[lamontcg]

> a highly specious argument that the unvaccinated were putting other people at significant risk.

The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

[koolba]

> The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

> Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

My right to choose my own treatment outweighs any right you have to feel safer. That includes you feeling safe that the local hospital system will not be at capacity if you have to be admitted.

It’s no different than having a bunch of chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system. People have the right to make potentially destructive choices that are not directly harmful to those around them.

[lamontcg]

> chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system.

That's the normal load and it is scaled for it[*].

COVID is like a DDoS.

And there is no elastic cloud scaling for nurses, you can't just turn up more instances from a ready pool.

[*] Well maybe not any more, and lets not get into a discussion of the for-profit health care system.

[kennyloginz]

Interesting way to look at it , a DDoS on healthcare. Makes me think of a Cold War sci-fi story called “Wasp”.

[bsder]

> It’s no different than having a bunch of chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system.

These aren't comparable. Obesity or alcoholism aren't communicable and don't lead to outbreaks. If they did, we'd be having similar discussions as to Covid.

[bsder]

> My right to choose my own treatment outweighs any right you have to feel safer.

No problem. Please sign this document stating that you will not seek treatment for Covid and that hospitals can legally refuse to treat you if you contract Covid.

But, see, that didn't happen. Instead what we wind up with are anti-vaxxers begging for the vaccine after they have been put on ECMO. Yeah, unfortunately it's too late at that point.

And even worse you are now soaking up a hospital bed for 4+ months that should have gone to someone who wasn't stupid.

And even worse that that is the dying person's family giving grief to the hospital staff because someone anti-vax dying of Covid doesn't fit their reality narrative. I could at least have some sympathy for the uneducated following foolish leaders. I have NEGATIVE sympathy for those who then abuse people trying to help them when the consequences come home to roost.

When I can see tears of relief in the eyes of a nurse simply by saying "Don't worry. I'm pro-vax." we have let the idiots have too much leeway.

[koolba]

> No problem. Please sign this document stating that you will not seek treatment for Covid and that hospitals can legally refuse to treat you if you contract Covid.

Why? Do you expect someone who doesn’t get a measles vaccine to sign a waiver refusing treatment if they get I’ll? Do you expect someone who refuses to wear a condom to refuse treatment if they contract an STD?

[bsder]

> Do you expect someone who doesn’t get a measles vaccine to sign a waiver refusing treatment if they get I’ll?

Perhaps? The advantage that we have with measles is that the vaccine can reach "herd immunity" and the measles vaccine is extremely effective. If enough people started dropping the measles vaccine because "Muh Choices!" that we fell below that and it started clogging the hospitals, yeah, maybe. The enclaves that refuse the measles vaccine find out about every 5-10 years why that's a bad idea.

[XiraceFulufuke]

Fortunately you can't stop the countdown till the moment you realize that the idiot was you.

[bsder]

If contracting a bad case of Covid 19 is enough to get anti-vax people to change their beliefs, perhaps that's pretty good evidence that maybe they haven't thought out the consequences of their position very well, after all.

As the kids say: "Fuck around. Find out." Or, as the olds say: "Play stupid games; win stupid prizes."

[Izkata]

> The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

Except that wasn't happening, and so much not happening that hospitals were reducing capacity. The emergency capacity built in early 2020 was dismantled after only a month or so and never brought back.

You can find individual hospitals reaching capacity all the time every year forever, but it was never the problem the news made it out to be. Current headlines include gasp hospitals at 80% capacity! ...Except that's normal. The more empty beds they have, the more money they lose - they try to run at around 80-90% full.

[bombcar]

> Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

I wonder how that would apply to obesity and unprotected sex.

[kurthr]

Um, obesity is an individual issue (at least at the current levels of hospital load associated with it) so your insurance and bills go up. Unprotected sex has two people involved and can be assault (if not agreed to) and if done by someone who knows they are HIV positive and infects another who dies... manslaughter.

[bombcar]

But we've shown that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, so not getting it is an individual issue ...

[kurthr]

So you filling up ICUs where there's no room for people who bothered to help their fellow citizens with heart attacks, car crashes, or cancer treatment is transmission? That is a different definition of transmission than I am aware of.

Can you please provide a dictionary or other reference?

In case you were wondering when ICUs were full of respiratory diseases, that would be last week.

[ifyoubuildit]

If 100 healthy unvaccinated people in their mid 30s caught delta, how many of them would you expect to end up in the ICU?

[kurthr]

Wow, what a cherry picked choice, too bad it's still awful and even an overly generous comparison makes that apparent.

   There are 23k ICU beds in the US.
   The population of the US is 330M. 
   The hospitalization rate for COVID was ~120/100k in 30 year olds.
   Average stay in ICU for COVID was 2-5 weeks.

So if the entire US was made up of unvaxed 30 year olds and 5% of them caught COVID every 2-5 weeks they would require ~3300x120x5%=20k ICU beds for at least an entire year! And since ICUs are normally about 30-50% full with other catastrophic medical events, that means someone else has to die for a self-important exercise of freedumb.

Normally, 30 year olds are healthy and don't present so highly in the hospitals or ICUs so on a percentage basis it's even worse (normal ~2%/decade vs ~20%/decade for 80yrs old). God forbid you're in rural America or your skin color is dark so you don't have access to the beds available in the cities. If you can't be polite to others, you shouldn't expect them to be polite to you.

[gjsman-1000]

Well... the awkward part about this is right now, it is now the opposite problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/environment/covid...

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20221127/more-vaccinated-peo...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinate...

[lamontcg]

As even that top article points out we'd expect the rate of unvaccinated people to approach the base rate which is 76% of the population having received one dose. And since old people are at more risk and are more vaccinated, we'd expect it to reach even higher eventually. But that happens because eventually the unvaccinated do all pick up natural immunity and the effect we're measuring is that the excess load caused by the unvaccinated is declining. We could have gotten to this point much quicker by having 100% vaccination rates (and 100% of the people still being admitted with COVID would then be vaccinated) but with an order of magnitude less load on the hospital system.

The top article you cite has all this information in it, and even mentions the base rate fallacy. It is criticizing the framing of the pandemic as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" and trying to focus attention on the elderly, but that is orthogonal to the question of if the unvaccinated are disproportionately clogging up the hospital system. Both statistics are true. Everyone should still get vaccinated to reduce the load on the hospital system (although this concern is now fading as antivaxxers actually do pick up immunity the hard way). We should also focus on the elderly more.

As a simple example: if a population begins entirely susceptible and there's a vaccine from day 1 which is available and reduces the risks of hospitalization by 9x and 90% of the people get the vaccine, then the rates of hospitalization will be split 50/50 between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Vaccinating the rest of the population would increase vaccination rates by 10% but would decrease overall hospitalization rates by 44%.