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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

You're forgetting the vaccine is also very efficient in preventing hospitalization. By a factor of ≈11 (average, ages 12-17 & 18-59) in the RKI (Germany) data[¹].

So even if you're aged 12 to 29, if you don't get vaccinated you're gambling at taking away someone else's hospital bed. Which will doom the rest of us.

So, can everyone please get fricken vaccinated ffs?

[¹] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

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> So even if you're aged 12 to 29, if you don't get vaccinated you're gambling at taking away someone else's hospital bed. Which will doom the rest of us.

According to [1] at no point in time since March this year (when they started recording this data) have there been more than 100 hospitalizations in the age group 0-30 in Germany a country with 80+ million inhabitants. If this means doom to all of us I don't know anymore.

[1]: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/altersstrukt...

That's a valid argument, I wasn't aware absolute hospitalization numbers <30 were this low.

… which just leaves the other arguments to get vaccinated. Namely, lesser chance of long-term symptoms and lesser chance of getting infected (last I checked, outbound transmission doesn't seem to be reduced much, but inbound is, so it still serves to slow overall spread.)

So in other words all of the non-debunked reasons for <30 to get vaccinated are all about individual health, and have no impact on anyone else's health.

> That's a valid argument, I wasn't aware absolute hospitalization numbers <30 were this low.

And yet you were more than willing to make the baseless claim in the first place, which is one of the biggest issues with all of this in the first place. The media is doing its best to make covid seem scary as it can and is helped along by misinformation like this, fueling overall distrust.

I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but hyperbole isn't helpful. Occupying a hospital bed won't doom the rest of us. In any given year only a small fraction of the population gets admitted to a hospital for any reason.

> Occupying a hospital bed won't doom the rest of us.

https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen

Germany is getting quite close to exhausting ICU beds and ventilators. Non-"essential" procedures have already been postponed.

"Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten (Betreibbare Betten und Notfallreserve" chart shows the ICU stats over time. Occupied beds are roughly a flatline around 20k, with a small 3k seasonal (covid?) variation. OTOH, the total number of available ICU beds have fallen from ~32k to ~24k, 25%. We are all nervous to see how the medical system will weather the winter covid waves, sadly the covid pandemic is far from over. But I'm confused: the data indicates the system has lost significant ICU capacity, a few times more than the seasonal (covid?) utilization variation. What is going on? Is this something Germans also openly worry about?

Two effects going on there in parallel:

1. In the last wave, some hospitals reported more ICU beds than they were actually prepared to staff, because each available bed in the datasheet got them a hefty government subsidy.

2. A non-negligible number of ICU nursing staff were worked into the ground in the Winter 2020/2021 wave and decided to quit (read: move into similar jobs with less horrible working conditions). From what I hear (caution: anecdata), a lot of the remaining staff are now considering to follow them.

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