets stop pretending what vaccines really do, and say the truth, and you'll likely get more participation:

1. vaccines reduce the chances of you catching or dying from COVID: by how much, impossible to tell yet

2. you can start increasing your exposure to other people without increasing the health risk to yourself or your family (iow, behave normally)

3. you help everyone by reducing the chances of transmission, and because we don't know real world efficacy (1), the more people get vaccinated, the better

4. if you are concerned with health risks from vaccination, note that they are likely the same as from COVID but lesser — if you are not getting vaccinated, follow the same social distancing rules you would otherwise.

While all of the above is widely known, that's not how it's communicated, which leads to people becoming sceptical of the vaccine.

Basically, it's the common elitist "we don't trust people are smart/reasonable enough to make their own call, so we'll feed them some propaganda".

Who is pretending? You managed to come up with an irrelevant and misleading take on the data. Do you expect the media to consider all hypothetical incorrect ways of interpreting the data, and say why they are incorrect? That doesn't seem like a reasonable ask.

I'm not sure in what sense those four things are not being communicated.

Based on your report, without having the facts at hand, I would guess that COVID is more lethal for the vaccinated because there are more elderly people in that demographic.

What I've found amusing is Michael Burry's concerns over the vaccination for younger populations in his recent tweets. He tends to delete all of his tweets relatively quickly, so they're only available for a flash.

There is no pro-vax people.

There are smart people that believe in science, and they are morons who don’t believe in science, and would rather push their ignorance into others. Get with it. Get vax’d ASAP!

The phrasing "believe in science" makes me cringe honestly. The whole antivaxxers stereotype of provaxxers is that they blindly trust authorities and institutions that proclaim themselves to be scientific while not doing any legwork themselves and think that they're scientific when they're effectively operating off faith in institutions and people with questionable credibility and integrity and conflicts of interest. I have seen no shortage of antivaxxers with quite a bit of brainpower especially recently.

I "believe" that the majority of uncorrelated data and analysis from different areas and hospitals and laboratories and morgues and universities and contact tracers and clinical data and so on that have demonstrated a grave risk from COVID, the efficacy of the vaccine, and the risk of the vaccine being outweighed by the risk of COVID. I recognize some science does support the anti-vax point of view but I do not believe it sufficiently makes the case to support their point of view, and that the analysis and data gathering I've seen so far from that camp has been flawed.

That's not a realistic interpretation of social dynamics.

On every issue, you'll find lots of people on both sides who have no idea why they take the position they take, they've just decided they're on the "cool" side, the other side are idiots and wanna wield that "I'm right and you're wrong" hammer for all its worth.

And sure I've seen this happen with vaccines. I've been attacked for discussing the side-effects of AstraZeneca for example. Not in context of "don't get vaccinated" mind you, but in context of "which vaccine each of us should choose".

That is why we have science, math, physics. It provides answers based on observation of physical phenomenon and evidence. The social battle is one of ignorance. There is no “two sides” to confirmed scientific fact. When it does occur, you can bet it is borne of ignorance.

Never seen any stories of conflict of interest in research/other issues that could lead to data not being a 100% truthful passthrough...?

See, this is fundamental misunderstanding of science.

In other news, water is wet, most accidents happen with 10 miles of the home, and most shark attacks happen in shallow water.

In other words, no shit. Imagine that, all the vaccinated people aren’t getting the virus, and therefore not dying from it. Wow, fucking ground breaking science.

There are people disputing that the vaccine prevents COVID. When you point out that the studies and data show that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines both reduce the chances of getting COVID by ~95%, they use that as proof. But of course, they don't sit there and say that it's "only" a 95% reduction, instead they just make simple bad-faith claims that "the vaccines don't prevent you from getting COVID".

So yeah...there are people that think the vaccines are worthless.

If your numbers are correct, and the OP report is correct and statistically significant, then we are looking at a death rate of (12.5% x 5% =) 0.6%, compared to 2% otherwise. So, while a huge 3x improvement, it's not as article worthy or vaccine-supporting like comparing 150 to 18k people.

I do actually believe that people who were on the edge, seeing such disingenious reporting, decide to have even less trust.

5% is 100%-95%, and 12.5% is the death rate of vaccinated people who got COVID (150/1200).

Per the article (1200 hospitalizations, 150 deaths) 12.5% is the death rate among vaccinated people who were hospitalized for COVID, not who got COVID. So you're missing an extra probability multiplication to account for what percentage of vaccinated people who do catch COVID go on to have a severe enough case to be hospitalized. That should be a big difference.

Sure, my bad, but my point was to compare incidence rates for vaccinated vs not, and 18k deaths are also out of 853k hospitalizations.

Keeping the comparison valid even if badly "misnamed", if hospitalization rates are the same (which are not reported here).

To explain the discrepancy in absolute numbers, I'd likely turn to pattern of behaviour: most (95%?) of the world hasn't gotten COVID yet, and most of those who are or would get vaccinated early exhibit a pattern of behaviour that's less risky anyway.

But saying the actual numbers like you are 3x more likely to die if unvaccinated with equal exposure, doesn't quite sell it the same way (because it means 30% would die anyway).

I still believe it's worth it, but that's what the numbers say, and it's not as black and white anymore.

Your 0.6% is pretty sensitive to the actual efficacy against death, which is probably higher than 95%.

And yet many people replying here on HN are questioning the results. Imagine how people interpret this in the general population.

Wouldn't this always have been true?

Yes. But this is 2021. I could release a study “water is wet” and some idiots would still not believe it due to their mistrust of anyone less dumb than themselves.

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