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Comment by jsolson | Hacker News Reader

> I prefer the known, extremely low risk of contacting COVID

I'm a little confused by this. I live in King County, WA (and I work at Google). According to data reported by the county (as tabulated by the NY Times), one in 19 residents have contracted COVID[0]. That's >5% -- with a 1.8% case fatality rate in the US[1]. That's a bit below a one in 1000 chance of having died of COVID if you live in my county, including the infection fraction. If you look a the risk of just contracting it, based on the county, the risk is higher than any other disease I'm aware of.

Am I missing something?

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/king-washington-...

[1]: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

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> 1.8% case fatality rate

That looks like a scary number until you look at it by age, then it looks very different. If you were at risk of dying from flu before COVID then your odds got worse, everybody else's risk level is largely unchanged. Should employers mandate that healthy employees get experimental vaccines in order to improve the mortality rate among non-employees who were already at risk of being taken out by a cold? Seems pretty obvious to me, but this thing went well beyond reason a long time ago. Unless Google and Facebook have a bunch of 65+ stalking their halls, it is really hard pretending that this isn't either a political move or some weird power trip.

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/dataviz8737/viz/COVID...

This reasoning works only if you believe the society isn’t supposed to help the vulnerable.

It’s clear that the older you get, the worse your immunity works. A vaccine isn’t 100% efficient in the first place and will work worse on a 70 yo than on a 30 yo. This means that in order to protect the vulnerable, the society has to achieve herd immunity.

Herd immunity would only occur if the vaccine stopped transmission, right?

Sadly, this is not the case. Vaccinated people achieve high viral loads too.

Except the viral load is decreased if you’re vaccinated https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vacci...

...aaand one day later the CDC says the direct opposite in order to justify a new mask mandate, citing unreleased but super scary and definitely trustworthy data.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210729042140/https://www.washi...

Don’t have to listen to CDC then, can trust the data that is already published.

> Don’t have to listen to CDC then...

heh, yeah - that'll work out great I'm sure. "You don't understand, officer! According to the published research..."

That’s just grasping at straws. If you try to get a holistic overview, no single measure is 100% effective. But you can combine masks, vaccinations, social distancing, etc. till pandemic stops to be a problem.

In breakthrough cases in the vaccinated population, their viral load has been found to be just as high as the unvaccinated population. According to Dr. Fauci, this is actually why the CDC changed their masking guidelines for vaccinated people.

> This reasoning works only if you believe the society isn’t supposed to help the vulnerable.

This reasoning is used to justify horrific acts. Is there no limit? Obviously your line in the sand is beyond compelled experimental vaccinations... what about throwing virgins into volcanos? That might actually be more productive, as it could be no less effective in combatting the virus - and it might actually sate the power mad doom cult and show the elderly how devoted young people are to them.

> compelled experimental vaccinations

What exactly seems to be experimental, considering the published clinical trials? You’ve got to have a hypothesis, like “In 5 years mRNA-vaccinated subjects develop chronic explosive diarrhea because of X, Y, and Z.” Then you can go ahead and test the hypothesis, that’s how science works.

> What exactly seems to be experimental...

Gee, I dunno, maybe everything related to the FDA's emergency use authorization?

Yes, you missed stratifying by age and preexisting conditions and BMI. This data was missing in the beginning, but we have more than the overall mortality rate now. This is indeed relevant for young people, which tech largely consists of.

Here is one of many risk calculators, based on UK data: https://qcovid.org/

Unknown factors for the unvaccinated are the severity of new strains (against which the vaccines may not work well though, see the CureVac trials) and long covid (which does exist but is not well studied yet). Unknown factors for the vaccinated are the potential of the spike protein to create havoc in your vascular system (yet a real infection gives you an uncontrollable large dose of it), and the related anecdata about rare severe vascular side effects.

Such unknowns have to be respected when making personal, political and employer decisions. Overconfidence easily slips into failure. People have issues with the related cognitive dissonances and prefer to take and rage defending sides.

Around 1 in 1000 may have died in King County, however the risk to an individual varies with age and comorbidities. If GP is young, isn't overweight, and doesn't work in close proximity to others, their risk of death is about an order of magnitude lower just by basic social distancing and exposure reduction. [0] shows COVID involved in about 3% of all deaths in the 18-29 group and about 13% in 85+.

Personally, I can't imagine the guilt if I knew I caused a close family member or friend to contract COVID, and have remained pretty cautious even after we have all been vaccinated.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

For a mid twenties healthy male, the risk of death from covid is 1 in 500,000. That is what you're missing.

Maybe he is living isolated in a remote location...

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