Hacker News Reader

Comment by parkingrift | Hacker News Reader

>But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.

Covid risks are not evenly distributed throughout the population. An extreme majority of serious cases are people older than 65, fat people, or people with other existing health issues.

If you are young, healthy, and active you are at virtually zero risk of Covid. If you are under 25, healthy, and active there is practically no personal health reason to get vaccinated for Covid.

View on HN

"Healthy" isn't something that's immediately obvious, and it's entirely possible you're not as healthy as you think. I was running half marathons with undiagnosed stage 4 kidney disease, which by the classification we had in Canada, would have put me at the highest risk for severe outcomes of COVID.

> If you are young, healthy, and active you are at virtually zero risk of Covid.

While you're right that the risk is very small, you are still at much, much more risk from Covid than from the vaccine, though.

You may or may not catch Covid whereas a vaccination is a binary decision.

Everyone will be exposed to Covid.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

Vaccination isn't a simple binary decision. There are choices to make regarding which vaccine and whether to get additional boosters.

Would you say "you may or may not catch the common cold" as well? I'm trying very hard to imagine any 2+ year old person living in a western country who wouldn't have caught the cold. "May not" seems dishonest here.

The data is that objectively you are more likely to have serious health issues resulting from Covid than you are the vaccine. And given the spread of Covid, the odds are close to 100% that you will catch it eventually. This is true regardless of health, age or obesite.

It's extremely simple math. If you have a 1/100 chance of something bad happening versus a 1/500 chance, you chose the 1/500 odds. It doesn't mean you throw your hands in the air and choose the higher odds just because they're low enough. You optimize for the best outcome.

That is just so flat out wrong… Omicron is less severe now, but there is a clear and real risk even for healthy people

The data is available for everyone. In the United States there have been 7,300 total deaths for people under 30 and 25,000 total deaths for all people under 40. Nearly 80% of all hospitalizations are from obese people. 40% have hypertension, 30% some cardiovascular disease, and so on and so forth.

If you are under 40 and don’t have a known comorbidity you can treat Covid the same way you would treat the flu. If you’re under 30 with the same health status you can treat Covid as if it doesn’t exist.

Kids under 20 are more likely to die from poisoning or an automobile accident.

You cannot look at the blanket outcome because it's affected by vaccinations in the individual, vaccinations on the societal level, and all Covid measures put in place, how they're enforced and to what degree individuals followed them. What you end up with is a skewed picture. You would need data on group A (Vaccinated healthy and young, living under the same rules, following them about in equal measure) and compare it with the outcomes of group B (Unvaccinated healthy and young, everything else the same).

What's more, it's the height of selfishness to think only of your own risk. Setting aside long Covid (which affects the healthy too), vaccinations reduces the severity of symptoms among everyone, reducing pressure on the health care system.

Yep, it's just inflicting suffering also to the healthy in a misguided and desperate attempt to improve a situation by making it more "fair". When in reality the total amount of suffering is just increasing many times, which just makes it much worse. But this is a typical communist/religious idea that you should "share" suffering by punishing yourself.

How is protecting yourself from a disease with a low but real risk of life-altering effects by taking a vaccine with minuscule (but also real) risks a form of self-punishment???

How? Because you are (forced) to take a second dose of a vaccine that's not needed, which makes you sick and gives you heart inflammation. That's how.

Well, taking the vaccine still has a much lower chance of causing heart inflammation than getting the disease while unvaccinated does, even when multiplied with the chance of getting the disease at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com