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Comment by skinkestek | Hacker News Reader

As a double, soon triple vaccinated healthy grown up, one thing I'd wish to say:

For people like me (healty, 40ies male in a job were I can work from home) the big reason to be vaccinated is for my own:

I don't want to be sick for days or be unable to smell or taste.

I also don't want to feel freezing cold, have headaches that makes it impossible to work or have the nasty long term side effects some get from Covid.

To avoid that I take the probably much smaller risk of taking the vaccine.

But it is something I do for me, my family and my employer. Not something I do for society: Covid has already proven beyond all my doubt that it won't eliminated by any of the current vaccines so for now I'm deaf to any claim to take it for anyone else, i.e. the herd immunity argument.

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> But it is something I do for me, my family and my employer. Not something I do for society

I'd say that this is exactly the definition of doing it for society!

I don't do it for the elderly or for everyone who works in healthcare or so on though.

Not because that wouldn't be worth it but because at this point my vaccination status doesn't change anything for those.

> Not because that wouldn't be worth it but because at this point my vaccination status doesn't change anything for those.

Who do you think is in the hospital with covid? I'm glad you came to the right conclusion even with the wrong parameters though.

> Who do you think is in the hospital with covid?

Around here?

Not 40ish well trained med, and particularly not double vaccinated ones.

I do this for me, my wife, my boss and my client (so I won't have to skip my duties at home or work for days).

Yes, exactly, but you'd have a higher chance of taking up a hospital bed if you weren't vaccinated, thus your status does something for hospital staff, which is what I was replying to.

Even if that wasn't your motivation, getting vaccinated is good for society as well.

No. He's not doing it for society at large waving my hand in a large circle. He's doing it for people close to him which is a very fucking different narrative and motivation. Doesn't mean it doesn't benefit society at large waving hand in a large circle but that's not the same thing.

That's basically the argument I use for masking. The severity of infection appears to be correlated with initial viral load. It seems unlikely that I'll be able to avoid getting COVID, but when I do get it, I want it to be as light as possible.

Covid could have been eliminated at some point. We know because there are scary other viruses like ebola that are not ravaging entire world because the moment it shows up we act decisively -- exactly because it is so deadly and scary.

Because Covid is not so scary everybody elected to wait and see how exponential growth looks like in practice. If it had 20% death rate we would have couple thousand people die of it at most.

No, we had no tools to eradicate it in the first place.

The worst crime was comrades in Wuhan denying any such outbreak is possible just before a Party meeting.

Or American politicians telling their constituents that masks and vaccines don’t work.

We have to keep this stuff in our brain and history. The way how many leaders acted in the beginning of all this drastically changed the way we see some politics and countries.

It seems that these horrible stupid decisions and lies are fading into irrelevance already

I think the draconian measures that China put in place make it very clear I could never have been eliminated. Not to mention the animal reservoirs (mink, domesticated pets, livestock).

Sure we could have maintained a lockdown for years to keep infection rates minimized, but that’s not a long term solution nor a process that will lead to elimination.

Except the draconian measures that China put actually worked initially. They lost battle when entire world around them got sick and it did not make sense for China to be isolated.

What did not work is other countries closing their borders immediately the moment it was known that the virus escaped China.

When the numbers of sick are low you can track every individual and preemptively put everybody he spent time with in isolation. This is how we fight other viruses like ebola, successfully, even without vaccines. There still exists no vaccine for ebola. The only real mechanism to prevent it spreading is finding and isolating people.

And, yes, ebola has reservoirs. And no, we are not in constant lockdown due to ebola.

The fact that China has a couple cities of several million on lockdown right now and still seeing rising cases is pretty much proof it didn’t work?

No, it is not. What happened initially and what is happening now are two completely different things. Nobody disputes that it is no longer possible to beat the virus. Even if China did beat the virus completely they would still be receiving fresh cases from abroad.

China is in a difficult situation now, because their vaccines are completely ineffective for Omicron, because their population is so densely packed and has low health standards and because their health system is much more fragile.

This is just hand waving. You’re basically saying we could have beaten Covid if: a) China locked down before the virus left their country, b) if their vaccine prevented Omnicron [note: no vaccine does], c) China wasn’t densely populated, had a healthier population and better healthcare system?

Whether Chinese policy has been effective depends on how many people have died and to what degree they had to tradeoff their economy for it. But without authoritative numbers on the table for discussion, we're just pumping text around the web.

For most of the duration of Covid I actually worked for a large company that maintains large (hundreds if not thousands of people) development workforce in Shanghai. I left in November 2021.

NONE of them got sick, as far as we know. Some of them are good friends of mine and in safe, private conversation confirmed the same.

There were some lockdowns, but it seems they were largely precautionary.

No one closed their borders as China did. And afaik no one closed their borders when we knew it escaped but just days & weeks later. Europe never really closed any borders for business travel and good transport, etc.

I don't think we can compare any measures against China.

China lockdown did nothing as is made entirely apparent by how they reopened their country and never had to lock down again. Lockdowns don't give immunity so obviously they either have bad reporting or they acquired immunity naturally.

Just watch some videos of china's reopening parties. There were raves and celebrations with hundreds sometimes thousands of people packed indoors in close quarters. Covid doesn't care how strict you were a month ago.

China is locking down but with pinpoint sophistication and people are getting vaccinated.

Yes, China is well known for their sophisticated healthcare. A country whose smog regularly makes it hard to see buildings just across the street is somehow becoming the most advanced country in the world at preventing covid transmission even though they ironically don't even share any data to confirm any of these speculations in either direction.

> Yes, China is well known for their sophisticated healthcare. A country whose smog regularly makes it hard to see buildings just across the street is somehow becoming the most advanced country in the world at preventing covid transmission even though they ironically don't even share any data to confirm any of these speculations in either direction.

You were just talking about how China was not locking down. China is locking down. Now you're just shitting on China by saying "How can we trust China with their secrecy and smog?"

because they aren't locking down like they were this is from instagram 4 days days ago in xian, one of their strictest lockdown locations [1] https://i.imgur.com/49QjHJN.jpg and this [2] https://i.imgur.com/OugsA59.png is from an article talking about the lockdowns in xian.

Neither of these pictures could've been taken during their early lockdowns that everyone talks about because people were literally blockaded into their own apartments and homes completely unable to leave.

That's pretty disingenuous considering the Chinese media covered in detail the struggles getting food only a couple weeks ago.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3162244/acc...

Journalist Jiang Xue says neighbours have been swapping food to deal with supply shortages and encouraging each other after ‘making it through another day’

if you think I'm being disingenuous then you weren't paying attention during china's first lockdown.

You realize several cities of several million are currently locked down?

Eliminating covid was never possible. Are you not aware of how many animal carriers there are or are you suggesting we could've prevented animal transmission somehow?

It could have been killed until around 18 months ago.

We chose to let people travel and to not put in place the same countermeasures that China put in place.

China hasn't eliminated covid in human or animals. No one has.

Some points to consider:

- ebola is transmitted via physical contact (with bodily fluids), not vapour in the air

- ebola tends to be contagious only once symptoms appear, not for several days before

Those two points alone make the two completely incomparable in terms of containment.

Just a heads up, I'm vaccinated and currently have covid. I was sick for days, barely able to smell, was freezing cold, had headaches — all as you describe. So.. not sure it will help you.

In Australia, of those in hospital or ICU with covid, more than half are unvaccinated. 92% of the country are vaccinated, so the remainder accounts for half of hospitalisations. That’s a massive difference. Vaccines help, they are not perfect, but they help.

You may be right, but you cannot actually conclude that, because the country is 92% vaccinated and half of ICU are unvaccinated, the vaccines work. You need to stratify at least by age, but also by comorbidities and so on. For example, it could be (not saying it is the case) that most of the ICU patients were considered too frail to be given the vaccine on medical grounds, and thus count as unvaccinated.

Too many politicians make "X is true therefore Y is true" statements that cannot actually be made based on the data being cited. One thing that's been clear from the beginning is the need for nuance and consideration of the details, not just blind jumps. There are health statisticians and mathematicians that do this sort of study for a living and I wish more politicians would cite their work.

> You may be right, but you cannot actually conclude that, because the country is 92% vaccinated and half of ICU are unvaccinated

They're two separate data points, he hasn't done this

He's stated separately that 92% of the country is vaccinated AND (separately) half of ICU admissions are from the unvaccinated, what it means is that that remaining 8% are responsible for more than half of the COVID hospitalisations

Considering how much of a surveillance state AUS has, they likely do have the data to draw these conclusions

It really does show how effective they are in also reducing the severity of the condition, which is a very important point to make

> Considering how much of a surveillance state AUS has, they likely do have the data to draw these conclusions

> It really does show how effective they are in also reducing the severity of the condition, which is a very important point to make

This is exactly what I was referring to in my previous comment. These are hypotheses, and professionals are needed to establish causality. This _is_ a nuanced issue, it's not simple (despite what almost everyone seems to think), and we should start ignoring simplistic sound bites on this topic.

It reduces the probability of disease. It isn’t binary.

Apologies for pedantry...

Vaccines reduce the severity of disease, sometimes to the point of no noticeable effect. They may reduce probability of transmission.

Can't both be true? You don't seem to be disagreeing with parent poster?

Some vaccinated people still get severe disease, and others even die (both at significantly lower rates than for the unvaccinated, of course). The reasons why this happens in some cases and not others is uncertain, and, accepting the Bayesian interpretation of probability as I do, I would describe that as reducing the probability of disease (and also death). Put differently, you cannot tell a priori whether being vaccinated will definitely stop you dying, but you can observe that the a posteriori population level rate is reduced. You are correct that it also reduces the probability of transmission.

> Covid has already proven beyond all my doubt that it won't eliminated by any of the current vaccines so for now I'm deaf to any claim to take it for anyone else, i.e. the herd immunity argument.

You're doing it to stay out of the hospital. That helps you and helps society.

The biggest fuckup in this whole thing was everyone getting their hopes up that the vaccines would end the pandemic via controlling transmission.

That is all your largely all you alls fault though.

At the end of 2020 it was looking increasingly likely that it was going to be endemic with the Alpha variant having been found, the related coronavirus 229E having been found to evolve antigenically, and Fauci was setting expectations that the vaccines would only be about 50% effective in preventing transmission.

For example August 7, 2020:

https://nypost.com/2020/08/07/fauci-says-covid-19-vaccine-ma...

> Fauci says COVID-19 vaccine may only be 50 percent effective

> The odds of a coronavirus vaccine being highly effective are low, Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Friday — and getting people to take it might not be easy, either.

The problem is that the initial VE results before any waning of neutralizing antibodies had happened and before any variants were way too optimistic and the results were not durable.

But we're still at >90% protection against severe disease and hospitalization along with long COVID and other issues -- turning Omicron into a cold virus for the triple-vaxxed, which was always the point if anyone actually listened to experts and not the news media.

Another heads up, fully vaccinated as well but Delta reseted my smell and taste.

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