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Comment by pattrn | Hacker News Reader

The author links the following paper as a source for his comments: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3868853. Unless I'm reading it incorrectly, the mortality rate of the infected, unvaccinated population is 0.5% (131 / 26,632), and the mortality rate in the infected, vaccinated population is 2.5% (33 / 1,410). Does this mean that the vaccine decreases your chance of contracting the virus, but increases your chance of dying if you do contract it?

(Note: I understand that the overall death rate from the paper is 0.002% for vaccinated population and 0.012% for unvaccinated population.)

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I read an explanation in another context, that sounded plausible: Mostly people with symptoms get tested, and the vaccines are quite good at preventing symptomatic illness. Thus the share of infected individuals not caught by tests is larger in the vaccinated population, which makes mortality among the vaccinated look worse than it is.

source https://www.ijpr.org/health-and-medicine/2021-05-13/no-the-d...

> Does this mean that the vaccine decreases your chance of contracting the virus

Yes.

> but increases your chance of dying if you do contract it?

No, I think not. Scroll down to table 3, page 14.

No one under 60 who was vaccinated and fell ill died. No one under 60 who was vaccinated was even hospitalized.

But even in the most at risk group, age 75+, vaccinations reduced mortality by a factor of 10.

I think it's safe to claim that "breakthrough infections are rare, the vaccine still provides a level of protection if one occurs, but when breakthroughs occur the elderly are at the most risk of death"

But recent UK data is telling us something different:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Page 16-17

Delta infections:

Vaccinated with 2 doses - 10,834, died 118 (only 2 in below 50 age group). Unvaccinated - 71,932. I'll add half of those with "unknown" vaccination status, so the total is - 79,111, died 257 (26 in below 50 age group).

Mortality rate for vaccinated: 0.01089 Mortality rate for unvaccinated: 0.00324

So apparently vaccinated have a 3 times higher probability of a lethal outcome. Not exactly what you'd want to see.

I think you’d need to separate out the populations by age demographics to make that hypothesis because the vaccinated population could be skewed towards older people.

Good point. I just checked the paper, and it's true that the vaccinated population had proportionally more 60+ year olds (by about 3x).

As I read through this more, It's a bit surprising that out of 805,124 people (includes uninfected) under the age of 45, there were only 5 deaths. Haven't looked into the data for a long time.

I'm guessing that vaccinated people get tested at a much lower rate when they're feeling cold like symptoms, so the denominator there is probably significantly reduced.

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