How death rates from Covid-19 differ between vaccinated and unvaccinated

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination

by Jugurtha • 5 years ago

128 247 5 years ago

Jugurtha• 5 years ago

I edited the title because of the title length limit on Hacker News.

xupybd3• 5 years ago

Wow how come the US death rate amongst the unvaccinated is so much higher? It's peaking at 18%. Is that where we would be if there was no vaccine?

It would also help to see some data on vaccine effectiveness against long covid.

Edit: I need to learn to read more carefully. As others have pointed out it 18/100000. My panic is over.

keltex• 5 years ago

Not 18%. 18 out of 100,000.

xupybd3• 5 years ago

Thank you. I read that horribly wrong. That is a relief.

Valgrim• 5 years ago

It's 18/100000, not 18/100

abeppu2• 5 years ago

But still, it is worth noting that the peak US vaccinated death rates on those charts (e.g. ~1.47 / 100k for Pfizer) are higher than the current _unvaccinated_ death rate in Chile. Vaccination contribute an order of magnitude decrease in the death rate, but surges can contribute an order of magnitude difference as well, within a country over time or between countries. Vaccines matter a lot, but all the other public health tools to prevent/combat surges also still matter.

angelzen4• 5 years ago

The numbers are small and the risk concentrated in the elderly ailing population such that an outbreak in nursing homes can skew the overall numbers one way or another, depending on lack of PCR tests or over-sensitive PCR tests. These numbers are mostly useful for detecting general trends, e.g. are the cases going up or down, what is the O(death risk)?. Strictly comparing different locales is not going to be very informative

encryptluks24• 5 years ago

If you change the age group to the youngest possible, there are times where those dying that are vaccinated actually surpasses those that are unvaccinated. The difference is so low though that I don't understand how it would make sense to vaccinate those under 12. I remember at the onset of COVID-19 that they tried so hard to make everyone scared to death (literally) that they would push videos of people dying in the streets saying it was COVID-19 causing it.

xupybd3• 5 years ago

A friend of mine is concerned about the life long impacts covid may have on his children. He really wants them to be vaccinated to prevent any of the long term effects.

I'm not sure what data there is on children and long term covid impacts?

glial• 5 years ago

This article has some numbers:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01935-7

deanc• 5 years ago

Because they spread to the rest of the population. I don’t understand how, two years into the pandemic people are still evaluating whether we should vaccinate people based only off the risk to themselves.

encryptluks24• 5 years ago

Vaccinated people spread to the rest of the population as well. Don't know why you think vaccination prevents people from spreading COVID-19.

verdverm4• 5 years ago

I don't know the answer to this, but how does the total viral shed of a unvaccinated child compare to a vaccinated 60+? Also the viral shed of children compared by vaccine status.

If it turns out the answer is lower and similar respectively, then it would seem vaccination of children makes little difference in the grand scheme.

Two years in and we still make policy with many unknowns. Why don't we have a better understanding of the effects of policies over the last two years? I suspect (hope) we will have a 9/11 style commission in the US to study covid and policy for many years

blindmute• 5 years ago

I don't care about the rest of the population; I care about the health of my children. So yes, I am going to evaluate vaccinating a young child based on the risk to them. The child death rate graph is just noise; you can't tell any difference between vaccinated and not. The side effect rate from vaccines graph is, obviously, 0% in the latter group.

6565656565652• 5 years ago

They are another host to store, mutate and retransmit

encryptluks24• 5 years ago

So are vaccinated individuals.

mint27• 5 years ago

The data there is clearly extremely noisy the way it jumps around so much

Godel_unicode3• 5 years ago

This observation always really irritates me; making no comment about this particular instance, data jumping around doesn't necessarily mean it's noisy. Some datasets have high variance.

yrttq123• 5 years ago

I'd be genuinely interested if they would provide the death rate for recovered individuals too, as that is something that gets discussed often.

mleonhard• 5 years ago

I need this data, too. My 71-year-old father had a mild case last year and is refusing the vaccine.

TigeriusKirk• 5 years ago

Why is the death rate in the US plummeting among the unvaccinated? Is it just less spread all around?

op00to• 5 years ago

We have thereputics and understand how to treat it. Also younger people are getting sicker.

nradov7• 5 years ago

Younger people are getting infected at higher rates, however there's no reliable evidence that they're suffering more severe symptoms.

skywal_l2• 5 years ago

Maybe because, even if you are not vaccinated, you have less chance of catching covid if everyone around you is.

rozap2• 5 years ago

OP is asking about survivorship rate of people who get it, not how likely you are to die of covid. Herd immunity shouldn't come into play here.

hwbehrens• 5 years ago

The denominator of the death rate is not COVID cases, it is total population. If the number of COVID cases drops, even if mortality remains constant, then the death rate will also see a concomitant drop. When compared to a graph of the daily cases, the pattern in the parent post essentially matches.

rozap2• 5 years ago

Probably a few things. Younger people getting it as schools open up, and it has already killed a lot of the people that it was able to kill.

Ajedi32• 5 years ago

Younger people getting it as schools open up

Wouldn't that cause an increase in the death rate among the unvaccinated?

AFAIK this data isn't "covid deaths/people who got covid", it's "covid deaths/the entire population".

Mikeb85• 5 years ago

Because Covid seems to be exceptionally efficient at killing those who are already sick. It's somewhat survivorship bias... Now that we have more effective means of protecting the at-risk (and plenty of them already died), the mortality rate is going down since the mix of people getting sick includes more healthy people as a %.

edmundsauto2• 5 years ago

Recently infected people haven't had as much chance to succumb. There are also delays in reporting I believe. I also think your explanation carries much of the effect size, but the timing also matters.

matwood2• 5 years ago

Less spread and delta was so contagious over the summer that it quickly burned through many unvaccinated populations.

zwieback3• 5 years ago

The average person (vax or anti-vax) will read this to the end, maybe even understand the numbers but then think "well, but half of COVID deaths are among the vaccinated". 90% of people know that Stats is the hardest math there is and the other 15% don't get it.

lmilcin• 5 years ago

These days you can't rely even on scientists to interpret results correctly. I see interpretation problems almost every other paper I read that has any non trivial research that involves statistics.

Vast majority of people are functional illiterates when it comes to statistics. How you present statistics is more important than what the data actually says.

admax88qqq• 5 years ago

Fun fact, you probably never could rely on scientists to interpret results correctly.

GDC72• 5 years ago

Not knowing statistics is a form of protection against depression, sadness and anxiety.

Gotta thank god that the majority of people believe bad stuff doesn't apply to them.

It's a burden for few.

If you want to see society collapse just improve the literacy in statistics

Der_Einzige• 5 years ago

Correct. The famous saying that "ignorance is bliss" is what comes to mind here.

rsynnott9• 5 years ago

Not knowing statistics is a form of protection against depression, sadness and anxiety.

Hrm, I'd have thought the opposite. A lot of the things that many people spend a lot of time worrying about are really vanishingly unlikely.

Arainach• 5 years ago

90% of people know that Stats is the hardest math there is and the other 15% don't get it.

I feel like this is a joke that I'm not understanding?

zwieback3• 5 years ago

Yeah, sorry, doesn't add up to 100, that's the whole joke.

steviedotboston2• 5 years ago

It really seems like it's safe to say that a fully vaccinated person's risk of dying from covid is low enough where based on the pre-2020 accepted societal standards for risk there should be next to no behavior modification expected.

erehweb• 5 years ago

Death is not the only bad outcome from COVID, though, so some behavior modification could be justifiable based on risk tolerance.

steviedotboston2• 5 years ago

The vast majority of cases for someone who is fully vaccinated are asymptomatic or mild. The risk of having a severe enough case to require any sort of medical attention is quite low, and for those people who do need it the new antivirals seem to be working very well.

sorenn111• 5 years ago

This point 100x times. I am more paranoid about COVID than most people are because I have an autoimmune disease (which is mild and seems to not really affect outcomes). While my autoimmune caveat can be written off, I see most people seeing death as the only bad outcome and framing their risk tolerance and mitigation based on that. What has given me extra concern from the start is the damage done by COVID for patients who survive and even have a mild case. The rates of Long COVID (potentially overdiagnosed because of similarities with pandemic restriction related depression) are sufficiently high that it more concern than is given.

xboxnolifes• 5 years ago

Death is not the only bad outcome for most viruses/diseases, but we only really track death so that's what we compare.

rob74• 5 years ago

The problem is that vaccination protects you from having a bad case of Covid, but it doesn't protect you from getting infected and infecting others. So, if the vaccinated carry on as if it's 2019, the disease will jump from one vaccinated person to the next until it finds an unvaccinated person.

moosey• 5 years ago

I believe that the proper response to this is to limit the percentage of hospital wards that can be devoted to COVID 19 cases, as the main effect of low vaccination rates is that the hospitals get too full.

And suddenly, I'm not worried anymore, unlike now where the regional hospitals are massively backed up or closed due to low vaccination rates.

My compassion is completely fatigued. All I can think about now is getting back to the gym when my youngest is fully vaccinated.

nradov7• 5 years ago

I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but since the virus is now endemic everyone will eventually be exposed. You can't seriously expect people to tolerate restrictions indefinitely.

jointpdf• 5 years ago

This is completely wrong—being vaccinated does reduce your likelihood of getting infected (and thus reduces likelihood of infecting others).

In September, unvaccinated persons had a 5.8X risk of testing positive for COVID-19 and a 14X risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to vaccinated persons.

Source: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...

sciurus3• 5 years ago

vaccination ... doesn't protect you from getting infected and infecting others

Thankfully, this is wrong on both counts.

1) Vaccinated people are significantly less likely to contract the virus

2) Breakthrough infections are significantly less contagious than infections in nonimmune persons

There's a good article diving into this at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/22/most-pern...

Tempest1981• 5 years ago

If I can modify my behavior and save an elderly grandparent's life, I will happily do so.

Teever• 5 years ago

You'd think so, but where I'm from there are rural areas where hardly anyone has vaccinated and those who get sick from COVID are filling all of the hospitals in the cities while many other people were actually protesting at hospitals.

It's really disconcerting to think all those amazing life-saving but time-critical techniques and technologies that we have developed in the 20th century don't mean a thing if you're screaming in agony in the back of an ambulance after a car accident while the ambulance is stuck in a protest 200 feet from the ER entrance.

fragmede• 5 years ago

Is it? 0.2 percent of American's have already died from this. Or put another way, 99.98% is the current best real live actual number of how survivable Covid-19 is. Not some made up number with a bunch more 9's or 0's, but 99.98%. Three nines would be pathetic for a website's uptime. (I might be biased on that one, I do that professionally.) This puts it 3rd on the list of health reasons Americans die, behind cancer and heart disease and we sure as shit do a ton of things to prevent cancer in a large population (see also: Why we don't have more nuclear power plants. Hey guess what you get when you get exposed to poisonous radiation?).

ipspam• 5 years ago

Pretty bad comparison. Covid is massively front loaded. Almost every single person in the US has a much higher chance of dying from heart disease or whatever over a legitimate period of time.

alibarber• 5 years ago

Reasonably sure that more people get cancer from things like smoking than their desire to build their own nuclear power plants.

People can still and will keep on buying cigarettes and smoke and give themselves cancer. Governments still permit their sale in a lot of places. I think the ship has sailed on support for the 'give up freedoms such as traveling to see your friends and family and engaging in social activities' preventative measure.

sokoloff• 5 years ago

I set our target uptime at 99.95% believing that to be the most reasonable balance of availability and willingness to take risks to increase the pace of developing the product.

0.2 percent of American's have already died from this. Or put another way, 99.98% is the current best real live actual number of how survivable Covid-19 is.

Side note: 1 - 0.2% is 99.8%, not 99.98%.

nradov7• 5 years ago

Based on CDC data the best number of how survivable COVID-19 is for unvaccinated patients is 99.4%. That's a population average. There is a huge variance between age groups.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Vaccination pushes the survivability rate closer to 100%. We also have some improved treatments that have recently boosted the survival rate.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 5 years ago

COVID19 is NOT a personal health emergency. As an American, your chance of dying from COVID are vanishingly small, and even your chance of being seriously ill or suffering from "long COVID" are extremely small.

But ... COVID19 IS a public health emergency. It is contagious enough and causes a need for hospitalization enough that it is fairly easy for it to overwhelm our public health care systems. This means that when you next cut your hand with a turkey carving knife, are involved in an automobile accident, turn out to have cancer, or suffer from any of an almost innumerable number of medical conditions, you (and everyone else) will face personal consequences (including risk of death) from COVID19's impact on health care systems.

This disease is not about you, or me, or individuals in general. It's about a threat to our public health systems because of large numbers (and the numbers don't have to be that large) of people catching COVID19, getting sick and overloading hospitals. It has nothing really to do with risk of death or long term consequences, although the friends and relatives of the hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, and the thousands of people with long covid might also want a word with you.

DanHulton• 5 years ago

I have friends and family who have had to delay lifesaving medical procedures because hospitals are still swamped and medical personnel are still overworked from dealing with the COVID cases we currently have.

Societal standards for risk still need to take into account far, far more than just "Am I, personally, going to die from exactly this one risk factor?"

oceanplexian• 5 years ago

I agree, however the obvious answer is that society should then build more hospitals and train more nurses, the same way that China did in 2020. Not plunge the economy into debt and force millions of people to change their behavior because of a broken system.

rsynnott9• 5 years ago

there should be next to no behavior modification expected.

So, there are a few things here.

Purely from an individual point of view, for the average vaccinated (and especially the average boosted person), this is probably largely true.

And indeed if the whole population was vaccinated then this would probably largely be true for everyone.

But the elephant in the room is the hospitals. If rates are high enough that the ICUs are full (typically, in heavily vaccinated countries, mostly of unvaccinated people and severely immunocompromised people) then that is a big, big problem. If you're in a nasty car accident, say, you may, under normal circumstances, end up in ICU. However, if ICU is full of covid patients, you won't, even if you need it. And, less dramatically, overcrowded hospitals mean a lot of routine stuff gets cancelled. Many countries' hospital systems have, in practice, been in a reduced normal capacity for the last two years, and there are significant backlogs; it can't go on forever.

But yes, if you, personally, are vaccinated and boosted (and not immunocompromised), then you, personally, are unlikely to die regardless of how bad your behaviour is. Not of covid, anyway. Perhaps avoid ending up in a situation where you need to go to hospital for something else, indefinitely, though.

spurgu5• 5 years ago

Why haven't governments been working hard at increasing capacity in terms of ventilators and hospital beds and other needed equipment, since March 2020? Back then governments actually did that, and set up emergency beds.

I know that there's a shortage of personnel, but it just seems that this would've been something to work towards since the beginning. I don't know what is practically needed from the personnel to nurse <60 year old Covid patients (couldn't less trained staff, 6 month quick course do the bulk of it?), the vast majority of which who go home, while it's the older ones who won't return home, and will likely require constant and/or prolonged care.

Solve the equation for the younger patients and boom, you can increase hospital capacity (or setup new "Covid ICU:s") and just let the wave hit. Seems it would be such a better solution than whatever we're doing now (prolonging the backlogs forever).

concinds4• 5 years ago

I don't believe this statistical analysis is proper, because it doesn't take into account the statistical problems highlighted here: https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-vaccine-ef...

charbonneau2• 5 years ago

Here's a 25 minute presentation from the same author analyzing COVID-vaccine efficiency and safety statistics in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6umArFc-fdc

benchaney2• 5 years ago

This article doesn’t identify any statistical problems. It just points out that it would be possible to get a misleading result if you handle your data incorrectly. It provides no actual evidence that such a mishandling is actually occurring.

concinds4• 5 years ago

The problem isn't only mishandling of data by statistical analysts, it is merely sufficient that government data be improperly recorded (as was famous last year, when people saw Covid statistics miraculously jump down on weekends and back up on Mondays in several countries) or that vaccinated/unvaccinated populations were misclassified (for example, by only defining people as vaccinated 2 weeks after they had their second dose, i.e. 3 months after the first dose, a rather long time). The article shows that artefacts you'd expect to see if data was improperly recorded, is actually visible in the real government figures. Whether due to the issues discussed, or due to other causes would require deeper analysis. But the onus then goes on people doing statistical analyses to understand, and correct for any mistakes in the originally compiled government data, and not blindly put numbers in Excel without deeply understanding the data they're feeding into it. Any good undergrad statistics prof would cringe at that.

chmod600• 5 years ago

The rate of death over what period? The site does not make that clear.

Is it annualized? Should we compare it to the murder rate of 5 or 6 per 100k?

gmm1990• 5 years ago

There are charts on that webpage that have the data per week if you scroll down a little.

mint27• 5 years ago

This is fine but still overlooks sample bias.

I.e older and more susceptible to illness people like 70 year olds are more likely to be vaxxed than 25 year olds. Had the vaccination rate been constant across ages, the unvaccinated death rate would be far higher and the vaccinated death rate far lower. It’s bad stats to not account for the population differences like that one.

angelzen4• 5 years ago

The charts offer an age breakdown. Click the "Change age group" button.

autarch2• 5 years ago

You can dig down and view stats by age group as well.

microtonal• 5 years ago

Another factor is that if the vaccination rate is very high, this also results in fewer deaths in the unvaccinated group, since it reduces the R factor.

hagbard_c7• 5 years ago

This is actually debatable given that "fully" vaccinated people who get infected - a so-called 'breakthrough infection' - seem to transmit SARS2 at close to the same rate as those unvaccinated [1,2]: fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts

Whether the R-factor is reduced markedly depends on the number of breakthrough infections. In this study the infection rate in household contacts exposed to the delta variant was 25% (95% CI 18–33) for fully vaccinated individuals compared with 38% (24–53) in unvaccinated individuals, i.e. the vaccinated run ⅔ of the risk of getting infected compared to the unvaccinated. Given that the vaccinated were of a younger age than the unvaccinated the actual risk reduction is likely to be even smaller than stated.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

[2] https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/fully-vaccinated-people...

bob_neumann4• 5 years ago

No, the death rate in the ONS data from England is age adjusted. So among the same aged cohorts, the vaccinated are more likely to die than the unvaccinated. Almost twice as likely for the last 6 months straight.

bob_neumann4• 5 years ago

I'm speaking specifically of the age 10 to 59 age group. For the last 6 months that age group, the vaccinated are almost twice as likely to die of any cause than the unvaccinated.

mint27• 5 years ago

So other people point out some things specifically about age so please read those,

is it also standardized for immune system status? Diabetes? Etc etc etc

repta2• 5 years ago

Thankfully, epidemiologists around the world did not wait for mint2 on HN to realize this. All of these all-age rates are age-adjusted according to the country’s population pyramid.

sciurus3• 5 years ago

This is one of the factors discussed at https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/math-covid-vaccinatio... , which is a nice overview of how innumeracy helps fuel covid misinformation.

mint27• 5 years ago

Wish I could edit my comment to add a statement that very sadly has been shown to have been needed. age is but one example out of many different conditions that would cause more frail people to self select. Stop replying to say one can zoom in and see age segments.

And please note that the main point of the article is an ELI5 of why absolute death numbers is misleading, but that eli5 doesn’t mention the sample bias which would be a good “next layer” to mention at least in the conclusion.

So yeah it’s all very fine that as so many people like to reply that a reader can dig around and find age groups assuming they already know about sample bias and thus are trying to control for those things. But oh wait one little problem. This article is explaining why one needs to look at rates not absolute numbers. If someone is aware of sample bias why would they need this article? Are you telling me people who need the first eli5 are going to know sample bias?!?!?

rllearneratwork• 5 years ago

Isn't their data also showing that Moderna is the most effective vaccine at preventing deaths?

anonporridge• 5 years ago

I believe that's been the growing consensus for a while now.

Pyramus5• 5 years ago

Yes, and we are also pretty certain that the mechanism of action is the number of mRNA particles contained: 30 µg for Pfizer/Biontech vs 100 µg for Moderna.

As a result, Germany e.g. uses half-doses for Moderna and vaccinates under 30s exclusively with Biontech.

jjcon• 5 years ago

I believe that has been established for a while now across multiple jurisdictions. Most approved vaccines in eu and us are quite effective though

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-09-17/...

GuB-42• 5 years ago

Moderna seems to be slightly more effective but with slightly worse side effects. Dose is the most likely explanation (30µg for Pfizer/Biontech vs 100µg for Moderna).

less_less• 5 years ago

An additional reason is that Pfizer/Biontech was available first, so old or otherwise vulnerable people are more likely to have been vaccinated with that.

That is, Moderna is probably more effective, but people vaccinated with it have an even lower death rate because they're less likely to have been in a vulnerable group.

This is also a major factor that can be missed when going over the vaxxed vs unvaxxed death rates. If (eg) 75% of the population is vaxxed, 5% chose not to take it and 20% are too young (and thus very unlikely to die of Covid), then the difference in death rate will be much smaller than you'd expect based on vaccine effectiveness.

HMH2• 5 years ago

Maximum death rate for all age groups with Moderna, which at least according to these plots provides the lowest death rate, is at 0.8/100_000 in August 2021 for all age groups. Maximum death rate for the unvaccinated of age 12-17 is at 0.17/100_000, for age 18-29 it is 0.76/100_000, also in August 2021.

So even unvaccinated younger people (age < 30) are better off than the average vaccinated Joe. The thing is, so far I have pretty much never heard of this in my countries media, at least to me it sounds like "vaccinate absolutely everyone or we are all doomed", which according to this data is not the case.

k8sToGo• 5 years ago

Except that you are also more easily spreading the virus if you are not vaccinated.

elif• 5 years ago

That perspective is only accurate egocentrically. If you look at population-level epidemiology you will find vaccines inhibit viral spread.

the-dude• 5 years ago

NL is at ~85% vaccinated 12 yrs up. Infections are through the roof.

johndevor• 5 years ago

you will find vaccines inhibit viral spread

Is this true? Countries like Singapore and Israel are seeing huge spikes in cases despite having some of the highest vax rates.

My suspicion is that vaccines have the downside of suppressing symptoms, thus making the vaxxed more likely to spread covid without knowing it.

nradov7• 5 years ago

Sterilizing vaccines inhibit spread. The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines aren't sterilizing to any significant extent. Vaccinated individuals might be contagious for a slightly shorter period but in the long run that doesn't matter because the virus is now endemic and everyone will be exposed eventually. Fortunately the vaccines are still fairly effective at preventing deaths.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

jrd259• 5 years ago

If you are under 30, it appears your risk of death is low regardless of your status, but you will not forever be under 30, and perhaps you know some over-30 for whom the difference in death rate is important? Even if there's no one you care about who is over 30, to the extent that vaccination also reduces your risk of infecting others, it is polite to your society to be vaccinated. Perhaps you get no great benefit, but others do.

enchiridion• 5 years ago

Does anyone have good stats to share on how vaccination impacts transmission? I’m curious.

ifyoubuildit4• 5 years ago

Presumably the under 30s will get covid within a few years, and then they will be in the pool of people with significant immunity.

spurgu5• 5 years ago

I was lying in bed for two days until I self-diagnosed with appendicitis and decided to go to the hospital. Turned out I was just in time. What I mean is I won't seek medical help unless absolutely possible (I live in EU countries where medical care is free). Due to this mindset (whether or not you think it's stupid, I don't really care) I'm simply not going to subscribe to having two boosters per year for the rest of my life. I've had two jabs now but as it looks like now I'm probably soon gonna start putting my immune system to work (and travel less as a result I suppose).

There are studies indicating a previous infection provides a stronger and longer lasting response than the vaccine, although this is not definite yet - Israelis and the CDC have made opposing conclusions on this topic.

eqvinox3• 5 years ago

You're forgetting the vaccine is also very efficient in preventing hospitalization. By a factor of ≈11 (average, ages 12-17 & 18-59) in the RKI (Germany) data[¹].

So even if you're aged 12 to 29, if you don't get vaccinated you're gambling at taking away someone else's hospital bed. Which will doom the rest of us.

So, can everyone please get fricken vaccinated ffs?

[¹] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

HMH2• 5 years ago

So even if you're aged 12 to 29, if you don't get vaccinated you're gambling at taking away someone else's hospital bed. Which will doom the rest of us.

According to [1] at no point in time since March this year (when they started recording this data) have there been more than 100 hospitalizations in the age group 0-30 in Germany a country with 80+ million inhabitants. If this means doom to all of us I don't know anymore.

[1] https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/altersstrukt...

nradov7• 5 years ago

I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but hyperbole isn't helpful. Occupying a hospital bed won't doom the rest of us. In any given year only a small fraction of the population gets admitted to a hospital for any reason.

mbesto• 5 years ago

at least to me it sounds like "vaccinate absolutely everyone or we are all doomed", which according to this data is not the case.

Sending mass communication about health with a list of "ifs ands or buts" is incredibly challenging especially for a pandemic level response, so if the communication is simply "get the vaccine" then you're going to get a higher uptick.

I understand your nitpick, but also understand the general population doesn't fully grok this stuff.

EDIT: Lemme also add - the data we're viewing is retrospective. We wouldn't know the effect until now, so of course the message has been "Get the vaccine"

bellyfullofbac• 5 years ago

That's a curious interpretation of the graphs... in all age groups in the US, the unvaxed line is higher than the vaxed graph (except for 1 data point for ages 12-17).

If you're unvaxed and using "So even unvaccinated younger people (age < 30) are better off than the average vaccinated Joe." as a justification, it's a bit like saying "I know being unvaxed I have worse survival odds than a fully vaxed 65 year old, but I prefer that!"

And please just compare data from close time periods, if we can pick different times for our rates, then I would pick October 2016, the chances of dying from Covid-19 at that time was absolute 0, even for the unvaxed!

bigodbiel2• 5 years ago

I mean it was never the case, since the beginning we all knew it was 95% of deaths among the 50+.

Then the goalposts (sorry for this language but there isn’t any other) shifted to continued transmission and viral mutation, until breakthrough became normalized. Now it’s filling up ICUs and healthcare collapse because of the unvaccinated.

It’s all really sad when the CDC itself needs to cherrypick data until it can proudly say that “vaccines are 5x better than natural immunity” as if it was a competition: man versus nature (never mind the dozens of studies proving otherwise)

fulafel• 5 years ago

So even unvaccinated younger people (age < 30) are better off than the average vaccinated Joe

Of course you can only say this only for a big 18-29 age group viewed as an aggregate (regarding mortality), but can't say that generally of members the group.

Eg according to https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-... the deaths in 25-29 age group are dramatically more common than among 18-24 year olds, and there are other individual traits that are big factors in death risk. So it's safe to say that lots of <30 year olds have multi-% death risks, not to mention lifelong or long lasting harm from the additional near death cases.

(But of course the most important thing is to reduce infections between people to keep riskier groups alive, so even without personal death risk it would be incredibly immoral to not get vaxed)

dougmwne2• 5 years ago

Dear HN, should I, a man under 40 get a booster shot? How many months after my second dose should I get it?

What are the best resources to answer this question? This information is scary hard to get for someone who wants science, not politics.

s53002• 5 years ago

> What are the best resources to answer this question?

….seriously?

Your doctor

Good lord we are in for some bad times

thugthrasher• 5 years ago

And if you don't trust your doctor to give you good information, then find another doctor. And never go back to the doctor you can't trust again.

distances2• 5 years ago

For what it's worth, it would never cross my mind to get a doctor's appointment to just ask if I should get a booster. The health care system does not have enough slack for everyone to do that. I'd read official recommendations.

gardncl• 5 years ago

What are the best resources to answer this question? Your physician. Not hacker news.

belter2• 5 years ago

Your physician if he reads hacker news

concinds4• 5 years ago

Your average family physician reads exactly zero published papers per year, and would rely on Googling and reading health authority summary pages or media sources. If the goal is convincing skeptical family members with hard facts, searching the scientific literature oneself is likely much more effective.

xigoi• 5 years ago

I'm not a medical expert, but my country (Czechia) recommends getting the third dose 6 months after the second.

sjg0073• 5 years ago

In the US: 6 months after the 2nd mRNA dose or 2 months after J&J.

undersuit• 5 years ago

I biked over to the employee health center yesterday and got my Moderna booster. Early April and May were when I went for the initial vaccinations.

34 Male, 31.2 BMI

I'm going to Las Vegas after Christmas, don't want anything disrupting the fun.

satysin• 5 years ago

Your countries health care service most likely has public guidelines on this which you should consult.

If you have some kind of medical condition and a booster concerns you I advise you make an appointment with your doctor to discuss your specific concerns and get professional advice.

Hacker News is not the place to ask such a question nor give any response other than "check with your local health care service or doctor" imho.

notatoad2• 5 years ago

as a person asking this question on the internet, i'm going to assume that you are not a scientist, and probably unqualified to make a scientific decision. you might be able to read some scientific-sounding information, but unless you're a professional in the field your odds of coming to a correct conclusion based on information you read is no better than random, and will almost certainly be biased by your politics.

i'll be getting a booster when my local health authorities say i'm eligible for one, because i know i have no relevant expertise that enables me to make a scientific conclusion on this subject. and neither does HN.

nradov7• 5 years ago

If you previously received an mRNA vaccine then you might want to consider waiting to get a booster until the Novavax vaccine is approved. It uses different technology and we expect that the combination of two different vaccine types will likely produce a wider spectrum of immunity. But there's little hard data on that so far and you shouldn't take this as medical advice.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2107659

bigodbiel2• 5 years ago

It becomes politics when becoming un-boosted means losing your access to society.

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

Bob Wachter who is the chair of the department of medicine at UCSF says get a booster 6 months after either Pfizer or Moderna. If you got the J&J get a booster after 4 months.

https://profiles.ucsf.edu/robert.wachter

rsynnott9• 5 years ago

a man under 40 get a booster shot?

Yes; there is minimal disadvantage to doing so, it appears probable that booster shots reduce the chances if getting covid (which, even if not fatal is often quite _unpleasant_), and thus transmitting it, and, while it is very rare for vaccinated under 40s to die of covid, well, no-one wants to be a statistic.

How many months after my second dose should I get it?

Recommendation normally seems to be 5 or 6 months; some authorities are recommending after 3 months for J&J.

What are the best resources to answer this question?

Your GP and local health authority.

hirundo• 5 years ago

If a lion is killing the weakest members of your herd it is natural to want to kill the lion. But that victory can be a defeat for the health of herd. I wonder if a scientist in a lab somewhere decided that a disease that takes the old and infirm while sparing the young was a wonderful species of lion, a gift to the herd to be released into the wild.

frickinLasers2• 5 years ago

For the irrationally angry throwaway, here you go: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...

VAERS (an early warning system that allows unverified reports and requires physicians to report all seemingly related deaths) shows 0.0022% (9,810) of vaccinated individuals in the US died after receiving the vaccine.

Generously assuming all those reports can be directly linked to the vaccination (they can't), that figure is already three orders of magnitude lower than the 1.6% (772,000) of people who caught COVID that died. Looking at the linked charts, if we'd had the vaccine at the beginning, we could surmise that roughly 77,000 (87,000 if you want to add the unconfirmed vaccine deaths) of COVID deaths would have been vaccinated, and almost 700,000 would have been unvaccinated. Add in the potential effect of herd immunity, which we never achieved--who knows how well off we'd be if people hadn't wasted so much energy railing against the public good (for an idea, maybe look at how the polio vaccine went over with the public, and how many people in the US now have polio).

Every death is a tragedy. A little bit of elementary school knowledge of how vaccines work, combined with actually using your brain, indicates the degree of tragedy could be reduced at least 10-fold if all the irrationally angry people would just get vaccinated.

lpolovets2• 5 years ago

that figure is already three orders of magnitude lower than the 1.6% (772,000)

I think the interesting ethical/moral/etc debate is what to do for people who are at lower or negligible risk of dying from COVID in the first place.

For example, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... suggests that <20k people under 40 have died from covid over 2 years. There might be age groups or demographics where the risk of death from the vaccine is higher than from covid. (This is a statistics observation, not a political statement.) For those groups, what should be expected in terms of vaccination? E.g. what if for your demographic, the risk of death from the vaccine in 1 in 50k but the risk of death from covid is 1 in 200k?

notatoad2• 5 years ago

what demographic has a 1 in 50k chance of dying from the vaccine but a 1 in 200k risk of dying from covid?

Tarsul• 5 years ago

if you go that far in your analysis, you should also include long covid in your risk assessment.

frickinLasers2• 5 years ago

It seems like it could be a debate worth having. I'd love to see a similar breakdown of vaccine deaths by age (though I don't think there's an official count of confirmed vaccine deaths yet).

If a healthy under-40 individual had the same or slightly higher risk of dying from the vaccine as from covid, but a lower risk of passing it to their parents and any elderly person they come into contact with, should they prioritize their own small statistical advantage over the lives of those others? Should they also consider infections down the line, generated by the individuals they infected?

If someone were to present a convincing case that such a hypothetical were true, I might be forced to rethink some things. However, since the vaccine isn't mandatory, I don't see much in the way of actionable conclusions (other than posting the stats to the CDC website). Personally, I'd take on at least double the (low) risk to try and protect my family. But I'm also biased by knowing how shitty COVID can be, and preferring a quick death to a COVID death.

sjg0073• 5 years ago

Mumps doesn’t cause infertility or brain swelling in all males but you’d still want to get vaccinated.

gilbetron• 5 years ago

You are doing your math incorrectly. The "0.0022%" number if for all age groups, so if you want to compare appropriately, you use the % for death via covid for all age groups, which is 1.6%. If you want to narrow it to age group, you need to find the death rate in VAERS by age group.

Furthermore, the 0.0022% is undoubtedly a gross exaggeration of death-by-vaccine, as VAERS is designed to capture nearly any result of death after a vaccination, including things like "got hit by a car" because drugs could cause drowsiness, for instance.

In fact, it seems that people that get the vaccine have a reduced chance of dying from non-Covid things.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm

absnetneg• 5 years ago

I think being generous with these arguments hurts more than helps. The reporting rules are mandatory for COVID-19 vaccines because they were authorized under emergency use.

"Healthcare providers who administer COVID-19 vaccines are required by law to report the following to VAERS" ... "Death" - https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html

Even someone who dies of a car accident gets recorded as a death. There is no judgement call made as to whether the vaccine caused it at all, it is required by law.

https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D8/D159F823

VAERS is a dataset that is meaningless on its own, especially in the case of the COVID-19 vaccine. It is meant to be compared with other datasets to uncover trends which could indicate a problem with the vaccine.

scotty79• 5 years ago

Example at the beginning shows clear algorithm how to turn ratio between vaccinated and unvaccinated deaths, percentage of vaccinated and population size into actual death rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated.

I wonder why they didn't apply it to real world data later on in the article.

repta2• 5 years ago

That is literally all they did.

silent_cal6• 5 years ago

Why are vaccinated people under 60 are dying at a higher rate than unvaccinated in England?

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adult...

petmon• 5 years ago

Probably Simpson's Paradox. A 59 year old is both more likely to be vaccinated and to die from any cause, compared to a 10 year old.

silent_cal6• 5 years ago

Then why did this trend only emerge in April? The population of young people being vaccinated has increased since then.

titaniczero• 5 years ago

Probably because those rates are from 10 to 60 years, which is quite a broad range. People in their fifties/sixties die like A LOT more than young people and these ages happen to be the most vaccinated compared to the youngest ones. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-simpson/

Also, when we are seeing far fewer vaccinated people in hospital in most countries (in my country 70% of the admissions in the hospital are from unvaccinated people), it is not only that the number of vaccinated people in hospital is much lower, you have to keep in mind that the number of vaccinated people is much higher (in my country +80%, almost 90%, are vaccinated) so the effect of the vaccine in death rate is even much higher (before measuring the effect of vaccines we even thought that vaccinated people would be the most prevalent in hospital because the number is vastly superior)

silent_cal6• 5 years ago

Then why did this trend only emerge in April? The population of young people being vaccinated has increased since then.

Pyramus5• 5 years ago

Your link also provides the likely answer when you scroll down to the comments:

One reason not to draw too much of a conclusion is that 10 to 59 is a really, really broad age group, and the underlying death rate at the top of that group will be much higher than at the bottom.
If the vaccination is also unevenly distributed in that group (and you would imagine the vaccination rate to be much lower among 10 year-olds than 59 year-olds) that would probably provide a sufficient explanation.

silent_cal6• 5 years ago

Then why did this trend only emerge in April? The population of young people being vaccinated has increased since then.

guilhas3• 5 years ago

The Public Health England weekly report, already adjusted for percentage of vaccinated, for the last few weeks clearly shows more deaths of the vaccinated from covid and other causes

The USA having more deaths this year than last, with the Delta that spreads faster but is less deadly

Personally not vaccinated, had covid recently, and have no plans of getting vaccinated. Caught from my Pfizer vaccinated wife, and we both had the same symptoms

pfg8• 5 years ago

Are you referring to the same ONS data mentioned in [1]? That figure is highly misleading.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29323441

guilhas3• 5 years ago

Can't find the data mention, or was edited out

Was this one? Mine is similar but released by PHE weekly, with more breakdowns

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

But even looking at this one you can see the trend shifting from end of September, where vaccinated are now dying more than unvaccinated

Do you think is misleading? Why? It is being used for months

latchkey• 5 years ago

Who's effects were worse?

bob_neumann4• 5 years ago

I noticed that they're only evaluating the covid-19 death rate. Not the overall death rate. Based on the latest data from England's ONS, in the 10 to 59 year old category, the vaccinated overall death rate is almost twice as high as the unvaccinated death rate

bob_neumann4• 5 years ago

Https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/dataset/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland

MaurizioPz3• 5 years ago

thanks, but the link doesn't work

pfg8• 5 years ago

I'm assuming this should be https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde....

Can you be more specific with your claim? The age-standardised mortality rate appears to be significantly higher for the unvaccinated population according to your source.

// edit: Sorry, I missed the part where you were talking about a specific age group. This can be explained by [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29323980

MaurizioPz3• 5 years ago

Sorry but I can't find a source for this statistic. Could you provide me a pointer to it?

moistly• 5 years ago

If your claim is true, the UK’s health authorities are deliberately ignoring this vital fact and have effectively engaged in manslaughter. That seems rather unlikely to me.

amai• 5 years ago

How death rates from Covid-19 differ between vaccinated and unvaccinated

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