| Let's start with an extreme example: each day more people die in traffic accidents, than by falling from a 10-story building. But still, we all can agree that driving a car is safer than falling from a building. Why? Because driving a car you get more chance to get to your destination safely than falling from a building. ChatGPT estimates 0.01% chance to die in car accident per year, when driving every day, and 90-99% to die when falling from a building, once. However, since there are many millions of people who drive a car every day, multiplying very little chance to die in car crash by millions of people, we get thousands of traffic-related death per day. Compare that to single-digit number of people falling from buildings, even if all of them die from it. Back to Covid, let's imagine a village with simple numbers like this: 10 people were NOT vaccinated,
100 people WERE vaccinated. Of 10 people who were NOT vaccinated, all 10 got hospitalized. Of 100 people who WERE vaccinated, 20 got hospitalized. _Correct_ way to look at this village would be: ALL people who were NOT vaccinated, got hospitalized - 100% hospitalization rate. But among those who WERE vaccinated, only 20% got hospitalized. Hence, it's better to be vaccinated - this way you'll get 80% chance of not being hospitalized :) I'm not a real statistician, and don't have actual numbers on hand, but situation with real world numbers is similar: among people who were vaccinated, less percent were hospitalized than among those who were not. It's just that we had so many many vaccinated people, that their small hospitalization rate, when multiplied by total number of vaccinated people, outweighs number of not-vaccinated and hospitalized people. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy