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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

This is a loaded question.

In slovenia, more people have died from smoking related illnesses than covid (even in the last two years), but somehow "corona lives matter", peoples personal choices to go out, get ill, and risk the 0.5% chance of death don't matter, governments take more and more power, because "every life matters", but on the other hand, you can still buy cigarettes everywhere.

If every life matters, then ban cigarettes, tax the shit out of sugary sodas and junk food, if you're willing to sacrifice basic human rights, also force people to exercise, and more lives will be saved than from corona. If all those lives don't matter, but corona lives do, someone is doing something very very wrong.

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So we should only pay attention to whatever illness causes the most deaths and ignore the rest?

You're free to get ill if you choose (from smoking, covid, whatever) but it's really hard to believe people don't understand you don't have the right to endanger others, be it with tobacco smoke or covid.

That's also why we have speed limits. If you want to endanger yourself driving 250Km/h that's fine. But you can't, because you'd endanger others.

TL;DR: your freedom ends where mine begins.

I mean... you probably shouldn't ignore the thing that kills the most people, to deal with something that kills less people than that. And yes, we basically do the calculation (deaths vs convenience) all the time.. look at speed limits for cars, they're just a calculation of traffic deaths per year vs time losses due to lower speed limits.. a few deaths is ok, because everyone can get to work faster, but a lot of deaths is not ok.

Especially now, with vaccines... if someone doesn't want to vaccinate, who exactly are they endangering (except others, who also chose not to vaccinate)? Thinking the vaccinated won't get in contact with omicron from other vaccinated people who got infected is stupid, but we still don't let unvaccinated people go to the bar, while I can go there, even infected (and with omicron, i could be infected right now, but noone tests us, the vaccinated ones).

> I mean... you probably shouldn't ignore the thing that kills the most people, to deal with something that kills less people than that

Smoking isn't ignored ... I don't think any illness is ignored in favor of any others. Doctors have been insisting people do not postpone medical procedures and checkups because they're worried about covid in hospitals (which has been happening, and causing more deaths).

One of the main reasons to get vaccinated against covid is specifically so hospitals don't get overwhelmed to the point where patients have to turned away, regardless of what they're suffering from.

> look at speed limits for cars, they're just a calculation of traffic deaths per year vs time losses due to lower speed limits

I doubt that speed limits have anything to do with "time lost". The difference in covering 30Km at 150Km/h vs 120Km/h is 3 min, negligible. Wake up earlier :)

Faster driving doesn't cause more accidents, but it does cause greater injury (complicated subject with lots of research, no time to dig all this up).

> with vaccines... if someone doesn't want to vaccinate, who exactly are they endangering

You're also endangering vaccinated people. The risk of serious illness is greatly reduced but you're not guaranteed not to die. A vaccine is like a seat belt (works super well but doesn't make you invincible).

And it's not just 1 or 0. People die from covid and survivors can have long lasting afflictions from it. I think the statistic is for every person that dies, there's 5 that will be "marked" for life by covid. Not "long covid" or whatever, but life long problems with reduced lung capacity, problems with kidneys, heart etc - things they will suffer from in varying degrees for years to come, burdening the healthcare and social welfare system and the economy in general (global cost is already in the trillions of dollars).

And it's still not ok to endanger those who aren't vaccinated because they can still end up in hospital, using up valuable resources. So if you want to have your covid parties that's fine if you sign a contract saying you'll receive no medical help whatsoever should you get infected. Anything else is morally wrong.

It's extremely tiring having to explain all this basic, obvious stuff to people. I'm sure if you thought it through you could figure it out for yourself.

> Smoking isn't ignored ... I don't think any illness is ignored in favor of any others. Doctors have been insisting people do not postpone medical procedures and checkups because they're worried about covid in hospitals (which has been happening, and causing more deaths).

Doctors have been saying that, but then rescheduling procedures. Some have even been stopped for some time. Here in slovenia, they even caught doctors, giving their timecards to a security guard to check them in/out out of the government hospital (so they get covid benefits) while they worked in private practice, because their government-hospital procedures (whole programme) was stopped.

> I doubt that speed limits have anything to do with "time lost". The difference in covering 30Km at 150Km/h vs 120Km/h is 3 min, negligible. Wake up earlier :)

But if we lowered the speed limit to 10km/h, there'd be almost zero deaths. And yes, we have speed limits lowering the speed from 130km/h to 110km/h in many places, because it loweres the chance of accidents there, while an accident at that both of those speeds are pretty bad anyways.

> You're also endangering vaccinated people. The risk of serious illness is greatly reduced but you're not guaranteed not to die. A vaccine is like a seat belt (works super well but doesn't make you invincible).

But vaccinated people also get ill and spread covid, and with omicron it's pretty much guaranteed that everyone, vaccinated or not, will get in contact with covid. The vaccine is basically helping only the vaccinated person, and has pretty much no effect on the spread itself (which is pretty much logical at r0=10 or whatever it is for omicron).

> And it's not just 1 or 0. People die from covid and survivors can have long lasting afflictions from it. I think the statistic is for every person that dies, there's 5 that will be "marked" for life by covid. Not "long covid" or whatever, but life long problems with reduced lung capacity, problems with kidneys, heart etc - things they will suffer from in varying degrees for years to come, burdening the healthcare and social welfare system and the economy in general (global cost is already in the trillions of dollars).

Again... we'll all get it, and you either trust your immune system, and take the risk for yourself, or you trust the vaccine+immune system, and take a lower risk, or you well.. stay at home, because vaccines won't prevent the spread of a virus so contageous as the omicron variant.

> And it's still not ok to endanger those who aren't vaccinated because they can still end up in hospital, using up valuable resources. So if you want to have your covid parties that's fine if you sign a contract saying you'll receive no medical help whatsoever should you get infected. Anything else is morally wrong.

Should we expand this to smokers and obese people, and extreme sportists? I mean.. getting covid is a one time "mistake", getting morbidly obese is years and years of self abuse, same with cigarettes, those take many years to destroy your lungs.

> It's extremely tiring having to explain all this basic, obvious stuff to people. I'm sure if you thought it through you could figure it out for yourself.

It's also exremly tiring to take away peoples basic human rights in the name of a disease that (with vaccines) kills less people than the flu (and who cares if someone doesn't get vaccinated, it's their problem).

> But vaccinated people also get ill and spread covid, and with omicron it's pretty much guaranteed that everyone, vaccinated or not, will get in contact with covid

Well yes, vaccines don't stop the spread but it will reduce it (definitely with Delta, maybe less so with Omicron). And then you have other problems like mutations happening more among non vaccinated.

And even with omicron, a vaccine will prevent serious illness.

Even if it just makes a 1% difference, among the almost 8 billion people in the world that's still a huge number. So why not get vaccinated?

It seems to me people are either scared for irrational reasons or just want to be different and think they know it better than the medical establishment.

> Should we expand this to smokers and obese people

Yes, I definitely think you could make a case for that. If people could reduce their craving for McDonalds by receiving a yearly injection and they refuse then yeah, you'd be in the same situation. But things are more complicated, being related to addiction, socio economic status etc ...

> It's also exremly tiring to take away peoples basic human rights in the name of a disease that (with vaccines) kills less people than the flu (and who cares if someone doesn't get vaccinated, it's their problem).

Again, nobody is forced to be vaccinated and it's not just their problem if they don't. You may be refused entry to bars & restaurants but that's not a basic human right, afaik.

I'm done with this!

> vaccines don't stop the spread but it will reduce it (definitely with Delta, maybe less so with Omicron).

Not with omicron, atleast not really.

> And even with omicron, a vaccine will prevent serious illness.

So, it's like smoking, the vaccinated get lesser chance of serious illness, and the unvaccinated have themselves to blame.

> Yes, I definitely think you could make a case for that. If people could reduce their craving for McDonalds by receiving a yearly injection and they refuse then yeah, you'd be in the same situation. But things are more complicated, being related to addiction, socio economic status etc ...

I mean.. they could reduse mcdonalds by just not eating at mcdonalds.

> Again, nobody is forced to be vaccinated and it's not just their problem if they don't. You may be refused entry to bars & restaurants but that's not a basic human right, afaik.

But curfews (restriction of movement) is a basic human right, that was taken away from us. And again, if vaccines only help the vaccinated, why not let the unvaccinated ones into bars (or mcdonalds)?

The limitations are there, so that hospitals don't get flooded with people. Without the limitations the healthcare system would collapse. If that were to happen, doctors would have to decide whether to help you because you had an accident or to treat somebody else with covid or somebody else with some other emergency.

Unhealthy diets affect only the people who follow them, not their peers. Smoking is different because passive smoking does affect others - that's why there have been government interventions (higher taxation, public campaigns) to reduce smoking in many countries in the last decades.

Your argument is besides the point anyway: just because there are other factors in life that can make you sick, that does not mean that we should not fight COVID.

But if lives (number of lives) matter, and we're unwilling to ban the sale of cigarettes to save lives (which is, lets be honest, not a very impactful thing on normal life of normal people, especially if you do it the new zeland way, by a cutoff year), we basically let all those people die, and we don't care.

Considering we have vaccines available for some time now, and considering we've dealth with contageus diseases before covid, getting unvaccinated is basically a lifestyle choice, and non-believers can still stay at home and not do the stuff we've been restricting to people who actually want to do that.

> But if lives (number of lives) matter, and we're unwilling to ban the sale of cigarettes to save lives (which is, lets be honest, not a very impactful thing on normal life of normal people, especially if you do it the new zeland way, by a cutoff year), we basically let all those people die, and we don't care.

I don't know if you can compare smoking to covid, smoking related diseases take years and more likely decades to be deadly.

But in saying that, one way to look at this is via economics. When you are born, you have a potential life expectancy and a potential to earn society money (taxes). Smokers quite often die younger overall and not reaching their value to society, however this is general with many other diseases. Obviously reducing preventable forms of deaths such as those from smoking are to the benefit of society. Whenever you hear that smoking costs the "country" $X billions a year, that is not only the direct costs but also the indirect costs.

I believe in Australia the direct healthcare costs of treating smoking related illness was pegged at some number around 110 million a year, which is substantially different to the promoted cost of billions.

The difference with Covid is that it is an anomaly, perfectly healthy individuals have an increase chance of dying, as well as those who do have other health factors. This number maybe small but it has a large impact on the economy on society in general. Not only is a persons economic value reduced by the direct costs to society are increased.

An example of this, might be, you build a hospital knowing that X amount of smokers will die a year as well as other illnesses. You can calculate this, and work out what type of hospital you need to build. But what you cannot do very easily is calculate an additional 5 million people a year dying over an immediate time. It also takes considerable time to build hospitals, and years to train doctors, as such it is difficult to ramp up quickly to deal with anomalies. Then you must also consider the amount of productivity which is lost when a person is sick, this is also a factor which is calculated in regards to society, and then the publics spending, fear etc.

You can also look at the cost increases in the supply chain, which will affect the economy for years to come. Smokers for example are unlikely to influence the price of wood, but covid has.

So while we should take a pro-active stance against smoking (and when I was smoking I used to say the same), the pandemic is a real-time disaster which cannot be dealt with over 20 years like smoking. People will continue to die from smoking for decades even if you banned it today, but people will die today and potentially from related issues for decades from covid. The effects of covid are immediate, substantial and impactful to society not only right now but likely for some time.

Given the multiple 'X lives matter' references I think this response is probably more loaded than the question could ever have been.

The thing with COVID is that it's a contagious and deadly disease. The thing with smoking, fizzy drinks and junk food is that they're not contagious and deadly diseases, they're lifestyle choices.

You can't compare them like-for-like.

I'm not an american, and I don't really care about your internal issues. Our phrase is "vsako zivljenje steje", which is literally translated to "every life counts", but "matters" makes more sense in this context.

It’s not true. In all the world covid caused way more deaths than smoke related diseases. If in Slovenia it’s not the case then they are massively undercounting covid deaths. And the covid mortality is 1%, not 0.5%. Stop spreading dangerous misinformation.

I have to disagree

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco

> Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.

Two years, 16+mio deaths. Total covid deaths, a bit over 5 mio.

edit: even obesity, 2.8mio per year, 5.6mio in two years - https://www.who.int/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/6-fac...

The thing is that tobacco deaths are usually from several years of use. I don't think most of the dead people who died from tobacco have begin smoking this last two years meanwhile covid killing is quite faster.

Only in India the excess deaths were 4.5M in one year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-57888460

The total death count for covid will be known only in the next years and it’s for sure many multiple of the current official numbers.

So, which country data do you want to use?

Usa, 480k smoking deaths yearly - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast... , still more than covid deaths there.

And not to mention counting the iffy counting of covid deaths (any death, even suicide within 28 days is a covid death) and covid hospitalizations ( https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/26/exclusive-half-c... ).

Let's be honest here... covid is really bad for old and already ill people. For young and currently healthy, the impacts of lockdowns will be worse than covid, especially for younger children (imagine just going to first grade, unable to rad and write yet, and you're put infront of a laptop with Zoom running, no real-life contact with friends, parents having to quit their jobs to take care of you, and all that to "save grandma", even with vaccines already available).

USA excess deaths are over 1M so it’s still greater than smoke deaths.

646k is for the first year: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29503

646k > 480k if I’m not mistaken.

So, every excess deaths is a covid death now?

20k of those, are just extra overdoses (100k total). - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...

Two years, 16+mio deaths. Total covid deaths, a bit over 5 mio.

I don't get it. You're arguing against government interventions because of relatively low fatality numbers. Yet, the fact that these numbers are not higher is a direct outcome of the world-wide vaccination campaigns. Don't you think you got it backwards?

I'm saying that we violated many basic human rights because of a disease that killed 5 mio people, citing those deaths as reasons to violate all the basic righs, while we're unwilling to violate a relatively minor right (to smoke), to save even more lives.

If you're saying we need a cufrew, because covid killed X people, but are not willing to ban the sale of cigarettes, even though they kill 3.2*X people, you're doing something wrong.

Covid kills X people because of the restrictions, otherwise it would kill N*X people, where N would be a lot higher number than 3.2 because of the secondary problems like hospitals overflowing.

An often ignored fact is that many of these restrictions and the fear many governments have stoked (e.g. fear of going to the doctor, fear of going out, interruptions in work) have caused many deaths. We won't know what the net cost is until many years from now.

Well we'd all like to think that but if you plot cumulative world deaths on a graph there's no inflection point in 2021. The graph just keeps going up and to the right at exactly the same speed as it always did:

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

It's really hard to explain this. I admit to being baffled. If vaccines are saving lives then there should have been a clear bend downwards in the trend line of the graph but if any such bend exists at all you have to squint to see it. If anything there looks like a slight acceleration in the first months of 2021 (but it's small enough I can't say for sure by eyeballing it).

Lots of people don't understand the numbers around total COVID deaths, by the way. In the past week alone I've seen internet comments saying that over 20 million have died of COVID, that vaccines have saved "millions of lives" when COVID overall since the start has only claimed (or rather, been temporally associated with) millions of lives, and VE lasted only months due to Omicron and when it rolled out. So it's impossible for vaccines to have saved millions of lives.

But this is understandable when you consider what people tell opinion polls. Lots of people, including people who think of themselves as well informed and educated, mis-estimate the dangers of COVID by orders of magnitude :(

https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...

What I see in this graph is a more or less linear growth instead of an exponential one. That's good news.

But a more tangible insight into why you're wrong and why vaccines do work is to look at statistics for hospitalization in intensive care: these days, the vast majority of ICU cases of COVID are unvaccinated patients. Given that most people are vaccinated, it should be the other way around if there was no difference between vaccinated or unvaccinated. This is a much stronger argument than speculating what a growth graph should or should not look like with or without vaccines.

Why would deaths increase exponentially over a period of years? That would not be expected and was not occurring even before vaccines.

The point I'm making here is that the data is contradictory, which means there is a need to investigate. Trials didn't show any impact on hospitalization or death (because it's so rare, they were too small to get significance). That means the data on them is confounded. For example, in the UK the data shows that pregnancy makes you more likely to be admitted to ICU with COVID but less likely to die. A biological effect? No, of course not. Rather, hospital staff have a lot of discretion on who they send to ICU or not, and they prefer to spend resources on women who are pregnant.

The expected curve without intervention would have an S-shape: initially, you see exponential growth which will flatten out later on when you reach a point of saturation.

In many countries, the intensive care units have not been in the situation where they had to triage, so the selection effects you report have not been necessary there. And even if, no hospital would make the decision on who to assign to an ICU based on their vaccination status, but based on the medical needs. The fact that we see dramatically less vaccinated people in ICUs is most plausibly explained by the effectiveness of the vaccines.

Logistic growth (S shaped) is observed in any specific epidemic regardless of intervention. But what we're looking at here is the sum of all COVID epidemics together.

"no hospital would make the decision on who to assign to an ICU based on their vaccination status, but based on the medical needs"

Your beliefs about hospitals and doctors are romanticized and I already gave you evidence of this. Albeit I didn't cite it, so let me do that now with this analysis of UK ICNARC data:

https://communityoperatingsystem.wordpress.com/2021/12/09/uk...

Pregnant women get admitted more and survive more because they weren't being admitted based on true medical need but rather the subjective feelings of staff that [currently/very recently] pregnant women should get higher levels of care due to having a baby.

This also affects other decisions. Doctors aren't always rational well informed calculating machines:

"We see a similar admissions bias when we examine the hospitalization fatality rates between the fully vaccinated and unvaccinated under 50s with PHE hospitalization data for 218,784 confirmed Delta infections – which show that whilst the 1.7% hospitalization rate of the unvaccinated is almost 2X that of the vaccinated (0.9%), the HFR in the vaccinated is 3 times higher (7.4%) than the unvaccinated (2.4%) and the case fatality rates is also lower in the unvaccinated."

Why does this happen, well, the population has been terrorized for years into believing things that are wildly untrue. The average Australian believes an unvaccinated person has a 33% chance of dying if they catch COVID. They think it's as deadly as smallpox or the plague. 40% of American Democrat voters believe half of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized with COVID! Half!

It'd be great if all the people who believed this nonsense were somehow excluded from the health system but of course they aren't. Quite the opposite: those who understand the true numbers and severity rates are much less likely to want to get vaccinated than those who think it's literally the plague and they're all being fired.

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