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Comment by glenneroo | Hacker News Reader

Getting vaccinated doesn't guarantee you will not have any complications. It increases the chances that a person will have zero or only mild symptoms, depending on which strain encountered, yet hospitalization and/or death are not completely out of the question i.e. to think you are invincible because you have received one of the various available vaccinations (each of which has varying degrees of effectiveness against various strains), is probably not a good strategy.

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No, but it drops the risk to levels comparable with many other activities that normal people take on a regular basis. Which is really the best that you can ask for in life.

That's a big misconception.

The vaccine "makes you 25 years younger" so to speak. Meaning that it gives an 80 year old the COVID risk of a 55 year old, which is still pretty big.

But if you are old, COVID still remains very dangerous to you, even if vaccinated.

If you are old, most diseases and activities are very dangerous to you. Your chance of dying in a car accident are highest of any age group, including 16-17yo new drivers.

Just being 80 gives you a 10% annual chance of death, which climbs dramatically as you get towards 90.

Your risk tolerance automatically goes up as you age, even if you don't notice.

You're right, the vaccines don't have 100% efficacy. However, they are the only way out of the pandemic (so that we can safely transition to an endemic state, much like the flu--still annoying and sometimes lethal, but not mandating the current constraints).

There are quite a few people who aren't getting vaccinated because they have doubts AND because they feel healthy and do not think they are at risk of a severe course of COVID-19 infection.

If their physician could tell them with confidence that the virus is very likely dangerous to them, that would maybe push them to getting vaccinated despite their doubts.

This stuff is hard. There are people that simply won't be convinced, no matter what. But anything to help sway the more reasonable "skeptics" out there is a win, I think.

I wonder what the exit condition for the pandemic mode is, or even how we define "out of the pandemic". Vaccines have delivered a great success in blunting the sharp edge. Compare cases vs. deaths. I picked 4 countries with varied vaccination levels: Singapore (>85%), Austria (>60%), Israel (>60%) and Romania (>35%). Case spikes occur regardless of vaccination levels, death spikes are near extinct in areas with high vaccination. Yet there are still broad restrictions: mask mandates, social distancing, wfh, vaccine passports, partial lockdowns.

Caveat: there is a lot more to this data than meets the eye, but public health policies appear to be driven by broad numbers, so for the purpose of the "how does the pandemic mode end" conversation these curves are a reasonable starting point.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

There is also a non-zero chance of getting hit by a bus if you leave your house. Might as well not go outside.

Forgive the joke, but this feels like a glass-half-empty take on something we're not fully understanding. I think we should look at numbers before determining whether or not the vaccine is a good strategy. Life involves risks.

I think if the average human being applied the precautionary principle to everything in their life as deeply as politicians have applied it during the pandemic, their life would be utterly miserable.

Perhaps I should have linked to this as my source: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-c...

Granted the data about vaccines efficacy was last updated end of July 2021, yet according to those numbers, I'm fairly sure the chances of getting hit by a bus are considerably lower. Also you can more easily avoid getting hit by a bus by looking both ways before your cross the street (freak bus accidents aside), whereas avoiding an invisible virus is slightly more difficult.

Thanks for the link. Getting hit by a bus is a bad example for sure. I just wanted to paint a picture about there being risks in life.

According to "usafacts.org" [1] there's a (very) roughly 1.6% rate of death, not controlling for age. The informationisbeautiful data shows that I'm >90% protected from extreme cases with 2 doses. That feels pretty safe to me given how low the rate of an extreme case is to begin with. (I'll admit I only measured death though)

You're right, though, it's not invincibility. That's a pretty high bar for anything.

[1] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...

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