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Comment by adamiscool8 | Hacker News Reader

Not OP but the chance of hospitalization in that age bracket is about 0.2% [0] There appears to be at least a 20% chance that post-vaccine someone of that age will feel rough enough to take medication [1].

People who are currently healthy choosing to avoid the risk of immediate short-term pain when presented with a small, remote gain seems like classic prospect theory!

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122354/covid-19-us-hosp...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer...

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20% chance of feeling rough enough to take medication does not seem much higher than the human average. Without comparing to placebo it is meaningless.

They did compare it to placebo, plus, humans don’t compare to placebo they compare to their status quo condition.

you are conflating "rough enough to take a medication" with being "so sick you are in the hospital with covid." crazy comparison. I got my vaccine and the second shot hit me hard enough that I had to take some ibuprofen. Not a single regret and it wasn't that bad.

you are comparing apples to oranges.

I'm not conflating anything? I'm only pointing out, under prospect theory, people value avoiding a loss over a risk for a gain.

It's rational for someone who is currently healthy, in an age group with a 0.2% of COVID turning into anything more than a standard cold/flu, to turn down an immediate risk (orders of magnitude larger) that they will feel unhealthy for a couple days.

> in an age group with a 0.2% of COVID turning into anything more than a standard cold/flu

except that's not the statistic... that's the death statistic for that age group. the odds of getting sicker than cold/flu are higher still and you will get much much sicker than the vaccine will give most people.

It was the hospitalization rate, as cited, and the rest of your comment is unsupported conjecture...

Except that's misleading considering that hospitalization is not a prerequisite for death and the statistic in that group is higher than 0.2%

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics

the death rate in that cohort is 0.36% or about 1 in 300

14,387 deaths in 3,978,547 cases

considering that they are on the high end of that bracket the next higher bracket is about 1.3% mortality rate or about 1 in 100 though that houses the group up to age 64 so it's more likely closer to the 0.5%-0.8% mortality rate but that's interpolating the data so it's messy.

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