Comment by jlokier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlokier | Hacker News Reader

The craziest thing is we keep seeing the phrase "the link between infections and deaths has been broken".

So far as I can tell, it has only been broken for the fully vaccinated, but for those not yet vaccinated, or not fully vaccinated, the delta variant is more dangerous than all the variants which came before and the link has not been broken for those people.

Even with the UK's good vaccination program, most people are not fully vaccinated yet, and won't be for months because of the time delays between vaccination for best effect, as well as the waiting time after the second one before it reaches maximal protection.

There are also people who would like to get their first vaccination, but are currently ill with something else and so rationally have to avoid the first vaccine for a while.

So although the overall statistics look better than previous waves, that should not be any comfort to those who are now going to be exposed to greater risk than in previous waves.

I would like to see more emphasis on statistics showing the risks to people who are still at risk, not the current presentations which imply a substantial minority of people's lives don't really matter because the overall numbers are down.

I worry mostly for the people who are still at risk (though hidden by the aggregate statistics), who will be forced to go back to work in unsafe environments, now that the law will no longer support them working from home, no longer requires others at work to wear masks or keep a distance, and no longer requires adequate ventilation.

As for public transport. Let me put it this way. 19th July is the day when I would recommend to stop using public transportation (tube, buses, taxis, trains), because it's the day the air will immediately become more dangerous in enclosed spaces.

Currently close to 90% of adults have had a first injection and 67% have had both.

I think the government's conclusion is that this is keeping deaths and hospitalisation rates low enough, and that now is a better time for infections to spike than later when winter arrives. School summer holidays are also starting.

They can obviously reinstate restrictions later if needed.

They may also be thinking that a spike now will persuade more laggards to get a vaccine and ultimately kill fewer people than a spike when the cold weather arrives.

Or perhaps more likely, they're not thinking very much and if it turns out to be a small but motivating spike, the Britons are lucky.

It's really unfortunate that the first injection by itself is not hugely effective against the delta variant, and the delta variant is more severe than previous variants.

I'd wait until a few weeks after the second injection before considering a person to be in the reasonably safe zone from death, if they were not young enough to be in the reasonably safe zone already.

I agree that the government is taking the view that the rates are low enough in aggregate. The messaging always focuses on the aggregate number as though that's all that matters.

However when seen from the point of view of an individual who is in the wrong cohort, the rates are not low enough unfortunately. And such people are directly affected by how everyone else behaves.

A large, planned rise in infectious other people, misleading impressions due to exponential curves and time lags, elimination of safety measures at work and the right to avoid the workplace, and elimination of safety measures on public transport, are not good for people in the wrong cohort.

It might be ok if those still at significant risk could stay at home. But they are also losing the right to insist on working at home when possible.

Problem is that the vaccine probably only creates a resistance, not a complete immunity against some variants at least. So in any case you probably don't want to catch covid even when vaccinated.

I think Israel with a high vaccination quota released numbers that showed an effectiveness of 70% without differentiating the variant, but don't quote me on this.

> The craziest thing is we keep seeing the phrase "the link between infections and deaths has been broken".

Death rates have fallen from a peak of around 1000 deaths per day in feb - with comparable infection rates, to 6 deaths per day. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

i think most people would consider that to be having broken the link, between infection and death.

6 deaths today because UK numbers are always low on a Monday; it's been around 30 a day for the past week and the trend isn't pretty (given deaths lag hospitalisations by around 2 to 3 weeks, and the daily infections were considerably lower 2 or 3 weeks ago). Death rate is climbing 56% per week (200 in last 7 days, so ~30 per day average) [0]

The link has definitely been weakened, but it's still there

[0]https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

1200 down to 30 even if that rises to 50, or 60, means the link is materially broken.

there will always be a death a rate. im not sure what you were expecting ?

Simply pointing out that 6 deaths is atypical (it's going to go well above 50, it's that today alone [0]).

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51768274

Death rate considerably lags behind infection rates especially at the start of a wave, for multiple reasons (for example, it does take take a while until people get admitted to the hospital, where they are often for multiple weeks before they die, or that in a wave first active people with lots of contacts get infected and only later it spreads to older people who often have fewer contacts). So might be too early to say that.

Death is the worst case scenario, but not the only one that we would like avoid. Having months of debilitating symptoms and possibly a lifetime of disability should be taken seriously.

Is “months of debilitating symptoms and possibly a lifetime of disability” common? I mean, if that’s the case then ok, fair point. But without any data to look at nobody can really say.

This recent research was sent to me [1]. It's in German but summarized: n=300, most symptoms are psychosomatic, seem to be more related to general fear or stress.

[1] https://deutscher-psychosomatik-kongress.de/wp-content/uploa...

Some chemical markers of long Covid have been recently identified, which is great news because it offers hope of research towards treatment.

Psychosomatic is what doctors call illnesses when they can't find a physical cause, especially if it "looks like stress".

I don't wish to discount genuine psychosomatic illnesses. However a psychsomatic diagnosis is often found to be wrong in the end, i.e. a physical cause is found after all. This causes no end of trouble for patients, who are effectively told it's all in their heads when it isn't.

Sorry to come back with another link, but this happened to show up in my feed today [1] Key result: "Seropositive children did NOT report long-COVID more frequently than seronegative children."

I want to add that a direct colleague of mine still hasn't regained his smell which he lost three years ago due to a serious flu.

There is so much we don't know about long covid. Some people seem to think it always happens after virus infections, but only now shows up on our radar due to media attention.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.16.21257255v...

10-20% of cases have symptoms lasting over several months. I cannot comment on the severity.

You're right, most people would consider that to have broken the link, and that's unfortunate because it's a misleading interpretation.

As explained in the comment you're replying to, the aggregate statistics are very different from the per-cohort statistics, which are unfortunately not prominently displayed.

And you also have not taken into account exponential growth and time lag. Predictions are that infections are to rise significantly to perhaps more than 100,000 per day. It hasn't occurred yet, and it's inevitable that it will accelerate if there's an abrupt change of behaviour.

It will be several weeks later that this will translate to whatever turns out to be the exponential rise in severe disease statistics, just as the current reported death rate is time-lagged from infection rates several weeks ago.

And not mentioned here is the non-death severe consequences: Long Covid mainly, which young people get. And all those people with cancer who can't get treatement while the hospitals are full of Covid patients, and for that matter, daren't risk going to hospital anyway because of the immunosuppressants they are on.

For those in the wrong cohorts, the link is not broken, and the death risk to them is about to go up as they are forced back onto public transport and back to workplaces with protections removed.

They are by no means all "laggards" with regard to vaccination, as though that's a personal choice.

I personally am eager to be vaccinated but won't be fully vaccinated with the appropriate post-second-shot delay until beginning of October. I'm in a slightly at risk group, and my family is significantly at risk. So there's no way I'm risking going to any shops or anything like that between now and October :/

That's why I feel for those who don't have work at home jobs. I do, and I'm eager to keep it that way.

If you're one of those people who likes to say "who cares if 10% of our users can't read our website", perhaps you also are the type to think "who cares if the death link isn't broken for 33% of the population, it's broken for the other 67% so that's fine!".

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