The High Cost of Disparaging Natural Immunity to Covid
wsj.com
wsj.com
In functioning democracies, heads would roll.
Equally clear is the superiority of getting both to either by itself. Throw in the administrative difficulty of establishing just what level of immunity is acceptable, and the safety, convenience, and zero cost of getting vaccinated, and the policy remains sound. No "explaining" necessary.
Still the research has displayed that almost any viral infection has undesirable outcomes in the long run so it would make sense to try to avoid as many as possible.
In the USA omicron deaths are now outpacing delta’s.
That is why we haven’t stopped doing things to slow its spread.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-deaths-in-u-s-exceed-de...
I see in your post history that you like to downplay the pandemic and the healthcare crisis it has caused. Why are you like this? What do you gain by it?
You mean except for the vaccines...
The difference between a "breakthrough COVID" case in a vaccinated person and a COVID infection in an unvaccinated person is a complete elimination in the risk of death and greatly reduced chances of severe illness and long-term disability. It's VERY preferable to be vaccinated.
It sounds like you're saying that nobody has ever died from COVID after being fully vaccinated against it, which isn't true.
Even if 1% of population is stupid enough to do it deliberately, and I very much doubt it's that high number, it still leaves 99% of people who did not catch it on purpose. Disregarding their immunity is not scientific at all. And focusing on miniscule Darwin-award population is not very emphatical to 99% who are not like that. Why do focus on Darwin-award subset like that's the most common case?
And know what? If you didn't catch it so far, it's highly likely that you'll get Omicron pretty soon. Or one of future variants. If not in next months then in next years, as we get back to normal and covid variants keep circulating as endemic virus.
How would you feel if you just recovered from the latest strain, you're full of antibodies, but it's not recognized at all by government and you have to take a booster shot made for last year's variant in order to get back to work? Does that make sense?
It looks pretty much insane to me, but I live in Europe where previous infection is more or less equalized with vaccine. I'm baffled it's not like that in the US.
This seems like literal survivorship bias.
In the the US, covid kills about 2% of those who get it, so the natural immunity numbers are boosted by the fact that people with weak immune systems have been removed from the pool.
Honestly though, isn't this by design? Isn't the whole point of vaccines to invoke a weaker immune response that does not endanger the receiver?
The 2% number is an overestimate. For the US over two years we had about 800K dead and 250M infected (ballpark assuming that 80% holds everywhere), which yields about .3% death probability per individual ever infected. For context, a bit less than 1% of the entire population dies each year (2,854,838 died in the US in 2019 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db395.htm#secti...), so about 6M people would have died in two years anyway even without covid.
You are dividing confirmed covid deaths by estimated covid infections, and that's not really valid.
When researchers study those with natural immunity, they examine people who are confirmed to have had covid before, so the CFR is the right number to use.
BTW, In the US covid has a CFR of 2%. It is not an "overestimate." It's not even an estimate. It's just what the number is. Obviously that number changes depending on the time frame, and it is (thankfully) dropping.
But this handling of the issue made the things even worse because it gave fuel for the conspiracy theorists, quacks, pseudo medicine followers etc.
How it should have been handled? By acknowledging possibility that it will give good protection for reinfection and verifying it by studies and constantly verifying it for new variants, by giving convalescents similar treatment that has been given to vaccinated - these people have suffered enough, most likely they did not seek out the disease, they got bad luck, so let them be, by encouraging them still to get vaccinated to improve their likelihood to not catch it again, by explaining that seeking out virus is by any means is really not a good idea and can result in very bad outcomes. That is - treating people as they are not complete morons.
The situation in EU has been a little better. Here at least having confirmed infection has been recognized to provide limited time protection but there are still issues with this.
You shouldn't refuse that just because you are worried people might try to get sick.
Now that omicron is proving to not be overwhelming, you’ll start to see restrictions lifted and the unvaxxed who were/get sick will be able to return to civilized society.
A lot of people wrote them all off as "antivaxxer" talking points since that's what the climate is around this topic, but this isn't a surprise to anyone who was following along (other than the fact that the CDC finally published on this, that was a pleasant surprise).