Skip to main content

Relative Risk Confusion Everywhere

I keep seeing the same error in the news: you're 25 times more likely to end up in the hospital if you're unvaccinated! It's due to a misunderstanding of relative vs. absolute risk. 

From Pixabay.

For readers who aren't familiar with the concept, I've made a visual aid based on actual figures from Indiana: 

  • Dates: April 15, 2021 through July 13, 2021
  • Hospitalizations due to COVID: 4,045
  • Percent of hospitalized COVID patients who were vaccinated: 2%
  • Population of Indiana: 6,500,000

Going by the high portion of unvaccinated COVID patients, it makes it sound like you're 50 times more likely to go to the hospital if you haven't had the shot. That's relative risk. If you're at a high risk of getting a bad case of COVID, that's meaningful. But if you aren't, you're reducing a tiny risk to a minuscule risk. 

I didn't forget to add the first two columns--they just don't show up in the context of a population of 6.5 million. Likewise, the 655 people who've died over the past 90 days. 

I'm not trying to make it seem trivial that people have died or gone to the hospital. Rather, it's to give a more realistic picture of risk. Doctors are often in the news or on YouTube telling about the horrors of COVID--but their perspective seems like it suffers from availability bias: they see suffering all day, and almost all of the suffering is among unvaccinated people. But they're homed in on a tiny group of people. 

Imagine the homeless for a moment. The vast majority of them are men. If you're a man, would you take an experimental medication that could help you avoid becoming homeless--maybe a medication that makes people more conscientious? It might be worth it for someone at high risk of becoming homeless, but again, for most it would reduce a tiny risk to a minuscule one.

The focus has been on illness for the past 18 months to the exclusion of almost everything else. In a state that has the 14th highest deaths per capita, here's a graph of COVID numbers for those past 18 months.


The absolute risk of being hospitalized from COVID is less than 1% per year--more if you're older or unhealthy, less if you're younger or without health problems. Just something to think about if you're prodded to participate in the most hazardous vaccine rollout in memory. Serious side effects of COVID vaccines are rare, but they're not zero, and doctors don't to know how to treat some of them. 

On a less serious note, the Babylon Bee understands relative vs. absolute numbers and even infinite numbers. 

Sources:
https://www.regenstrief.org/covid-dashboard/
https://www.coronavirus.in.gov



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This Just In: Yogurt Doesn't Improve Health

A recent study from Spain finds "In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," states López-García. Most yogurt is pretty much pudding with a little bacteria . Pudding is a sugar bomb. Hard to believe the stuff doesn't improve health outcomes, isn't it? But as usual, researchers are calling for...more research. "For future research more specific instruments must be used which may increase the probability of finding a potential benefit of this food."
23 comments
Read more

Paleo Diet: Eating Differently from Everyone Else is Fine!

I've been seeing more and more articles by women (it's always women) whose heads have exploded trying to figure out life without yogurt and cupcakes. Oh, the shenanigans they get up to: bathroom problems from stuffing themselves with vegetables, paleo baked goods that don't taste the same as ones from the bakery, and especially the irresistible urge to eat "normally." The technical problems aren't hard to sort out: substitutes like baked goods will taste different because they are different, but an adjustment period of a few months will make those foods taste normal. And whatever you eat, don't stuff yourself. First, though, read a book by Loren Cordain or Mark Sisson to learn about the paleo diet before diving in. The articles I keep reading, though, have more to do with attitude: the urge to be exactly like everybody else or the urge to be helpless. If you're in the second category, I can't, by definition, help you. If you'd rather be Lu
19 comments
Read more

Robert F. Kennedy shows up at the FDA

 
Post a Comment
Read more

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder .
18 comments
Read more

A Reason to Eat Red Meat, Fat, Eggs and Salt

It looks like Reason magazine has been reading about my diet...or maybe just studies showing no associations between red meat and mortality, saturated fat and heart disease, stroke or cardiovascular disease, or salt consumption and disease. Summarizing published research from the past few years, the article calls the government's dietary advice of the past forty years a fiasco of misinformation,  even noting there's a positive association between a low-sodium diet and death. It adds that the US government's Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has dropped their long crusade against cholesterol. The article explains, Observational studies [which the government relied on] may be good at developing hypotheses, but they are mostly not a good basis for making behavioral recommendations and imposing regulations. It's refreshing for the mainstream media to recognize that mainstream dietary advice hasn't been working instead of parroting the same misinformation. T
17 comments
Read more