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ScottyG's avatar

Unvaxxed. Just recently caught from my vaxxed daughter. I had cold symptoms for 2 days.

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Tardigrade's avatar

"20 times likelier to die… 17 times likelier to be hospitalized…10 times likelier to be infected..."

This, people and felines, is RELATIVE RISK, which is often deployed disingenuously to freak out the average citizen. It was used to great effect to convince everyone that every living breathing human needs statins. It works because most people are fairly ignorant about math in general and statistics in particular.

While relative risk might have an actual statistical usefulness in certain situations, it is absolutely inappropriate to use in assessing one's own risk/benefit calculation.

Here's a real world example from several weeks ago (numbers approximate due to my memory, but in the right range). "If hospitalized with Covid, the unvaccinated are 4.7 times more likely to die than the vaccinated." The actual statistics being described? If hospitalized unvaccinated, the chance of dying was .033%. If hospitalized vaccinated, the chance of dying was .007%. In other words, if you're in the hospital with Covid, whether you're vaccinated or unvaccinated, the chance of dying is *less than 1/10th of 1%*.

Anyone who is seriously worried about academic and minute differences like that would be much better off investigating lifestyle interventions to improve their overall health, which would make a much bigger impact.

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