[HMH]

Maximum death rate for all age groups with Moderna, which at least according to these plots provides the lowest death rate, is at 0.8/100_000 in August 2021 for all age groups. Maximum death rate for the unvaccinated of age 12-17 is at 0.17/100_000, for age 18-29 it is 0.76/100_000, also in August 2021.

So even unvaccinated younger people (age < 30) are better off than the average vaccinated Joe. The thing is, so far I have pretty much never heard of this in my countries media, at least to me it sounds like "vaccinate absolutely everyone or we are all doomed", which according to this data is not the case.

[jrd259]

If you are under 30, it appears your risk of death is low regardless of your status, but you will not forever be under 30, and perhaps you know some over-30 for whom the difference in death rate is important? Even if there's no one you care about who is over 30, to the extent that vaccination also reduces your risk of infecting others, it is polite to your society to be vaccinated. Perhaps you get no great benefit, but others do.

[enchiridion]

Does anyone have good stats to share on how vaccination impacts transmission? I’m curious.

[zwieback]

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

Once a vaccinated person has a breakthrough infection they spread similarly but of course the chance to contract it is lower and the time to "virus clearance" is faster.

[spurgu]

I was lying in bed for two days until I self-diagnosed with appendicitis and decided to go to the hospital. Turned out I was just in time. What I mean is I won't seek medical help unless absolutely possible (I live in EU countries where medical care is free). Due to this mindset (whether or not you think it's stupid, I don't really care) I'm simply not going to subscribe to having two boosters per year for the rest of my life. I've had two jabs now but as it looks like now I'm probably soon gonna start putting my immune system to work (and travel less as a result I suppose).

There are studies indicating a previous infection provides a stronger and longer lasting response than the vaccine, although this is not definite yet - Israelis and the CDC have made opposing conclusions on this topic.

[ifyoubuildit]

Presumably the under 30s will get covid within a few years, and then they will be in the pool of people with significant immunity.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Or they could vaccinate and have significant immunity nearly immediately without COVID.

[ifyoubuildit]

Yes, one of those two things will happen. The point is that the under 30s aren't likely to make it to a different age bracket where they are more significantly at risk without first achieving immunity in one of those ways.

[elif]

That perspective is only accurate egocentrically. If you look at population-level epidemiology you will find vaccines inhibit viral spread.

[nradov]

Sterilizing vaccines inhibit spread. The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines aren't sterilizing to any significant extent. Vaccinated individuals might be contagious for a slightly shorter period but in the long run that doesn't matter because the virus is now endemic and everyone will be exposed eventually. Fortunately the vaccines are still fairly effective at preventing deaths.

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

[johndevor]

> you will find vaccines inhibit viral spread

Is this true? Countries like Singapore and Israel are seeing huge spikes in cases despite having some of the highest vax rates.

My suspicion is that vaccines have the downside of suppressing symptoms, thus making the vaxxed more likely to spread covid without knowing it.

[scythe]

See e.g.:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/how-vaccines-...

Country-level anecdata is basically useless without a multi-factor analysis due to huge differences in restrictions and self-directed prevention by the public.

[spurgu]

Or Gibraltar which is 100% vaccinated.

[the-dude]

NL is at ~85% vaccinated 12 yrs up. Infections are through the roof.

[mbesto]

> at least to me it sounds like "vaccinate absolutely everyone or we are all doomed", which according to this data is not the case.

Sending mass communication about health with a list of "ifs ands or buts" is incredibly challenging especially for a pandemic level response, so if the communication is simply "get the vaccine" then you're going to get a higher uptick.

I understand your nitpick, but also understand the general population doesn't fully grok this stuff.

EDIT: Lemme also add - the data we're viewing is retrospective. We wouldn't know the effect until now, so of course the message has been "Get the vaccine"

[fulafel]

> So even unvaccinated younger people (age < 30) are better off than the average vaccinated Joe

Of course you can only say this only for a big 18-29 age group viewed as an aggregate (regarding mortality), but can't say that generally of members the group.

Eg according to https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-... the deaths in 25-29 age group are dramatically more common than among 18-24 year olds, and there are other individual traits that are big factors in death risk. So it's safe to say that lots of <30 year olds have multi-% death risks, not to mention lifelong or long lasting harm from the additional near death cases.

(But of course the most important thing is to reduce infections between people to keep riskier groups alive, so even without personal death risk it would be incredibly immoral to not get vaxed)

[k8sToGo]

Except that you are also more easily spreading the virus if you are not vaccinated.

[bigodbiel]

I mean it was never the case, since the beginning we all knew it was 95% of deaths among the 50+.

Then the goalposts (sorry for this language but there isn’t any other) shifted to continued transmission and viral mutation, until breakthrough became normalized. Now it’s filling up ICUs and healthcare collapse because of the unvaccinated.

It’s all really sad when the CDC itself needs to cherrypick data until it can proudly say that “vaccines are 5x better than natural immunity” as if it was a competition: man versus nature (never mind the dozens of studies proving otherwise)

[eqvinox]

You're forgetting the vaccine is also very efficient in preventing hospitalization. By a factor of ≈11 (average, ages 12-17 & 18-59) in the RKI (Germany) data[¹].

So even if you're aged 12 to 29, if you don't get vaccinated you're gambling at taking away someone else's hospital bed. Which will doom the rest of us.

So, can everyone please get fricken vaccinated ffs?

[¹] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

[HMH]

> So even if you're aged 12 to 29, if you don't get vaccinated you're gambling at taking away someone else's hospital bed. Which will doom the rest of us.

According to [1] at no point in time since March this year (when they started recording this data) have there been more than 100 hospitalizations in the age group 0-30 in Germany a country with 80+ million inhabitants. If this means doom to all of us I don't know anymore.

[1]: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/altersstrukt...

[eqvinox]

That's a valid argument, I wasn't aware absolute hospitalization numbers <30 were this low.

… which just leaves the other arguments to get vaccinated. Namely, lesser chance of long-term symptoms and lesser chance of getting infected (last I checked, outbound transmission doesn't seem to be reduced much, but inbound is, so it still serves to slow overall spread.)

[atomicUpdate]

> That's a valid argument, I wasn't aware absolute hospitalization numbers <30 were this low.

And yet you were more than willing to make the baseless claim in the first place, which is one of the biggest issues with all of this in the first place. The media is doing its best to make covid seem scary as it can and is helped along by misinformation like this, fueling overall distrust.

[unanswered]

So in other words all of the non-debunked reasons for <30 to get vaccinated are all about individual health, and have no impact on anyone else's health.

[nradov]

I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but hyperbole isn't helpful. Occupying a hospital bed won't doom the rest of us. In any given year only a small fraction of the population gets admitted to a hospital for any reason.

[eqvinox]

> Occupying a hospital bed won't doom the rest of us.

https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen

Germany is getting quite close to exhausting ICU beds and ventilators. Non-"essential" procedures have already been postponed.

[angelzen]

"Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten (Betreibbare Betten und Notfallreserve" chart shows the ICU stats over time. Occupied beds are roughly a flatline around 20k, with a small 3k seasonal (covid?) variation. OTOH, the total number of available ICU beds have fallen from ~32k to ~24k, 25%. We are all nervous to see how the medical system will weather the winter covid waves, sadly the covid pandemic is far from over. But I'm confused: the data indicates the system has lost significant ICU capacity, a few times more than the seasonal (covid?) utilization variation. What is going on? Is this something Germans also openly worry about?

[majewsky]

Two effects going on there in parallel:

1. In the last wave, some hospitals reported more ICU beds than they were actually prepared to staff, because each available bed in the datasheet got them a hefty government subsidy.

2. A non-negligible number of ICU nursing staff were worked into the ground in the Winter 2020/2021 wave and decided to quit (read: move into similar jobs with less horrible working conditions). From what I hear (caution: anecdata), a lot of the remaining staff are now considering to follow them.

[bellyfullofbac]

That's a curious interpretation of the graphs... in all age groups in the US, the unvaxed line is higher than the vaxed graph (except for 1 data point for ages 12-17).

If you're unvaxed and using "So even unvaccinated younger people (age < 30) are better off than the average vaccinated Joe." as a justification, it's a bit like saying "I know being unvaxed I have worse survival odds than a fully vaxed 65 year old, but I prefer that!"

And please just compare data from close time periods, if we can pick different times for our rates, then I would pick October 2016, the chances of dying from Covid-19 at that time was absolute 0, even for the unvaxed!