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Comment by angelzen | Hacker News Reader

That is a good point. I used to fantasize of living in a fictional world where there is such a thing as inalienable human rights. I struggle to swallow the hard pill that a disease with a survival rate of 99.9% in under 65s has upended that fiction. (BTW, I am not facetious, and the coming winter risks being brutal).

I have long suspected that the modern 80 year life expectancy was a grand illusion. I wonder if the covid pandemic is Mother Nature's way of signalling that the party is over and it's time to return to 'Gaudeamus igitur, Iuvenes dum sumus'.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

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Look, if you could actually show up with actual bodily autonomy then this would be a different conversation.

The fact of the matter is that no one is capable of being autonomous in the face of communicable diseases because if you are infected you turn into a factory for the disease that affects everyone else.

Citing a 99.9% survival rate is disingenuous when it’s infecting everyone. That’s blatantly obvious with Covid shooting up to 2-3 place for cause of death and if recall correctly one of those other major causes of death it’s competing with is cancer which is actually a basket of diseases with unrelated causes.

Even with the vaccine “mandate” the US gov has set, you still have the option to get tested frequently and not be vaccinated.

You can’t refuse the vaccine, refuse to get tested and prove you are immune, and want to walk around uninhibited in public when you could be carrying this disease. That’s not bodily autonomy that’s just saying “fuck you I do what I want” to society, so don’t be surprised when claims of “my body, my choice” or clamoring about rights falls on deaf ears to the rest of society

CDC estimates do show a 99.9% survival rate for the 18-49 age group. Survival rates do decline for the older age groups.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, it's the smart thing to do. But vaccinated people can still carry and spread the virus. They may be somewhat less contagious but we don't have clear data on that yet.

I feel like you read part of my response and then wrote yours immediately.

You are talking about how the vaccinated can spread the virus, which is I agree is true, but ignoring that they can only spread the virus when they get a breakthrough infection. The vaccine massively limits the chance of being infected.

If you cannot recognize the fact that the change of infecting someone else is a function with two variables where x*y where x is a Boolean of isInfected and y is a floating point of chanceOfBeingInfected then I don’t know how we can continue talking as you are in a different reality than I am.

If you get the vaccine your y value in the previous function drops dramatically. If you only look at the x value then of course you won’t see a value in getting vaccinated because you are ignoring the effects of vaccinating

CDC data shows that breakthrough infections are common. Since the virus is now endemic in the worldwide human population and can't be eradicated, all of us can expect to be exposed to it multiple times in our lives (just like the other 4 endemic human coronaviruses). Whether we're exposed by a vaccinated or unvaccinated individual is irrelevant.

Since exposure is inevitable, the smart move is to get vaccinated yourself. And take other steps to maximize your odds of surviving a breakthrough infection.

> CDC data shows that breakthrough infections are common

What do you mean by common? Do you mean that it happens or that it’s the same rate of infection as being unvaccinated? Your argument only works if the breakthrough infections are as “common” as getting infected without the vaccine.

> Whether we're exposed by a vaccinated or unvaccinated individual is irrelevant

But it is relevant that the chance of a vaccinated individual being contagious is _massively_ lower. You can’t argue that breakthrough infections of vaccinated individuals exist, so therefore coming into contact with a vaccinated person is as risky as coming into contact with an unvaccinated person.

You're not thinking this through clearly. Zoom out and consider longer time periods.

For any single interaction, your risk of virus transmission is probably lower with a vaccinated individual than with an unvaccinated individual (although the magnitude of the difference is unclear). But unless you're living as a hermit you're going to be in contact with thousands of people over the next several years. Some of those people will be infected and contagious. So you will inevitably be exposed multiple times.

The length of time does not matter when talking about infection rates and population groups.

If you have two population groups A and B and A has a massively lower infection rate then population group A is not going to have the virus surge through the entire population.

But this is all veering off my original point that you can’t claim bodily autonomy as a reason/right to not take preventative measures like the vaccine if you aren’t actually being autonomous.

It isn't infecting everyone or affecting everyone equally. Generally, more dense and poor areas have higher case rates. It doesn't make sense to apply the same restrictions everywhere, if your odds of catching the virus happen to be slim.

>It isn't infecting everyone or affecting everyone equally.

You are 100% correct. The vaccinated are barely affected while the unvaccinated are heavily affected.

>It doesn't make sense to apply the same restrictions everywhere, if your odds of catching the virus happen to be slim.

Correct again. We should not limit the vaccinated and prevent the unvaccinated who refuse to take routine tests from affecting the public.

Just so you think I am not allowing for any other option. I am 100% fine with someone who takes a Covid test and gets a negative every single day being allowed the same public privilege's as someone who gets the vaccine. My actual issue is with people who conflate not getting the vaccine with not getting tested as well but still somehow being allowed to walk around in public

You deliberately missed my point, which was about how and where the virus spreads, regardless of vaccination rates.

Transmission happens where people are crammed together. The Provincetown case from the summer vividly illustrated how this applies in highly vaccinated populations.

> You deliberately missed my point, which was about how and where the virus spreads, regardless of vaccination rates.

I didn’t deliberately miss your point, I’m saying your point is wrong.

You can’t talk about the “how and where the virus spreads” if you are acting as if vaccinated and unvaccinated populations have the same rate of spread. The existence of breakthrough infections does not invalidate the fact that the vaccine lowers transmission rates in the population.

It isn’t some binary field of isUseful where the presence of single transmission of the virus from someone who is vaccinated flips the value to false

As we delight at the thought of bringing misery to our fellow man, let's take a look at this intriguing report from UK, specifically the covid cases table at page 13 and covid case rates at page 17. Something strange: covid case rates among vaxxed/unvaxxed are roughly the same for >30 age group, showing a 2x-5x decrease in the vaxx population only for younger ages. Me thinks that this data warrants forcing all older people, vaxxed or unvaxxed, take a covid test every living day of their lives to prove their cleanliness and gain the priviledge of walking amongst the rightful. Hmm...

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

Making a second separate post. As this actually made me question things I went looking down this rabbit hole. Lo and behold this looks like a google bomb of bad material[1]. I then follow this through and find a whole set of people already pointing out how the paper does not claim that the vaccine is known to cause issues and pointing our your cherry-picking[2].

If you are going to spread misinformation across the internet, please at least run your clips through a thesaurus so they aren't a few seconds of googling away to discover the issue.

[1]https://imgur.com/Dgujf3N [2]

I am interested in push back, because the publication is internally inconsistent. One one hand they say on page 5 "With the delta variant, vaccine effectiveness against infection has been estimated at around 65% with Vaxzevria and 80% with Comirnaty", on the other hand their own data says roughly no difference in infection rates between vaxx/unvaxx in >30 age group.

Alas, your link [1] is just a random reddit screenshot and link [2] is accidentally missing.

My apologies for missing that link last night especially as the user appears to have scrubbed the comment. Let me quote the same information I meant to have linked to.

This is from page 12 of your linked source, the bit with words before the nice graphs you wanted me to focus on.

> These data should be considered in the context of vaccination status of the population groups shown in the rest of this report. The vaccination status of cases, inpatients and deaths is not the most appropriate method to assess vaccine effectiveness and there is a high risk of misinterpretation. Vaccine effectiveness has been formally estimated from a number of different sources and is described earlier in this report. In the context of very high vaccine coverage in the population, even with a highly effective vaccine, it is expected that a large proportion of cases, hospitalisations and deaths would occur in vaccinated individuals, simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective. This is especially true because vaccination has been prioritised in individuals who are more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease. Individuals in risk groups may also be more at risk of hospitalisation or death due to non-COVID-19 causes, and thus may be hospitalised or die with COVID-19 rather than because of COVID-19.

Your own source is saying your interpretation of the data is incorrect and explaining why you’d see higher rates of vaccinated individuals hospitalized. Why are you claiming that the study proves what it says it doesn’t prove?

Thanks for sharing. Just to make it clear, I am in full agreement that covid vaccines are very effective at reducing covid infection severity, especially in older age groups. The document we are discussing confirms as much.

> simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective.

They are computing case rates. This part of the argument doesn't explain that the case rates are similar in vaccinated vs unvaccinated population.

> This is especially true because vaccination has been prioritized in individuals who are more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease.

The cumulative vaccination uptake rates are 85%+ in >50 ages group, see charts on pages 9-10. While prioritization may have a sizable effect at small vaccination rates, once almost all of the population is vaccinated we have to assume the most of the vaccinated are not 'more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease', otherwise we are simply saying that (almost) everyone is more susceptible. Also, it is 'susceptible of severe disease' not simply 'susceptible of getting infected with covid'. If 10-15% of the population were to have 90% smaller susceptibility to covid infections within the same age group from natural causes, we would have heard about that by now.

For me, the mystery remains.

I could speculate a number of hypotheses, the first one being that there is something about they count 'covid cases' that doesn't match the rest of the literature, but I was unable to find the specific paragraph describing that. Perhaps there is something really dumb that escaped me :(

On the flip side, I also don't have visibility in how 'vaccine effectiveness' rates are computed in the rest of the literature. Perhaps there is something about how other people count 'covid cases' that presents a different picture.

That being said, theirs is a real life measurement of an entire country on natural timeframe, vs. studies that are usually done on population samples on limited timeframes, and then extrapolated to entire countries on natural timeframe. So while this is a single source, it is from a highly credible org with a highly credible setting, making it difficult to dismiss offhand.

For the record, somebody provided an alternate explanation along the lines of 'they are doing a dumb thing'. Specifically, population estimates are less reliable than vaccination counts, and as vaccination rates go near 90% and over, the unreliability greatly increases when computing unvaccinated_estimated = pop_estimate - vaccinated. A corrected graph using a different population estimate:

https://twitter.com/JamesWard73/status/1436017485262823424?s...

> For me, the mystery remains

Same bud, not really sure where to take the conversation if you are dismissing offhand your sources interpretation of the data and then still say

> So while this is a single source, it is from a highly credible org with a highly credible setting, making it difficult to dismiss offhand.

Oh hey, you finally posted data from a not immediately bad source that backed up your point. This is legitimately something that makes me look at the data and question current course.

Now question for you. Do you have other data sets backing this up, or only the single one that goes against the other data sets?

I actually am taking this into account, but a single set of data or studies that purports one conclusion is not going to make me ignore the hundreds of other studies that disagree

> it's time to return to 'Gaudeamus igitur, Iuvenes dum sumus'.

Crescat una veritas.

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