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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why we should care about number of cases in countries with freely available vaccines.

Disease (as reflected by hospital admissions) and death are what we care about. And those numbers are continuing to trend in the right direction.

The US media is just addicted to fear at this point. With a more boring/traditional president in the office and the covid panic waning, there is a news vacuum. And the media is trying to fill that vacuum with the delta variant. But you can calm your nerves just looking at the data yourself and not reading anything the media has to say.

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Hospitalizations are spiking in Florida right now, and infections are reaching all-time highs: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/florida-covid-ca...

I don't disagree that the media is fear-mongering for clicks (see inaccurate reporting of CDC report) but in this scenario, there's something actually happening here.

> there's something actually happening here.

because those people dont want to take the vaccines?

If somebody who refused to get vaccinated gets sick, you can say it's their fault. But some people can't get vaccinated, and for others who did get vaccinated the vaccine will have no effect - these will still be at risk until (if ever) herd immunity is reached...

> But some people can't get vaccinated, and for others who did get vaccinated the vaccine will have no effect

How many people are we talking about?

Not sure on the numbers, but immunocompromised people (undergoing cancer treatment for example) often can't build antibodies after a vaccine. Those people are really vulnerable and depend on an immune herd.

At the moment? At least every person under 12, which is ~15% of the US population (and presumably similar elsewhere in the world).

People under 12 are at such a low Covid risk it’d be more ethical for us to send those vaccines abroad where they can be put to productive use saving lives.

And whose fault are vaccine injuries?

Deaths have absolutely plummeted, and correlations have very clearly broken from previous "waves". But in order to extract compliance from the population, there needs to be a call to action, so the goalposts were moved to infections, as opposed to hospitalizations/deaths.

> Deaths have absolutely plummeted

From my experience it can take a month or two until the plug is pulled, a lot of people who are discharged to LTACs also don't make it but it takes a bit

This and similar arguments begin from an assumption of bad faith by scientists.

It’s unbecoming.

You should care about the number of cases because each case is a potential for a new mutation that could be the one that bypasses vaccines or becomes more deadly or …use your imagination.

Nobody cares about controlling you, and if they did they wouldn’t use facts covid they would just use tanks.

> Nobody cares about controlling you, and if they did they wouldn’t use facts covid they would just use tanks.

This is a really great way to cause revolt. Why do you think China retains such an iron grip over information? It’s how you control a large population.

After the past two years it'll be a long time before I ever trust a "scientist".

Long Covid. It's not just death and hospitalisations. From The Lancet:

"Patients with Long COVID report prolonged, multisystem involvement and significant disability. By seven months, many patients have not yet recovered (mainly from systemic and neurological/cognitive symptoms), have not returned to previous levels of work, and continue to experience significant symptom burden."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

Frankly we don't really know how bad the long term effects will be for even those with "mild" illness.

Vaccinated people don’t get “long covid” in appreciable numbers.

There is no data to support this claim.

There is no data to support that they do.

Yes there is. The risk is halved, not zeroed.

That’s not how making claims works

In the UK we're not vaccinating under 18s in volume - not yet anyway. I really don't want my kids to take part in the Great Adolescent Long Covid Experiment.

Long Covid is not a problem in children according to this study:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782164

Hopefully! Although I think "no clear evidence yet" isn't the same as "no problem". From the article itself there is a lack of clarity/conclusiveness:

"Children can experience SARS-CoV-2 postviral syndromes, but it is unclear to what extent these individuals are affected by long COVID"

We've been learning new stuff about COVID for 18 months now. I suspect we'll continue learning more about it for a long time to come. And I'm not keen to bet my kids' wellbeing on "it'll be fine" if I can avoid it (and they may yet catch it anyway - one can't wrap them in cotton wool).

Just saying - I prefer caution over complacency really.

Vaccination only reduces the risk of long covid (as defined by "still symptomatic after 28 days") by about half. It helps but it's no silver bullet.

I don't think "from The Lancet" has the same weight as it used to.

The Lancet actually played a major role in promoting anti-vaccine sentiment.

They were the ones who initially published Andrew Wakefield's now-discredited research [1] linking the MMR vaccine to autism. This research and the media attention it garnered massively undermined public trust in vaccines in both the UK and US.

It took them over a decade to officially retract the article.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/

Because an uptick in cases always has resulted in an uptick in hospitalizations and death.

Maybe you think things have changed (and indeed: I think vaccinations have changed the pattern of cases -> hospitalizations -> death). But ultimately: cases give us a glimpse of what is to come 3 or 4 weeks earlier.

And lo-and-behold, the Florida hospitalization counts are now kicking up dramatically. Good thing we got the news out weeks ago about Delta, so that public opinion can start changing (and now people are beginning to get vaccinated, which should lessen the number of hospitalizations).

Similarly: UK hospitalizations are in fact dropping now!! (coinciding with the drop in case counts 3 or 4 weeks earlier). So even in highly vaccinated countries like UK, case# remains our best predictor for hospitalization counts.

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USA is too late however: we let up on our vaccinations and this surge is going to catch a lot of us by surprise. Hospitals are filling up again.

The vaccinations are coming in too late to stop this current surge (July / August timeframe). But the vaccinations will help us prevent a winter surge.

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