[rory]

It seems like you are basically agreeing with me while pretending to disagree. Of course we could eradicate the virus with a magically high vaccination rate using a magically effective vaccine. But that's not possible in our current reality.

By insinuating that we can eradicate the virus using current technology and current infrastructure, it causes vaccine-hesitant people to see their choice as a type of prisoner dilemma. When in reality, their choice is more like "do I want to get initial immunity via the vaccine, or do I want to (eventually) get it via the virus.

[giantrobot]

We can eliminate viruses with current technology and current infrastructure. We've done it with several diseases already.

The vaccine "hesitant" don't have a prisoner's dilemma. They're not understanding or being misled about probabilities.

A symptomatic COVID infection has a fairly high probability of a "long haul" case and a smaller but still relatively high probability of hospitalization. It should be painfully clear that with a high infection rate the hospitalization rate is high enough to flood hospitals and cause follow-on effects like non-COVID emergencies being unable to receive proper treatment.

Waiting to gain immunity to COVID through natural exposure has a high chance of a long haul condition, hospitalization, and death. On the other hand the vaccines have a chance of side effects so low as to be effectively none. Once vaccinated the chance of breakthrough symptomatic infection is low and the chance of long haul conditions, hospitalization, and death are extremely low.

There's no dilemma about vaccines for anyone being rational. Even if you're hesitant about mRNA vaccines (despite hundreds of millions of doses with no problems) there's viral vector vaccines readily available.

[nradov]

We cannot eliminate the SARS-CoV-2 virus with current vaccines. I would encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but the virus is here to stay.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/07/who-says-covid-is-here-to-st...

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

[rory]

Again, it seems like you're basically agreeing with the trappings of argument. I am talking specifically about eradicating SARS-COV-2, not eliminating a virus in abstract. It's obvious that there are some viruses we are able to eradicate, but it is also obvious that there are some we are not.

The rest of your comment is punching ghosts. Keep in mind that most people are not rational, and empathizing with irrational people is a more effective method of influence than scorn.

[native_samples]

This is the sort of argument that causes people to reject vaccination.

1. "a smaller but still relatively high probability of hospitalization."

The risk of hospitalization for COVID is (in the UK, other countries are comparable) something like 0.1% per week for the 65-75 age range [1]. It is much lower for younger people. Ignoring the actual probability of getting infected is not legitimate - people care about overall outcomes. Claiming this is a "relatively high probability" is the sort of false claim that creates resistance to vaccination, because it makes the people promoting vaccination look mis-informed. Especially when they claim to be more rational and have better information than the people they're criticizing, this is guaranteed to piss people off and make them double down on their position. After all, someone who tried to convince them they were wrong just demonstrated an incorrect understanding of risks, and vaccination vs infection is all about marginal risks.

2. "A symptomatic COVID infection has a fairly high probability of a long haul case"

Long COVID isn't even a definable thing, so talking about it will immediately reduce your credibility with those who don't want to take a vaccine. You really have no idea what the probability is given that long COVID isn't a real disease, in the sense of having a defined set of diagnosable symptoms.

Injuries from taking the vaccine on the other hand are definable. Most countries have databases with entries describing those injuries, but they are incomplete so it's hard to know the full risk. Most pre-COVID studies suggest the under-reporting rate is anywhere from 10x to 100x, so the true numbers are certainly quite high, especially as under-reporting for COVID vaccines is clearly much higher: lots of people claim the vaccine made them sick for a day or three, but don't report this. So people who talk about the risk of long COVID but never talk about the risk of long vaccine look biased and irrational (i.e. not doing a cost/benefit analysis).

3. "It should be painfully clear that with a high infection rate the hospitalization rate is high enough to flood hospitals"

There are quite a few countries have got through prior waves in which nobody was vaccinated without hospitals being overloaded. Switzerland for example publishes long term data on hospital capacity. As you can see [2], at no point did the country run out of beds or even come close. In fact ICU beds have been decommissioned over the past year because there were too many, and regular hospital beds were never more than 10% COVID occupied. Therefore, this is not painfully clear, especially as you're using vague terms like "flood" and "high".

4. "Waiting to gain immunity to COVID through natural exposure has a high chance of a long haul condition, hospitalization, and death"

The COVID IFR estimates published by the WHO is ~0.2%. This is not "a high chance ... of death".

5. "There's no dilemma about vaccines for anyone being rational"

You have just demonstrated that you don't understand the actual risk levels involved with COVID, so it would be wise to refrain from criticizing other people's rationality.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

[2] https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/icu

[giantrobot]

The death rates for COVID infections in the US is sitting pretty at about 1% [0]. The hospitalization rate is over 5% [1] on average and way higher in some regions.

Meanwhile influenza's IFR in the US, which includes pneumonia from an infection, is about 0.05% and the hospitalization rate about 1% [2].

As for vaccines, you're full of shit. Feeling sick for a few days after a vaccine is not in any way similar to actually being infected with COVID. Besides the symptoms being extremely mild and in no way debilitating they're not communicable! If you get vaccinated and go to work you won't vaccinate your entire office by accident.

So far in the US we've got about 40 million known cases of COVID with over 600,000 deaths. We have hundreds of millions of fully vaccinated adults with very few deaths from the vaccines. One of the two things is orders of magnitude safer than the other. Hint: catching COVID is not the safe one.

[0] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33617808/

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2019-2020.html

[nradov]

The death rate for COVID infections in the US has been 0.6%, almost all of which were unvaccinated. 40 million cases is a drastic underestimate; the best estimate of actual cases was 120 million as of July.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but vaccinated people can still infect an entire office by accident. It's possible that vaccinated people might be less contagious on average but we don't have solid data on that yet.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1

[native_samples]

The numbers we're talking about are slightly different. You're referring to CFR but calling it IFR. There are many more infections than positive tests ("cases"). That's OK, the difference is quite subtle. Likewise your hospitalization stat is hospitalizations per infection and only in one US state, whereas the stat I quoted is the weekly risk of COVID hospitalization for everyone in that age band in the UK.

It doesn't matter much. The stats you cited don't change the point being made: whether it's 0.1% or 1%, neither number is "relatively high", "fairly high" or a "high chance". These are all quite low probabilities.

"Feeling sick for a few days after a vaccine is not in any way similar to actually being infected with COVID"

For many people it does seem to be the same. I know a few people who got COVID. They report the same experience as many people who got side effects from the vaccine: a day or two of feeling really rough, followed by recovery. But getting COVID, or at least COVID bad enough to notice, isn't that common. The cumulative number of cases is about 10% of the population where I live. Probably there were far more infections, but if those infections don't yield noticeable symptoms then they don't matter, so we can say 10%. By now I know more people who got sick from the vaccine than sick from COVID. It's not a massive surprise as far more than 10% got the vaccine. Given how they work, it makes sense that lots of people who get it report getting a form of COVID. The assumption that it's always drastically worse to get COVID itself does not match what I hear other people around me report. For example nobody who got COVID said it interfered with their periods. The vaccines have done this to several women my girlfriend knows.

This is what leads to problems and disagreements. People are pushing vaccines with claims about COVID that don't match the stats, and claims about the vaccines which seem to be contradicted by lived experience from the offline world. What are people to make of this?