It's hard to peer through the layers of emerging science and virology, psychology and sociology, policymaking and politics, media and information theory... to find the truth of a thing like COVID.
* Eight deaths out of 13 million doses is 0.6 micromorts from getting the vaccine, about equivalent to driving 150 mi.
* For a 35-year-old man in the US, risk of death if you're diagnosed with covid is 0.1% [1] or 1000 micromorts.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...
Consider the problem: you must either do X (1/200 chance of death) or YZ (Y has 1/300 chance of death, Z has 1/300 chance of death).
Reworded this becomes: you must either do X (5 micromorts) or YZ (Y is 3.3 micromorts, Z is 3.3 micromorts). And now you've got things that are easier to compare and work with in a scale that we can think about. Most people are doing things on the scale of 0 to 20 micromorts. The more adventurous are doing things that get up to 100 or so. The thrill seekers go up from there.
This is also a concept in insurance - https://www.insurancethoughtleadership.com/six-things-commen...
Cambridge University - Professor Risk https://youtu.be/a1PtQ67urG4
A previous discussion on it from 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266462
I still think it's almost certain that, for a typical healthy person, getting the vaccine is by far the safer choice. (And that's before we even start worrying about non-fatal outcomes such as long COVID.) But the difference is probably a lot less than the 3 orders of magnitude you're suggesting.
My understanding is at this point very nearly everyone has either contracted COVID or been vaccinated? And that your chances of never getting COVID if you remain unvaccinated are extremely low? But even if this was 75%, it only changes you from a 1000 to 750.
The denominator in my statistic I don't think was diagnosed by a doctor, it was just having a positive PCR test, which could happen through regular surveillance. But I agree that that's something we need to adjust for if we want things to be directly comparable. The CDC estimates this is about a factor of 4 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...), bringing the 750 down to 190. Still much larger than 0.6!
That is right. And some get infected without suffering harm, as was known by early reports from the quarantined Diamond Princess boat. Passengers in a cabin with infected mates sometimes had no medical issues.
It is important to consider how certain groups such as children had nearly zero negative outcome from the virus while developing robust antibodies and this without the shots. For children the vaccine risks outweighed gains that may have been helpful to those in high risk categories (older compromised lung capacity obese).
The question of which of these "nearly zeros" is smaller, no? A risk of 8 in 13M is still very small, and could easily be an order of magnitude smaller than the risk of death in this age group.
Not really. Like others have posted the risk of getting the virus is close enough to 100% as to not matter at all. And the risk cited was for a 35 year old man, not an octogenarian, which is pretty average. It would be better in this specific instance to use the average 35 year old woman since they suffered clotting disorders more commonly (just about exactly). It wouldn't be as useful to compare with children since they didn't suffer from the clotting disorders as commonly--it mostly affected middle aged women.
Think about it like this.
The chances of dying in a vehicle wreck is very small. But those who have died in them probably would have preferred finding an alternative means to get to their destination.
If someone doesn't want to get a vaccine for fear they'll become a statistic, that's perfectly valid.
As someone who lives in a sparsely populated, rural and mountainous area in Greece, the risk of being killed in a car accident still exists but it is a lot different than city accidents. Seatbelts, car mirrors, airbags are all mandated by the government.
Mirrors are not so useful, because not many cars are driving on the road at any given time. Most motorcycles do not have even one mirror because they are useless. Animals may cross the road, sharp rocks may have fallen on the street which can cause a vehicle to literally fall of a cliff. Good luck hoping for an airbag to save your life, while you are on a 10-20 meter fall.
Safety is still provided by the car gizmos, albeit to a very small negligible amount of the local population. Safety measures mandated from the government to the car manufacturers are more relevant to big cities than here.
Dangerity on the other hand, the ability to be in danger, is more preferable when it is cheaper. The car gizmos, take up space, and cost money. Safety is not always better, and when it costs too much money, every normal person should fear safety, and take the side of dangerity instead.
A normal non fat person, who exercises once in a while, and is reasonably mindful of their eating habits, should definitely choose the side of dangerity in case of Covid. Safety in that case costs too much money, and it should definitely be avoided.
As can be seen, getting infected is actually not that bad compared to getting the AZ vaccine. In younger age groups the vaccine became hard to recommend contrary to what many claimed and continue to claim on social media.
You also obviously haven’t read case reports for the people that got the blood clots and survived, if you’re only considering deaths as an undesirable outcome. They will have to adjust to significant sequelae for the rest of their lives.
The analysis that your link is missing a comparison between the harm of getting hospitalized with covid and the harm of a case of blood clots. Without that severity comparison, while it does show that for all age groups hospitalization is many times more likely than clots it's hard to make a judgment either way.
> You also obviously haven’t read case reports for the people that got the blood clots and survived, if you’re only considering deaths as an undesirable outcome.
But you also need to count the people who got covid and survived with serious long-term symptoms, no?
It probably makes sense to get a vaccine for younger people, just not the awful AZ. And many countries agree, having switched to mRNA. What they didn’t do yet is admit that they were pushing the AZ crap much harder than was called for and apologize for screwing up vaccine procurement.
And this is just a first of more bad reactions to vaccines that are happening, which should be added up. And then mortality comparison for kids will be much different.
All that was required to avoid this madness was being honest and make jabs voluntary.
People gauge the trust they should put in the medical government complex actually quite well.
It's really weird to see 5K people die from COVID-19 in the last 14 days and then come to HN and read someone describing a fantasy reality. Really cool place.
My model is if extreme harm is remotely possible, I ignore comparisons to other risks and take action to help limit it to minor harm (e.g. don't text while driving, wear a seat belt, wear a hard hat on a skyscraper building site, etc.).
But "take action to increase safety" creates a combination of challenges for the average person:
(1) Most people don't change easily ("Taking action" means change);
(2) Most people underestimate the likelihood that the near future will be different than the present, that change will be thrust upon them;
(3) Most people don't recognize that they don't change easily, or that they underestimate the likelihood of near-term change.
(4) Very few realize that changing behavior overlaps with a lot of performance-related skills, some of which are poorly understood by virtually everyone.
I have coached ten of thousands of sessions teaching voice acting, and I find that people attempting performance get stuck between stages 1 and 2 in the “Four Stages of Competence”:
(1) Unconscious incompetence (Ignorance)
(2) Conscious incompetence (Knowledge)
(3) Conscious competence (Skill)
(4) Unconscious competence (Awareness)
As https://TaskCompetency.com/ points out, stage 3 is okay for accountants, unworkable for performers.
People think that if they've simply been given information and received coaching, that it somehow magically imbues them with special performance powers, yet they haven't:
(1) Turned information into knowledge.
(2) Applied knowledge to build skill.
(3) Practiced skills to build awareness.
So when people making an effort and paying to achieve change still fail at most steps for implementing change, I think there are a number of blind spots making it very difficult for people to really understand what safety is, because it's hidden behind "life performance" issues. Just my two cents.
You might ask if I am simply a poor coach, and if better coaches get better results—maybe it's not an "other people" problem, but more a problem with my perceptions and approaches.
There is a saying among some in our industry: "Once you get an agent, you lose your talent". (https://AcademyofVoiceover.com) This is due to newly trained talent no longer applying skills they have learned, due to believing that having had their training affirmed by getting an agent makes their performance "automatically high quality".
There is a similar statement commonly found on websites of acting coaches, that goes something like "I'm one of the best coaches of my acting method, and I know this because I get the students of other coaches teaching my method and they haven't learned the method well". Of course statements along the lines of "others are bad, I alone am good" usually overlook many things.
So in my experience, even trainers and producers of performers have a blind spot to some of the challenges in creating change in even people who are motivated to change.
My pet hypothesis is that:
1: (Some) People are terrified of death.
2: Death is in the future.
3: The future means change, people reject change and the future.
4: Rejecting the future, people embrace their past.
5: Memories of the past are simple. The past does not change.
6: Change is bad, because it brings to mind the future, and death.
The above doesn't explain or really take into consideration future planning, like "if we won the lottery", or "let's settle down and have kids, a house, pets, hobbies together and apart. Let's create a home." The fear of death certainly seems to loom larger as one ages.
I try not to be afraid of death. I do freely admit I have trouble with a future that I don't get to see, I would love to be able to experience thousands of years of awareness, to see what happens next. I never want the story to end, and I'm never satisfied with "and they lived happily ever after."
In a joke format: Boss: Why didn't you come to work today? Me: I realized I could die, so I stayed in bed.
It was not about science or credentials. Wrongthink was not allowed and people were made believe they were fringe minorities by simply turning up censoring to very high levels.
>Oh many of us are pretty good at assessing risk.
My figure would be less that 5% of the population are good at assessing risk, what's your guess?
Using the grandparent's 9/11 TSA analogy - talk to literally anyone - the vast majority of people will openly acknowledge that TSA screening is pure security theatre, but they accept and go through it anyway. You'll find the same thing regarding the Epstein suicide, domestic spying apparatus, etc. Most people know and accept statistically likely truth, but they play along because compliance makes for a more comfortable life.
1. If one of the vaccines causes horrible blood clots in the brain, get the other one.
2. If a bunch of self-important dilettantes claim that said vaccine is safe, but can’t comprehend how sex and age affects the risk profile… ignore them.