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Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

> ...the vaccine still stops serious illness to a high degree.

Anecdotally, you don't know that, you don't know what caused you to have a mild case, if this had happened a year ago you wouldn't be giving credit to a vaccine.

> it does seem like this virus is bucking the trend and not necessarily becoming less potent

Don't you think it's possible your very mild case might be evidence against this claim? Anecdotal, of course. I haven't seen the data for infection vs hospitalization/fatality rate for the Delta variant against previous ones, but it just seems to me that someone having caught it and had a very mild case wouldn't logically jump to "it isn't less deadly."

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The numbers don’t lie, .001% of vaccinated people end up dying from covid, which is an order of magnitude less than folks who aren’t vaccinated.

OK, that's good, but the claim I was responding to was that the new variant is not less deadly than the old one. I was asking about infection v hospital rates for the old and new variants. Also with all these different variants going around, if the newer one is less deadly it would skew that number unless the different variant cases, deaths and vaccination statuses are all accounted for.

A variant can be more dangerous even if it’s not technically more deadly simply because it’s more contagious.If a virus is 10x as transmissible, and a lot more people get infected than would otherwise, a 1% mortality rate would result in a lot more dead bodies

Sure I have no idea why the case was mild. This is just me saying "I seem to know a lot of vaccinated people who had mild cases".

"it just seems to me that someone having caught it and had a very mild case wouldn't logically jump to "it isn't less deadly."

I wasn't basing that on my own experience, just on random reports of studies I've picked up on. In two different studies from Canada and Scotland for example, patients infected with the Delta variant were more likely to be hospitalized than patients infected with Alpha or the original virus strains. So it does a least seem possible that it's both more infectious and more deadly to hospitalized individuals than other strains. It does seem like an unusual mutation therefore in that its both more deadly in theory, and more infectious. This is all I'm saying here.

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