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.
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?!?!?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
> 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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
> 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"
> 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)
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)
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?
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] mint2|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mint2|4 years ago|reply
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?!?!?
[+] [-] bob_neumann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microtonal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angelzen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sciurus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autarch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] repta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steviedotboston|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erehweb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rob74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanHulton|4 years ago|reply
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?"
[+] [-] rsynnott|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fragmede|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Teever|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tempest1981|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bud|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HMH|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jrd259|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elif|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|4 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] fulafel|4 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] k8sToGo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigodbiel|4 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] eqvinox|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] bellyfullofbac|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] zwieback|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GDC7|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] lmilcin|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Arainach|4 years ago|reply
I feel like this is a joke that I'm not understanding?
[+] [-] guilhas|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] pfg|4 years ago|reply
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29323441
[+] [-] latchkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yrttq123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silent_cal|4 years ago|reply
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adult...
[+] [-] bob_neumann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod600|4 years ago|reply
Is it annualized? Should we compare it to the murder rate of 5 or 6 per 100k?
[+] [-] dougmwne|4 years ago|reply
What are the best resources to answer this question? This information is scary hard to get for someone who wants science, not politics.
[+] [-] concinds|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xupybd|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scotty79|4 years ago|reply
I wonder why they didn't apply it to real world data later on in the article.
[+] [-] repta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TigeriusKirk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rllearneratwork|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jugurtha|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encryptluks2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirundo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frickinLasers|4 years ago|reply
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.