I got my COVID booster shot yesterday and it has hit me pretty hard. After my second shot in April I felt genuinely grateful for feeling crummy: grateful for the existence of the vaccines, for the opportunity to be vaccinated, for a healthy functioning immune system. Today I am just crabby about all the folks in my county who have refused to get the shot, making our town less safe for everyone else.
Let's talk for a minute about the assertion that keeps popping up about COVID, the idea that we shouldn't make such a fuss about a disease with "only" a 1% mortality rate. The thing is, 1% (which is too low as a mortality estimate for unvaccinated people in the first place) is non-trivial. Take a look. We vaccinate entire populations against diseases with much lower mortality rates. You can't go to school if you're not vaccinated against some of those diseases, because we take them seriously.
So many people have died avoidable deaths. This post by Kieran Healy shows 2020 all-cause mortality (so not just COVID deaths, which have become yet another bone of contention for the folks who think COVID is overblown), broken down by state and compared with data from the previous 5 years. So much loss tucked into that graph -- so many deaths.
Kieran Healy also looked at COVID deaths as a function of a county's proportion of Trump voters. In 2020 the lines mostly run together, except for a scary blue line that illustrates the early explosion of COVID in New York City. Since vaccinations became widely available, the lines have diverged more and more: the counties at the 90th percentile for Trump votes have seen a COVID death rate >50% higher than the rate seen in the counties at the 10th percentile.
The focus on purportedly low mortality rates disregards the impact of morbidity altogether, as if the only people with any serious complaints are the 1%. As if long COVID weren't a thing. As if all these hospitalizations and ICU admissions are only a big deal to liberal snowflakes who need to toughen up.
My brain is not firing on all cylinders today; it is befogged by the immune system I am trying to nudge into fighting off this virus more effectively. I keep making a hash of the logic puzzles that are usually a pleasing diversion. So if I seem to have made a hash of any of the logic in this post, please be kind.
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