nk15

Interesting, evidence-based guide for anyone or their families who may get close to an ICU admission, God forbid. The author seems to be an expert in the field. It is a bit sobering, not very well tailored to Covid, and not very clear how much control a patient or family has over it in Covid units (in some ways it is addressed to health care personnel, but more likely both health care staff and patient families). Good to have a sense of these things though.

What You Need to Know Before You Wind Up in the ICU (msn.com)

freed0m

I am not sure I read the data correctly. How do they derive that "Natural immunity appeared more protective against hospitalization" with fully vaccinated people are 10 times of people previous infection but unvaccinated? And 8 or 1, the number is too small to use for any meaningful comparison, right? It does not allow for any margin of error at all.

bambinomartino

The Daily Caller is not a "neo-nazi and white supremacist website". You are in essence accusing a fellow forum member of reading and promoting Neo-Nazi sources.

[mod edit]

shorthauldad

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...jenny-harries/

fransknorge

In the UK, the cumulative deaths was around 127 000 the 15th April 2021, it is 138 000 today.
So 10 000 in 6 months. Based on the numbers from Dr Harries that puts it in the top of the range compared to the flu.

invisible

Now I made a rule to send any fearmongering clickbait articles directly into /dev/null

They have been scaring us for freaking 1.5 years. Enough.

I am one of these who wants to live instead of being afraid to die. I am done listening this nonsense.

fransknorge

How can you know it is fearmongering without reading ?
The article is about how a family member of someone in ICU (not necessarily COVID related) can behave and help the medical team, as well as a glimpse of understanding of what happens to your family member and how you can productively help him/her. No a single fearmongering and educating.

lobo411

Yeh... Duh....Because covid isn't a major threat once people are vaccinated.

corporate-wage-slave

She did say that in the interview. The context being that 90% of adults have had their COVID jabs, but only about 30% of eligible adults have had their flu jabs as of a week ago. One interesting point is that when we define how some COVID patients have a bad time due to co-morbidities - well having flu and COVID puts you in that bracket.

corporate-wage-slave

Really good study to come out of France today, assessing how good vaccines are at avoiding serious cases of COVID, sufficient to have hospitalisation implications.

- Two studies in all, one for those 50-74 years old, the other for those over 75 years old.
- The numbers of cases involved in the study are huge - 15.4 mliiom for the younger group, 7.2 million for the older cohort
- Both groups had 50% vaccinated, 50% unvaccinated
- Pfizer, Moderna and AZ were all in scope here, mostly Pfizer.

- Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation was in excess of 90% overall, measured from 2 weeks after the second dose.
- For Delta specifically the effectiveness was 84% for the older group, and 92% for those aged 50-74.
- Similar levels of protection seen against mortality
- No difference between the vaccine brands, if anything AZ slightly better than the other two, but for AZ there was an average 77 day interval between doses, compared to 28 days for Pfizer.
- No reduction in effectiveness - in terms of hospital admissions - during the 5 month study period after vaccination.

These are very similar to the UK figures, except that the UK isn't comparing against such a large cohort of unvaccinated cases. No data here on people younger than 50, but the UK figures suggest vaccine effectiveness is greater in the younger age groups.

https://www.epi-phare.fr/rapports-de...-octobre-2021/
Two PDF reports with details are linked in there for download.

shorthauldad

Not wishing to provoke an[other] argument (!), but I can't help but feel that "effective" really, really needs to be qualified there. Covid is a disease that particularly affects the old and those with underlying medical conditions[0][1].

To me it seems somewhat odd to claim that any particular treatment is particularly effective for a certain age group if you fail to present that alongside the absolute risk for that age group.

Reducing the risk of dying from Covid for a particular cohort from - let's say - 5 in 1,000,000,000 to 1 in 1,000,000,000 looks really good if you say it's a 5x improvement of relative risk, but on an absolute risk scale for a population it's patently a nonsense.

[0] Why does COVID-19 disproportionately affect older people? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7288963/
[1] COVID-19 Risks and Vaccine Information for Older Adults https://www.cdc.gov/aging/covid19/co...er-adults.html

corporate-wage-slave

It is true that older people are more susceptible to severe outcomes, but you have focused on deaths, when the report you're quoting from is mainly focused on hospitalisation. The unvaccinated add around 30 years to their age by dint of being unvaccinated, so someone 35 unvaccinated acquires the age profile of someone 68 and vaccinated or thereabouts. If someone 35 gets taken to hospital they generally survive at that age - so they don't show in the death rates but the experience tends to be life changing, and not in a good way.

Younger people - both vaccinated and unvaccinated - are ending up in hosptial in far greater numbers due to COVID than is usual in normal times, with the unvaccinated experiencing worst outcomes. When I first worked the intensive care units, back in January, everyone was older than me, now almost all are younger than me. On the week 40 surveillance, someone aged 35 has 1 chance in 50,000 of being hospitalised in the course of a month, if vaccinated, about the same as baseline pre COVID. The unvaccinated multiply their risk of this by a factor of 6.5 - way over usual levels and the same as vaccinated people aged 68. If we look at ICU risk, the multiplied increase is about 9 or 10 times compared to the vaccinated. If we consider years lost via premature deaths, or indeed economic impact, I can make the case that it would have been better to vaccinate people in their 30s before some older cohorts. Around about 1 person a day aged 30 to 39 is currently dying from COVID in the UK, 80% of them are unvaccinated when 30% of that age group in the wider population is not yet vaccinated. We strongly suspect that almost all of those deaths in the unvaccinated were avoidable. You can't necessarily say that of people aged 68, vaccinated or unvaccinated.

That's the UK situation, but just look at the USA situation if you want to really see what happens to people under 50 who elect not to receive a safe and effective vaccine.

Loren Pechtel

No evidence? Nah, they've got evidence--it's just fraudulent!

All this obsession with comorbidities--flu deaths are all about comorbidities!

shorthauldad

Not wishing to seem dismissive, but I've never really understood what the phrase "life-changing" is supposed to mean, it always felt a bit too much like newspeak to me. The UK [still] has a Prime Minister who seems to be doing just fine, if somewhat more cautious about the risks of Covid than he was before he ended up in ICU.

Q: Would a child not being allowed to travel to see its relatives or to be allowed to attend school for months on end count as "life-changing"? Based on our experience, it certainly would. No needles, doctors or ICUs involved, but damage incurred just the same. You won't track that on any Covid dashboard, of course.

Covid-19: Unvaccinated face 11 times risk of death from delta variant, CDC data show
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2282

So for healthy teens we're going to reduce the risk from of the unvaccinated from "1 in a huuge number" by vaccinating to "1 in a very, very large number". Hmm....

Smiley90

You are again only focusing on death, though. There are many, many other outcomes not as binary as that - including "long COVID", which can even take out elite athletes at arguably peak physical condition for at least a year and counting. So it makes sense to talk about vaccine effectiveness not just at reducing deaths, but also at reducing hospitalizations and any adverse health effects.