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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

> Or on the flip side, we can keep describing it as what it is, i.e an illness which largely inconveniences the vaccinated and jeopardizes the lives of those who are not.

This description suggests that vaccination status is the most significant risk factor for dying of covid. That is factually wrong. Moreover, it's politics, it's an attempt to convince people to get vaccinated.

Age and health are more significant factors than vaccination status. Therefore it would be more accurate to describe covid as "an illness which largely inconveniences the young and healthy and jeopardizes the lives of those who are not".

Source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/09/covid-19-vaccine-sta...

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"Fully 25 percent of deaths were among vaccinated people, the county reported. How can this be? If the vaccines are so effective that they reduce mortality 42 times over, how could the vaccinated account for such a large proportion of the deaths?"

Someone needs to learn statistics there. The 25% number is useless without knowing what rate of the general population is vaccinated. If 100% are vaccinated, all deaths would be vaccinated too. If, say, 50% of the population are vaccinated, but only 25% of covid deaths are vaccinated people, the vaccine is in fact quite effective in reducing death in hospitalized covid cases[¹] — by a factor of 3.

[¹] assuming they would mirror the vaccination rate, which they don't.

> the vaccine is in fact quite effective in reducing death in hospitalized covid cases

No one in this thread, including me and the article I linked, is arguing otherwise.

You would have to have around 94% vaccinated to have 25% of deaths be vaccinated at 42x protection. No country has that.

… that's where the [¹] comes in. None of these statistics can really be done with naïve back-of-the-envelope calculations. How many people get hospitalized with covid to begin with? How many people require intensive care? How many just die outside a hospital because no ICU beds are available?

That is incorrect because it fails to take into account that the elderly are much more likely to be vaccinated, and also much more likely to die from COVID.

In the USA, something like 85% of people older than 65 are "fully vaccinated", and a almost all of the rest have had one dose.

These still make up a substantial proportion of hospitalizations, because Covid is 2–3 orders of magnitude more likely to lead to serious symptoms for this age category, so that vaccinated elderly people have comparable risk to unvaccinated people 30–40 years younger.

At 85% vax rate with 42x protection you would still expect almost 90% of deaths to be in the unvaccinated.

Looking at the source, this was about King County, Washington, where more people over age 65 have completed the full vaccination series than there are census-estimated residents of that age. Effectively everyone over 65 has been fully vaccinated there. https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/vaccinatio...

If you tally up more age categories, about 92% of people over the age of 35 have been fully vaccinated.

Or flipped around, 80% of unvaccinated people in that county are under the age of 35, 15% are age 35–50, 5% are age 50–65, and essentially none are older than that.

It is amazing that even so, 83% of hospitalizations and 75% of deaths were among the unvaccinated. These vaccines are astonishingly effective!

Yeah, I am not trying to say the vaccines are not extremely effective.

In King County, for age group >65yo, vaccination rate is >95%, and the percent of vaccinated hospitalizations for this age group is 3%.

In UK, for age group >60yo, with similarly high vaccination rates, the percent of vaccinated hospitalizations for this age group is 82.5%.

These numbers inhabit different realities. I cannot think of any reasonable explanation. Some attempts:

* King County is failing to vaccinate the highest risk subpopulation within this age group.

* King County is hospitalizing comparatively vast numbers of unvaccinated elder covid patients.

* King County, UK, or both, is having serious data collection and/or reporting problems.

* UK is using a different vaccine

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/public.health.seattle...

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

Edit. Peeking at the Singapore dashboards, they are much closer to the King County picture than the UK picture.

https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics

> This description suggests that vaccination status is the most significant risk factor for dying of covid

...

> Age and health are more significant factors than vaccination status.

You can't easily change your age or health to reduce your risk. You can change your vaccination status. Thus for any given individual vaccination is the most significant action that can be easily taken to significantly reduce their chance of dying of COVID.

> You can't easily change your age or health to reduce your risk

It's still useful information. An elderly person, informed of his elevated risk, may make different choices than if he thought "well I'm vaccinated so I'm safe".

Anyway, your post is proving my point. The goal in describing covid as "dangerous to the lives of unvaccinated; inconvenient for the vaccinated" is to convince people to get vaccinated, not to describe reality.

There's a factual case for vaccination, and many have made it. But others are being dishonest and manipulative. There's a price to be paid for that and it may end up being more expensive than the benefits accrued.

> You can't easily change your age

Strictly speaking, my age changes constantly without me even thinking about it :P

That doesn't change the fact that shaming and bullying younger people into getting vaccinated cannot possibly stop hospitals getting overwhelmed with Covid patients, and that in countries with reasonably high vaccine uptake amongst the elderly (which is fairly common - they've been much more willing to get vaccinated in most places because they're at higher risk) blaming the unvaccinated for hospitals being full has more to do with politics than actual on-the-ground reality. Sure, on an individual level getting vaccinated reduces your personal risk, but in terms of society-wide risks many places have reached a point of substantial diminishing returns precisely because age and health are the most significant factors.

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