Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

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I think you need to read it again. Especially table 1.

In the data they have they found that:

1. For all unvaccinated people, they had 38,964 covid-related deaths and 65,170 of other, non-covid-related deaths of unvaccinated people.

2. For all vaccinated people 21 days or more after second dose they found 458 covid-related and 57,263 non-covid-related deaths.

It doesn't matter when these were recorded (unless we want to account for Delta, but there is not enough data for this here).

So unless we are seeing huge increase in non-covid-related deaths of vaccinated people, this data suggests that vaccination makes it many, many times less likely that you are going to die of covid as compared to you dying to other things.

Which I think is wonderful news to see in actual numbers from a large sample of data gathered over longer period of time.

If that's is not a clear indication to you then I don't know what is.

Yes although the vaccine was given first to the most vulnerable people (ie more likely to die from other things) so this still doesn't give a clear sense of the improvement. No one is doubting the effectiveness of vaccines (ok a bunch of idiots, but not me) but this isn't the most helpful stat to assess the relative improvement.

The elderly were prioritized in getting vaccinated, and they have a higher baseline death rate. So it's still not clear what it means that the # of non-covid deaths in (1) and (2) is roughly the same.

I'm not disputing that the vaccines are effective at preventing death, but that doesn't mean that we can just point to any stat that looks good and celebrate without considering what it actually means.

Wouldn't that just point to the vaccine being even better than the stats suggest (by just looking at ratio of deaths of vaccinated / unvaccinated) since the vaccinated group would be the more vulnerable in the first place.

Also there are more people vaccinated than not now so that would also skew the data to make a direct comparison look worse.

The data you mention provides extremely strong support for vaccine effectiveness in preventing death. The single data point in GGP post is quite useless, as GP points out.

> So unless we are seeing huge increase in non-covid-related deaths of vaccinated people, this data suggests that vaccination makes it many, many times less likely that you are going to die of covid as compared to you dying to other things.

Unless it's happening within that 21-day window, which is the claim I've been seeing elsewhere for around a month now.

The ratio of Vax vs. Non-vax death proportions is 1.3%.

So,50X to 100X reduction in deaths versus all-cause

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