Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

> 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!

View on HN

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com