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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

That's the usual way it goes, as long as relatively high mortality virus is circulating in most of the world population.

Both infection- and vaccination-produced immunity decays over time. So everyone's choice is between keeping up their vaccination, or getting COVID repeatedly.

Which boils down to a question of whether you think being vaccinated or getting COVID is less risky.

Yes, there's some +/- on the decay rate, but in a relative weighting between risk (COVID without immune system primed) and needing more frequent boosters, why pick the COVID option and roll the dice on death or permanent organ damage?

Personal choice, I stay vaccinated, at least until (fingers crossed) the circulating strains of COVID evolve to be less dangerous.

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“Relatively high mortality”? Can you think of any virus even close to COVID mortality that we take these kinds of draconian measures to prevent?

Can you think of any virus that caused hospitals around the world to be overwhelmed with patients, compromising their ability to treat normal ailments?

Hospitals are frequently overwhelmed and operate at capacity limits basically constantly in large parts of the world

Yeah let's play this game! Let me count all the viruses that killed close to a million Americans in the last 2 years!

1. COVID

Transmissivity /= mortality rate

Why are we talking about the mortality rate and not the overall mortality of the virus? Seems that the metric that matters is how many people it kills. Especially since we are actively fighting the virus harder than most in the past few years.

I'm sure you know this but there hasn't been a pandemic virus as virulent and deadly as COVID-19 in modern times.

For some perspective, Chicken Pox killed roughly 100 Americans every year and that vaccine was mandated in effectively all schools and universities across the country.

The chicken pox vaccine was invented in Japan in the 1970s, was approved for kids in the US in 1995, and required in schools sometime in the early 2000's, depending on the state -- nearly 30 years after its invention. This is very unlike the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.

> Can you think of any virus even close to COVID mortality that we take these kinds of draconian measures to prevent?

SARS-CoV-1 (2002), MERS (2012+)

"Of the 7 coronaviruses, the former four can cause common cold symptoms, but SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV can lead to severe respiratory syndromes, with about 6.76%, 9.6%, and 35.5% mortality rates, respectively." [0]

We just dodged a bullet because they were regionally-contained and/or had lower transmissibility. But if you were in Asia before and after 2002, you noticed.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7334925/

Edit: And if we want to go to the more-lethal, less-transmissible end of the spectrum (so roughly equivalent in terms of public health risk), the regularly recurring Ebola outbreaks in Africa. Most recently the 2013-2016 campaign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks

That paper was a meta-study from July of last year based on papers even older, and it's loaded with problems. This paper in the Lancet [1] and this paper in BMJ on Delta [2] both have mortality at significantly lower. World-o-meter has the mortality rate in New York at 0.28%. [3]

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... (Among RT-PCR-confirmed cases tested by Oct 1, 2020, 342 (2·4%; 95% CI 2·2–2·6) of 14 237 died within 30 days of their positive test. Mortality was 0·4% (95% CI 0·3–0·6) at ages 0–39 years, 2·0% (1·7–2·3) at ages 40–64 years, 7·5% (6·4–8·7) at ages 65–79 years, and 15·4% (11·6–19·6) in those aged 80 years or older (figure 4))

[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n579 (The absolute risk of death in this group of community identified participants, however, remains relatively low, increasing from 2.5 to 4.1 deaths per 1000 cases.)

[3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

You're confusing case fatality rate (detected infection denominator) with infection fatality rate (total population denominator).

The study I cited was (broadly) CFR. That Lancet study is (broadly) IFR. If you proactively surveillance test 13.5% of Madurai's population, you're going to get a different class of people in your denominator, and your calculated mortality is going to decrease.

The BMJ study is probably the most broadly compatible, which leaves us at 2.5% (non-Delta) or 4.1% (Delta), which appears to be case fatality rate?

If we want to argue apples:apples, we should use EMR-based studies that attempt to calculate IFR, as at least they're reasoning with the same population composition.

This [0] has SARS-CoV-2 at somewhere between 0.26% and 0.83% IFR. Which for context, is compared to respiratory flu at 0.0088% (estimated total population EMR due to flu) [1]. So we'd expect about 29.5x as many people to die from SARS-CoV-2 (using the high end estimate of flu and the low end estimate of SARS-CoV-2, to generate the lowest possible multiple). If you want to, you can probably dig European numbers out of this excess mortality calculation [2], although that's all-cause mortality, with no attempt to isolate cause.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7543961/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5935243/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7346364/

> This [0] has SARS-CoV-2 at somewhere between 0.26% and 0.83% IFR. Which for context, is compared to respiratory flu at 0.0088% (estimated total population EMR due to flu) [1]

Isn't this disregarding (or generalizing) the fact that age plays a significant role with SARS-CoV-2? Those numbers are vastly different between, say, teenagers and 60+ year olds.

I don't see many 60+ running around protesting. Mostly it's the 0.01% IFR crowd.

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