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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

Those numbers aren't really comparable, because the meaningful decision you can make is between "getting vaccinated" and "not getting vaccinated". If you don't get vaccinated, you still might not contract COVID, and if you do contract it, the chances are pretty good that it won't be severe enough to ever be diagnosed by a doctor. So that 1000 micromorts is estimated from a subset of people whose outcomes were significantly worse than average.

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.

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> If you don't get vaccinated, you still might not contract COVID

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!

> your chances of never getting COVID if you remain unvaccinated are extremely low

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).

That's right, though I'm not sure how "nearly zero" for the safest group (2-5) compares with "nearly zero" for the vaccine. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them is multiple orders of magnitude larger, but we're talking about very low risks regardless.

The benefits to children are nearly zero, while there is some risk. I am still unclear why a medical treatment emergency use exemption was extended to low risk of mortality age groups. Importantly, the shots don't prevent virus re-transmission to others.

> The benefits to children are nearly zero, while there is some risk. I am still unclear why a medical treatment emergency use exemption was extended to low risk of mortality age groups.

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.

> So that 1000 micromorts is estimated from a subset of people whose outcomes were significantly worse than average.

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.

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