[amurale]

You're correct about long term harm, I lumped them together. A better formula would be:

  P(covid death or long term harm) < 0.05%
  vs.
  P(vaccine long term harm) = ?

since my estimate is they're about the same order of magnitude, I prefer to take the devil-I-know vs. the small-scale-tested vaccine.

I model the potential harm based on a similarly rushed vaccine of 1976 which caused a large increase in cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome [0]. Longer trials and phase IV monitoring was instituted in response to this rushed vaccine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak

[MauranKilom]

What is your reason for assuming P < 0.05% for long-term harm due to COVID-19? You quite clearly assumed 0.05% for death only, therefore attributing even less to long-term health effects. But so far, there appear to be many indications that COVID-19 does have significant medium (and possibly long) term consequences even in asymptomatic cases.

I fully admit that I am not up to speed in proven COVID-19 medium- or long-term effects beyond having seen headlines, but to essentially assume none when there have been very obvious and multi-faceted indications of them implies you must have a very good basis of research to base your estimate on. Care to share?

[amurale]

I take the IFR (infection fatality rate) for age < 65, and multiply by 10 to get a worst case of IFR+long term harm. Note that we're talking about severe long term harm - such as autoimmune disease etc. Not "it took me 3 months to recover" stories.

For example, IFR(age<65) in geneva[0] is 0.0045%. multiply by 10 to include also long term harm, you get 0.045%.

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laninf/PIIS1473-3099...

[MauranKilom]

Ok, I can get behind that thought process.

I will note that the cited 0.0045% infection fatality rate number is quite old/outdated (June 1st). It's not easy to match different areas under the age curve (which seems to be exponential) and that it can vary a lot by region, but here is a review paper which has your number for ages 0-34 (Table 3) and (substantially) higher ones for ages above that:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...