> long after covid is any sort threat whatsoever
People dying and people with - and still getting- long COVID would probably disagree with that statement.
People dying and people with - and still getting- long COVID would probably disagree with that statement.
But you do you, is the point. I'm perfectly fine with my choice of not taking it: I'm not overweight, I lift weights and exercise regularly, have low bodyfat percent, I get plenty of sunlight for Vitamin D and immune support. I do not need the vaccine.
This mentality of extreme safetyism applied indiscriminately even now is insane. Are you going to take covid boosters for the rest of your life? The disease is going to be continually weakened and become just another coronavirus. The rest of us will move on with our lives. Quite simply, I'm not worried about Covid at all. Can you say the same about the long term prospects of endless boosters on your body? I sure couldn't.
Tell me now how 100% confident you are there are no side effects because the propaganda experts and drug companies told you so, so we can come back to it in 6 months when more side effects start being discovered and posted here on HN...
Mostly the very old, at this point; though I'm in my 40s where the rate starts to tick up. But beyond that, there's the risk of long term morbidity. My niece was early 20's, active, in good health, with no comorbidities and is now pseudo-disabled. The vaccine only removes about 30% of the risk of this type of outcome, but still that alone is worth it.
> What is the vax status of those that are dying, presumably many have taken the vaccine anyways yes?
Looks like people who have taken the vaccine have about 6-10% of the risk of death of those who haven't, controlling for comorbidities.
> Are you going to take covid boosters for the rest of your life?
A lot of us might-- though I've got a fair bit of hope that we come up with something better in the next couple of years. I will do my best to avoid infection in the meantime.
> The disease is going to be continually weakened and become just another coronavirus.
Viral selection is complicated. Yes, in the very long term, many viruses end up becoming less virulent, but others go in the other direction.
> Can you say the same about the long term prospects of endless boosters on your body? I sure couldn't.
I'm pretty dang confident that I can bound the risk from the vaccine to be much lower than the risk from COVID infection.
I've never understood this type of selfishness. If you get sick you will, on average, infect another 2-3 people. It's not just about you.
2. Since Delta, both vaxxed and unvaxxed cases have the same viral load.
3. Since December at least, boosted and vaxxed have higher RATE per 100k of covid infections.
So whatever benefit one gets is individual benefit only and not getting others sick in any different way as the vaxxed folks do.
It does look like there's about a 20-30% reduction of infection from random surveys of the population and from nucleocapsid seroprevalence assays; transmission-once-infected is very difficult to measure, but it would be surprising if it did not have some effect.
> 2. Since Delta, both vaxxed and unvaxxed cases have the same viral load.
There's a key fallacy here: we're looking at a population of cases detected by similar means and then found that they have similar viral loads. Not too surprising of a finding (survivorship bias, basically).
There's some data indicating that viral copy assays are not good proxies for finding true infectious shedding -- and that vaccinated individuals can be much better in this regard despite having higher loads. e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01816-0
> 3. Since December at least, boosted and vaxxed have higher RATE per 100k of covid infections.
This is absolutely and completely untrue. There's been a couple of times where the vaxxed have been higher in the data series, but the overwhelming trend in the data has been the opposite. e.g. right now in Santa Clara County, where I am, the unvaccinated case rate is approximately 268 per 100,000 per week; the fully vaccinated case rate is about 46 per 100,000.
Of course, people who elect vaccination don't behave exactly the same as those who don't... and so many people in S.C.C. are vaccinated that the exact number of unvaccinated has some uncertainty (but it's not off by a factor of 5).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
3. It is true and the government admits that boosted and vaxxed have higher rates. Ontario source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220228051509/http://covid-19.o...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220331081902/http://covid-19.o...
Here's how it looks:
Posting a disputed study that I criticized to try and refute me, when I posted important 2022 followup data to viral shedding based on actual infectivity rather than just RNA copies indicates you either didn't read my comment or didn't understand it.
> 3. It is true and the government admits that boosted and vaxxed have higher rates. Ontario source:
I just knew you were going to point to the Ontario data from Mar-Apr. This is why I said in a couple places they popped above for a couple data points. Are you deliberately being obtuse?
Compare to basically any other data series from any other time; e.g. my locale:
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-case-rates-vaccination-...
That study is not alone either. NEJM has similar studies too.
Your link seems to be an outlier. Denmark, UK, Scotland, and other provinces in Canada also show the same higher rates in boosted and fully vaxxed than unvaxxed. Walgreens data for US also shows this. Look at page 3 of:
https://www.walgreens.com/businesssolutions/covid-19-index.j...
Canadian government seroprevalence data also shows that between December 2021 and May 2022, there were at least 17.5 million infections. This is in a population of 38 million. This was despite extremely high vax rates.
So, how exactly did the vaccine prevent infection and transmission? Vaxxed folks were allowed to enjoy services with a false sense of security and spread Covid to others while unvaxxed folks were denied from society.
Please don’t resolve to ad hominem attacks on hacker news.
You are responding to a practical concern with a theoretical counter. But practically speaking the vaccine doesn't change the picture at all. The situation pre-vaccine was COVID was going to spread like wildfire after any lockdown attempt ended and everyone was going to be exposed to it. The situation post-vaccine, even with that reduction in infection rates, was the same.
Ditto speed, since this is an exponential process that reduction won't have an especially material effect on when everyone gets COVID.
We ran a natural experiment on this in Australia [0] - having a highly vaccinated population didn't appear to have any impact at all on COVID transmission rate or reach in who gets infected. The numbers are not convincing that the vaccine did anything for transmissions. The effect of personal protection seems to explain all the benefits of the vaccine.
The people who don’t mask up, regardless of having taken the vaccine or not, are actually the biggest problem. I wouldn’t call them selfish because it is their ignorance of how disease works that is to blame. I wouldn’t even blame most of them in light of all the propaganda and confused public servants that say otherwise. I would reserve the selfish tag for the people who know they are carriers and continue to go maskless anyway.
So, we can shrug this one off, because in the end it _only_ kills a percent or so of people, overwhelmingly already infirm or elderly.
We may not be so lucky the next time, and this attitude _will_ get us in trouble when that happens.
Not sure why that is hard to understand. If this virus killed 95% of people would you be arguing against lockdowns?
I think most people can agree that its one of those to little to late situations in china and they need to reconsider at this point, but that doesn't make what they are trying to do wrong.
Lets say another virus is discovered tomorrow, how high would the mortality have to be before you were to accept all those effects you list?
And lastly, how high would it have to be before you would accept actually shooting people who violated quarantine procedures? With the understanding that a statement like never, could mean the extinction of humanity (a valid choice I guess).
Especially something that is so drastically over represented in the sick, old, and obese but not the young and healthy. Why is it justified to shoot healthy strong young people, privileging the interests of the comorbid group? In a situation where again, they're going to get sick anyways? What if we just shot the old and fat people and then everyone could stop worrying about covid?
To answer you, who knows, but much much much higher than 0.2% death rate for under 50's etc.
I think what China's doing is wrong and foolish, but maybe their citizens like being locked in their apartments for such a trivial disease, who knows?
In the actual circumstance in the real world, animals would need to be culled because it passes between deer and cats and humans. Maybe we start shooting cats and deer now? No more pet cats.
This is the dumbest argument I've ever seen made on here. If it killed 95% of people, no sane person would be arguing because it becomes obvious that you are in danger. If 1.1% of the population dies and you don't have any of the health risks coinciding with mortality from the virus, then you have little reason to put your life on hold, unless you're unlucky and don't realize you have some unidentified health issue, which at that point, is a rounding error.
I guess if you're on the side doing the coercing then, yeah, at that point you probably think you're saving everyone from themselves.
Comorbidities are tricky - and triathletes are a weird body type to build and maintain.
I would advise a balance between weightlifting, moderate cardio, lots of sunlight exposure for Vitamin D and testosterone support, and a balanced diet.
And yes there are instances of young, non co-morbid people dying from covid. Statistically, not that many, so I'm not worried about it.
That is exactly what I do, and I never get sick.
hearing unhealthy people threaten me with disease just doesn't carry water.
also i dont go anywhere except back and forth from jobsite to house, i dont interact with many people, and i live in a rural area.
Maybe your next thought is the vaccine makes the conference safer. Let's play Choose your own Adventure. You have to sit next to someone on a crowded airplane in economy class for 3 hours and this person loves to talk. You get to choose that this person is either a) vaccinated, or b) tested negative for covid every day for the past 3 days. Which do you choose?
It's fascinating and scary that fear has led our society to let segregation creep in under the guise of public health.
From a public health perspective, universal (or near-universal) vaccination is an unequivocal good. Given the sum of what we know about both COVID and any side effects of vaccination, this remains the case.
Is it a vaccine, or a therapy? Why does the supposed efficacy of the vaccines ability to prevent spread of covid wane so quickly? At best the vax is novel therapy that temporarily boosts immune system to fight the current strain. But whatever the side effects of this mechanism, they can accumulate with each successive round of boosters. Is it safe to keep taking these shots every 6 to 12 months? Who knows... but if they have to be repeatedly taken, they clearly do not effectively stop the spread of covid which the evidence shows.
I'll take my chances as having good enough genetics and lifestyle, and being young enough, in aggregate to tip the scales well past the point where getting covid and whatever natural immunity that it provides is just fine.
>latent comorbidity
Yea and I can get hit by a bus tomorrow. The main comorbidities that dominate the stats as present in over 80% of deaths are obesity and age. I have neither. We have to be realistic here.
Look at Haiti vs New Zealand regarding vax rates vs death rates. It is not unequivocally good.
The COVID vaccines are prophylactic and therapeutic. So far, they seem to be mostly attenuating with respect to their immunity, not unlike flu vaccines (in two regards: both weak cross-strain protection and much milder illness when infected with the targeted strain). Additionally, there's decent empirical evidence that "breakthrough" cases are generally less contagious.
"Being realistic here" means getting a free, readily available vaccine that reduces the risk of serious illness or death. Separately, it means doing your civic duty to reduce load on our medical institutions and lessen the latent risk to those around you (who may have comorbidities that you are not privy to and are not entitled to be privy to).
That’s just a logical fallacy.
Aspirin cures my headache, but I will still get headaches - does that mean aspirin is useless?
Furthermore, it is pretty obvious that a non-replicating fragment of a pathogen given even every 6 months is going to cause less damage than the real thing (also available every 6 months the way things are going). Luckily we've done extensive trials to back that up.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/25/long-covid-...
2. Healthy young people under 50 or even 60 were not dying or getting hospitalized. Whatever risk they want to take, they should be able to take it without mandates. Since the vax does not prevent infection or transmission, one is only taking individual risk and not affecting others.
Compassionate grounds such as taking care of sick family member, funeral etc were also not exempted.
Everyone who were COVID+ despite being vaxxed were allowed to fly, go to gym, restaurant etc. Meanwhile, an unvaxxed person wasn't allowed to do the same even if they could show a negative PCR test.
This isn't true at all, plenty of businesses have a no-symptoms policy. On the flip side, I don't think they could effectively screen everyone anyway.
We still have them actually in July 2022. Kids aren't allowed to go to summer camp without being 2 dose vaxxed. Travellers who are unvaxxed need to show a negative test at airport, another negative test on 8th day and quarantine for 14 days.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-case...
By 35 and again by 50 your risk of death's increased. By 60 you're already seeing a disproportionately large amount of deaths.
What you said only applies to Latinos
No. What I said applies to all cohorts. Take a look at the bar chart entitled "Percentage of deaths vs. population". That's not broken out by race or gender, only by age.
Below 35 deaths are underrepresented. When you hit 35+ the inner bar (percentage of deaths) becomes a larger part of the outer bar (percentage of total population), by 50 it's nearly equal, and for 60+ deaths are overrepresented.
https://i.imgur.com/dlDhdix.png
Source:
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/
Here's how the Ontario's hospitalization and death rate looks based on age and vax status in the 4 month period:
Source:
https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ep...
Even before the vaccinations, the pre-vaccine infection fatality rate in anyone under 50 or even 60 was absolutely tiny. Look at page 1475 of this which shows the IFR pre-vaccine based on each age year:
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821...
and that's with 3 shots. i'm almost sure i would be in an ICU if i didn't get any shots.
How could we prove this hypothesis?
It's a meme really.
In any case, I never had any shots, got Covid last December, was sick for 3 days with a bad sore throat and recovered just fine shortly after.
Many people are rightly not so obsessed with irrational safetyism and have no problems avoiding the vaccine and getting on with life.
I have chosen not to receive any Covid19 vaccinations and so I am "unvaccinated". I thought it was never going to happen, but eventually I contracted covid19, over Easter period this year. I too experienced myalgia, a mild fever. I also had a sore throat for about 2 days. I didn't completely lose my sense of smell, but coffee (for example) didn't taste great. Same with wine. That anosmia, such as it was, persisted for a week or two.
But that's it really. It was all over in about 2.5 days. I would not describe what I experienced as "harsh". I've had Influenza, and that was harsh. Sat me on my arse for a solid week. But not this. By day 4, I was doing household chores and more or less back to normal (mild anosmia not withstanding).
So, YMMV. :-)
My girlfriend got vaccinated and boosted, caught COVID, was bed ridden for several days and then general malaise and tiredness for two weeks.
I got vaccinated and boosted, went to the same party my girlfriend was infected at, stood next to the same people that infected her, took her to the hospital to get tested because we didn't think it was COVID, and I never even got infected.
Anecdotes are literally useless when discussing these things. There's so many individual variations about how you respond to COVID, to the point where your experience is likely affected by how stressed you have been the month you caught it.
This is why the people who actually care about understanding the issue collect large amounts of data, and that data largely shows getting a vaccine to significantly reduce your chance of getting it, and your chance of dying from it.