Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

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> "If I was running things, I would tell people that they have no power to punish anyone whatsoever and design the Covid rules with that in mind, making them focused entirely on helping people instead of controlling them."

to be fair, i agree that we should avoid punishing people for making different risk calculations, and resultant choices, because as a population, it's advantageous to have a variety of strategies employed simultaneously to any potential catastrophe. folks who are trying to coerce a singular "right" approach are literally wrong in their meta-approach.

however, the phrasing of your initial comment fails to recognize that a range of responses could be entirely valid, and suggests 'helping' people find the one right and true way. the better phrasing and intention is to admit that many approaches can simultaneously be valuable, and focus less on being right. being humble is recognizing that no one of us (or even a group) ever has perfect and complete information, and that we should act compassionately and acceptingly towards our fellow humans in light of this truth.

yes, we should share information with each other, but we should also accept that people will actualize that information differently because we're each touching different parts of the elephant[0] and are acting in accordance with our different senses.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

Well, I agree that there are valid reasons to make different risk calculations, however, part of that calculation has to be the chance of catching and spreading Covid to people who have higher risk.

I personally have almost no risk from Covid. But if I don't take precautions I could easily kill grandma, who can't vaccinate, and others at the nursing home.

I agree that there's no one true risk calculation for everyone, and there are costs whatever we do, but a lot of this would be solved if we were trying to help each other instead of fighting.

> "...I could easily kill grandma..."

see, there's the hyperbole that makes you lose credibility. ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated. visiting with grandma (or any family, for that matter) is an instance where wearing a mask (and certainly a number of other potential mitigations) could make a difference, so use your brain to make that assessment, not some brainless heuristic infringed upon you by an irrelevant affiliation.

> ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated

My grandmother can't vaccinate for medical reasons and I have other specific health reasons, including past issues with the flu, breathing troubles, general poor health, and the fact that she's 100, all give me reason to believe that she has special risk factors.

The place she is at has had Covid deaths and there are others of similar age with similar risk profiles.

> so use your brain to make that assessment, not some brainless heuristic infringed upon you by an irrelevant affiliation.

Please, I haven't done any sneering like this to you and you don't know my grandma's situation or her medical history. I have solid medical reasons to believe that Covid would threaten my grandmother specifically, far more than the general population.

That said, I'm not particularly cavalier about a 1-2% risk of death from Covid, even though I know that rate is a moving target (and hopefully getting lower over time with better treatment protocols, vaccinations, etc.). Climbing Everest is something like a 5% risk of death and you can see a trail of bodies on your way to the peak. I see no personal reason not to take a vaccine with a risk ~0.0002% [1] (though I know that some people do have specific medical reasons not to and yes I know of the study that accidentally inflated the risk by 25x due to bad math) and I do wear a mask indoors or when mandated, though I also realize that I'm fortunate enough not to have to wear a mask for long factory shifts or such and I have sympathy for those who do have such problems.

this isn't about your grandma (may she live many more years), but the sanctimoniousness (and misguidedness) of your comments.

your chance of death from covid is likely (much) less than 0.2%, an average that's disproportionately (and unfortunately) inflated by the elderly and unhealthy. the elderly and unhealthy are the folks who we should encourage (but not force) to get vaccinated because of the elevated risk. everyone else can, and should be allowed to, make their own risk-aware decision.

> "and I do wear a mask indoors or when mandated..."

and therein lies the crux of my critique. you've outsourced your health decisions to politicians/bureaucrats more interested in their own skin than yours, and yet, make confident claims about the correctness of those decisions. if you're wearing masks as mandated, but not around friends and family (i.e., social situations where you're spitting at each other in close proximity), you're just performing safety theater. and factory workers don't need your sympathy or your mask mandate, since most are distanced enough from each other that a mask literally does nothing more for their safety.

the disinformation you seem to have internalized is why this is all so frustrating, and why we need to route around the mediopolitical gatekeepers trying to drown out the 'hard truths' with their relentless deluge of crafted messaging.

It's crazy how you brush aside the elderly and "unhealthy" as people who can die without your consideration and you think their deaths only 'mess up' the numbers. They are treated like an undesirable population whose deaths shouldn't be taken into account.

Shouldn't we vaccinate, wear masks and social distance if only to help the elderly and "unhealthy"?

The virus isn't going away. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but it only has a limited and temporary effect on reducing transmission.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

You can't seriously expect people to continue wearing masks and social distancing forever. That would be absurd.

> ‘Shouldn't we vaccinate, wear masks and social distance if only to help the elderly and "unhealthy"?’

you’re nakedly appealing to emotion here, and baiting for an inflexible, naïve answer. that’s a despicable kind of rhetorical move that doesn’t serve to push our collective understanding forward, but rather attempts to coerce and strives for conformity. it’s diametrically opposed to the point made by the linked nature article.

if the question was, “should we take measures to protect the elderly and unhealthy, who are at elevated risk?”, then ‘yes’ is an easy response (and embedded in my previous comment), because that both invites collaboration and admits a variety of potential measures, without ego or mediopolitical posturing. more importantly, it doesn’t presuppose that everyone must be coerced to vaccinate, to wear masks illogically, and to lock down randomly to achieve that objective.

You can't think of a non-emotional, logical objection to millions of people dying pointlessly? Do we need to say something like "the economy will go down" to get you on board?

> your chance of death from covid is likely (much) less than 0.2%

EDIT: I had to address this, too, but even if I assume that figure we get 15.6M dead people once the world is infected. I agree that I have a low personal risk, it's not making grandma die of not breathing--something we know painfully well because of how grandpa died grasping for every breath--that I'd like to avoid. Yeah, there's a DNR order, but I don't wish that misery on anyone.

> and therein lies the crux of my critique. you've outsourced your health decisions to politicians/bureaucrats more interested in their own skin than yours, and yet, make confident claims about the correctness of those decisions.

See, this is an unwarranted assumption on your part. I wear them as mandated because, well, it costs me nothing in general to wear a mask when unneeded. I already mentioned that I don't have to deal with, say, 12 hour factory shifts.

> if you're wearing masks as mandated, but not around friends and family

I do wear masks when it makes more scientific sense and I haven't been visiting friends & family in the first place. The few times we did, we did wear masks.

So your criticism is just really off base here. You don't know me, you don't know what I do, and you seem to be reaching to find any criticism despite not being in any position to know anything about me.

Why?

my apologies for being overly critical of you particularly, because that’s not the strict intent, as there is a larger audience to consider. it’s hard to thread the needle between the personal and the general on an open forum like this.

i do stand by what i said in general however. masks are an insignificant mitigation in most situations (but not for grandma). we can reduce deaths at the margin (like vaccinating the elderly and unhealthy), but without a sterilizing vaccine, many were very likely going to die no matter what else we do/did. it’s ok (better, even) that we don’t all think the exact same things and do the exact same things, since that more completely explores the solution space. in that vein, share information, rather than trying to ‘help’ or convince.

Apology accepted. And on the point of sharing information, I can agree with you. I do want to see more of that because I doubt that any of us knows everything about this. Please continue to share whatever information you find and how you came to know it.

I lived with my parents for all of last year and my mom was going thru chemo, so at the time, the threat to her life from covid was very present in my mind. That has gone away since she got vaccinated and I'm grateful. At the same time, my best friend's parents are not vaccinated and I worry that they will get very sick and/or die. My great uncle died from covid. I agree that maybe the phrase "easily kill grandma" was hyperbole from the other poster, and yet i don't know their grandma's situation and the way I read it, their grandma cannot be vaccinated.

Regarding the vaccination rates, I don't think they are as high as you had said/estimated. What I found[0] said 65-74 was around 80% fully vaccinated in the US and 75 and up was around 77% fully vaccinated. If I did the math correctly on my phone, the difference between 80.83% fully vaccinated 65-74 year olds and 95% fully vaccinated is 4,474,231 people. The diff between 77.1% of 75 and up and 95% of them is 4,027,214. While estimating 95% when the percentages were 80.83% and 77.1% may seem insignificant, combined, operating on a large set of people, the difference between your estimate and what I see reported by the CDC adds up to 8,501,445 people...which is just the difference, not the total number of people not fully vaccinated in those age groups. I also think that those percentages are not evenly distributed across geography, as some places have higher vaccination rates and other lower ones, which could make it lower than 80% or 77% in certain pockets.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know if I did the math right above and that I know very little about how statistics work. I think it is very hard for many of us to avoid exaggerating and bending data to align with our fears. Just as I think you were doing your best to estimate the percentage of people fully vaccinated, I assume the original poster was doing their best to estimate the risk to the life of their grandma.

[0]: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

perhaps i misheard it, but i literally heard the 95% for over-65s figure this morning on the radio, which seemed to be quoting the cdc (but again, it didn't have my full and undivided attention). the difference could also be first dose vs. 'fully vaccinated'.

At least this link says even for first dose it's only 91% and 87%, again, which could be off, yet seems as if it would be accurate.

Again, I don't know. What I've learned this year is that statistics can be very unintuitive and I know so little about how they work, that in uncertain times like these, I almost feel reliant on choosing someone to trust who I think understands this stuff better than I.

@nuerow cited nytimes[0] on the 95% estimate in another comment[1]. for the purposes of my argument, the precise number isn’t important, just that it equates to “most”.

and incidentally, that’s the shape of most arguments on most things, because we’re embedded in unbounded uncertainty. the most precision we can have about most things is ‘a little’, ‘some’, ‘a bunch’, ‘most’, etc., not something like 54.736%, despite how enticing precision like that can be. it’s mostly engineering where precision like that is practical, available, and useful.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28848408

I think precision also matters when dealing with large numbers. If it's 60% plus/minus 30%, not such big deal if dealing with 10 people, it'd be either 3, 6, or 9 people, a range of 6 people. But if it's plus/minus 30% when dealing with a population of 100,000,000, that's a range of 60,000,000 people.

That being said, yes, I agree there are many situations where precision doesn't matter that much and that qualifiers work sufficiently to describe the general sense of the situation. I think what actually drove me to write my precision rant was ironically where you stated that "easily" was hyperbole, which I took to mean as you believing it was not an accurate or precise enough description of the actions that might kill the grandma. Perhaps this thread wouldn't have happened if the person wrote "I might possibly kill grandma." I don't say that facetiously—I think these disagreements about the accuracy and precision of our observations of the world can lead to so much conflict, as it has for me in my life.

So, in a way, I'm grateful for you going back and forth with me, as I've learned even more deeply that while other people may seem to use too much or too little precision to me, I may use too much or too little for them.

yes, it’s miscalibrations of risk, but not necessarily numerical imprecision, that prods my reaction. it’s possible to kill grandma, in many different ways, but it’s not probable, unless intentionally reckless or malevolent. risk is inherent to life, and we need to be continually adjusting our risk assessments so that our individual and collective behaviors approach consistency.

I think the challenge with "easily" "possible" and "probable" is that they are imprecise and often very subjective. One person's "possible" could be another person's "probable."

Looking at stats from Nov 2020 for infection fatality rates[1] (I didn't know the difference among infection fatality rates, case fatality rates, and crude mortality rates until after I had read this[2]), a female over the age of 80 who contracts covid-19 had a 5.759% chance of dying, or approximately a 1 in 17 chance. Is that probable or possible? I suppose it might be relative to one's normal chance of dying. Perhaps her odds of dying from breaking her hip are much higher and therefore much more probable, so covid becomes a possible cause of death. But also, that was for 80 and above, so maybe at 100 the odds are much higher than 1 in 17. However, with new monoclonal antibodies perhaps they're much lower.

I think sometimes I struggle to have conversations on accuracy of risk calculations without getting more precision. Yes, I don't think it needs to go into 4 decimal places, as that precision is very hard to achieve in non-engineering settings as you had mentioned. I also think sometimes words can be way too nebulous and imprecise to bring clarity between two people, as I've done a lot of work with language, emotions, and conflict, and very often (how often is very often?), conflict comes down to different interpretations of the same word.

[1]: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatalit... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid

yes, that's the calibration aspect of it. for instance, we implicitly accept a 1% lifetime chance of dying in a car accident because of the great utility of automobiles. that's a useful calibration point because it has (nearly) universal acceptance and application.

a 6% chance of dying is nothing to sneeze at, but it's still far from probable, which by definition is more likely than not (>50%). and while it's 6 times death-by-car, it's also dependent on contracting covid in the first place (a prior, in bayesian terms). and that prior probability depends largely on whether the grandchild has covid themselves and how contagious they are (how much and where the virus is), and given that as an additional prior, what relevant precautions they take. this chain of dependent probabilities is also why most precautions have marginal effect (because multiplying lots of fractional numbers results in a smaller fraction). none of this chain of reasoning requires great precision by the way; a single digit of significance at each step being plenty for sound decision-making.

finally, note that a 100-year-old has a 30-35% all-cause chance of death: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html . the addition of covid risk is not immaterial, but relatively not overwhelming.

I appreciate these points, especially about the chain of dependent probabilities. Things can become much less likely depending on many different variables and such.

I guess for me, and maybe for the person with the grandma as well, emotions sway my perception of how risky something is or not, especially with covid. While my mom was going thru chemo, I was already worried that she might die from cancer, and then more so that I would bring a regular flu to her when she was immunocompromised and accelerate that process. Covid-19 stopped me in my tracks, a level of fear I can't recall feeling, that just by being in the same room with my mom and having conversation with her, I could possibly cause her death.

If a grandma of mine were to die from a broken hip, which is probably much more statistically likely than covid-19, I most certainly wouldn't feel as much anger towards myself and regret as if she would die from covid-19 and I had thought I gave it to her.

When my parents got vaccinated, I felt a huge relief, knowing that their probability of dying seemed to drop even more than where it was, almost to zero (I believe), which I probably had originally exaggerated due to fear, and yet, almost all of that fear disappeared for me.

I guess if anything, this thread has helped me pause and reflect on just how much my own emotional state can influence how I see risk, both amplifying or minimizing it away from its more mathematical reality. Thank you for helping me realize this.

awesome, outsized emotional influence on risk assessment is tough to talk about rationally, but it's so important to public policy discussions, not to mention our daily decisions. it takes a lot of emotional sturdiness to self-examine that way.

regarding covid risk, it makes sense to take precautions around the elderly and infirm, because while the risk isn't overwhelming, it's still relatively significant, and feeling relief by taking those precautions is totally understandable. it's just the extrapolation of that kind of situation to blanket public policy that really doesn't make sense (because risk varies so widely for the whole gamut of daily circumstances).

> awesome, outsized emotional influence on risk assessment is tough to talk about rationally, but it's so important to public policy discussions, not to mention our daily decisions.

Yeah, the more I think about, I wonder just how many pandemic decisions have been made by conflicting emotions, especially conflicting fears. Me afraid of my mom dying of cancer + giving her covid-19, others afraid they'll lose the restaurant that they've poured their life into, others afraid the government is using covid-19 as an excuse to gain more control over their lives and steal their property, etc. I talked with a friend the other day who isn't vaccinated and said, "Ya know, if I get covid and die, maybe it's my time." Made me think just how much more I seem to fear death than that person does.

I was listening a little to Sanjay Gupta's conversation with Joe Rogan and one point he made that I liked was talking about how sometimes the conversation about covid-19 risk becomes life or death, overlooking the possible negative effects of just having the virus itself.

> it's just the extrapolation of that kind of situation to blanket public policy that really doesn't make sense (because risk varies so widely for the whole gamut of daily circumstances).

I agree in that risk is widely distributed and it's one of the reasons why I love the idea of decision making at different levels and the concept of federalism in general. I think where it can be a struggle, especially in our current forms of government, is when people cross geographical boundaries. As people move from one place to another (and maybe even as we communicate and therefore virtually feel in many places at the same time or in this one large place together), standardization almost becomes required to make things work. Setting aside the conversation about medical validity of vaccines for a second, one thing they do is help to standardize someone's status for communication to other entities. As someone who (used to) travels a lot internationally, something like a vaccine passport (which they've done for yellow fever for years) makes it easier to verify someone's medical status. Possible to do with covid-19 positive tests as well, just maybe more complex, not sure.

Anyway, I get the feeling you and I could go back and forth for hours on probably any topic lol.

> see, there's the hyperbole that makes you lose credibility.

It is not a hyperbole, and it saddens me to hear this level of ignorance in this forum.

The COVID-19 mortality rate for the age >65 is over 20%. That's over 1 death per 5 infections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan...

> ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated.

No, not quite. It is estimated that 95% of the total US population of >65 received at least one shot, but the percentage of fully vaccinated people in that age group is around 84%.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine...

However, these numbers are averages. Willingness to get the shot varies widely across the US. There are regions within the US where barely half the population took a single shot. For instance, in Idaho, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Mississippi less than half the population took even a single shot, so the majority is still totally unvaccinated.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/these-state...

The CDC says that the covid IFR for the 65+ cohort is 9%, not 20%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

> it saddens me to hear this level of ignorance in this forum

Ahem.

> The CDC says that the covid IFR for the 65+ cohort is 9%, not 20%.

It seems you did not noticed that the data I presented was provided by the CDC.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

Your misconception is that you've tried to compare apples to oranges, as you tried to compare IFR estimates with death/infection ratio, which aren't the same thing at all.

Nevertheless, I'm sure no one would make the mistake of interpreting a 10% IFR as being negligible, thus even with that contrarian nitpicking the point still stands.

"Death / infection" is a meaningless number unless you accurately measure the number of infections. Which is what the Infection Fatality Rate attempts to estimate. Which is why the CDC posts that estimate that I linked to, which is 90,000 deaths / 1M infections, or 9%. Straight from the horse's mouth, as they say.

If you're going to be this arrogant then you need to get your facts straight. Yes, 9% is nothing to sneeze at, the difference between 9% and 20% is quite material.

You're displaying signs of Dunning-Kruger - by saying things like "1 death per 5 infections" I'm not wholly convinced that you understand what an IFR is. Tone it down.

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