Encouraging natural immunity is asking for hospitals to get filled up by people giving themselves covid on purpose. This affects non covid patients too.
I suspect that's why the media doesn't do it.
I suspect that's why the media doesn't do it.
The comment that I replied to was explaining how the segment of the population that is a candidate for giving themselves covid while being high risk is (and has been) shrinking out of existence.
Meanwhile, there is a much larger (and growing) cohort that continues to be harrased if they (fairly) decide they don't need these vaccines, and the harrasment is justified by claims like yours.
Even the CDC has finally come around and published data along these lines (despite numerous studies suggesting the same starting from early last year). But after bullshitting people for so long, I guess we just have to expect there will be a ton of inertia behind the idea that every human needs these vaccines, no matter what.
Once that point is made, the discouraging natural immunity argument can stop because hospitals can't overfill anymore.
However until that point can be made[0] I think the "don't encourage natural immunity" position will prevent the most deaths.
By the way, I also don't condone harassment of unvaccinated people or vaccination as a requirement for employment etc either. Those are separate issues to me.
[0]: I tried looking for it but CDC data is only sept 2021 and estimated only 146M infections https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I was using an estimate of 120m instead of the 146 that you quoted. And I'm just a dummy on the internet, so I'm probably at least a little wrong. But the gist was that if you could jab everyone tomorrow (which you can't), you might get a little bit of a benefit in the stats, but politically you'd be dead
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29914681
There's no reason hospitals can't still fill up anyway if you have enough volume.
EDIT: I should mention that I really appreciate what you said above:
> By the way, I also don't condone harassment of unvaccinated people or vaccination as a requirement for employment etc either. Those are separate issues to me.
I'd like to think the govt is hoping that each time restrictions are loosed, some type of immunity has developed and restrictionz can be loosed more. When things seem to get worse and worse again, the restrictions are added to ensure hospitals can work.
At the end of the day, a large decrease in severity will be the deciding factor. We can try to model when that will happen, but it will have to actually happen regardless of what the models say.
I have no idea how they came up with the estimate, but the site is maintained by reputable institutions, so I am inclined to believe these numbers unless proven otherwise.
That way they have their freedom and hospital capacity isn’t put at risk. If the people refusing to get vaccinated are willing to shoulder the risk themselves I have no problems with it.
This is the point: the people who are refusing to be vaccinated that have recovered from a prior infection are not at a higher risk of severe outcomes than the folks who got vaccinated and didn't have a previous infection [0].
So maybe if your definition of "should be vaccinated" is narrow enough, then maybe you can justify some kind of priority order for treatment. That's not a topic I'm going anywhere near though.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
As an individual, it's really the numbers around the ratio of unvaccinated individuals in hospital / ICU consuming resources unnecessarily and therefore depleting them for the rest of us unnecessarily that's maddening. That plus the regrettable stories about people that are vocally anti-vax that end up dying from covid.
So for me it's like fine, freedom is important and you can choose to go against whatever recommendation you want. But at the same time you have to shoulder the consequences for it too. You can't have it both ways. Have the freedom to do whatever you want but also not bear the consequences of those actions.
I think I'm failing to make this clear enough. I'll try again.
The set of unvaccinated people is made up of those with a prior infection (call them R for recovered) and without (call them N for naive). And for simplicity, we'll keep the vaccinated variable to a binary, yes or no. So you have vaccinated with a prior infection (VR) and vaccinated without (VN).
When you say unvaccinated you are talking about R + N. We have data from the CDC that says R and VN were at roughly equivalent risk of hospitalizatiom during delta, and VR was a little bit better. N was by far the worst, and is who you actually mean when you talk about the people disproportionately filling up the hospitals. Because that's what the CDC is saying, that members of R, VR, and VN were all showing up in the hospitals at a similar much lower rate, and N was in a different universe.
You wouldn't know this unless you specifically asked yourself the question and went looking for the answer, because so far it has gotten very little air time. So it's not surprising that you and lots of other people are not aware. I'm only aware because I happen to be a member of R, and so this is important to me. It sucks living in a world where lots of people think its fine to lump me in with N, and advocate for taking away my livelihood and freedom of movement.
Saying "the unvaccinated are clogging up the hospitals" is like saying "I don't like Mexican food" when really you just don't like spicy peppers. You may avoid some burn that way, but now you're missing out on the rest of the cuisine, and you've failed to equip yourself with the knowledge to avoid the Indian or Thai dishes that will destroy you (because you think it's just the Mexican part that matters, not the spicy ingredients).
Does that make sense?
Unfortunately some of the R set ("some" is also fuzzy, I don't know how much but by this point I'm guessing high proportion), were in the N set and just didn't need to go to the hospital. So the mentality and risk factor prior to move from N to R is the same. There is no deterministic way (except moving to VN first) to mitigate that risk ahead of time.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.03.21268111v...
The big question, of course, is timing — if you had a mild case in 2020, you're unlikely to do as well as someone who got their second dose a couple months ago.
I think you're absolutely right, which is why I'm here banging this drum. People should care about the distinction, because it matters if you want to actually understand the situation.
Certain groups are overrepresented in the prison system in the US. Some people think this means that all members of those groups are bad people. The people who think this are poorly informed, and can only get in the way of solving the actual problems.
And no, I'm not equating the treatment of unvaccinated people to that of minorities in the US. I am equating the structure of the misunderstanding involved (disadvantaged minority + other problems describes a lot of prisoners, but its the other problems that dominate the equation. Just like unvaccinated + seronaive can describe a hospitalized patient, but the seronaive part is what matters).
I tried to explain this better in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096072
What we do know, thanks to a mountain of unambiguous data, is that people who have had vaccine shots go to the hospital way, way, way less often than those who have not. Which means vaccines prevent other people from suffering bad health outcomes due to lack of healthcare resources. It is a win for everyone.
The CDC looked at how people fared with delta with a previous diagnosis by March 2021, so presumably anywhere from when pcr and antigen tests started up until March. There is no breakdown of previous variants in this study, its just if you had a previous infection, you were protected.
I know, this doesn't sound like anything you've heard yet. They still manage to slip in a recommendation that "all eligible persons should be up to date with COVID-19 vaccination", but the data doesn't support that.
> Four cohorts of persons aged ≥18 years were assembled via linkages of records from electronic laboratory reporting databases and state-specific immunization information systems.† Persons were classified based on whether they had had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection by March 1, 2021 (i.e., previous COVID-19 diagnosis)§; had received at least the primary COVID-19 vaccination series¶ by May 16, 2021; had a previous COVID-19 diagnosis and were fully vaccinated*; or had neither received a previous COVID-19 diagnosis by March 1 nor received a first COVID-19 vaccine dose by the end of the analysis period.
> By the week beginning October 3, compared with COVID-19 cases rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, case rates among vaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis were 6.2-fold (California) and 4.5-fold (New York) lower; rates were substantially lower among both groups with previous COVID-19 diagnoses, including 29.0-fold (California) and 14.7-fold lower (New York) among unvaccinated persons with a previous diagnosis, and 32.5-fold (California) and 19.8-fold lower (New York) among vaccinated persons with a previous diagnosis of COVID-19. During the same period, compared with hospitalization rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalization rates in California followed a similar pattern. These results demonstrate that vaccination protects against COVID-19 and related hospitalization, and that surviving a previous infection protects against a reinfection and related hospitalization. Importantly, infection-derived protection was higher after the Delta variant became predominant, a time when vaccine-induced immunity for many persons declined because of immune evasion and immunologic waning (2,5,6).
So uh, what is that.... 0.01% of the entire population? Less? Yes, some people will cheat the system but people cheat all systems all the time. That's just life.
Most people will do the right thing. We cannot build a society around 0.01% of us who cheat.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/moral-majority-media-strikes-a...
https://globalnews.ca/news/8524409/hana-horka-czech-singer-c...
https://cbs12.com/news/local/new-covid-variant-detected-in-a...
> "Omicron is acting like a super booster," Unnasch said. "People who have gotten omicron are going to be really well protected against infection, not just disease moving forward, which is a really good sign."
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2557/
It was a while ago that the CDC estimated recovered COVID numbers to bre around 146 million. It is more like over 200 million at this point with overlap of vaccinated people.
I am sick of being ignored of having recovered, and people making the excuse that if they let us know how good natural immunity is, or even talk about it, the idiots will go out and get COVID. I don't want a nanny state, or police state for that matter. The WHO and a lot of the world are at odds with the CDC especially on masking and boosting of under 12 year-olds.
Besides boosting one after the other may be weakening the immune system [1]. It makes sense. It raises antibodies, but wanes quickly. Natural immunity lives in B- and T-cell long-term memory of the immune system. SARS-COV1 recovered are still testing strong for immunity for over 18 years now.
I am getting repetitive, but let's address obesity, diabetes, poor lifestyle choices, and their kind before mandating anyone's personal health choices or shaming them for their decisions. If I call out obesity it is fat shaming..., but go ahead and lump the recovered in with the unvaccinated and try and shame and steer the course of our lives with mandates and policing.
[1] https://newsrescue.com/covid-boosters-could-weaken-immune-sy...
And since I first posted the CDC released a study that shows natural immunity is better than vaccination. Not surprised since vaccination went from 95% efficacy, and you will not catch or transmit COVID (very early on); to well, it's like 78% effective after a few months, and you can catch a mild case of COVID; to it drops below 50% after 3 to 5 months (vaccines cannot be FDA approved if they show less than 50% effectiveness), and you will need a booster, and you can be infected and infect others.
And we can debate mask-wearing, but there are no substantive studies on the issue, and if naturally immune and the vaccinated are protected (probably greater than 90% of the population by now), why masks? Not to even drag in having all of our children masked 8 hours/day, while the rest of us are able to limit our mask-wearing even though 12 and under are the least at risk for anything serious from COVID.
there's no interest in talking about actual treatments or a $1 early treatment remedy [1], like every other disease. There's nothing that's patentable and profitable, so the focus is on vaccinations, which increasingly show more infections
The US DoD maintains detailed military personnel data to protect national security. Their health care surveillance data shows everything from neurological issues impacting US airforce pilots to 300% increase in miscarriages and cancer. The data is being scrubbed and military whistleblowers are trying to fight to bring it to public attention.
It's like Snowden, but from the healthcare department of the US military. [2]
1 - https://c19early.com -- w/ peer reviewed data sources
2-https://twitter.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1485695818996854788