* 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...
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.
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