Covid-19: stigmatising the unvaccinated is not justified | Hacker News Reader

Covid-19: stigmatising the unvaccinated is not justified

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28 pointsmrfusion15 comments

Well, we need better stats; if unvaccinated are the reason why hospitals are actually overloading then we definitely should do something. Those stats seem not to be clearly released anywhere (for people like me who do not know where to look). If vaccinated patients who need care for other ailments do not get help because mostly unvaccinated people are taking up beds and doctors, well... But is this the case or not? I cannot find data...

Unvaccinated individuals are taking up the hospital space.

According to the CDC's most recent data unvaccinated individuals are 11 times more likely to require hospitalization. This is after the Delta variant*. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitali....

Also see this data from Minnesota which is very recent. https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/stats/vb...

Anecdotal articles I read reinforce this. The worst I've heard is that 30%-40% of patients in various hospitals are vaccinated. Which sounds bad, except these numbers are in places where 80%-90% of the adult population is vaccinated, so 10% is taking up two-thirds of hospital space. Additionally, most of the people who are hospitalized and vaccinated are older individuals, and they still typically spend less time and recover better than unvaccinated younger individuals.

* There was a recent article, "Hospitalizations Rising Among Fully Vaccinated in US, Fauci says", which speculates that this data is outdated. But it publishes no statistics to back up this claim. Frankly this is kind of misleading: of course vaccine efficacy wanes, the question is whether it's enough to make a significant impact. Even then, you can bring back efficacy with a booster. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/hospitalizations-...

"10% is taking up two-thirds of hospital space". This is incorrect, by a large margin.

There is a separate resource that tracks hospital bed use by covid status. Right now indicates 1074 out of 7327 beds are occupied by covid patients. The Minnesota breakdown of hospitalization cases is vax 216 / unvax 493. The sum is not 1074, but we can adjust using the ratio. We end up with 764 beds used by covid unvaccinated individuals out of 7327 total, for a 10% of the total hospital capacity.

I cannot find resources with precise data on what the other 90% of the beds are used for (other than 5% are unused), but from an late Aug article: "Minnesota’s hospitals report they are at 92% capacity, including patients with COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), traumatic injuries and other medical complications." One further context point: there are 5,900,000 people living in Minnesota.

https://mn.gov/covid19/data/response-prep/response-capacity....

https://www.startribune.com/wintertime-virus-keeps-minnesota...

https://www.kbv.de/media/sp/2021-11-19_Corona_Report.pdf has current statistics for Germany, where the author lives (and I do, too). As I read that, German hospitals would have a significant but not unmanageable problem without the unvaccinated, with >1% of hospital beds taken up by covid patients. >1% is enough that the hospitals planners need to consider the matter.

Here is the website to find newer issues of this report in the future. It seems to be updated weekly:

https://www.kbv.de/html/corona-report.php

> unvaccinated individuals are 11 times more likely to require hospitalization

Next up: increased likelihood of hospitalization of other choices that aren't choices for a minority of those groups that everyone wants to demonize, like the obese.

The stigma isn't not so much about increased likelihood of hospitalisation. It's about decreased likelihood of hospitalisation for things like cancer. I mention cancer because two people IRL have mentioned cancer operations to me.

IMO if obesity took so much of the hospitals' resources that they had to defer cancer operations, then the obese would get a considerable stigma.

What percent of people hospitalized with COVID are overweight/obese?

I've seen data on that somewhere, and IIRC it's one of the factors that would be significant if the simple single bit "vaccinated or not?" didn't make everything else fade into the noise. Look at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33932335/ for example. So and so many "per cent increase", while lack of vaccination causes "factor of x" increases and fuck the per cent.

In Finland it was over 50% last time I checked (BMI of 25+). Or it might've been deaths. In any case a significant number.

Who is "we" and what is the "something" you propose "we" do?

This letter doesn’t really make clear who the writer is.

Here’s some more information:

https://www.rubikon.news/autoren/gunter-kampf

Here’s another letter:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355903095_Call_to_a...

The same author, on the same topic, writing for the Brownstone Institute:

https://brownstone.org/articles/this-is-not-a-pandemic-of-th...

What goes unexplored is to what degree are the rates of COVID in the vaccinated population influenced by the unvaccinated population, given the fact that they will be increasing overall rates of transmission? Might we have a shrinking incidence of COVID if more people were vaccinated rather than a growing one? Might that mitigate the effects of declining immunity? Depending on the answers to these questions, vaccine scepticism/hesitancy (if not the unvaccinated as such, who may have e.g. medical reasons for not getting it, and on a worldwide scale availability may be a concern) may still be justifiable to stigmatise regardless of incidence of COVID within the vaccinated population today.

That said, political rhetoric is more wide-reaching than just the underlying epidemiological reality. When considering whether this is justified we must also take into account the societal effects of this rhetoric; will this effectively weaponise peer pressure against vaccine sceptics to society's overall advantage? Or simply cause them to dig their heels in? Maybe it's a gamble, although it feels like the losing outcome may be to simply drive another fault through an already polarised social world.

No one's cancelled deer season yet. Deer are known to be carrying COVID.

What was the goal, again? "Zero COVID?" Un-strained hospitals? is any evaluation of the desirability of those goals allowed? Is any review and adjustment of the methods we're trying to achieve those goals with acceptable?

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