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Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

mdp2021

How do you define that «virtually»? If it is "never (justifiable exceptions aside)", then yes, it is falsifiable by anecdote. '∀x: P(x)' is falsified by '∃x: ¬P(x)'. It's just Popper. I am just telling you it was very possible to die with it middle aged and in good health with the original 2020 variant. Surely you can guess how I know. With the new ones, I do not know, I have no experience.

If that «virtually» means "following some statistics", than those statistics must be judged as quite blurry by our experience: they conceal what we have seen.

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I'm sorry to hear that you know people who died of COVID. I don't think anyone I've ever met later died of COVID, and that's true of most of my friends too, as far as I know. It's just very rare, which is why they couldn't get enough deaths in the (large) COVID vaccine trials to meet any threshold for significance.

As for "virtually never", why would you think "never with exceptions" is the definition? "Virtually never" here just means "it happens very rarely relative to the total number of COVID deaths". Isn't that normal use of English? We're not communicating in SAT here.

I agree that the statistics are blurry, but they're mostly blurred in the direction of exaggerating the risks. I'll take your word for it that your acquaintance did indeed die of COVID, but it must be remembered that such classifications were being handed very liberally, especially in the USA where COVID death classifications were being directly incentivized with money.

> just very rare

Not really: it is more a matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals. To attempt giving you the idea, I tried a web search for "Bergamo coffins" - I will not offer a selection, I cannot choose. I picked that because the case of Bergamo got famous, as probably the first one, but more were reported (in Brazil, I remember, etc).

In fact, I was not referring to one acquaintance, but many (very many - though, most of them elderly, and yet as healthy as they get). Let me tell you, from time to time I still get asked by skeptics "yes but what exactly did they die from": well, when they die without their lungs, I hold little doubts. This given, as I wrote, I definitely will not rule out that «bad treatments» may have brought the disease statuses to the collapse. What you saw was "normal, infected, healthy, healthy, healthy, worsening, compromised": it consumed them until sudden collapse, when recovery did not work.

Also: I have seen that many reason as if they were afraid of death and not afraid of damage. Some hold exactly opposite weights. And I have heard often, speaking with my local peers, remarks like "he was an Oak - and now he cannot do three steps without gasping". And this also involved young, sporty people.

So, as I am trying to tell, the risks are there, very real, very possible: it's their framing that is, to the best of my knowledge, still mysterious ("old or sick" goes in the direction but remains gross when applied to experience. It has the statistical ineffectiveness that would have you avoid driving a car and only travel by plane).

With the classifications ("died with" vs "died of") a real mess was made in many countries: but this really confused the image, also concealing, as I am trying to convey, the devastation it did there where it did hit hard.

I could say that the emergency management did not speak SAT.

No, it really is very rare. This isn't some local perspective issue, this is a virus with an IFR of less than 0.1% and by no means everyone caught COVID, many never did. Again - if it were actually not rare, there would have been sufficient deaths from COVID in the pool of 65,000 vaccine trial participants (for Pfizer alone) to have actually seen a difference, but in reality more people died in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm! 65k people is a lot of people. That's more than the population of the town I grew up in, yet COVID deaths were so rare in that group that they may as well not have happened at all.

Bergamo coffins are not a great example to pick because that was an artifact of telling the local undertakers (whom were all quite old) that handling the bodies would be a death sentence, so they refused to do it and as a result coffins piled up.

> This isn't some local perspective issue

I'll try to be clearer - though I have myself difficulties in pointing the finger precisely to the point. With «matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals», I meant: sure, you may have an IFR of 0.1% as a raw division, but the questions press on why some have seen an apparent decimation, and many have seen nothing or almost nothing. Is it a perceptive illusion from observing at close distance an Erlang distribution? Or are there factors to be defined that would tell more than "old or sick"? Genetics? Organization? Societal features? Crime rates for Europe tell you very little if the values for the critical parts of Lyon and those of German remote countryside are mixed. I am still wondering what made experiences so different.

But anyway, your (undisputed) post was about the effectiveness of vaccines, and I had you digress after your «virtually never deadly», just wanting to precise that some of us have seen something much less comforting, and would recommend to remain wary of the risks (and some already infected people would say, you may want not to consider death as the risk, but the damages), in case the raw numbers may fascinate into suggestion that one can just relax. It is just a margin note. "Numbers are comforting" // "Yeah well..."

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