The risks of dying from Covid if you are vaccinated

[Tomconroy]

.I'm reproducing an excerpt from David Leonhardt's The Morning newsletter. Unfortunately I can't provide a link. Based on extensive research out of Oxford University, the risks of dying from Covid pre Omicron if you are vaccinated are comparable to the flu. However that is not entirely good news. If you are older the risks of dying from the flu are significant. The Oxford research indicates that a healthy infected 75 year old woman has a 1 in 220 chance of dying from Covid if fully vaccinated. The elderly are still at significant risk from Covid even if vaccinated. You don't want to know about the risk to the unvaccinated.
Anyway, here are a couple of paragraphs:

Encouragingly, there are reasons to believe that Omicron’s death rate may be lower. Three new studies released yesterday suggested that Omicron causes milder illness on average than earlier versions of the virus. “I would guess that the mortality risk with Omicron is much smaller” than with earlier variants, Dr. George Rutherford of the University of California, San Francisco, told me yesterday.

One reassuring comparison is to a normal seasonal flu. The average death rate among Americans over age 65 who contract the flu has ranged between 1 in 75 and 1 in 160 in recent years, according to the C.D.C. Pre-Omicron versions of Covid, in other words, seem to present risks of a similar order of magnitude to vaccinated people as a typical flu. Some years, a flu infection may be more dangerous.

With Omicron, “I think the risk is not super high for relatively healthy and boosted people in their 70s,” Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, told me. “I think it’s moderate at most.”

[durablend]

1. Still seems like a lot

Especially with those warnings that "everyone" is likely to catch it at some point.

[milestogo]

2. A moderate risk of dying.

I do not find that encouraging.

[JanMichael]

3. What the risk of long haul? Hospital use? What's the risk of overwhelmed hospitals?

Death is not the only metric. It is vastly more transmissible so many more are infected so hospitals still get too many cases so many non-covid surgeries and treatments get postponed.

Also Delta is still here. The two together are a problem along with many others. Like when too many teachers are out and few substitutes are available.

But thanks for consistent attempts to downplay this.

[Tomconroy]

4. It is impossible to assess the risks of long haul Covid because

there is no medical definition of the term.

[JanMichael]

5. It happens.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/index.html

It think this is defined well enough:

"As of July 2021, “long COVID,” also known as post-COVID conditions, can be considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Learn more: Guidance on “Long COVID” as a Disability Under the ADA, Section | HHS.govexternal icon"

[Tomconroy]

6. I don't doubt it happens. But that isn't a definition. Is it a sympton

that lingers a few months like in any serious respiratory illness?Or is it a serious physical disability which lasts longer than say four months? A different definition will give you very different ideas about how widespread the problem is.

[modrepub]

7. Older Equals More Risk

No matter what the disease. The older you are the less vigorous the response your body has to infection. Fact of life. COVID isn't any different than any other type of medical event for the aged. That said, getting vaxed and boosted will lower your risk, but not eliminate it.

As my mom and step father have said, you gotta have a lot of vinegar running through your veins to get as old as we are.

[Tomconroy]

8. If you are interested Minnesota is the one state in the nation

That has tried to maintain and publicize the effects of breakthrough cases:

https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/stats/vbt.html

The evidence is just as you say.

[modrepub]

9. From Nassim Nicholas Taleb

No, Covid 19 is not an old person problem

Clearly Covid affects the old, disproportionately. But so do practically almost all other ailments. A simple fact of life, in a population, it is the old that die disproportionally of all causes.



Golden Rule (Ergodic) Argument

Another problem young psychopaths don’t get is that the way society is built is via dynamic not static reasoning. As I keep writing in the Incerto, a certain class of people (usually involved in technology) affected with Black Swan blindness have a mental disorder making them ignore that things move. A 30 y.o. is not going to be frozen in complete youth and (civilized) societies have been organized around intergenerational commitments: you treat the current elderly the way you would like to be treated when you grow older. For even psychopaths will be older some day.

It is not about a single event (this pandemic) but all future pandemics, including the one that will hit when you are older. Why is it so difficult to grasp that by killing seniors, you reduce your own life expectancy?

https://medium.com/incerto/no-covid-19-is-not-an-old-person-problem-6968f720d153