Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

This was going to be a 20 year issue the second it happened. It's a virus. Viruses are spectacularly hard to contain, and containing this one was lost loooong ago.

 

Can someone point me towards somewhere that has statistics on how reduced the symptoms of COVID are if you do catch it after having the Pfizer vaccine?

 

So it'd get the people who have no strong pre-existing opinions on vaccines, but fall for dick enlargement spam emails every time.

 

The unfortunate answer to this is, "Statistics don't work that way."

 

I mean, I believe you, but why not?

Like, you can track what percentage of people who catch COVID* have mild, moderate or severe symptoms; why can’t you compare what percentage of people that catch it after having the vaccine have mild, moderate and severe symptoms, and compare?


*not sure why it automatically capitalises that.

 

Because statistics are influenced by how you ask the questions and a number of other factors. Making a comparison between two number sets thus requires that said elements be controlled for.

That data -- on the likelihood of severe symptoms and so on -- is part of the vaccine trial and has been widely publicized. Here is one publication of the data. Note that the one case of severe COVID in the vaccinated group occurred before that person could get their second shot.

That said, statistical questions are highly influenced by how they're asked -- the exact wording is really fucking important, and influences just what numbers you need to look at.

You asked:

... which is a request for data on symptom severity in the same individual depending on whether they got the vaccine or not.

This is really hard to answer. First off, people who are vaccinated are likely to simply not get the disease at all. Do you want me to count this as "zero symptoms", or is your question comparing a person who got sick without the vaccine to that same person getting vaccinated and then getting sick anyway?

The problems involved in directly getting that data are... kinda obvious, especially when previous COVID infection itself would be a major confound when it comes to measuring symptom severity in that sort of case (and you can't "un-vaccinate" someone).

Secondly, you ask about "how reduced" -- which means you're, as written, not asking about overall symptom severity between categories but rather the reduction in symptoms, which means you can't get a meaningful answer without detailed symptom profiles... which is hard as fuck to do, in large part because of the above-mentioned issue with only being able to compare cases in which you asked the exact same way, but also because of the multiple comparisons problem and the sheer variety of symptoms that COVID can produce.

Basically, it's a really messy question, and fundamental aspects of how statistics work make it really hard to directly answer.

Edit: And the confounding problem means that you can't even look at numbers in the general population -- that comparison would necessarily assume that people who do get vaccinated and people who don't are otherwise identical in all variables which would effect infection rate and symptom severity... which is very blatantly not the case.

 

Clearly what we need to do is some warcrimes on twins.

 

Ah, no. ‘Zero symptoms‘ is slightly different to ‘did not catch’, in that asymptomatic carriers can still spread but you presumably can’t if you did not catch it in the first place.

The vaccine is supposed to be 95% effective after the second shot has had time to take effect. In looking up what ‘95% effective’ meant, it seems to mean ‘a 95% reduction in the amount of people in the vaccinated group who catch COVID over X period in comparison to how many people in the control unvaccinated group catch COVID in the same period’. I assumed asymptomatic cases would go into the 5% who still caught it, though I guess that depends on whether they actually tested people who showed no symptoms.

I wanted to know if it also caused a lower rate of severe symptoms in that 5%. My bad if my wording was off. If that’s too difficult to answer, or I’m still wording it wrong, then that’s fine, as the lowered chance of catching it is enough even without any measurable benefits in the event that you do.

 

Asymptomatic carriers don't have the disease. Definitions vary -- Wikipedia, for instance, quotes a disease as "a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not due to any immediate external injury."

This is somewhat atypical, as it's mixing medical and legal definitions and the medical dictionary it quotes gives a more typical version. Merriam-Webster's medical dictionary gives another: "an impairment of the normal state of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts that interrupts or modifies the performance of the vital functions, is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms, and is a response to environmental factors (as malnutrition, industrial hazards, or climate), to specific infective agents (as worms, bacteria, or viruses), to inherent defects of the organism (as genetic anomalies), or to combinations of these factors : sickness, illness."

TL;DR? You need to have a medical issue or symptom to have a disease... but cause doesn't matter (which is why, say, the traumatic injuries from a car accident are considered a disease by medical professionals).

COVID is the disease; the virus is SARS-CoV-2. It's entirely possible to be infested with the latter without having the former; it's why Mary Mallon isn't considered to have had Typhoid.

Secondly, I wasn't even referring to that, but rather to the increased chance of an exposure failing to produce an infection in someone who has been vaccinated.

 

O-kay? This semantics lesson is trying to tell me that when you said-

-you were saying ‘people who are vaccinated are likely to simply not (show any negative symptoms). Do you want me to count this as zero symptoms’? That seems like a weird question to ask, as with that definition the answer is obviously yes. Are you clarifying this because you’re pointing out the 95% who don’t catch it actually include asymptomatic transmitters as ‘BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19’ refers to the disease not the virus?

Either way, what I’m getting from this is my question cannot be answered. That’s fine.

 

All you need are:

Twins

and

Warcrimes​

This post is not a solicitation for warcrimes upon twins, nor a call for any such action, nor any intent to condone such action. I'm just pointing out the sort of inhumane set up you'd need to get really precise data about this.

Honestly looking at some of the horrible long-term effects of oxygen-deprived organs, the overt sickness symptoms for the disease seem much less important, and the even less-intense overt sickness symptoms of the vaccine seem kinda trivial. But that's just my opinion.

 

I mean, sure. If we’re going complete fantasy, throw in some Coil time-split action to get the really precise data comparison. I’m not really looking for that level of precision though, just anything solid that points in the direction of the vaccine benefiting its recipients if they actually catch the dis- virus.

This isn’t possible because of confounders, category ambiguity and getting a reliable control group (I think). The second could probably be combatted by using an unambiguous category (how many people die who caught the virus with vs without the vaccine) but the other two are statistical things I can’t comment on.

Don’t disagree, the protection from catching it in the first place is good enough to go through the relatively minor symptoms of the vaccine.

 

I somehow missed this. The answer is that the Pfizer vaccine seems to almost entirely protect against severe disease. Obviously it's not actually perfect, but they literally didn't get so much as a single case of severe COVID in the vaccinated group when they looked.

I thought I was relatively clear:

A large part of the point here was that the exact definition of what you're talking about makes a shitton of difference in statistics, with the ultimate point being that the question wasn't answerable as you asked it.

Let's say that I've somehow miraculously turned into Coil, complete with his fictitious powers, and have decided to use this power to answer your question. In one timeline, I give a thousand people a COVID vaccine. In another, I give them a fake vaccine. I then take detailed medical data on all of them.

Oh, and since I'm Coil, I ventilate their bedrooms with COVID particles -- in both timelines -- after the vaccine's taken effect. Calvert's a dick like that.

In the timeline where they got a fake vaccine, two thirds of my victims patients -- about 666 (a fully appropriate number, given what Coil just did to them) develop symptomatic COVID. About 540 of them only develop "mild" symptoms. 540 of them only suffer "mild" COVID (which is still a nasty bug). Of the remaining 126, about half -- 63 or so -- only suffer "moderate" COVID symptoms. The remaining 63 suffer severe COVID, and many need to be hospitalized. Despite the medical professionals' best efforts -- Panacea wasn't available -- anywhere from six to thirty-three die.

In the timeline where I gave them a real vaccine, only 33 people develop COVID symptoms at all. 26 or 27 suffer "mild" COVID symptoms. The remaining six or seven suffer "moderate" COVID. Nobody suffers severe disease or needs to go to the hospital.

Those numbers, by the way, were largely drawn from the Pfizer clinical trial data and from the United Kingdom's government fact sheets on COVID infection. Anything else, I rectally sourced while trying to keep things as realistic as possible.

That said, this leaves Coil-Me with a bit of a dilemma if he's going to try and answer your question: Does he compare the 666 unvaccinated COVID victims to their vaccinated selves, or does he compare them to the 33 people who developed COVID despite the vaccine (the so-called "breakthrough infections")? Or does he compare the 33 people who developed COVID when vaccinated to their unvaccinated selves?

Each of these comparisons would be answering a slightly different question, and would be useful in different circumstances, for making different decisions. The numbers, obviously, would also be quite different.

And this is why exact wording is so important when asking for numbers. Statistics can give very different results depending on how you look at something.

Edit: I just realized that one aspect of my numbers was potentially misleading: I couldn't find, after admittedly minimal searching, data on the ratio of mild to moderate symptoms in Pfizer breakthrough infections. As such, I calculated based on the same ratio I used for unvaccinated cases... which I should be clear is an assumption, one that's very unlikely to be true. The number of deaths and severe cases, however, remains zero.

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...-making-people-sick-and-it-s-coming-from-dogs

Satan: "Oh hey, I heard these days people like dogs more than each other, so let's use the dogs to kill them."


Apparently cats can get it too, but that's old news and I haven't heard much about cats spreading it back to humans.

 

ok so I was legitimately thinking about make a snippet like this for some good old power fantasy stress relief (the shadow government that rules the world putting giga-stud drugs in the covid vaccine so that people will want to take them and that the people who do will outbreed the anti vaccinators) and I'm kind of worried if it'll be seen in poor taste. maybe I should just change it to some made-up virus?

 

Terrible taste. Do it anyway.

 

Yooooo. I wasn’t the one who posted that. So imma delete it alright?

 

Well, it looks like my state is nearing a 70% vaccination rate, which means most restrictions will probably be lifted soon, according to the state governor at least. We'll see how it goes.

 

I really want to share it - but has anyone got source for that? There is a small chance that it is misinformation itself.

 

Spoiler: Post-Lockdown Family Reunion Meme

 

20 years is remarkably optimistic.

 

After the past couple of years, a little optimism is nice to see.

 

Delta variant increasing: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/1026090/delta-covid-19-variant-more-infectious/

Out-of-context quote for QQ:

 

Spoiler: Pictured: FUCK

That is in Moscow. It went from ~2K people infected/day to here. The new indian strain got brought over here and most of the new arrivals have this one.

And apparently, more than enough of the vaccine is being produced, it's just that there is a big problem with actually getting people to get up from their ass and get vaccinated.

 

Without axis labels, that graph literally looks like something out of How to Lie With Statistics.

 

You can see the graph here: https://yandex.ru/covid19/stat?utm_source=main_graph&utm_source=main_notif&geoId=213

The levels have been basically stable since February, until just ~10 days ago, and today there have been more new cases than at any single day previously.