[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?