So why are we upset if a 747 crashes with 500 dead? Their own fault to climb on the airplane? They knew the risk?
That’s not a good comparison because anybody who isn’t vacced but could be is taking a big risk and knows it (unless they are stupid, for which there is no solution).
We have to accept that there is no cure for stupidity.
Graham wrote:
People don’t understand the incredibly uneven distribution of risk within a population. They think that a 1.5% case fatality rate (UK cumulative 8.94m positive tests, 140k deaths) means that anyone who gets Covid has a 1.5% chance of dying.People and the media cannot grasp that almost all the risk lies with a very small subset of the population in question.
That’s a key point.
As Prof Spiegelhalter put it (in the FT, I think):
It’s very difficult to estimate mortality risk - when you have something that varies at least by over 1000-fold depending on your age or risk factors, the average is pretty pointless.
Or the 3rd point in this
edited to add:
I recall another gem of his illustrated the age-dependent risk factor for Covid:
A fully vaccinated 80 year-old had the same risk (OK, on average:-o) as an unvaccinated 50 year old.
DavidS wrote:
It’s very difficult to estimate mortality risk - when you have something that varies at least by over 1000-fold depending on your age or risk factors, the average is pretty pointless.
The question is not what the meaning of the average really is, but how individuals react to the fact that the average is pointless when it comes to the individual.
In normal risk management (like the one we apply in aviation) one would say “the average is pretty pointless so let’s assume I can’t be better than average and apply risk mitigation based on this assumption”. In Covid far to many people are inclined to say “the average is pretty pointless so let’s assume I’m mister invincable and therefore my risk is by orders of magnitude lower than average”.
Yes, the average is pretty pointless and the true risk of an individual depends on age, (extreme) overweight, smoking (also past smoking), genetic predisposition and a plethora of factors we do not know yet. As there is not a single subpopulation where the risk of vaccination is bigger than the risk of the disease, the answer to this insecurity is pretty simple and straightforward for all people who are not stupid, selfish or both.
DavidS wrote:
A fully vaccinated 80 year-old had the same risk (OK, on average:-o) as an unvaccinated 50 year old.
And you think it’s good news for the unvaccinated 50 year old that his remaining life expectancy is reduced to that of an 80yr old ?
Malibuflyer wrote:
As there is not a single subpopulation where the risk of vaccination is bigger than the risk of the disease, the answer to this insecurity is pretty simple and straightforward for all people who are not stupid, selfish or both.
Exactly.
The problem appears to be that this whole thing turns more and more in a fight of beliefs rather than ratio of known facts. Unfortunately, it gets very difficult to discuss with anyone who has his mind hardwired to one particular belief.
In the movie I linked above from Romania, there appears to be a guy who is in pretty dire condition with Covid and who still maintains he would not get the vaccine, even if he could. What do you do with people like that.
The “news” that vaccinated people can spread the virus as much as unvaccinated is very bad from many points of view, but certainly will again be a big hubbub for anti vaxxers to prove that their earth is indeed flat.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
No. they understand very well that this means 15 out of a thousand will die.
Not 15 out of every thousand. If you’re taking the UK population as a whole, many or most groups of a thousand you select (at random) will not have anyone in them who is vulnerable enough to be killed by Covid. The 15 in 1000 ratio appears with much larger sample sizes.
When the media say things like “people aged 50-60 have a X% chance of dying” what they fail to say is that almost all the risk in 50-60s lies with a very small number of vulnerable people in that group. Most people in that group, taken individually, have a risk infinitesimally smaller than the X% being quoted. The risk is not spread evenly.
I do not argue against vaccination of course.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
140k deaths and millions of people handicapped is a “small subset”? Again, I find that cynical. Accepting these kind of death and loss of health numbers reminds me of very dark times indeed. So why are we upset if a 747 crashes with 500 dead? Their own fault to climb on the airplane? They knew the risk? Here we are talking of a number which is well over a medium size city, all in all so far more than whole countries worth of people have been killed by this bug.
Where to start with this?
140k is the headline figure of ‘deaths’ and is defined as ‘died within 28 days of a positive test’. It does not mean they died from Covid. A very significant portion of these people, perhaps a majority, will actually have died from other causes. It is certainly known that a very significant number contracted it in hospital here in the UK. This is an age-old problem with reporting cause of death and not new to Covid – an elderly and very sick person with multiple comorbidities is in hospital and dies – what do we put as the cause of death? Their whole body was failing in multiple ways and something was always going to kill them very soon. To ascribe it purely to the final infection that finished them off (or one that they had 3 weeks ago) does not tell the whole story and attempts to simplify into newsworthy statistics something which is actually very complicated and difficult to define.
Excess deaths over a few years will also tell a story. These are not 140k random people cut down in their prime – they are mostly very old and quite sick and could reasonably be expected to die in the event of any respiratory infection. This sounds heartless, but it’s how it is.
We do not have millions of people handicapped. That’s just media rubbish.
Your example is interesting. 747s have crashed, lots of people have died. But we don’t say “enough” and stop flying. It’s taken as one of life’s risks, as respiratory infections should be.
In my view the role of government here should be limited to facilitating and funding vaccine development and roll-out.
Malibuflyer wrote:
And you think it’s good news for the unvaccinated 50 year old that his remaining life expectancy is reduced to that of an 80yr old ?
No, I think they should both get vaccinated. But “everything else being equal” even after vaccination the 50 year-old will have the same risk as a 20 year-old. Who should also get vaccinated, but in terms of his own death alone it’s understandably less urgent for the 20-year-old.
Complications arise with “Long Covid” and the risk of infecting others, but that goes beyond the mortality rates.
I found the link
Graham wrote:
In my view the role of government here should be limited to facilitating and funding vaccine development and roll-out.
by now that vaccines are readily available I fully agree. It should be up to everyone to be able to get vaccinated and get booster shots when they or their medical advisor/doc deems it worthwile.
The way Covid certificates work however has definitly shown a huge difference where they are implemented to where they are not. For me, the 3 way certificate (recovered, vaccinated, tested) or even a 2 way (removing the test possibility) are a sure way to get people to vaccinate. I would go even further than this and impose lockout for anyone not having a certificate to any public indoor venue.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
The way Covid certificates work however has definitly shown a huge difference where they are implemented to where they are not. For me, the 3 way certificate (recovered, vaccinated, tested) or even a 2 way (removing the test possibility) are a sure way to get people to vaccinate. I would go even further than this and impose lockout for anyone not having a certificate to any public indoor venue.
I’m sure they make a big difference.
But in my mind, they are an unacceptable restriction on basic freedoms and represent a worrying step towards close government control of individual behaviour and a shift towards a “papers please” culture. This is a much less outrageous idea in most of Europe (with totalitarian rule in living memory and authoritarian government being ‘one of the options’) than it is in the UK and US.
Where I think we differ is that I believe it is a government role to educate with regard to vaccines, but you believe education is not enough and the government should coerce or de facto compel? Essentially I am pro-choice, and you are not.
gallois wrote:
@Graham are you claiming that those 140,000 people who have died woulf have died when they did if Covid never existed?
Not at all, why should you say that?
No-one can possibly predict the answer to what I think you’re getting at, let alone in 140,000 individual cases, but I think it’s safe to say that in an imaginary non-Covid universe not many of them would have been flying aeroplanes or playing football in the park a year later.
We will not see significant excess mortality when we look at it over years and decades. It will not slash populations like the plague did.
