[znebby]

I'm really struggling to understand these numbers.

In some other articles I'm seeing that it offers 100% protection against hospitalisation and death.

"The J&J vaccine was 85 per cent effective at preventing severe Covid-19. Twenty-eight days after the jab, it offered “complete protection” from hospitalisation and death." [1]

Wouldn't having "severe" infection require hospitilisation?

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/d05c7c57-da11-42a1-aa33-b66052c90...

[outlace]

Presumably severe includes some people who don’t need hospitalization. Some high risk patients can get new monoclonal antibody treatments that may prevent them from needing hospitalization. Some people are sent home from the ED with oximeters and told to come back if their oxygen saturation drops below a certain threshold and a doctor calls them everyday. Hospitals in hard-hit area have to be very judicious about only admitting patients who really need it so there may be some severe/high risk cases that are just closely followed as an outpatient.

[zeku]

My grandma got severe covid and was sent home with oxygen tanks and other stuff. She's made it through thankfully.

Rural USA area hit hard.

[roywiggins]

I've seen "severe" be measured by oxygen saturation; some people are able to manage severe COVID at home.

Some people have to, because there simply isn't any hospital in their area with space for them.

[spookthesunset]

> Some people have to, because there simply isn't any hospital in their area with space for them.

Citation needed on that one. There is a lot of media fearmongering out there that results in outliers and things that are normal practice getting taken out of context and blown up into something scary.

[roywiggins]

You can see it in statistics. When the hospitalization starts dropping while case counts are going up, it's because more cases are being managed at home.

Prioritizing critical care is normal when care is in short supply, but it means that you are more likely to have to deal with COVID at home when the local healthcare system is overstressed.

> on Nov. 1, the Covid Tracking Project’s seven-day average showed about 80,000 new cases — which we would predict should lead to about 2,800 new hospitalizations a week later, by Nov. 8. Instead, there were 2,600, a little fewer than expected. On Nov. 15, we had 146,000 new cases, which should have resulted in about 5,100 new hospitalizations by Nov. 22. However, there were fewer than 3,700. This pattern of declining rates of hospitalization continued through the end of November.

> What is happening is pretty simple: Because hospitals are filling up, they are admitting fewer and fewer people. Any doctor or nurse will tell you that as the demand for beds soars, the threshold for admission rises with it...

> The decision on whether to admit a patient depends on two things: clinical judgment and bed availability. Critically ill patients will always be admitted. But as hospitals start to fill up, those who are less sick — younger covid patients, or those whose oxygen levels aren’t yet dangerously low — get sent home. These patients would be safer in a hospital bed, but there isn’t one available for them anymore.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/07/covid-hosp...

[ideamotor]

I think they are saying none of the hospitalized cases occurred after twenty-eight days, but statistically they can't really say it provides 100% hospitalization prevention at that point even if that is accurate. At lease one expert on CNN indicated protection was continuing to increase throughout the study which is promising. I'd like to see a follow-up.

[GizmoSwan]

People would get the disease but it won't kill them. They get a milder version of the disease that they otherwise would have.

It is like having some sort of immunity to type A,B, Spanish, etc of flu and getting them still but not dying like in early 1900s.

[jiofih]

Severe means severe symptoms but doesn’t imply hospitalization.