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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Don’t mistake relative risk for absolute risk. Not everyone who is vaccinated gets Covid, but everyone vaccinated is at risk of vaccine side effects.

If a 30 year old has a 0.08% chance of hospitalization, the risk drops to 0.008%. But they might stand a 1 in 5 chance of getting infected so now it’s 0.016% to 0.0016%.

But if they get injected with a vaccine, the risk of a rare side effect might be 1 in 100,000 or 0.001% which is pretty similar to Covid.

It’s the same analysis the UK did that caused them to recommend against the AZ vaccine for certain age groups.

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Your numbers are way off. The CDC estimated the hospitalization rate in the 18-49 age group at 3%.

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

Dying, not hospitalization.

Nope. Look at the data again. The risk of dying from an infection in the 18-49 age group is 0.06%. The risk of hospitalization from an infection in that age group is 3%; you claimed 0.08% which is wrong by two orders of magnitude.

Huh? 0.06% and 0.08% are 2 orders of magnitude different?

Are you being intentionally dense? Your original comment claimed a 0.08% hospitalization rate. The actual hospitalization rate is closer to 3%.

Typo. Meant death.

18-49...could that age gap be any wider. A 20 year old is going to deal with Covid quite a bit differently than a 40 year old.

Super skewed by the cohort they cobbled together. Look at the COVIDNet data for the decile age bands of hospitalization at peak waves: [0]

>18-29: 5/100000 = 0.05%

>30-39: 10/100000 = 0.1%

>40-49: 14/100000 = 0.14%

I would ask why our agencies keep doing things like this and burning trust, but it's rhetorical.

[0] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html

You're comparing completely different statistics. The 3% is the infection hospitalization rate; in other words, the odds of being hospitalized once infected. The rates from your source are the total number of people per 100k who are hospitalized for covid in a given week; it does not mean they only have a .05% chance of being hospitalized once infected, it means .05% of the entire age cohort are hospitalized from covid that week.

edit2: actually, I see the denominator there is total population not cases but I still don't follow.

There have been 19,850,744 cases in 18-49 year olds [0] and 63,207 hospitalizations [1] which suggests at 0.3% infection hospitalization rate..

[0] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics

[1] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_5.html#virusTypeD...

I think 1 in 5 is very optimistic. Unless you intend to remove yourself from society, you are very likely to catch Sars-Cov-2 in the upcoming years. Probably more than once. It's endemic and easily transmittable.

In the long run, everyone will get Covid (though many may be asymptomatic). It's not going away.

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