Hacker News Reader

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

My under 40 triathlete friend with no comorbidities who wound up in the ICU for a month and needed two surgeries to drain his lungs would beg to differ. Or my buddy down the block under 40 with no cormorbities who is now on beta blockers for long term Covid. As would folks like my Dad who the vaccine and first booster didn't work on due to his suppressed immune system from receiving my kidney.

Careful with extreme endurance exercise, it can be immuno suppressive [0]

I would advise a balance between weightlifting, moderate cardio, lots of sunlight exposure for Vitamin D and testosterone support, and a balanced diet.

And yes there are instances of young, non co-morbid people dying from covid. Statistically, not that many, so I'm not worried about it.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3475230/

>I would advise a balance between weightlifting, moderate cardio, lots of sunlight exposure for Vitamin D and testosterone support, and a balanced diet.

That is exactly what I do, and I never get sick.

He was the same. Covid kicked his ass though.

i work out 6 hours a day. in my occupation.

hearing unhealthy people threaten me with disease just doesn't carry water.

also i dont go anywhere except back and forth from jobsite to house, i dont interact with many people, and i live in a rural area.

He does far more than just what you listed. He's been doing it for years with advisement from multiple doctors.

Lance Armstrong had advanced testicular cancer while competing and placing 6th in the Olympics in 1996.

Comorbidities are tricky - and triathletes are a weird body type to build and maintain.

Yes extreme endurance can be immuno suppressive.

With billions of cases around the world there will always be some outliers, but those are irrelevant for decision making. What does the data show?

Yes and this insanity is literally keeping large numbers of people from engaging in parts of society. Some conferences, meetups, and events still require attendees to be fully vaccinated with no testing option. I was unable to attend an event just last week for this reason. It's stunning.

You weren't unable to attend anything. You had an option to attend the event - get vaccinated. You chose to not attend the event. The only thing "keeping you" from it is you.

That's a great point. Next up, we'll make sure Muslims can't go to the same conference because they chose not to go.

Maybe your next thought is the vaccine makes the conference safer. Let's play Choose your own Adventure. You have to sit next to someone on a crowded airplane in economy class for 3 hours and this person loves to talk. You get to choose that this person is either a) vaccinated, or b) tested negative for covid every day for the past 3 days. Which do you choose?

It's fascinating and scary that fear has led our society to let segregation creep in under the guise of public health.

With Covid everything is fine until it isn't.

Furthermore, it is pretty obvious that a non-replicating fragment of a pathogen given even every 6 months is going to cause less damage than the real thing (also available every 6 months the way things are going). Luckily we've done extensive trials to back that up.

> Who are dying and at what rate?

Mostly the very old, at this point; though I'm in my 40s where the rate starts to tick up. But beyond that, there's the risk of long term morbidity. My niece was early 20's, active, in good health, with no comorbidities and is now pseudo-disabled. The vaccine only removes about 30% of the risk of this type of outcome, but still that alone is worth it.

> What is the vax status of those that are dying, presumably many have taken the vaccine anyways yes?

Looks like people who have taken the vaccine have about 6-10% of the risk of death of those who haven't, controlling for comorbidities.

> Are you going to take covid boosters for the rest of your life?

A lot of us might-- though I've got a fair bit of hope that we come up with something better in the next couple of years. I will do my best to avoid infection in the meantime.

> The disease is going to be continually weakened and become just another coronavirus.

Viral selection is complicated. Yes, in the very long term, many viruses end up becoming less virulent, but others go in the other direction.

> Can you say the same about the long term prospects of endless boosters on your body? I sure couldn't.

I'm pretty dang confident that I can bound the risk from the vaccine to be much lower than the risk from COVID infection.

While I sorta tend to agree with you, this is a _RESULT_ of people refusing to take the vaccines (or do full lockdowns/wear masks/etc). Like the original SARs strains it should have been possible to eradicate through strong public health measures, one of which was vaccination.

So, we can shrug this one off, because in the end it _only_ kills a percent or so of people, overwhelmingly already infirm or elderly.

We may not be so lucky the next time, and this attitude _will_ get us in trouble when that happens.

China literally locked down Shanghai and millions of people in their homes, had police everywhere monitoring, had almost no exceptions other than for the police, and literally boarded people in their homes, engaged every spying mechanism they had, did mandatory testing, for more than six weeks, and it did not stop COVID - but it is increasingly clear it only delayed it from spreading inevitably. Even WIRED, pro-vaccine, has written articles about all the people who died from the lockdown and inability to get medical care due to the restrictions. It was the most full, most strict lockdown physically possible and it still did not work and China is looking at needing to repeat it.

It did work. The outbreak in Shanghai was contained and reduced to zero. Maybe they will have to do it again.

After it already went endemic, and the transmissiblity went through the roof.

Not sure why that is hard to understand. If this virus killed 95% of people would you be arguing against lockdowns?

I think most people can agree that its one of those to little to late situations in china and they need to reconsider at this point, but that doesn't make what they are trying to do wrong.

People that think the spread of this coronavirus could ever have been stopped, let alone without destroying social fabric, mental health and causing an economic depression/hyperinflation are insane.

The 95% thing was a hypothetical. But lets rephrase it a bit.

Lets say another virus is discovered tomorrow, how high would the mortality have to be before you were to accept all those effects you list?

And lastly, how high would it have to be before you would accept actually shooting people who violated quarantine procedures? With the understanding that a statement like never, could mean the extinction of humanity (a valid choice I guess).

I shouldn't have even added them because I still don't think a coronavirus type of infection that is (or will evolve to become) so contagious can actually be stopped, and I'll stand by that main point.

Especially something that is so drastically over represented in the sick, old, and obese but not the young and healthy. Why is it justified to shoot healthy strong young people, privileging the interests of the comorbid group? In a situation where again, they're going to get sick anyways? What if we just shot the old and fat people and then everyone could stop worrying about covid?

To answer you, who knows, but much much much higher than 0.2% death rate for under 50's etc.

I think what China's doing is wrong and foolish, but maybe their citizens like being locked in their apartments for such a trivial disease, who knows?

> shooting people who violated quarantine procedures?

In the actual circumstance in the real world, animals would need to be culled because it passes between deer and cats and humans. Maybe we start shooting cats and deer now? No more pet cats.

>If this virus killed 95% of people would you be arguing against lockdowns?

This is the dumbest argument I've ever seen made on here. If it killed 95% of people, no sane person would be arguing because it becomes obvious that you are in danger. If 1.1% of the population dies and you don't have any of the health risks coinciding with mortality from the virus, then you have little reason to put your life on hold, unless you're unlucky and don't realize you have some unidentified health issue, which at that point, is a rounding error.

I guess if you're on the side doing the coercing then, yeah, at that point you probably think you're saving everyone from themselves.

This kind of skepticism goes both ways: you could get COVID next week and discover that you have a latent comorbidity that otherwise would never have affected you.

From a public health perspective, universal (or near-universal) vaccination is an unequivocal good. Given the sum of what we know about both COVID and any side effects of vaccination, this remains the case.

This is an abuse of language: "universal vaccination"

Is it a vaccine, or a therapy? Why does the supposed efficacy of the vaccines ability to prevent spread of covid wane so quickly? At best the vax is novel therapy that temporarily boosts immune system to fight the current strain. But whatever the side effects of this mechanism, they can accumulate with each successive round of boosters. Is it safe to keep taking these shots every 6 to 12 months? Who knows... but if they have to be repeatedly taken, they clearly do not effectively stop the spread of covid which the evidence shows.

I'll take my chances as having good enough genetics and lifestyle, and being young enough, in aggregate to tip the scales well past the point where getting covid and whatever natural immunity that it provides is just fine.

>latent comorbidity

Yea and I can get hit by a bus tomorrow. The main comorbidities that dominate the stats as present in over 80% of deaths are obesity and age. I have neither. We have to be realistic here.

Look at Haiti vs New Zealand regarding vax rates vs death rates. It is not unequivocally good.

These questions presuppose a false dichotomy: vaccines can be therapeutic, prophylactic, or both. Simultaneously, they can be either sterilizing or attenuating with respect to the immunity they provide.

The COVID vaccines are prophylactic and therapeutic. So far, they seem to be mostly attenuating with respect to their immunity, not unlike flu vaccines (in two regards: both weak cross-strain protection and much milder illness when infected with the targeted strain). Additionally, there's decent empirical evidence that "breakthrough" cases are generally less contagious.

"Being realistic here" means getting a free, readily available vaccine that reduces the risk of serious illness or death. Separately, it means doing your civic duty to reduce load on our medical institutions and lessen the latent risk to those around you (who may have comorbidities that you are not privy to and are not entitled to be privy to).

> but if they have to be repeatedly taken, they clearly do not effectively stop the spread of covid which the evidence shows.

That’s just a logical fallacy.

Aspirin cures my headache, but I will still get headaches - does that mean aspirin is useless?

More to the point, these "but it's non-sterilizing" complaints NEVER came up about other vaccines before COVID was made a political point by one political party

> But you do you, is the point

I've never understood this type of selfishness. If you get sick you will, on average, infect another 2-3 people. It's not just about you.

The vaccine doesn’t stop you from carrying or transmitting COVID, it just lessens the severity the symptoms you suffer personally.

The people who don’t mask up, regardless of having taken the vaccine or not, are actually the biggest problem. I wouldn’t call them selfish because it is their ignorance of how disease works that is to blame. I wouldn’t even blame most of them in light of all the propaganda and confused public servants that say otherwise. I would reserve the selfish tag for the people who know they are carriers and continue to go maskless anyway.

It reduces transmission.

The R number has never been that high, where did you get it from? If it were "2-3 people", every variant, except maybe the latest, would have infected every person on earth by now.

The R number depends on social practices as well. It was higher before lockdowns, but with masks and the eventual vaccine it got reduced to the 1-2 range, and later below 1. Or at least danced around that number depending on whether the lockdown was suspended temporarily or not.

1. Covid shots do not prevent infection or transmission.

2. Since Delta, both vaxxed and unvaxxed cases have the same viral load.

3. Since December at least, boosted and vaxxed have higher RATE per 100k of covid infections.

So whatever benefit one gets is individual benefit only and not getting others sick in any different way as the vaxxed folks do.

> 1. Covid shots do not prevent infection or transmission.

It does look like there's about a 20-30% reduction of infection from random surveys of the population and from nucleocapsid seroprevalence assays; transmission-once-infected is very difficult to measure, but it would be surprising if it did not have some effect.

> 2. Since Delta, both vaxxed and unvaxxed cases have the same viral load.

There's a key fallacy here: we're looking at a population of cases detected by similar means and then found that they have similar viral loads. Not too surprising of a finding (survivorship bias, basically).

There's some data indicating that viral copy assays are not good proxies for finding true infectious shedding -- and that vaccinated individuals can be much better in this regard despite having higher loads. e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01816-0

> 3. Since December at least, boosted and vaxxed have higher RATE per 100k of covid infections.

This is absolutely and completely untrue. There's been a couple of times where the vaxxed have been higher in the data series, but the overwhelming trend in the data has been the opposite. e.g. right now in Santa Clara County, where I am, the unvaccinated case rate is approximately 268 per 100,000 per week; the fully vaccinated case rate is about 46 per 100,000.

Of course, people who elect vaccination don't behave exactly the same as those who don't... and so many people in S.C.C. are vaccinated that the exact number of unvaccinated has some uncertainty (but it's not off by a factor of 5).

> It does look like there's about a 20-30% reduction of infection from random surveys of the population and from nucleocapsid seroprevalence assays; transmission-once-infected is very difficult to measure, but it would be surprising if it did not have some effect.

You are responding to a practical concern with a theoretical counter. But practically speaking the vaccine doesn't change the picture at all. The situation pre-vaccine was COVID was going to spread like wildfire after any lockdown attempt ended and everyone was going to be exposed to it. The situation post-vaccine, even with that reduction in infection rates, was the same.

Ditto speed, since this is an exponential process that reduction won't have an especially material effect on when everyone gets COVID.

We ran a natural experiment on this in Australia [0] - having a highly vaccinated population didn't appear to have any impact at all on COVID transmission rate or reach in who gets infected. The numbers are not convincing that the vaccine did anything for transmissions. The effect of personal protection seems to explain all the benefits of the vaccine.

[0] https://chrisbillington.net/COVID_NSW.html

1. That was only true before Delta. When Delta came, the viral load became the same between vaxxed and unvaxxed folks and combined with waning immunity of 3-6 months, most people were basically "unvaxxed" with respect to transmission by fall. Omicron took it even further where since December, in Ontario, boosted and vaxxed folks have had higher rate per 100k of covid infections.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

3. It is true and the government admits that boosted and vaxxed have higher rates. Ontario source:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220228051509/http://covid-19.o...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220331081902/http://covid-19.o...

Here's how it looks:

https://imgur.com/a/H4ErmyC

> 1. That was only true before Delta.

Posting a disputed study that I criticized to try and refute me, when I posted important 2022 followup data to viral shedding based on actual infectivity rather than just RNA copies indicates you either didn't read my comment or didn't understand it.

> 3. It is true and the government admits that boosted and vaxxed have higher rates. Ontario source:

I just knew you were going to point to the Ontario data from Mar-Apr. This is why I said in a couple places they popped above for a couple data points. Are you deliberately being obtuse?

Compare to basically any other data series from any other time; e.g. my locale:

https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-case-rates-vaccination-...

How’s that study disputed?

That study is not alone either. NEJM has similar studies too.

Your link seems to be an outlier. Denmark, UK, Scotland, and other provinces in Canada also show the same higher rates in boosted and fully vaxxed than unvaxxed. Walgreens data for US also shows this. Look at page 3 of:

https://www.walgreens.com/businesssolutions/covid-19-index.j...

Canadian government seroprevalence data also shows that between December 2021 and May 2022, there were at least 17.5 million infections. This is in a population of 38 million. This was despite extremely high vax rates.

So, how exactly did the vaccine prevent infection and transmission? Vaxxed folks were allowed to enjoy services with a false sense of security and spread Covid to others while unvaxxed folks were denied from society.

Please don’t resolve to ad hominem attacks on hacker news.