Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. This smells of literal survivor bias. The group that survives the delta variant is a smaller set than all who got infected while all vaccinated persons survived, even ones that wouldn’t have survived without the vaccine.

View on HN

I wasn't impressed by your point at first, but it occurs to me that the vaccination rate was way higher among older people, at least in the U.S. and probably in many countries. On the other hand, the rate of those who got covid-19 was higher among younger people. So, you may have a point there.

While true, it's not by much; mortality for covid-19 is less than a percent of all hospitalizations, iirc.

Right. The point of the vaccines is to not have to find out if you are in the 99% who survive Covid or the 1% who don’t.

and if virus keeps mutating... twice-annual booster shots all over the earth?

I really hope we don't end up with a Marek's disease, but in humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention

It seems more likely that after we've all developed some immunity to it and some variants, we'll have some level of resistance to what most strains bring to bear, and so milder and less lethal, like existing colds (also a coronavirus...) and flus.

You make it sound as if that's good news.

If this was missed in the design of the study, why would it be good news?

I do not think you remember it correctly. Cumulatively mortality is around 2% and sometimes higher of all known cases.

That seems wildly optimistic.

In the UK, 2% of people who tested positive have died. In the US, 1.7% of people who tested positive have died.

The mortality rate among hospitalized people even higher.

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

That's about right for those who tested positive, but current CDC estimate is that for each one that tests positive, 3.3 others got it and never got tested. That makes the actual rate something like 0.38%. Which is a lot more than 0, and is even a lot more than a normal flu, but it's not 1.7%.

Sure, but the CDC is mostly talking about the United States and the world is a lot larger than that. People are still dying all over the globe from this in fairly high numbers. And in the developing part of the world we don't even really know the numbers at all, we only do for those places that have a reasonable infrastructure and where healthcare did not completely collapse.

Developing countries will probably have a larger undercount so estimates derived from the US may already be projecting a more conservative figure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com