Let's start with an extreme example: each day more people die in traffic accidents, than by falling from a 10-story building. But still, we all can agree that driving a car is safer than falling from a building.
Why? Because driving a car you get more chance to get to your destination safely than falling from a building. ChatGPT estimates 0.01% chance to die in car accident per year, when driving every day, and 90-99% to die when falling from a building, once.
However, since there are many millions of people who drive a car every day, multiplying very little chance to die in car crash by millions of people, we get thousands of traffic-related death per day. Compare that to single-digit number of people falling from buildings, even if all of them die from it.
Back to Covid, let's imagine a village with simple numbers like this:
10 people were NOT vaccinated,
100 people WERE vaccinated.
Of 10 people who were NOT vaccinated, all 10 got hospitalized.
Of 100 people who WERE vaccinated, 20 got hospitalized.
_Correct_ way to look at this village would be:
ALL people who were NOT vaccinated, got hospitalized - 100% hospitalization rate.
But among those who WERE vaccinated, only 20% got hospitalized.
Hence, it's better to be vaccinated - this way you'll get 80% chance of not being hospitalized :)
I'm not a real statistician, and don't have actual numbers on hand, but situation with real world numbers is similar: among people who were vaccinated, less percent were hospitalized than among those who were not. It's just that we had so many many vaccinated people, that their small hospitalization rate, when multiplied by total number of vaccinated people, outweighs number of not-vaccinated and hospitalized people.
Cool. I didn't know the effect of the vaccine is so poor, that you now need to account for statistical biases to see its effect at all. That's less than what i was told, and I'm not happy.
Honestly what a shit vaccine. Measles and Tetanus vax did better.
Cool, so your question was in bad faith, you were not at all prepared to learn, have wasted our time, and you still don't understand anything about the base rate fallacy.
You must be a liar or willfully ignorant to say that after the entirety of 2019-2021 happened. The efficacy of vaccines in general and specifically of the various Covid-19 vaccines have been talked about ad nauseam. No even merely scientifically literate person has said that the Covid-19 vaccines (or any vaccine for that matter) are 100% effective.
It's so weird how people will close their eyes for basic science to virtue signal to their group. I sincerely hope you open your mind and prevent your virtue signaling from killing you (or anyone you know) in the next pandemic.
> If i quote the WHO[1] on this, you might just say they are not literate enough.
This is a page primarily about herd immunity, not about vaccine efficacy. You had to dig to find this (or somebody dug for you).
Having said that, even though they added several sentences on how certain things are unsure or need more research, I will admit that they worded this specific sentence badly: "Vaccinated people are protected from getting the disease in question and passing on the pathogen, breaking any chains of transmission."
It is clearly overstated and does not match the careful wording later on: "We are still learning about immunity to COVID-19. Most people who are infected with COVID-19 develop an immune response within the first few weeks, but we don’t know how strong or lasting that immune response is, or how it differs for different people. There have also been reports of people infected with COVID-19 for a second time."
> The rest of your post are personal attacks that do not add to your point.
They do, because you clearly have a bone to pick that is preventing you from rationally approaching the matter and discussions in general. Think about what point you're actually trying to make and what that has to do with the base rate fallacy. Really, verbalize it. What is it? Why did you feel the need to inject that into the discussion, even though it doesn't belong here at all?
The WHO did not word it badly, it was the accepted knowledge back then.
You previously accused me of somehow missing the 2019-2021 timeframe, but that the vaccine doesn't really protect you well from infections was not established until autuum 2021. Consequently, as the scientific data to show it was not collected yet. Either you got the year numbers wrong or there is some retcon happening.
> Why did you feel the need to inject that into the discussion, even though it doesn't belong here at all?
Why is that on me? You tried a stab at antivax whackos and it backfired.
> Really, verbalize it.
I got vaccinated with the belief that it would reliably keep me from the hospital. Because it "prevents severe causes of the sickness" (translated from german). We blamed and shunned unvaccinated people because they were an unreasonable burden to the hospitals, and now you casually remark that its the low efficacy of the vaccine, not being unvaxxed, that causes the majority of people who end up hospitalized. For how long has that been?
Maybe we should have worked on a vaccine with better efficacy (hey, let me dream up the impossible, maybe immunity like with the measles vax where 99% ppl actually can't get sick at all) instead of harassing unvaccinated people?
> The WHO did not word it badly, it was the accepted knowledge back then.
Bullshit. I already showed how they were careful in the rest of their wording in your own source. 100% efficacy was never 'accepted knowledge'.
> Why is that on me? You tried a stab at antivax whackos and it backfired
Bullshit. The base rate fallacy was and is very present. The misinterpretation I referred to made sense to mention: It is a very commonly known recent and relatable example of the base rate fallacy. You made it a tribalistic ad hominem in your own head.
> you casually remark that its the low efficacy of the vaccine, not being unvaxxed, that causes the majority of people who end up hospitalized.
I did not say this at all and you still do not understand the base rate fallacy. A larger percentage of the unvaccinated people were hospitalized than of the vaccinated. There were just generally way more vaccinated people.
> Maybe we should have worked on a vaccine with better efficacy (hey, let me dream up the impossible, maybe immunity like with the measles vax where 99% ppl actually can't get sick at all) instead of harassing unvaccinated people?
See, now there we go. The mention of the Covid-19 vaccination triggered this frustration and made you decide to inject it where it did not belong and keep your mind closed to the math and science surrounding this. The math does not care about your feelings and is what it is. Accept it.
It’s difficult to give any accurate interpretation of, because it’s not a meaningful statistic.
For example, every person hospitalised from COVID-19 had consumed water at some point in preceding months. It’s not evidence that water causes severe complications from COVID-19.
> In and of itself own, as quoted by OP, it’s not meaningful.
This is an overly literal, pedantic, and ungenerous interpretation of what I said.
Clearly the actual numbers as well as the base rates for the relevant groups are necessary to meaningfully interpret the statistic, but I was hinting at a similar case after describing the logic for the original case, not exhaustively describing the similar case.
Whats the correct interpretation of this?