311–320 of 477 posts
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If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
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You don't, but if the death rates are generally stable and predictable a huge increase during a COVID wave seems highly likely to be related. There have been plenty of analysis of various countries mortality rates compared to normal years. In general, the trend seems to be that poorer countries have probably missed a lot of COVID deaths due to lack of testing infrastructure and heavily rural populations. https://www.…
> You don't, but if the death rates are generally stable [...] For example: if a crematorium has historically dealt with 20 cremations a week and is now doing 100 a week, you can estimate that 80 people are dying from COVID per week. The estimate is likely to be pretty inaccurate, but it's the best source of information that there is.
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> Meanwhile Texas, the poster-child for bad behaviour, is headed back to normal. Fifty THOUSAND people died in Texas. I'm not sure how anyone can hold it up as a *good" comparison.
The population of Texas is 29,000,000 - so even (incorrectly) assuming that these 50,000 people died exclusively from Covid and not compounded by several co-morbities... that's 0.17% of the state's population. And even as a factor of the number of cases in TX (2.84mil, last check), that comes to 1.7%.
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Still a small fraction of what Europe has experienced. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
There are serious indications that India is under-reporting death count by a factor of 5-50x. Despite showing 5-10x lower death rate in your source, it was rare for European crematoriums have backlogs like in India [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/non-stop-cremations-cast...
Based on over a year's worth of global data, it is reasonable to highly correlate confirmed positive infections with death counts, with only the degree varying from 2% to 6%. Using "official" numbers alone, and the exponential growth they have exhibited in the past week, it is impossible to deny that an unmitigated disaster is unfolding before our eyes in India. Speculate and blame all you want, the situation is dead…
Reversing this would be good too. https://www.democracynow.org/2021/3/11/rich_countries_block_...
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None of the vaccines are 100% effective. A 74% effective (at preventing symptoms) vaccine (like Oxford/AstraZeneca) means 26% of people can still get the disease (and likely some more can get infected, without getting disease symptoms). A 95% effective (at preventing symptoms) vaccine like the Pfizer/BioNTech one means 5% of people can still get symptoms (and likely some more can get infected, without getting disease…
I believe that 74% and 95% are efficacy values. The actual effective values would be lower.
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The point of wearing masks is mostly to prevent you from infecting others if you're already infected. They're somewhat effective at preventing infection but that's not what they're best at - if you're wearing a mask in a room with an unmasked, contagious case, you're still in danger.
Maybe they should advertise it like that. I and most i know are wearing thinking it would reduce our risk to exposure.
Based on over a year's worth of global data, it is reasonable to highly correlate confirmed positive infections with death counts, with only the degree varying from 2% to 6%. Using "official" numbers alone, and the exponential growth they have exhibited in the past week, it is impossible to deny that an unmitigated disaster is unfolding before our eyes in India. Speculate and blame all you want, the situation is dead…
Shipping vaccines and materials needed for vaccine manufacture would be a good start. Reversing this would be good too. https://www.democracynow.org/2021/3/11/rich_countries_block_...
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The 100% figure was specific to the "in the Phase 3 trials" tidbit I left in my post. Apologies if that was unclear. With only 30,000 people or 40,000 people in the phase 3 trial, its impossible to differentiate between 99.99% and 100%. We can only see how far above 99.99% we've gotten by deploying to the public.
Pretty sure it's worse than that. The number that dictates how accurate the "100% effective against hospitalizations and death" stat from the trials can be isn't the total number of people in the trial, it's the much smaller number of people in it who were hospitalized and died. In reality, I don't think that's enough to differentiate between 90% and 100%, and honestly it'd probably be pretty hard to rule out 80% eit…
In contrast, there have been anywhere from 1000 to 3000 deaths PER DAY due to COVID19. The only question remaining is: how far back do we go to count COVID19 deaths. Do you want to start in January, or do you want to start in February? Vaccination started in December, maybe we should include December deaths?
The month of February 2021 was well in excess of 50,000 COVID19 deaths. (2000 to 3000 COVID19 deaths per day every day through Feburary). Estimating that to a round number is ~70,000 or so.
74 breakout deaths vs 70,000-ish total deaths puts us in the 99% effective range already. And that's after I've "steelman" chosen lots of numbers not very favorable to my argument.
It seems like a verifiable fact that the vaccines are well in excess of 99% effective against death. How much so (99.9% or 99.99%???) is a mystery to be left for someone who is better at analyzing these statistics.
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The USA is currently experiencing 700 deaths/day due to COVID19. Its not over. As the death count of the unvaccinated population rises day-after-day, it will only make the safety results of the vaccine more and more certain.
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The point of wearing masks is mostly to prevent you from infecting others if you're already infected. They're somewhat effective at preventing infection but that's not what they're best at - if you're wearing a mask in a room with an unmasked, contagious case, you're still in danger.
Maybe they should advertise it like that. I and most i know are wearing thinking it would reduce our risk to exposure.