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Comment by TurkishPoptart | Hacker News Reader

In my state, we have a reduced "hospital capacity" because 3,000 nurses and other HCW were fired for not getting sufficiently "vaccinated". Now our governor (Inslee) is calling retired HCWs back into the workforce. Complete madness - not rooted in science, but in political science. Our country is due for a talk about natural immunity, especially when most of the people I know who've had 3 "vaccine" shots and still got covid. Are they now immune?

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On a statistical level, the vaccines don't have to be 100% effective, and they aren't. For every person you hear about being sick after 3 doses, there are probably 10 people that would have gotten it, but didn't. If there was 10x less healthcare capacity, you can see why that would be a larger problem.

That said, the vaccines do seem pretty focused on the 2019 variant of COVID-19. It's 2022 now, and that variant is dead. So we're definitely getting imperfect protection. (I got my 3rd dose anyway, of course. And I'm still treating the pandemic like a pandemic. I skipped holiday travel, I don't go out unless absolutely necessary, etc.)

I like how vaccines can "probably" reduce chances of being sick, but saying vaccines "probably" have unknown long-term effects is heresy.

We have evidence of one and not the other. It's really simple.

Exactly. We have no evidence of long-term effects, and are trusting the same people who told us a year ago that vaccines provide protection to tell us they're safe. It's asinine.

I'm curious what the scare quotes around the words _vaccinated_, _vaccine_ and _hospital capacity_ are meant to convey.

The vaccines, imperfect as they are, seem to have dramatically reduced the incidence of severe symptoms requiring hospitalizations and of death due to Covid. My wife is a vascular surgeon & one of her colleagues handles the placement of ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) for patients with severe respiratory failure. Since the vaccines have become available, the only patients going on ECMO are unvaccinated.

I'd call the Covid-19 vaccines pretty remarkable and only condemnable if your criteria for success is 100% effective in preventing all cases of Covid-19 with no risk of adverse effects.

> The vaccines, imperfect as they are, seem to have dramatically reduced the incidence of severe symptoms requiring hospitalizations and of death due to Covid.

Is that why there's now more vaccinated people hospitalized for COVID than unvaccinated? I seriously can't understand how people participate in these mental gymnastics. There's more COVID "cases" now than ever before. How does that lend credit to vaccination?

The only places where vaccinated hospitalizations outpace unvaccinated are in places with very high vaccine uptake. If you compare on a per capita basis, hospitalizations in the unvaccinated are higher.

There's also a highly transmissible variant, which shows some level of resistance to vaccination.

These aren't difficult concepts to understand.

Tell me you are math illiterate without etc.

Tell me you can't google "more vaccinated in hospitals"

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19843315.covid-scotland-...

> Case rates lowest in unvaccinated as double-jabbed elderly drive rise in hospital admissions

Must be fake news though, right?

According to that article this is being driven almost entirely by hospitalizations in the 70+ population. That group is nearly 100% double vaccinated in Scotland.

What you are seeing here is classic Simpson's Paradox. It is exactly the same thing we saw earlier with Israel with delta. Here was an article on that which covers how Simpson's Paradox works in that situation [1].

[1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...

> hospitalizations in the 70+ population. That group is nearly 100% double vaccinated in Scotland.

Double vaccinated and hospitalized. Must mean the vaccine is working, right?

No. It just means the vaccine does not reduce your chances of hospitalization by 100%. It is "only" reducing them by 90+%.

When you are dealing with a population that is nearly 100% vaccinated, even though unvaccinated people are hospitalized at 10x the rate of vaccinated people you will still have almost all hospitalizations be vaccinated.

> It just means the vaccine does not reduce your chances of hospitalization by 100%. It is "only" reducing them by 90+%.

Oh we're just guessing numbers now? How quickly the discussion devolves into something other than science.

Still math illiterate, I see.

Unvaccinated people are hospitalized for COVID at a much higher rate than vaccinated people. Here's recent data for Washington that clearly shows this [1]. Washington's numbers are similar to those of most of the rest of the US.

[1] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...

This is hospitalizations WITH covid, not FROM covid - a totally useless metric.

Is your theory is that the reason unvaccinated people are hospitalized with COVID at 11 times the rate of vaccinated people is because unvaccinated people get in accidents, or have heart attacks and strokes, or have cancer, etc., at a much higher rate than vaccinated people? They aren't going in because they have COVID...they are going in for those other reasons and then happen to be found to have COVID?

We're talking about Washington, a one-party state with extreme left politics. This is how it actually works:

Vaccinated person goes to the hospital for a cough and fever - "oh no dear, it can't be COVID because you're vaccinated, it must be the common flu" - not counted.

Unvaccinated person comes in for a wrist sprain, tests positive on the PCR - "OMG UNVAXXED HOSPITALIZATION" - probably counted twice, too.

Does NYC count as left? I went in after having diarrhea/vomit for 2 days, and all they did was give me a Covid test and send me away. I'm vaccinated. This was months ago, before omicron and the uptick in breakthrough cases. As a vaccinated person I've been tested multiple times when I didn't even have Covid symptoms.

What I've witnessed is the opposite of trying to skip testing vaccinated people to shift numbers. You're just making things up.

So there's no incentive for hospitals to over-count COVID cases, no federal money involved with inflated numbers, and no political motivation to artificially create a disaster? How nice it must be to live ignorant.

The exact same pattern seen in Washington is seen in far right states. Try again.

About 50 Percent of Massachusetts COVID Hospitalizations Weren't Admitted for COVID

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/about-50-percent-of...

And this is only what they're being forced to admit.

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