Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonzini | Hacker News Reader

> why are they so adamant to vaccinate those with prior infection

Because the data shows they don't matter.

This is the same thing as deaths due to covid vs. deaths while positive to covid. Sure some people might have been miscounted as covid deaths but actually died due to cancer/car accident/whatever. Despite this the excess deaths over the past two years is much higher than the number of covid deaths; thus showing that miscounts must be a small minority which, in any case, is absolutely dwarfed by excess deaths not counted as covid deaths. It might even grow a little as testing improves but it still remains mostly irrelevant.

Likewise it may be that some people do not need a vaccination. However, we have a 30/70 split in number of covid hospitalizations, with 30 being vaccinated people, in countries where the split in the normal population is 90/10. This means that despite some unvaccinated people having had prior infection the vaccine reduces hospitalizations by 20x. Given this data the most effective strategy is to just vaccinate everyone without what is effectively a pointless distinction.

As the number of unvaccinated but protected people will grow (through a combination of more infections, more vaccinations and more deaths), the proportion above will revert to 90/10 and unvaccinated people will not be an issue anymore. For now however analyzing the proportion of naturally immune people among the unvaccinated is, again, mostly irrelevant.

View on HN

> Because the data shows they don't matter.

Source? Because the CDC says otherwise.

> In the first full week of October, vaccinated New Yorkers with a prior Covid-19 case were 19.8 times less likely to catch the virus than their unvaccinated and uninfected peers, whereas people who were unvaccinated but previously infected were 14.7 times less likely, and vaccinated but uninfected New Yorkers were just 4.5 times less likely.

In other words, natural immunity alone can be up to 5X more protective than the vaccine alone, according to the CDC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2022/01/19/cdc-prior-c...

The person you are replying to is talking about hospitalizations for severe ilness. The study you are quoting is talking about covid infections in general. These two are not the same and the vaccine protects from the former (severe illness and death).

No, he's also talking about severe illness and death. He's saying that prior infection is a good substitute for the vaccine in preventing severe illness and death. The corollary being that we should consider "vaxed or prior infection" and "immunologically naive" as the two relevant groups (for mandates etc), not "vaxed" and "unvaxed".

Prior infection is a good substitute for the vaccine because the ones that die from that "prior infection" aren't going to be in the statistic that shows how effective a prior infection is compared to a vaccine for a subsequent covid infections

You're responding to the wrong comment. I'm clarifying what the other commenter said, not championing his point.

That being said, your comment still doesn't make any sense. The people who would be substituting prior infection for a vaxpass would not be the dead ones, because dead people are not known for going to comedy shows, bars, or restaurants.

Ie, the claim is that "conditioned on being infected [and alive], a vaccine is superfluous". The [and alive] that you clarified is about as helpful as "and non-fictional"

Here is the actual study: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...

Importantly it doesn’t account for the effect of boosters and looks at pre-omicron data.

That noted the best protection seems to be had by a combination of vaccination and prior infection, which is perhaps unsurprising.

Also other CDC studies suggest that natural immunity declines quicker than vaccine induced immunity (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm?s_cid=mm...).

Given these results it would seem like generally a good idea to get vaccinated, even if you have had prior infection.

> Importantly it doesn’t account for the effect of boosters and looks at pre-omicron data.

Don't just read the summary. Look at figure 1:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm#F1_down

There are unvaccinated, uninfected people...and then there is everyone else. Once you have been infected or vaccinated, the difference between is so small as to be academic. And as the authors note, the importance of natural infection increased over time, as the virus escaped the vaccines:

"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."

To your other claim:

> other CDC studies suggest that natural immunity declines quicker than vaccine induced immunity

No. That's not what that study said. First, it followed symptomatic infection, not severe illness. As we're seeing now, Omicron pretty handily bypasses vaccine-induced immunity to cause minor illness.

Also, methodologically, the study you're citing was bad. It only gave credit for natural immunity to those people with confirmed infections, which was/is an underestimate, and made vaccines look more effective than they are. A substantial fraction of the "only vaccinated" group almost certainly had undiagnosed covid infection.

> There are unvaccinated, uninfected people...and then there is everyone else.

This is shifting the goal. The disclaimers I cited come directly from the study and are highly relevant when comparing the effect of natural immunity vs vaccination.

> No. That's not what that study said. First, it followed symptomatic infection, not severe illness.

This doesn’t contradict what I said. The study gives evidence that natural immunity (to symptomatic infection) declines more quickly than vaccine induced immunity.

> Also, methodologically, the study you're citing was bad. It only gave credit for natural immunity to those people with confirmed infections, which was/is an underestimate, and made vaccines look more effective than they are.

One, the same effect would also have been present in the natural immunity group, as people may have been reinfected since their initial confirmed infection.

Two, this is largely irrelevant to the point I was making.

The statistical evidence suggests that even if you have had a previous confirmed infection, you’re still better off getting vaccinated.

>The statistical evidence suggests that even if you have had a previous confirmed infection, you’re still better off getting vaccinated.

Sure. And you'll continue to be better protected every time you get a booster, every 6 months, for the rest of your life. But all of us are going to stop getting boosters at some point. We're going to decide we're "immune enough", and go on with our lives, even though there will be some minute chance of getting Covid, from whichever variant is then around.

Many people with prior infection may feel they are "immune enough", and you can argue over the significance of the remaining risk, but ultimately that's a decision they make for themselves, just as all of us do in every facet of our lives every day.

Regardless of the minutia of the numbers, the recommendation to get vaccinated regardless of whether you have had COVID in the past or not is based on the fact that a very high number of people in the US and worldwide "think" they probably had covid but aren't entirely sure because they never got tested. The vaccine for everyone is easier and cheaper from a public health standpoint than to have people taking serology tests that may or may not be accurate and then waiting for the results in order to find out if you should get the vaccine or not. When the fact is, even if you were previously infected, you will be even better off getting vaccinated.

Apparently a lot of people without prior infection or the vaccine feel they are immune enough. And they are the ones clogging the ICU beds and otherwise taxing our health care system. I think "immune enough" in some cases, like a pandemic or potential pandemic, has to be decided from a public health standpoint and not on an individual basis.

> This is shifting the goal. The disclaimers I cited come directly from the study and are highly relevant when comparing the effect of natural immunity vs vaccination.

No, it isn't. It's clarifying that there's a great big forest here, lest we get lost in the details of the spots on the bark beetles in one particular tree. The immunity granted by prior infection is at least on par with that of vaccination.

Moreover, I quoted directly from the study to explain why short-term squiggles in the lines at the bottom of the graph aren't worth dwelling upon: the vaccines are getting worse over time (against symptomatic infection), and the effect of natural immunity is gaining importance. This is exactly as you would expect for a virus that has evolved to partially escape the vaccine.

Regardless, these are minor differences. You can't reasonably argue that vaccination has a definitive advantage over natural infection. We should be counting both.

From a recent editorial from a Johns Hopkins professor addressing the CDC trying to whitewash their own failings in the study:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-cost-of-disparaging-na...

"Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization."

"Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant."

Classic NIH: Say there isn't enough data when challenged on a policy, then deliberately not study it. They did this for DECADES with cannabis.

I don't think your math is correct there and that data is pre-Omicron.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/omicron-largely-evade... estimates that prior infection offered 85% protection against Delta but only 19% against Omicron.

The vaccines also offer very little protection against infection by Omicron, and less with the B.2 variant.

Definitely not saying vaccines aren't important - they keep you out of hospital! But they don't prevent infection post Delta.

I don’t know why you think this. Covid cases — people merely testing positive — are overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated in every state. Vaccine cuts your risk by 3x to 5x depending where you look.

Look at this chart: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...

If you read to the bottom of the previous study I posted they addressed vaccine effectiveness too based on UK data. They work! Just make sure to get your booster.

> It cuts your risk by 3x to 5x depending where you look.

In other words, it's 70-80% effective, which is pretty poor performance for a vaccine. So, can we please get an update that encodes the Omicron spike instead of trying to boost antibodies for a virus that's now extinct?

They’re working on it. But the original target effectiveness during vaccine development was 75%. We got lucky it was so much better against earlier strains. It’s still pretty good — about the same as an average year’s flu shot.

It’s a far cry from the apparently very popular myth that the vaccines no longer work at all.

The flu shots are some of the least effective vaccines out there.

The original target effectiveness was set low because anything to nudge the R value down was better than nothing.

We now know that we can do much better.

Flu shots are about 40% effective.

What would be interesting, would be to see flu shot efficiency and COVID shot efficiency over time.

Preferably including Omicron data as well.

Quick question, if I forced you to stand in a groin-kicking machine that will:

A) Once in every.. I dunno, 200 times (0.5%) it kicks you so hard that, without protection you're 100% going to die

B) Once every 10 times (10%) it kicks you so hard you're sent to the hospital

C) Just to spitball, let's say 3 out of 10 times it will kick you hard enough that you're out of commission for a couple days but able to recover without hospitalization

D) 3 out of 10 times it will lightly kick you where you hurt a bit but it's just a minor inconvenience

E) The rest of the time it will let you leave without being kicked.

Ok, so you're strapped into this machine. Now, before I turn it on, I offer you a cup (protection). 70%-80% of the time this cup will offer you complete protection against whatever the machine throws at you. But remember that it's still 100% effective when the machine does nothing, so we only need to look at the 70.5% of the time the machine will actually kick you.

So with 70%-80% protection call it 75% effective, we drop our percentages for each scenario:

A) 0.5% -> 0.125% B) 10% -> 2.5% C) 30% -> 7.5% D) 30% -> 7.5%

This is just doing the simple math. The vaccines drastically lower the chance of severe COVID compared to no vaccine at a higher rate than their overall effectiveness.

So again, you going in there wearing the cup or no? Because that's the choice you have when it comes to getting vaccinated.

Pfizer is planning to release an "Omicron + previous variants" version of their vaccine in March. I guess even with the accelerated approval scheme it takes some time. Then we will wait for the manufacturing.

There is also the "what will happen to the previous batches" question as no one will be willing to get the old vaccine.

I think what they are suggesting is that natural immunity + vaccine is also more protective than just natural immunity

But natural immunity doesn't work if you die or end up having severe loss of health, so vaccine + natural immunity would be best way.

CDC said last October that 146 million people (~40%) in the US have already recovered from Covid.

There are also interventions other than vaccines, e.g. early treatment, https://c19early.com

yes, vaccine + natural immunity gives you super immunity by a large factor, they also found that it doesn't matter if you get the virus, then get vaccinated, or get vaccinated then get the virus, you'll end up with super immunity.

Super immunity is not a scientific concept, it would be nice to have some numbers or studies to show the difference.

Natural immunity as a personal choice should have been possible. But that has not been an option, for someone who wants to be part of society.

There is a behavioral component.

Is that because people who have caught it are more likely to take precautions against catching it again?

Those who were vaccinated but previously uninfected may have had a “it can’t happen to me and if it does, I’m vaccinated” attitude.

I’d expect unvaccinated people to be in the bucket with covid deniers and anti-maskers, which would have the highest base rate of COVID.

I doubt it. I caught it in Aug/September during the delta wave and am way less careful now than I was before. Not saying this is true or advocating a position here, but I feel like the pandemic is over for me, I don't have to worry about any current variants, etc. The people I talk to who have also developed natural immunity have the same sort of feeling.

Meanwhile… my sister and her daughter had a Covid sandwich: caught it in summer 2020, got vaccinated as soon as feasible, then caught it again a few days ago.

Anecdotally, my sister is one of those people who “catches everything” so I can’t say I’m surprised, but clearly there is no such thing as absolute sterilizing immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) for this particular coronavirus.

It's not specific to this one, it's true of all coronaviruses.

This article explains why it's so hard to make a vaccine for coronaviruses:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-17/coronavirus-va...

Of course, this was written a few weeks before "Project Warp Speed" when everyone and their dog announced that had found a vaccine for this brand new coronavirus.

You are confusing the effect on individual people with the effect on the whole community. I do not debate the effect of natural immunity on individuals who have had COVID in the past, but it is not widespread enough to cause a dent in the infection or to alleviate the stress on the healthcare system.

The effect exists but the data shows it does not matter.

> The effect exists but the data shows it does not matter.

You may have been right at a time where almost nobody had a previous infection. However, estimates by reputable sources https://covidestim.org/us show that a large percentage of people have been infected by covid at least once. The data are by state, I see ~75% for MA, 80% for CA and NY, and you can pick your favorite state.

At this point it is more correct to say that the vaccine does not matter, and immunity by prior infection is the dominant effect. Either that, or the Yale school of public health, the Harvard school of public health, and the Stanford Medicine institutes who run the covidestim.org site are full of shit.

If the vaccine does not matter, why do we still see such a prevalence of unvaccinated people among patients Who required hospitalization?

Because many of these are older individuals with contraindication. The elderly with unknown vaccine status. The homeless. People in nursing homes trying to live out the last years of their life without the discomfort of vaccine side effects.

Not age adjusting the vaccinated and unvaccinated cohort is disingenuous. Not breaking out ‘unknown’ vaccine status — which only becomes relevant for the stats after death - is disingenuous.

You are reading propaganda, and reading it uncritically.

The elderly (more susceptible) are overwhelmingly more vaccinated than the younger, not less.

Medical records are not well distributed. In most of these statistics, unknown vaccine status is considered to be the same bucket as unvaccinated. My hypothesis is that most of this group is either elderly or homeless.

Similarly, there is a selection problem for the elderly who choose to remain unvaccinated. You're saying that they think vaccines are ineffective -- and this is definitely a cohort of people! But there is a separate cohort of people, who are more likely to be hospitalized, who know they have severe existing health problems.

Some anecdotes:

I got COVID before there were vaccines and I've received all three shots. While all of my friends caught Omicron, I have not - and I'm the only one among them who got sick beforehand. On the other hand, I have an unvaccinated coworker who has now gotten Delta and Omicron. I know that doesn't prove anything, but it also doesn't make these studies I see any more illuminating either.

As an aside, I'm not even sure I want things to go back to "normal" other than lifted travel restrictions and the anger/frustration/callout culture to go away. Restaurants taking over the streets, working from home, less cars, etc have all been a boon for the way I live my life.

> However, we have a 30/70 split in number of covid hospitalizations, with 30 being vaccinated people, in countries where the split in the normal population is 90/10. This means that despite some unvaccinated people having had prior infection the vaccine reduces hospitalizations by 20x. Given this data the most effective strategy is to just vaccinate everyone without what is effectively a pointless distinction

No. This is wrong. As the parent noted, the CDC's own data shows that prior infection provides robust protection against severe disease. Both without vaccination:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm#F1_down

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm

As well as a substantial additional benefit after vaccination:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm

> Previous COVID-19 illness was associated with reduced odds of severe outcomes (aOR = 0.27; 95% CI = 0.09–0.84).

Moreover, the CDC estimates that over 150M people in the US (out of a country of 330M) have had Covid:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

That's 45% of the US population (before Omicron). There's no rational way to characterize this as insignificant.

I did not say that prior infection does not reduce severe outcome. It does but _it does not change the fact_ that the severe outcomes are much more rare among vaccinated people. This means that there are still too few people with prior infection, for this to be an important factor in policy making. It will be once the proportion of unvaccinated people in hospitals starts to resemble the proportion in the general population.

You said:

> Given this data the most effective strategy is to just vaccinate everyone without what is effectively a pointless distinction

The data clearly shows that protection from natural infection is at least as substantial as from vaccination, and that ~half (if not more) of the US population has had it. This fairly obviously impacts the most effective strategy. Mandating vaccines (and now boosters) in young, healthy people who were already at small risk, including those who have already had the virus, is so absurd that I can't even characterize it as science. It is simply punitive behavior.

Most countries recognize prior infection. We're in a small, small club of scientifically illiterate nations here, and it's rather embarrassing.

> It will be once the proportion of unvaccinated people in hospitals starts to resemble the proportion in the general population.

If the total number of hospitalizations is a manageable number, the percentage that are vaccinated is irrelevant. It's a metric of punishment, not a realistic policy goal. I have no idea what the future will bring with regard to the ratio of unvaccinated hospitalizations, but I know that hospitalizations in general will fall as the population achieves broad immunity -- and natural infection certainly counts toward that goal.

> Mandating vaccines (and now boosters) in young, healthy people who were already at small risk, including those who have already had the virus, is so absurd that I can't even characterize it as science. It is simply punitive behavior.

The idea that a vaccine is a punishment is disturbing. I'm glad to have been able to get it.

I said the mandate is punitive, not the vaccine.

If you feel more comfortable getting an unnecessary vaccination, nobody is stopping you. Other people should not be coerced into doing the same against their will.

College kids are currently being expelled for refusing boosters. Children are being refused classroom education. Prior infection is not taken into account, and risk/benefit is not a factor. There's no other way to frame this than as coercive behavior.

College kids were already required to get multiple vaccines to attend and I remember being lined up to take the swine flu nasal spray with no say in the matter if I was going to continue education.

> There's no other way to frame this than as coercive behavior

We coerce people constantly when they have bad behavior that affects society and others. I don’t know why people keep trotting out mandates as having aspects of coercion/authoritarianism is a mic drop moment explaining why they are bad. How is this worse than all the other health based coercion we’ve had?

I think their point is that the data shows that previous infection provides good protection. If the goal is protection, then this should count for something, and should be factored in to the risk-benefit ratio. The risk-benefit ratio is not negligible for young, which is why the vaccine still hasn't been approved for the very young (and there's certainly not a step function in the risk-benefit ratio, by age). But, the risk-benefit ratio calculations being used don't seem to be including previous infection. This is not necessarily scientific.

For the other-than-COVID vaccines that are required for enrollment, there isn't existing protection in the majority of the population. Nobody has natural, effective, protection against measles.

I think the practical problem/reason is that there's infrastructure set up to track and share vaccination/booster status. There's no infrastructure set up to track, or even test, immunity status, which is the real metric of risk. So, for practical reasons, proof of vaccination status will always be favored and, almost certainly, held above the true, yet difficult to measure, immunity status, to drive policies. This is an easy out, that might cause harm, relative to an "ideal" policies that were based on immunity.

> College kids were already required to get multiple vaccines to attend and I remember being lined up to take the swine flu nasal spray with no say in the matter if I was going to continue education.

Saying it's happened in the past isn't an argument that it should continue in the future. I doubt your swine flu nasal spray had as intense of negative side effects as the COVID second shot and booster tend to in the young and healthy. Now that we're in booster territory and Delta is being phased out the shots are almost certainly more painful than the disease for some portion of the population.

> How is this worse than all the other health based coercion we’ve had?

I can't recall any other health based requirement for attending an event or restaurant. I also don't understand why people continue to harp on how a personal COVID vaccination decision "affects society and others" at this point. The vaccine only marginally prevents infection at this stage, and the primary benefit of reduced severity should stop everyone who's vaccinated from worrying about what others around them may be doing. I get the flu shot so I don't get the flu, and I'm not sitting around telling others who haven't that they're putting me in danger.

When I worked in DoD intel in the past, I had to travel to multiple nations with extremely high rates of dangerous tropical disease. I took multiple vaccines for this purpose. At no point do I ever recall worrying about whether the local populations I was dealing with were vaccinated at all. Because that's how vaccines work. They make it so you don't have to worry about others not being vaccinated or giving you the disease. With diseases that are highly dangerous to children, this is a different case, because you can't vaccinate children when they're extremely young and therefore a person not being vaccinated can transmit the virus to them. With COVID it is the absolute opposite. Small children are at minuscule risk and are actually far more at risk from influenza due to the dynamics of the virus. This risk age gradient is actually unprecedented and a unique feature of COVID.

What's really happening here is people who have considered themselves progressive and tolerant their entire lives have decided that they want to impose policies that are tyrannical, but they have to desperately backfill this logic to make it feel okay. They aren't willing to let any form of data disrupt this because if they did, they would have to admit to themselves that they had a tyrannical impulse in the first place.

Notice how when he got the swine flu nasal spray he wasn't demanding that everyone else in every public place he went to also get it. Nothing about this makes sense unless you view it as people trying to psychologically justify tyrannical impulses.

> When I worked in DoD intel in the past, I had to travel to multiple nations with extremely high rates of dangerous tropical disease. I took multiple vaccines for this purpose. At no point do I ever recall worrying about whether the local populations I was dealing with were vaccinated at all.

Yeah the tropical diseases are an interesting parallel for me too. In a place where malaria or dengue are prevalent I don’t blame others for being vectors of the disease, I assess my own risk and behave accordingly. And the mere fact that they’re spread via mosquitoes instead of air/surfaces doesn’t change the necessity of congregating people to spread. But these diseases are not universally dangerous, so people should not be universally pressured to take any measure to avoid them.

I’m not sure I fully agree with the tyrannical impulse premise, but I’d subscribe more readily to a tribal “badge of honor” premise, which in this (and indeed most cases) happens to be tyrannical. I think generally the masses don’t intend tyranny, rather they virtue signal to coerce and thus become tyrannical as a result.

Marginal reduction in transmission can mean the difference in ending a pandemic or dragging it out for another year or two. There is a big difference in an R value of R1 and R0.9

And you probably don't remember ever being required to show vaccination status to get into a stadium or restaurant in your lifetime because you hadn't previously lived through a pandemic.

> Marginal reduction in transmission can mean the difference in ending a pandemic or dragging it out for another year or two.

Sure, it’s great that we have the vaccines to do so. We should be focusing on making them available to everyone on earth rather than forcing them down the throats of those who don’t want them to get to the fastest “end.”

> And you probably don't remember ever being required to show vaccination status to get into a stadium or restaurant in your lifetime because you hadn't previously lived through a pandemic.

Fair enough. My reply was in response to a status quo argument, but indeed this pandemic hasn’t been just that. In which case I think you have to assess the dangers to those who have been vaccinated, which is not much. Indeed with omicron the risk isn’t very high for a large portion of the population vaccinated or not. And the vaccines are available to anyone who wants to reduce their risk, thus the mandates make little sense.

There is a pre—existing vaccination mandate for enrollment at colleges in the US.

All the vaccines mandated by colleges have been around for decades. It’s not “just another vaccine” to add to the list; there is a difference.

Which brings it all back to a lack of trust in the vaccine/science. The current science is that the vaccines are safe and provide a greater degree of protection than prior infection alone. Outside of some very rare conditions that would make someone unfit for a vaccine, there's no reason not to get vaccinated. Refusing to get one only increases your chances of ending up in a hospital and for what? There's no advantage to giving yourself a disadvantage no matter how small you think the benefit a free vaccine would give you over the protection a natural infection has already given you.

Your logic here is flawed. Even if you've already had covid, the vaccine will give you more protection. That's good. We can't do the reverse (give deliberate natural immunity to those who are already infected), but that's no reason to say that natural immunity is "good enough." That goes for the individual as well as society. Would you decline airbags because seatbelts as effective?

I think you're hitting a strawman here.

Are any number of vaccine shots "good enough"? Or, should we be getting one every month to get as much protection as possible?

There's a line to be drawn somewhere, and I think what's argued here is that natural immunity should count for something, instead of being lumped into the same group as those "unvaccinated and no prior infection".

> Even if you've already had covid, the vaccine will give you more protection.

And more risk. Which is greater?

Your ~half estimate is more like 70-80% these days. See https://covidestim.org/us

(This makes your case stronger, of course.)

Absolutely. I'm being intentionally conservative here.

The severe outcomes are even more rare amongst prior-infected, unvaccinated people.

I suggest you look up seroprevalence surveys. The bulk of COVID infections (barring mandatory and regular testing being extant in a given locality) go undetected, due to the mild symptoms in the vast majority of the population. The seroprevalence surveys have shown this since May 2020.

And again I do not debate that. But they are too few to have an impact on the overall statistics of unvaccinated people. It they were not such a small minority, you would not be seeing so many more severe outcomes among the unvaccinated.

See https://covidestim.org/us for an update to your "too few" statement. The number of previously infected people is at least 70% in all US states I have looked at (80% in NY and CA).

While not directly comparable, an official report from the UK [1, Figure 3] estimated that effectively 100% of blood donors were either vaccinated, previously infected, or both. This was in September. Blood donors are not a representative sample of the population, but it's not hard to believe that by now effectively everybody (in the UK) has some kind of immunity.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

It 70-80% has been infected, then most of the vaccinated population will be vaccinated and infected, which provides still stronger protection than just infections.

The end result is the same: higher proportion of severe illness among the unvaccinated, which is most easily fixed by vaccinating them.

> higher proportion of severe illness among the unvaccinated

No, among the unvaccinated and uninfected, which, as the data others have been giving shows, is nowhere near even a majority of the unvaccinated any more, let alone enough of a majority to treat it as if it represented all unvaccinated people. So your claim that the unvaccinated but infected are too few to matter and should not affect vaccine recommendations, let alone vaccine mandates, is egregiously wrong.

Again, a category error:

You are failing to differentiate between the two subgroups of unvaccinated people, the previously infected/unvaccinated, and the purely unvaccinated. Additionally, you are not doing any further subdivision on these two groups by age. The blanket "one size fits all" strategy you are advocating is assuming that all of these groups are at zero risk for adverse events from the vaccine. Young, healthy males have a statistically zero risk of severe COVID complications, and a statistically small but non-zero risk of myocarditis. The risk of myocarditis from the vaccine falls to practically zero as you progress upwards up the age distribution, which is the exact group of people who have the highest benefit from the vaccine. You are talking about a gradient which impacts both the cost and the benefit, with a diminishing cost and an increasing benefit going up in age. Not taking this into account is so illogical, that in my opinion, people who hold this view are clearly blinded by bias.

If I'm going to get smeared as an "anti-vaxxer", I'm going to go ahead and use a label to describe humans who hold the rigid, data-resistant view that you possess:

Immunity deniers

> Young, healthy males have a statistically zero risk of severe COVID complications, and a statistically small but non-zero risk of myocarditis.

Now imagine having a healthy 7-year old son, and having an excruciatingly difficult conversation with your spouse about why he shouldn’t get vaccinated. Or having to cut off ties with your mother-in-law, preventing your children from seeing their grandmother, because she thinks you are actively harming your own young children by not getting vaccinated despite having natural immunity.

These people are destroying the very bonds of society.

My wife is from a family of fiercely independent Filipino immigrants. She's always been super levelheaded. I lucked out with her. Her late father was a chemist, and her uncles are all practicing physicians. They were all universally shocked when the push to vaccinate kids started. They know it's not dangerous to kids. They can't even talk about it without lapsing into angry rapid Tagalog. She was right there with them.

Here's a new editorial from a prof at Johns Hopkins:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-cost-of-disparaging-na...

Might be useful in those conversations on previous infection. And I agree regarding the social fabric being destroyed by these bureaucrats. They are going to slowly try to find a way to ease out of this in a manner that minimizes the damage to their reputations. That's what political elites have always done when their narratives crumble after they have dug in. See the utter absence of contrition or self reflection after the Iraq wmd fiasco for an example. Or Vietnam. They don't care how much damage they do in the process.

Regardless of how small the absolute risk, the risks of COVID are far higher than the risks of the vaccine, even for 7 year olds. So why are you choosing to die on that hill?

Regarding 7 year olds, you are grossly misinformed, but that's not your fault. The US Federal government is continuing in it's grand tradition of doubling down on bad science to save face of bureaucrats who made bad policy decisions. For previous examples, see the thousands of studies by NIH to justify cannabis prohibition, USDA food pyramid, dragging feet on leaded gasoline for decades, etc.

The rationale for vaccinating kids was to prevent them from spreading it. The vaccine did that effectively before Delta. With omicron, it's worthless for preventing spread. Kids are the one age group at higher risk from flu than covid.

My two kids (8 and 15) aren't vaxxed. They caught omicron, and now they are in the ICU... Oh wait,no they are fine, had almost zero symptoms, and were playing outside the day they tested positive. Which is, statistically, a virtual certainty. They aren't morbidly obese or immunocompromised, so they shrugged it off.

Nobody is dying on a hill. We're just better at statistics and aren't gullible enough to believe these panicked fools.

Put an experimental product from Big Pharma in your kid for no reason. That's your call. But ask yourself why you suddenly trust the FDA, an organization that labeled oxycontin non addictive, approved Vioxx, approved remdesivir for covid despite it being useless, and that's just the past 15 years. Fear is the mind killer indeed.

At this point, the vaccine is as experimental as getting COVID.

We have lots of data on both. Said data shows that 7 year olds are much more likely to have serious affects from COVID than from the vaccine. That's not to say serious outcomes from covid are at all likely. Just that the relative risk is lower with the vaccine.

To reiterate, the absolute risk is tiny, so it's really not a big deal. But if you truly understand statistics, then you will also see that everyone will be exposed to COVID and you are better off with the vaccine than without no matter the age cohort.

And the vaccine reduces transmission (less so than we had hoped, but a reduction, nonetheless), no one ever said it would 100% stop transmission.

I suppose taking an experimental vaccine seems unnecessary if you consider a wild virus to be natural, maybe even artisinal, and you ignore the fact that while the vaccine is quality controlled and the same as what billions of people have now received, and the virus is constantly mutating, well then I guess the virus sounds safer.

> Immunity deniers

Let's not do this. When this mess is over we'll all want to work and break bread together again, and that's much more important than whatever any of us happened to believe or say in the fog of war.

You're right, labeling people is a terrible thing to do.

I'm just at a breaking point now, after 2 years of having the most anxiety and risk-averse among us gleefully demonize, censor, and shame those of us with heterodox opinions. When you add to that the enthusiastic endorsement of forcing people like me to get a shot despite already having immunity solely to appease their paranoia, the bitterness has put me over the edge. Considering that it's the same crowd who has spent decades chanting "my body, my choice" and insisting that the government "never come between a person and their doctor", the hypocrisy adds to the outrage. I've been called a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the highly improbable chain of coincidences that made me doubt the narrative around the virus' origins, then had to watch as they all change their minds without an ounce of self-reflection or a single apology. On top of this, the national media has been completely, un-flinchingly on board with all of it, which is a distinguishing characteristic from the harassment and government intrusion upon LGBT folks championed by the political far right until the 2010s. They gave these anxiety driven tyrants full moral authority to violate my rights. I hope you can understand my bitterness.

The last thing I want to do is dehumanize others. For the crime of not wanting to get NEEDLESSLY injected with a rushed, experimental genetic technology whose trials were entirely run by pharmaceutical companies who have a long history of overstating benefits and hiding risks for their products, I've been ostracized, condemned, and coerced by the same people who insist on not eating GMO produce.

Enjoyed your posts and keep it coming.

Just finished a few trips to Latin America. Kissed the ground when I got back here to Florida, where kids goto school, don't wear masks, and don't have to be vaccinated. Here, we respect individual liberties. We respect the right to go out and earn a living and put food on the table and if we lock everything down, at least uncle sam sends out checks to hold us over for a while.

People are starving and dying in places like Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries in LA. Small business has been devastated by the un-ending lock downs.

Unemployment is rampant. People cannot put food on the table. Its crazy. The lack of empathy that local governments have in LA for a persons right to earn a living is unconscionable. Maybe its because the virus has hit hard the wealthy elite ruling class since they tend to be rich, fat, white, and old. I dunno. But they are all wanting to break in to America and would if they could.

That's really awful to hear regarding Latin America. How is Columbia doing? Do you have any insights there?

Lots of columbians here in miami trying to make ends meat. I've met one famous soap actress who cleans houses here ( in Fl) and also a successful psycologist who is waiting on tables because of the economic malaise caused by forced business closures.

Politics is a contact sport.

I completely agree with your comment and to help summarize why you are having to explain all of these things to these people, I suggest everyone on this thread read the following link to understand their error.

Dividing groups of people up without going deep enough into categorization creates contradictory conclusions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

My point is that it is NOT a pointless distinction, and there is a huge discrepancy between "unvaccinated - prior infection" and "unvaccinated - no infection" cohorts. Countries that track prior infection (there are a few) show this in their data, and if you separate them you will see the "unvaxxed - no infection" get worse and the other much better. If the subject matter were something less politically polarizing I'm suggesting this would be a split group in everyone's data.

The only people who make getting vaccinated a political matter are those who refuse to get vaccinated. If you look at the data (and not just the convenient headlines) “unvaccinated, prior infection” have a lot higher chance of reinfection and a lot higher chance of a severe outcome than vaccinated. Sure it is still better to be “unvaccinated, prior infection” vs “unvaccinated, no prior infection” but not the same order of magnitude as “vaccinated and boosted”.

Roughly speaking this is the difference between your risk of driving with no seat belt and no air bags (unvaccinated), no seat belt and no air bags but with a bicycle helmet (prior infection), seatbelt (vaccinated), and seatbelt and airbags (vaccinated and boosted).

> Roughly speaking this is the difference between your risk of driving with no seat belt and no air bags (unvaccinated), no seat belt and no air bags but with a bicycle helmet (prior infection), seatbelt (vaccinated), and seatbelt and airbags (vaccinated and boosted).

It's absolutely not the same delta there. Not even close. The relative risk and absolute risk are completely different in magnitude, and unvaccinated cohorts are concentrated in younger, healthier populations with a minimal level of risk.

The most distinguishing characteristic of COVID is it's age-risk gradient. There is LITERALLY a 1000X delta in IFR between the youngest and oldest demographics. The fact that the vaccine policies don't take this into account has resulted in the greatest erosion in trust of public health authorities in history. Your analogy doesn't even take this into account, which further demonstrates the shallow aspect of it.

> There is LITERALLY a 1000X delta in IFR between the youngest and oldest demographics.

This is the point that I can’t seem to express eloquently enough to overcome the nonstop torrent of poorly calibrated advice from the authorities. I don’t have time to pore over the data, but last time I checked the annualized death totals for children (17 and under) were approximately equal to the 2019 deaths from influenza for that age group. When the marginal benefit of vaccination gets that low, you do have to start asking whether the side effects are worth it—trading a 0.01% risk of myocarditis for a 2% risk of death is clearly worth it, but can you say the same when the risk of death is on the same order of magnitude as the side effects?

(edit: numbers are hand-wavy, not trying to make an authoritative point)

Vaccine side effects are less frequent and less severe that. Unvaccinated COVID side effects in all age cohorts. By a significant margin.

Myocarditis in particular is 8x more likely to occur with COVID vs the vaccine.

So, while an argument could be made that the risk of adverse reaction or death from COVID is too small to matter one way or the other in young people, it is not correct to say that the vaccine is more risky.

There is one exception I have seen in some data that myocarditis risk was roughly equal or slightly higher for young men of a specific age group who received the second dose of the moderna vaccine. But one could of course avoid that particular vaccine and still be better of vaccinated because that of course is only for myocarditis and the absolute risk is very tiny.

This article breaks it down, and references a newer, larger N Oxford study using data from the British NHS. Agreed on it being certain age cohorts. My dad would be a lunatic to not be vaxxed. But a 20 year old who is healthy?

https://ravarora.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-vaccine-indu...

I have not gone through that study or article in depth yet, but the thing that jumps out at me initially is that it is using seroprevelance data from Battacharia and I am yet to understand how he is so confident in his numbers. All of his surveys from my understanding rely on data gathered from people who came in looking to be tested. Which would obviously taint the randomness as people who think they might have had COVID are much more likely to take the time to come in and be tested.

Also, if his data is to be believed, then the protection offered by having had COVID in the past has been far overstated.

>died due to cancer/car accident

The WHO definition of a covid death means that they can only be counted as covid deaths if there's a clinical link between cause of death and covid.

Ergo, cancer and car accident victims with covid wouldn't be counted.

I suppose it depends on how your country defines it and if it follows WHO guidelines

Correct, that's why I characterized them as miscounts.

There are popular theories about thousands of such miscounts happening to get more money from the government, but it makes no sense for them to be more than a small minority of mistakes.

>There are popular theories about thousands of such miscounts happening to get more money from the government, but it makes no sense for them to be more than a small minority of mistakes.

Show me profit motive, and I'll show you an audit worth doing. If you've not parsed and checked that data, I'd recommend not passing judgement on it. The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Earlier in the pandemic many public health agencies over counted COVID-19 deaths by including everyone who had tested positive regardless of the actual cause of death. Most agencies have now corrected those numbers to better align with WHO and CDC guidelines so current metrics are generally more accurate. For example Santa Clara County had to adjust the death count down by 22%.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/santa-clara-countys-co...

> However, we have a 30/70 split in number of covid hospitalizations, with 30 being vaccinated people, in countries where the split in

Is that vaccinated? Fully-vaccinated? Or "up to date" (i.e., whatever round of boosters are being pushed)?

The point is, the narrative has pushed the importance of "the science". Yet so much is actually not consistent with science / scientific method at all. Ffs, they can't even get the definitions and language right.

These aren't occasional lapses. They're non-stop. I hear what you're saying. However, it still doesn't address the negligence. After two yrs it's not incompotence, is it? Still?

". Given this data the most effective strategy is to just vaccinate everyone without what is effectively a pointless distinction."

So...we don't need science. Just everyone bend over and do what the authorities say, when they say, and how they say it? That's it? Kids? New borns? And everyone else on the low side of risk? Just because?

You can't have your science and dismiss it too.

Saying that some people might have been miscounted is pushing an agenda that is not pro science I'd say.

In London this number has been as high as 40%, so it's highly relevant to present accurate numbers.

But the only place science has won is in producing a good vaccine, the rest has been a shit show of crazy decisions and a hunt for those who didn't want to get vaccinated right away.

I sincerely hope sanity returns.

Data has been showing 80/20 vaxed/non vaxed hospitalizations for this new variant. How does that change your worldview?

Isn't that highly subjective, however? Two people show up to the hospital feeling equally lousy, both test positive for Omicron. First guy says he's vaxxed and boosted, doc suggests he's fully protected, this is the worst of it, go home and rest up (which is exactly what a doctor told my father). Second guy says nope, I'm unvaxxed. Doc is probably going to admit this guy overnight for observation.

Multiply by tens of thousands, and you can project the effects on hospitalization stats, which aren't necessarily tied to the degree of illness.

Except that with your second example the hospital isn't going to admit the patient for simply "feeling lousy". So, no, the assertion that this is how that stat has become inflated is not the actual cause.

I think you are purposely attempting to divert from the main point. Consider "lousy" to be, say, a 102 fever, persistent cough, and inability to taste anything. And then both test positive, as I stated. The unvaxxed guy is likely to be admitted, at least for observation.

You're still not making any sense. The symptoms you describe wouldn't meet hospital admission criteria unless the patient had serious risk factors other than being unvaccinated. Hospital admission is primarily based on respiratory distress or blood oxygen saturation under 94%. A mild fever and cough can be managed on an outpatient basis. Ageusia is clinically irrelevant.

Perhaps, although that's assuming every doctor in every ER at every hospital in the country has the same minimum criteria. Somehow, I doubt that is the case.

What's your point? You might be able to find a few doctors who fail to follow the protocol but that has no measurable impact on the healthcare system.

It seems like you don't have any actual knowledge of how healthcare works in the real world and are just making things up.

Point is doctors are not robots, they enjoy a significant amount of autonomy, and I still believe that all other things being equal, many doctors are more likely to admit an unvaxxed Covid-positive patient than a vaxxed Covid-positive, because they believe that the unvaxxed patient has a higher risk of more serious symptoms.

So you have a belief, but no actual data or even anecdotes to back it up.

Nearly half of Omicron admissions released a day later. Did they magically recover overnight, or were they admitted with mild symptoms in the first place, just as a precautionary measure?

Early data from France suggests omicron patients leave hospital far more quickly - including 43 per cent in less than a day

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

(at Kaiser Permanente Southern California) Among 154 Omicron variant-infected patients who completed hospitalization by January 1, 2022, 129 (83.8%) were discharged in ≤2 days

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...

If that was the case the doctors would see that the vaxed getting admited would have a higher death rate than the unvaxed as they would only admit those most likely to die from that group. If they did have a higher death rate then the stats and the doctors experience would reflect that and so the doctors would not heavily select for the unvaxxed. Though there is the possibility in your hypothetical that even the vaxxed with worse symptoms on average than the admitted unvaxed have a better chance of survival than a less symptomatic (when admitted) unvaxxed but if that's the case it pretty much shows the doctor are behaving correctly in a 'bias' of admitting unvaxxed.

The fact that "lousy" is subjective in the examples given, and is being leveraged to make your point however you see fit, at least to me, discredits the point you're attempting to make.

Source? That might mean we’re approaching herd immunity and critical mass for vaccinated people in the population, which would be fantastic.

https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data#casesByVaccinationStatus

8% of the population in the paper are not vaccinated.

27% of hospitalizations are not vaccinated.

~50% of ICU cases are not vaccinated.

The conclusion is that people are bad at understanding statistics.

The labeling for the data is tricky. If you don't actually dive in you will miss it.

8% are not vaccinated at all.

27% are not vaccinated, partially vaccinated or unknown status

50% of the ICU cases are not vaccinated, partially vaccinated or unknown status.

It is good to understand that 1/2 of the people who come into the ICU are reported as unknown vaccine status by default because they can't speak or fill out paperwork.

I use to produce these reports for this government and the ones before for years . Presenting facts a certain way is what happens and reports get rescoped when the data doesn't agree with the intended outcome.

8% of the population has had no vaccination at all and 27% of hospitalized have had no vaccination at all. The unvaccinated and hospitalized population is THREE TIMES higher than it should be. That is the story in this report.

> I use to produce these reports for this government and the ones before for years . Presenting facts a certain way is what happens and reports get rescoped when the data doesn't agree with the intended outcome.

Are you saying the numbers presented in this report are not accurate or were fudged in some way?

I don't think you should lump unknown and unvaxxed. It creates a false impression. ICU numbers would look different. Most people in the ICU are unknown.

I could go on about hospital visits for non covid reasons being lumped with covid hospital visits.

I have issues with how data is collected in the field. I have issues with the reclassifications that go back and claim covid killed this patients after dying of other reasons.

I have issues with what they decide to collect and what information they ignore.

The same source gives roughly 60/40 for hospitalizations and 50/50 for ICU, so the more severe the symptoms the more vaccinations help.

The ICU stat is tricky. They classify anyone who they don't know their vax status as non-vaxxed. Many people who come into the ICU can't speak, fill out paperwork. They are classified as non-vaxxed. By the time they recover enough to share their status they get transferred out of the ICU.

Probably the most misleading stat of them all.

If somebody comes in the ICU with COVID symptoms, it's extremely likely that they were hospitalized earlier and thus their vaccination status is known.

If somebody comes in the ICU without non-COVID symptoms, they aren't in the statistic, in other words you need to make the probability of "unknown status" conditional on being in the ICU for COVID.

I would like a source, but still: no need to even ask me, as it's exactly the case I mention in the last paragraph.

The assumption that excess deaths can be attributed to any single cause is simply not based on data and/or science.

What is the age breakdown of these excess deaths? If the distribution doesn't mirror the age distribution of known COVID deaths, that's an immediate indicator that it's factoring in multiple sources.

Drug overdoses, attempted suicides and actual suicides are way up, for example. Drug abuse is way up. Child abuse is way up.

I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm simply saying that you can't know that you are right without a careful analysis of the data. It should be noted that the "excess deaths are way up" is also used as a tool of people claiming that the vaccines are killing people as well.

Again, I want to emphasize, I don't know the detailed data behind the excess deaths. COVID is certainly one factor, but what percentage does it constitute? I'm not claiming I know, but you are. That's the difference.

You are also ignoring the studies out of Israel (sample size of 2.5 million people), Qatar (sample size of 400K people), the recent CDC study in other replies to your comment, etc. It's a long list of studies that show that prior infection is a superior, more durable form of immunity to Delta than vaccine-only populations.

Additionally, it's rather absurd to use hospitalizations as a metric for the general population. I'm sure you are extremely aware that the bulk of unvaccinated people getting hospitalized are not young or healthy. "Some unvaccinated people" is also a statement ignoring the shocking prevalence of prior infection in seroprevalence studies, which isn't really shocking when considering a respiratory virus that has an R0 that has been at minimum 3 in the beginning with the original variant, and is now 6-7 with omicron.

The data has changed, but many people's opinions have remained fixed. I don't understand what motivates this, but it's become tiresome as it continues to drive policies that are intuitively foolish and violate centuries of immunological knowledge.

In case you haven't seen it before, https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps has graphs of excess data for most of Europe (plus Israel) by age groups.

I find it a great resource to cross-check the misinformation of the mainstream media. For example, I challenge anybody to look at the 0-14 and 14-44 graphs and tell me when covid actually occurred.

Note that excess is not defined as a deviation from a typical year, but as a deviation from a typical year when no diseases are circulating. The goal of the euromomo website is to detect things like flu outbreaks, so the number of excess deaths is usually greater than 0, capturing the flu, heat waves, and presumably other disasters.

I am talking about the raw "deaths in 2020 - average deaths in 2015-2019" number. It is much higher than just the COVID deaths.

> Note that excess is not defined as a deviation from a typical year, but as a deviation from a typical year when no diseases are circulating.

Data is deseasonalized, which does not mean what you wrote.

> Data is deseasonalized, which does not mean what you wrote.

You are correct that I oversimplified a complex situation. https://euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/ describes their method, especially section "Hypothesis".

Their model includes a sinusoidal seasonal component, as you noted. However, what I said is also true. From the Hypothesis section, third bullet:

"Parts of Spring and Autumn are less likely to be influenced by additional processes leading to excess deaths and the main pattern of mortality can therefore be modelling using only those periods, resulting in a baseline being the number of deaths expected when no particular process increases mortality."

As is clear from the bullet that precedes the text that I quoted, "processes leading to excess deaths" means winter infections and summer heat waves. So my description, while incomplete, is hopefully not too misleading. For completeness, I should mention that they also adjust for population growth. (You can't just do 2020-avg(2015-2019) because the total population is different.)

But winter excess deaths will not be zero _in the absence_ of winter infections. Because they add that sinusoidal component, they will be zero in an average-strong flu year for example, and less than zero in weaker flu years.

Your claim is empirically false. The total number of excess deaths was 81K in 2017, 158K in 2018, 101K in 2019. (You need to click a few buttons to enable data from past years.) The reason is that the sinusoidal amplitude is fairly small and is explicitly calibrated not to capture the flu. Look for example at the 2019-2020 winter graph: the empirical data matches the model until covid kicks in. For some reason, people die more in winter irrespective of the flu, and the sinusoidal component attempts to capture this effect.

Stepping back from the details for a minute: this is a 15-year long joint effort of public health authorities in Europe, with the explicit goal "to design a routine public health mortality monitoring system aimed at detecting and measuring, on a real-time basis, excess number of deaths related to influenza and other possible public health threats across participating European Countries." In terms of data analysis, their model is very simple, comprising a constant, a linear trend term for population growth, and a sine-wave term for non-flu seasonality. Do you really think that they would be so incompetent as to use a model that explicitly removes the flu, which is the very effect that they are trying to capture? Give them some credit, they know what they are doing.

> Drug overdoses, attempted suicides and actual suicides are way up, for example. Drug abuse is way up. Child abuse is way up.

Just to be clear, you're saying that the reason we've seen hundreds of thousands of excess deaths last year is because of drugs, suicides, and child abuse.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/mortality-dashboard.htm#

If people want to explore some "crude" (CDC's word) data by age group. Cherry-picking some data, there were 10-15 times more drug overdoses then covid deaths in 2020 (Q2-3) for 25-34. Similar ratios for 15-24. And I'm sure it'll be the exact opposite for higher age groups or if you focused on people with comorbidities. Yet these demographics are grouped together without any nuance when it comes to mandates. Note this is pre-vaccine and pre-delta so not really representative of current state of things.

There are 10-15 times more drug overdoses than COVID, but there arent significantly more overdoses than previous years. Some increase, but it looks like a steady increase.

In other words, excess death counts would account for overdose deaths because they are expected. They wouldn't be considered "excess" deaths.

The numbers I have seen for excess deaths pretty closely match COVID death numbers as counted from death certificates. So you have two unconnected sources matching up pretty closely. I'd say there is a good chance the near million COVID deaths number we are looking at is pretty close.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com