I wish people would stop referring to COVID as "the flu." As you acknowledge, it's a novel virus. However, all of the attention has simply been on whether it's causing death or severe illness. We’re only starting to study the long term effects, such as this recent Lancet article showing cognitive deficits associated with COVID infection, even mild ones: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext
My sense is that absence of effect could very well be attributed to absence of evidence at this point. We need to ensure that we're getting the data needed to understand other potential effects and their prevalence, and proceed with caution in the meantime.
It's not a quibble that this guy, perhaps attempting to demonstrate that he's bad at simple arithmetic (this isn't "math", just arithmetic), is confusing TWO orders of magnitude. He was supposed to say "0.18%" and "0.27%", but at least his use of fractions clarified that.
The UK is currently losing 65 people per day, three weeks after case-counts hit 26,000 per day, that's 0.25% - a mixture of vaccinated and unvaccinated, of course. But while individuals can feel smug about their own 0.18% odds, you have to let your national outcome guide your personal behaviour (if you're a good person), and we vaccinated must at present, wearily protect the "vaccine-wrong" (I don't care if they're hesitant, procrastinating, lazy, or actual anti-vaxxers: they're all "WRONG", so "vaccine-wrong" is the new word. Use it.).
In short, policy must be guided by the current national mortality rate of the combined vaccinated and vaccine-wrong. For any given level of vaccination, you have a new, lower mortality rate, but once you have it, you can go back to counting cases again, just with less urgency.
I wish people would stop referring to COVID as "the flu." As you acknowledge, it's a novel virus. However, all of the attention has simply been on whether it's causing death or severe illness. We’re only starting to study the long term effects, such as this recent Lancet article showing cognitive deficits associated with COVID infection, even mild ones: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext
My sense is that absence of effect could very well be attributed to absence of evidence at this point. We need to ensure that we're getting the data needed to understand other potential effects and their prevalence, and proceed with caution in the meantime.
It's not a quibble that this guy, perhaps attempting to demonstrate that he's bad at simple arithmetic (this isn't "math", just arithmetic), is confusing TWO orders of magnitude. He was supposed to say "0.18%" and "0.27%", but at least his use of fractions clarified that.
The UK is currently losing 65 people per day, three weeks after case-counts hit 26,000 per day, that's 0.25% - a mixture of vaccinated and unvaccinated, of course. But while individuals can feel smug about their own 0.18% odds, you have to let your national outcome guide your personal behaviour (if you're a good person), and we vaccinated must at present, wearily protect the "vaccine-wrong" (I don't care if they're hesitant, procrastinating, lazy, or actual anti-vaxxers: they're all "WRONG", so "vaccine-wrong" is the new word. Use it.).
In short, policy must be guided by the current national mortality rate of the combined vaccinated and vaccine-wrong. For any given level of vaccination, you have a new, lower mortality rate, but once you have it, you can go back to counting cases again, just with less urgency.
Excellent. The only quibble is that 0.0018 percent is 9 / 500,000 not 9 / 5,000.
Cases falling in UK too.