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Comment by simplyunjustly | Hacker News Reader

Pretty odd article to see from fellow doctor and someone who gets angry at stuff like this probably should find another career. Is she angry at the patients who abused their bodies all their lives, resulting in their inpatient stay? All the heart failure patients who simply refuse to follow simple instructions that would keep them out of the hospital? I just looked, 42% of the patients on our inpatient floor with COVID-19 were vaccinated (this is a small hospital, so I'm not making any conclusion based on that).

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I know a doctor at a hospital and he said that the current percentage of vaccinated Covid admissions is very close to the overall percentage of vaccinated people in his area.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Every jurisdiction reporting actual, real data and not just rumours on Fox News has indicated that over 90% of Covid admissions are unvaccinated, even in areas with greater than 50% of the population with two doses.

There's nothing I can show you that would make you believe what I'm saying, so I'm not going to try. But I will say that I heard it directly from a doctor in a high-level position at a large-ish hospital. I know him very well, and he has zero reason to lie to me about it.

But yeah, I'm probably lying (or being lied to) and it's all BS. Whatever works for you. The media (aside from Fox News) is always 100% truthful and must be trusted above everything. Same goes for the government.

> There's nothing I can show you that would make you believe what I'm saying

Real data from a reputable source would be more than sufficient.

Remarkable how you seem to be unable to produce any...

Do you have real data from a reputable source that says otherwise?

I'm talking about hospitalizations broken down by vaccination status. Not cases, not symptomatic cases, not deaths. Hospitalizations.

I already supplied data from numerous independent studies that examine that exact question.

Are you saying you haven't actually read any of them?

Want more? Okay, fine, here's just one jurisdiction which provides a wealth of data and a variety of breakdowns, including percentage of hospitalizations by vaccination status (this is a jurisdiction where >60% of eligible people are fully vaccinated and >75% are partially vaccinated, so there's a wealth of data about vaccine effectiveness):

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

> 92.1% of hospitalized cases (5,260/5,709) since Jan 1, 2021 were unvaccinated or diagnosed within two weeks from the first dose immunization date

I'll grant you that breakdown doesn't specifically break out Delta cases from non-VOC cases, but they also include a specific analysis of vaccine effectiveness versus Delta based on current data in the province:

> B.1.617 Variant [Partial] 57% (51 to 63%) [Complete] 85% (78 to 89%)

Now, this is a blended set of numbers across all vaccine types, and so represents the average effectiveness across Pfizer, Moderna, and AZ. So there's some nuance that's missing, here.

Regardless, even with just a single dose of a COVID vaccine the average effectiveness versus Delta of symptomatic illness is greater than 50%, which, as I previously noted, will absolutely put a significant dent in the R-value. And 85% is absolutely fantastic.

Alright, I showed you mine, now you show me yours.

The simple fact that you aren't willing to offer any evidence when asked for it does in fact make you and your assertion appear to be a lot less credible. This is public data at least anywhere in the US. Where is this largish hospital? Inquiring minds want to know.

Is it public data anywhere in the US? I know that my state (Michigan) doesn't break down hospitalizations by vaccination status. Or if they do, it's not with the rest of the Covid data they put out online.

The link below suggests that the story your doctor acquaintance is telling telling is either an outlier for your state or is just incorrect. BTW, I found this data from last week with this search "us hospitalizations covid vaccination status". There's also CDC data which is updated weekly that can be seen in the same search. So not hard or complicated to verify.

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrou...

Perhaps they or you just misunderstood the context or statistic that was presented. It might not be possible (or advisable), but you could disclose the name of the hospital and we could follow up with them to validate the claim.

There was no misunderstanding. I'm not going to disclose the name of the hospital, which I'm sure you can understand.

I'm just relaying an anecdote that was told to me by someone who would know. I can't offer anything more than that, and I completely understand why anyone would choose not to believe it.

Individual nurses and doctors are not pandemic experts and can often be mistaken about statistics and biases in numbers.

Vaccines will be updated to include Delta.

> But yeah, I'm probably lying

Well, you've made false statements and promoted untrue things in this thread, so ... yah, I think I'll err on the side of not believing a goddamn thing you say.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm

In the Provincetown, Massachusetts outbreak: "Among five COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized, four were fully vaccinated".

I agree that event is concerning.

But it's also a small sample size and there could be many reasons why, in that group, the numbers came out the way they did, including natural clustering.

That would also explain the OPs anecdote as it's very possible an individual hospital is seeing more hospitalizations among the vaccinated just due to the vagaries of statistics. That's why large sample sizes and careful analysis are so important when coming to these conclusions.

But we have substantially more data from Canada and the UK and so far that data shows that the vaccines are effective versus Delta.

What concerns me about that case and some of these other anecdotal stories with similar breakthrough percentages is that it can also speak to possible vaccine batch quality issues in a given region/area. The storage and transport of the mRNA vaccines is a bit complex already to ensure effectiveness.

No true Scotsman here!

Ignore the data from Britain, Israel, Massachusetts, anecdotes here. Just keep on spewing the CDC/CNN talking points as gospel.

What? I cited a recent study from Britain. Did you read the comment thread and the supplied references or are you just knee-jerking?

I then provided reasons why the two known datasets that might sugggest particularly poor vaccine efficacy versus Delta (both of which I was aware of) should be taken with a grain of salt. In the case of Mass, the dataset is small and hard to extrapolate from, and the Israelis released neither their data not their methodology so we can't evaluate the quality of the study.

Unless you can explain otherwise those are both perfectly valid reasons not to cherrypick those studies to make the case here, particularly given they contradict a mountain of evidence that leads to different conclusions.

Of course, you're more than free to similarly critique the citations I provided if you care to.

Frankly, I'm not sure you know what the No True Scotsman fallacy is...

Just looked at our census data again today, 50% of the patients hospitalized in our community hospitals are vaccinated. Not a huge sample size, but still. I'm not sure if our health system reports on this data or not.

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