Pavel wrote:
Perhaps talking about immunity instead would be better.
I don’t know the situation in your country, but in Germany this is exactly what happens: Vaccinated and Cured are always looked at together and treated exactly the same way. “Unvaccinated” colloquially only refers to people that are neither vaccinated not cured.
Pavel wrote:
Those people are not getting it twice at any statistically significant scale.
Not so sure – Most of the “cured” people got it pretty recently. Data on patients who are cured for more than 12 months is as scarce as data on people that are vaccinated for more than 12 months. It’s quite likely that even cured benefit significantly from a booster vaccination.
Ibra wrote:
the latter are well equipped to naturally cope with infection without vaccination and anyway are gown up and probably rock solid, so they can do what they wish
Nobody is “well equipped” to cope with this disease. If the question is, if a given dose is better spent as 3rd dose to a 65 year old who got the first two six months ago or as a first dose to a 35 year old who is not yet vaccinated there is no general answer.
But this question is quite philosophical: There is no longer a shortage of vaccine. In some reasons there is a shortage of staff, but that is temporary. In Germany we have walk in vaccination centers in every major city where you can get a shot immediately -
Archer-181 wrote:
The reason why I don’t believe the Guardian is I don’t think they lie, but they tend to be “economical with the truth”.
That goes for the whole press these days.
Nevertheless, the article quoted pretty much goes along the same lines of what we read everywhere. I have a few friends / acquaintances who work in hospitals whom I see regularly and what they say is pretty much the same over a number of hospitals around. The profile they see right now are unvaccinated healthy younger folks. The vaccinated ones who end up in hospital are mostly from the priority groups which got vaccinated first last spring.
Archer-181 wrote:
I tend to get my news on Covid from……………….. Plus this forum!
For once I have to say that the old moniker that there is a lot of doctors flying has proven a huge benefit in this particular crisis in this forum.
Archer-181 wrote:
It is all very sad that I no longer trust the National Broadcaster.
Which broadcaster can you really trust? Or is it an overreaction not to trust any broadcaster?
Personally I think this is one of the big quagmires which this crisis has shown more than many others, but it is definitely not limited to this crisis. I am highly skeptical of many news services these days, because all of them without any exception have got a particular bias. I suppose it is useful to determine what kind the bias is to know in what you can trust a particular service or not. News services have taken an even greater down turn in credibility and trust than most governments have. this, imho is a massive problem.
The vaccinated ones who end up in hospital are mostly from the priority groups which got vaccinated first last spring.
That’s wholly predictable – the oldest, most frail, and with health conditions which put them at the head of the queue regardless of age. These will always make up the majority of those seriously ill in hospital.
This is not news.
What is relevant is that the remaining people who are seriously ill in hospital seem to be “voluntarily non-vacced”.
Ibra wrote:
What I found unfair is people who of are in desperate need of the 3rd dose (old +60y and double vaccinated or fragile ones) are not being prioritized
I actually wonder why prioritize at all these days. There are enough vaccines around, there is no more shortage. Basically, what is keeping governments from simply opening up the vaccination centers for everyone who needs them is something I can’t understand. I am past 6 months now and would like to get the booster but I have to wait until they decide to open up for under 65. On the other hand, vaccination centers have overcapacity.
The way things look, I am not at all sure about being “better equipped”. Most hospital cases they have here are now exactly those who were deemed young and healthy. Most probably because all the others have vaccinations.
There is another problem anyhow, which so far has not really had a lot of press, probably because up to now it was considered a disease of the “old,fat,unhealthy”. : Whoever gets Covid is gone from the workplace for a considerable amount of time. 10 days minimum, more realistically a month or more. Vaccinated people who get Covid are much more likely to be back much earlier than anyone who ends up in hospital and possibly ICU. I know people who have had the thing last spring and still are not back at work.
The question is also what about long covid in vaccinated people. My question to one of the docs I talk to was answered by “we don’t know because we have not had any of those yet”. In other words, no vaccinated person who has had covid has come up with long covid? If that is true, then it is another very valid reason to stop messing about and vaccinate.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I actually wonder why prioritize at all these days. There are enough vaccines around, there is no more shortage
I don’t know but I know some oldies that we want to see this Christmas who have their third dose appointment in end of January…
The rest of young & adults are doing just fine, worst case we all get vaccinated with the real thing sooner or later 
Malibuflyer wrote:
Nobody is “well equipped” to cope with this disease.
Of course they are.
For 99% of healthy people aged <60, infection with SARS-Cov2 (whether vaccinated or not) is a total non-event. If they even notice they are unwell, it is not anything they would seek medical attention for and the kind of thing they routinely shrug off once or twice a year. They’d never know they had it if they weren’t being constantly told to get tested.
It’s this sort of hysteria – the idea that there’s something akin to bubonic plague going round – that drives the ludicrous over-reactions we’re seeing.
Get a jab. Do what else you can to minimise your risk. Live your life.
Graham wrote:
Get a jab. Do what else you can to minimise your risk. Live your life.
Yep, that is it. If everyone would do exactly that, we would not need any discussions whatsoever.
Graham wrote:
For 99% of healthy people aged <60, infection with SARS-Cov2 (whether vaccinated or not) is a total non-event.
The problem here being that 1% (if it was that few) of a whole population is still enough in numbers to create a huge amount of problems. Not least it means a lot of people severely sick, temporarily or permanently disabled or dead.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
The problem here being that 1% (if it was that few) of a whole population is still enough in numbers to create a huge amount of problems. Not least it means a lot of people severely sick, temporarily or permanently disabled or dead.
I said nothing about the other 1%. I simply countered @Malibuflyer’s obviously incorrect assertion that no-one at all is well equipped to deal with the virus by pointing out that the vast majority of people actually are, with reference to 99% of otherwise-healthy <60s.
Of course for those >60 or with comorbidities, it’s a bit more of a concern. But still, at a population level, not that much of a concern for most people because risk is not evenly distributed and almost all the risk lies with very small subsets of even that population. For those >80 and those with multiple or serious comorbidities (the biggest correlation being with obesity and obesity-related conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and other cardiovascular issues, as well as respiratory problems) it is quite a concern and, depending on how you balance your desire to live a full life vs minimising the risk, quite possibly worth self-isolating to try and avoid infection.
Vaccination dramatically lowers an individual’s risk of becoming ill with Covid-19. For most people it lowers it from “so low it hardly matters” to “so low most people wouldn’t understand probabilities that small.” The other thing that dramatically lowers an individual’s risk is not having any of the most prominent lifestyle-related comorbidities in Western society. Age, we can do nothing about. But overall, unless you are in a high-risk group, the risk of serious Covid-19 – particularly if vaccinated – is negligible and is completely overblown. This is probably related to the very poor understanding of risk in the general public and the media.
GA flying risks are worth a comparison. It is often said that GA flying carries roughly the same statistical risks as riding a motorcycle. However in both cases the statistics don’t tell the whole story for the average member of that population. In both GA flying and motorcycling the risks are not evenly spread across the populations: in both cases most of the risk lies with those who are to some degree or other reckless, or careless, or incompetent, or engage in particularly high-risk variants of the activity. Most members of the population have a risk substantially lower than the average, which is skewed to the position it occupies by a relatively small number of high and very high risk individuals. Covid-19 risk is the same.
