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Comment by greesil | Hacker News Reader

The "no-vaxers" pay with their lives, self-valued at ~$10M USD. If the death rate is 1% then the expected value is $100K. Seems fairly pricey already. I'm not sure lack of skin in the game accounts for dodgy personal beliefs.

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I'm not sure this holds because humans in general are pretty bad at reasoning about low-probability, high-magnitude events. People will deal with a ~1% chance of $10M very differently to a guaranteed $100k. (To be clear, I also don't believe that "lack of skin in the game" totally accounts for faith in conspiracy theories.)

People will deal with a ~1% chance of $10M very differently to a guaranteed $100k.

Money is a very bad medium to talk about probability and human reasoning because doing so supposes that all dollars are worth the same when in reality they are anything but. Your last dollar is more valuable than your hundredth dollar which is more valuable than your thousandth dollar which is far more valuable than your millionth dollar. Giving someone ten million dollars does not make a hundred times as much difference to their lives as giving them one hundred thousand.

I was actually typing something like this in addition to what I already wrote, but I didn't think it was totally applicable in the context of the GP's statement. For the vast majority of folks an unexpected bill of $100k and an unexpected bill of $10M are likely to be equally ruinous.

People trade health at low and high probabilities for money all the time. That's the model that produced the $10M number in the first place.

The $10M number came from people already not taking into account low probability events.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

VSL

People are extremely bad at making decisions involving small probabilities. Plus, of course, the same people tend not to believe the data on deaths. There are even stories of people using their last breaths to again state that they do not believe viruses (or this virus, specifically) exists.

Not everyone dies. A lot are unnecessarily burdening the medical system while paying no out of pocket costs.

Would you be equally happy if you were sick enough to be hospitalized as you are when you're healthy? If not, that's a cost. I doubt the out-of-pocket medical costs are the most important part of this decision.

You guys are missing the point. The point is that people who are anti vax clearly have skin in the game by any measure. The point is not impacted by these little details, so don't go off in some flamewar here

I think you're also missing a point: the anti people don't believe they have skin in the game. Any statistics you quote is just fake news.

The point has wooshed over your head and flown into orbit. The original context was having skin (perceived or not) in the game and if it would always impact behavior. I'm not trying to convince anti vaxers of anything, just observing human behavior in general.

The people who refuse (or elect out of) vaccinations I've spoken to don't agree on that 1 % number. Or they think the vaccinations cause greater damage, meaning abstention is still a net positive.

Framing it as them knowingly sacrificing the equivalent of $100 k for no good reason ("belief!") is dishonest to the complexity of the problem.

Most deaths occurred before the vaccine was available.

I don't think that's actually true. If the reported numbers are correct, the number of deaths in the US was around 250k when the vaccine became available and now it's 700k. That's 450k more after the vaccine despite being widely available for a bit over a year.

The math is fuzzy since there were several months where even though the vaccine was technically available, you couldn’t just go get it at will. It’s unavoidable, though, that the deaths after will be higher than deaths before the vaccines were available, because one of those is an unbounded range.

There's also a lot of gymnastics involved in order to count all these covid deaths, and a constant withholding of actual absolute death counts.

Most serious illnesses will compromise the immune system. A compromised immune system will make you more vulnerable to any infection. So the most common and most spread infection will then also naturally be the most common one to trigger death.

If someone has aids, which is a decease that compromises the immune system, and then dies from pneumonia. Did they die from pneumonia or aids?

Yes, the assigned cause question a problem. And add to that the concept of "excess" deaths being a more telling figure than the causality number. So looking at a model of past deaths you can predict future deaths (roughly) and so assume the excess to that prediction is caused by COVID-19. The problem with that is researchers are saying that up to a third of those deaths could be being caused by health care displacement, not the virus directly. i.e. a trauma patient can't make it into the ICU because it's full of COVID patients.

The statistics are a total mess in my opinion and any being professed with any exactitude should be taken with a grain of salt.

A year ago today on MLK day it was only available to those 75 and older. The vaccine in the US has not been available to the general public for a year! Healthcare providers yes, general public no.

More excess deaths have occurred post-vaccine and vaccine adoption is not correlated with a reduction in excess death at the national level.

https://www.usmortality.com/excess-absolute

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