Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

I’m an older person who got vaccinated, boosted, and got omicron anyway. The difference between me and someone my age who didn’t get vaccinated is for me it was more like a sinus infection with sneezing and a mild headache, rather than hospitalization and death. Now I have antibodies against omicron. It’s like getting a fourth dose of vaccine.

 

LMAO... ok now you just got me rolling laughing.

Follow closely... if you are not hospitalized, you are not dying!!
Sure there might be a few here and there that never go to the hospital and die alone in their homes.
Generally, sick people go to the hospital and end up dying there if they have a serious illness.
So YES, a low hospitalization rate means a lot to how many die! If very few people end up hospitalized then even fewer are dying.

How in the world are substantially more people catching covid yet the death rate is not increasing with it not an important point to consider when looking at risk??

We don't force vaccines on many illnesses because we look at risk. To ignore that is insane.

It's getting to the point that discussing this with you is laughable at best.

I have never disputed that vaccines are good at protecting from serious death or illness.

What I can't stand about the 96 times more headlines is they do nothing to show risk based on age.
It's a damn scare tactic! A healthy 30 year has virtually no risk of dying of covid no matter their vaccine status. 96 times more of the insanely low death rate for a 30-year-old. ... let me know what you get.

About 95% of all US covid deaths are age groups 55 plus.
80% is 65 plus.
About 2% is age group 0-44...

This is why her message of 96 times more likely to die is a terrible message and needs to add context.

Oh and by the way, the age groups that should take the vaccine, are generally the most vaccinated right now anyhow.

 

Happy you are around to root on the gators for many more years.

 

As I said (insinuated)…we will hear stories about how if one did not get the vaccine they would have ended up in the hospital or death. A complete false insinuation.

 

I've been thinking about the human perception challenge of multiples of small numbers. The CDC recently stated that the unvaccinated have a 96x greater risk of dying from Covid than the vaccinated. How meaningfulness of this number depends on the actual vaccinated risk. If there's a 1% risk for the vaccinated, the equivalent is 96% for the unvaccinated. However, if the baseline risk is 0.001%, then the unvaccinated risk is only 0.096%.

So let's look at a more intuitive (inverted) example. Your chances of winning a 100 million Powerball drawing are around 1 in 292.2 million with a single ticket. You can increase your odds by 100% by buying another ticket. You still only have a 2 in 292.2 million chance of winning, which ain't great. Now let's say someone offers you a free ticket for each you buy. Would you take it? Of course you would. What if it was 96 more tickets? You increase our chances without the cost but still have long odds.

That's similar to how I think of the vaccine benefit. You can reduce the risk of dying from covid substantially by getting something that has low "cost" for most of us. While the benefit of winning $100 million is phenomenal, not dying is pretty good too. In some ways, it's akin to Pascal's wager.

Now the extreme case can be made that the chance of dying from Covid is so low that it's not worth the cost (eg make appt, drive to pharmacy, wait, get poked and feel poorly) of getting the vaccine. I don't know how to calculate that subjective threshold but I think are above it given the daily deaths.

 

I don’t think anyone has made that insinuation in such general terms. It’s just more likely they will.

 

I don’t know man. I beat the North Vietnamese, cancer, and now covid. I’m wondering if my luck is about to run out.

 

It’s not just not dying. It’s not getting extremely sick and ending up in the hospital. The benefit of that is in itself worth it.

The risk of dying for adults is much higher than the flu, and the vaccine is much more effective than the flu shot, yet we take the flu shot. The risk of dying for most adults is higher than dying in a car accident, and the vaccine is more effective at preventing death than seatbelt+airbag. Most people don’t think twice about wearing a seat belt. The risk of dying for most is low in any particular year, but vaccines materially reduce the risk of all cause mortality for most adults.

 

No you made it in literal terms...

"The difference between me and someone my age who didn’t get vaccinated is for me it was more like a sinus infection with sneezing and a mild headache, rather than hospitalization and death."

Complete false insinuation.

 

Are you saying unvaccinated people aren’t being hospitalized and dying? If not then what’s your point?

 

For ages 30-49, your risk of dying of anything is lower than old age. Yet more than 10% of deaths for that age group involved Covid. Obviously for the unvaccinated that percent is higher.

 

That's a logical fallacy.

If the final unvaccinated mortality rate is x, why does it matter what the in-hospital mortality rate is?

If a 100 people are admitted and the in-hospital mortality rate was 100%, the number of people that died is 100. If 200 people are admitted and the in-hospital mortality was 50%, then 100 people have died. In both cases 100 people died despite differing in-hospital mortality rates.

 

Nobody would give a shit if overall COVID death rate was .001%. That would put the virus on the par with typical influenza. But the FACT is it was closer to 1% overall. The worst pandemic since 1918.

Anyone saying “no big deal, only 1 out of 100 would die” is either an idiot or a sociopath. Naturally, it would make one wonder what would be the threshold of legitimate concern for such a person? 3%(which was the feared ballpark figure for covid around Jan 2020)? 10%? 50%?

 

Raw numbers and information are paramount.

In Australia over a 15 day period in the last month they had 552 deaths, 417 were vaccinated and 60 were boosted. One of the boosted was a man in his 30s with no known underlying conditions--so perhaps a with versus from.

Now Australia is approximately 95% vaccinated and 40% boosted so the adjusted risk ratios would still show a benefit.

But in that group that died they had 35 deaths from nursing homes. 14 of the people that died had not been vaccinated. That's 40%. It's highly unlikely, but possible they were anti-vaxxers. More likely they were too frail to get vaccinated.

For instance in Australia if you knew all the unvaxxed deaths were perfectly healthy, then the benefit signal of the vax would be very good. But without looking at the underlying health profile of the deaths and adjusting the results can be very misleading.

I'm not saying the vaccines don't work--but there is a reason to be skeptical they are providing as much of a benefit as the CDC claims.

 

You clearly do not know what you are talking about.

The number of people getting sick to the amount of being hospitalized is something every public health official must consider when trying to come up with public health policy.

The death rate once hospitalized must also be considered.

Omicron is just nowhere near as deadly as Delta was. This is why more and more countries each week are ditching their vaccine mandates. The vaccine is failing to prevent spread but if you have a booster, is a lot of help with hospitalization. However, even unvaccinated are far less likely to be hospitalized and die if infected with Omicron.

If I was a high-risk individual, I sure as hell would not risk it. But the data does not warrant forcing people to get the vaccine if they don't want it.

 

Do you have a link to this data?

 

Too many don't want to look at the health profile and age of deaths. Just get your shots!

Look at Isreal who is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world.

They are now experiencing more deaths than any other part of this pandemic. Data will still show unvaccinated are much higher in deaths, but I agree with you that CDC claims of vaccine efficacy should be viewed with a grain of salt. Just like most of pandemic, the CDC claims vaccines provided better protection than those who already had natural immunity. Many experts pushed on that just to be canceled or silenced by social media... Its a scary time when science cant question anything.

 

There is no breaking through with you. Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

 

it is cdc data

COVID-19 Provisional Counts - Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics

 

The state of Washington does a great job of putting out COVID numbers, by age group, every week. Numbers published yesterday (2/2) have these highlights:

12-34 YO: 3X more likely to get COVID if unvaccinated, and 5X more likely to be hospitalized
35-64 YO: 4X more likely to get COVID and 7X more likely to be hospitalized
65 and older: 5X more likely to get COVID, 8X more likely to be hospitalized, and 9X more likely to die

Even if 1% of the population could be hospitalized from COVID, in a country with 330 million, that's 3.3 million people! If if we cut that by 1/3 because of people who have immunity either through prior infection or the vaccine, that's still over 1 million people. The Washington state data shows we could cut this number by 1/5 or more by simply getting everyone eligible vaccinated.

If we got everyone vaccinated, we'd already be in the epidemic stage of this virus in the US. There would still be people hospitalized and dying, but numbers would look more like an annual flu event. Sad, yes, especially for those effected personally, but generally acceptable when it comes to overall numbers. But we aren't there yet, and there is still a strain on our hospitals, even if Omicron isn't as virulent. It's simply too many cases overall, and still too many unvaccinated, who have a significantly higher propensity to need hospitalization.