There are a lot of assumptions in that counterargument that people will hope you don't examine, for example, the assumption that the probability of a covid transmission ending in harm crosses the same probability threshold if, say, drunk driving ending in harm. I say it doesn't. And since the stakes are so high with what we're talking about allowing the government to do, the burden of proof is on needing to prove the individual's likelihood for serious harm being high.
You do realize that drunk driving is illegal, right? Do you think drunk driving should be legal because it's "unlikely" to cause harm to others?
> I say it doesn't.
628k confirmed deaths in the US from COVID. 37.8M confirmed infections. That's a death rate of 1.66%.
In 2016, 10,497 people died from drunk driving. 1 million people were arrested in 2016 for drunk driving. That's a rate of 1.0497%. So COVID is literally more dangerous than drunk driving.
Drunk driving stats: https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im...
Imagine we're bottling soda in plastic bottles. There's an X% chance that a bottle explodes during the process. We also know if we over-fill a plastic bottle with CO2 the start it makes it slightly more elastic, and empirically it reduces that rate by Y%. We're not really sure why they were exploding, but we know that stretching them works.
Do you care about the other parts of the bottling process?
* Millions of COVID cases were never counted in those statistics; people who never got tested, due to being asymptomatic, low-symptomatic, having poor access to testing due to a vulnerable socioeconomic status, catching it before tests were widely available, and the natural rate of false-negatives due to self-swabs. It is very likely that, actually, the official statistics don't capture the majority of total COVID cases. This isn't a clerical rounding error; the real denominator in that death rate is somewhere 2x-10x lower than published, and we'll never know exactly where. [1] [2]
* This situation has not improved since the beginning of the pandemic. While testing is far more widely available now, the secondary issue of non-sterilizing vaccine immunity is now in play; the vaccines are by-and-large "leaky", but tend to result in far less severe, oftentimes even asymptomatic, infection. Many of these people are not getting tested, but are still getting COVID, and thus the count is underreported. Or, maybe they do get tested, and it comes back positive, but should that test actually be included in the overall COVID death rate? After-all, because the vaccines are good at reducing the chance of death, the COVID they have isn't quite the same as the COVID an unvaccinated individual would have. I don't know, but its a valid question which the broad statistics do not care about; its COVID, its included in the aggregates.
* Here's an interesting fact most people don't know about: testing sites, of course, gather data about the patient before a test. One of those pieces of information is: are you vaccinated, when were you vaccinated, which vaccine. Pretty basic stuff. Except, the systems CVS and Walgreens (two of the largest testing providers in the US) used to gather this data, for many months early in the vaccination cycle, did not ask this, or did not ask for all three pieces of information. It was only within the last month that Walgreens started asking for all three.
* Let's continue down this path of "fun reporting": I had COVID four weeks ago. The first question everyone asks is: Oh, you got a positive test, which variant was it? I've been asked this dozens of times, which makes me think many people don't generally realize: the nasal swabs cannot determine the variant. In fact, states do not run variant tests on every swab! Generally, they run variant tests in aggregate on a statistically significant subset of swabs, then report the data in a range of once a week, to once a month.
* Many state reporting agencies are actually really bad at differentiating between "positive tests" and "positive individuals". In other words, the most "responsible" citizens, those who get tested at the start, then once or even twice at the end of the 10 days, are in many jurisdictions actually screwing up the statistics.
* Many deaths were counted in those statistics. Oftentimes, over-counted, at least in the context you're using those statistics in (what is COVID's death rate?). First world hospitals, having pretty excellent access to these tests as the pandemic entered its teenage stage, entered a pattern of testing every admittance, even for symptoms unrelated to COVID. If they were positive, and they died for any reason, COVID was, of course, listed on their chart; it then got counted as a comorbidity, not the true cause of death. State reporting agencies still count it as a COVID death; they don't discriminate.
* But, of course, many deaths were undercounted; especially those who died before seeking medical care, or before testing was widely available.
* And that's not taking into consideration tertiary deaths caused by the state pandemic response, not COVID itself; millions of people delayed seeking regular and even urgent medical care due to fear of the virus. Many of these cases were not even at the behest of the patient, but rather due to medical offices delaying appointments or moving to virtual appointments, which offer a far lower standard of care. The impact to generalized mental health, social development of children, adolescents, and young adults, socioeconomic development of young adults, and many other facets of our society, will continue to be studied for the rest of our lives. Let's say it turns out that a broad, authoritarian lockdown saved a million lives, but it is also directly or indirectly traced to 20 million new cases of clinical depression; is a lockdown a good idea? Even with hard numbers like that its actually not obviously clear one-way or the other, and the worst part is: the people making these decisions never have the numbers. They're always acting on intuition; it takes years to even realize that this possibility even exists, at any magnitude, and we never know the true numbers. Did you know suicide is the 10th leading cause of death? Did you know that social isolation increases rates of clinical depression, which is positively correlated with suicide? Quarantine saved lives; how many did it cost? How many will it cost? But we're super duper sure it was the right call... right?
* Drunk driving is far, far, far more common than the arrest rates would suggest. Like, its actually insane how common drunk driving is. Cops are not gods. They do not catch everyone. One million people were arrested in 2016 for drunk driving; its likely that 50 million+ people drove above the legal limit in that same year, multiple times each.
This is just me, outlining the uncertainty of our world. Because here's the kicker, here's the Topic Of Choice: We should mandate vaccinations. You sure? Are you absolutely certain, beyond any doubt, knowing how much we don't know, that its actually the right call for our society?
You've thought through the medical consequences. There probably won't be any en mass, sure. What about social ones? We've got a nation of tens of millions of people who don't want to be vaccinated, where personal freedoms run deep for all its pros and cons, and you so strongly believe that our society will be Better if we force these people to undergo a medical treatment they don't want. Do you actually think this is such an easy decision? That there wouldn't be social consequences? That the mandate would go out, and everyone will forget that the government just shit all over their perceived freedoms (whether or not those freedoms are legitimate is irrelevant; they believe they have them, we live in a democracy, and there are 500 million+ guns in America).
The world is very, very complicated. You're making broad, authoritarian suggestions based on an unbelievably erroneous analysis of data, yet you were totally convinced you're right. The people in charge are totally convinced they're right. No one is right. No one has access to all the information. We live in a very complex, very scary world where even the most equipped, powerful, rich states cannot have even 2% of the information they need to make the right decisions.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18272-4
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221137972...
Yeah, so I went with the stats we did have data for. I didn't speculate since I'm not omniscient and that's ignorant at best, disingenuous at worst. Both COVID cases and deaths are under-reported.
> Drunk driving is far, far, far more common than the arrest rates would suggest. Like, its actually insane how common drunk driving is. Cops are not gods. They do not catch everyone. One million people were arrested in 2016 for drunk driving; its likely that 50 million+ people drove above the legal limit in that same year, multiple times each.
The link I gave called out that 111M people self-reported drunk driving. That's an unreliable stat, so I went with the arrest rate which is a known quantity.
I wasn't "convinced" of anything. I chose the closest stats that we can get, which are definitely NOT perfect. What real-world data is "perfect"? Only when systems are self-reporting is data even close (e.g. latency, HTTP status counts, etc) and even those can be wrong due to log loss, servers failing, networks failing, etc.
You work with the data you have, and try to make informed decisions, instead of wildly guessing.
Also vaccine requirements aren’t anything new, so is the concern here that they’re mandating vaccines or this specific vaccine due to how new it is? If the latter, then what’s your bar for acceptance?
You've introduced a new assumption though: that a unvaccinated person has and transmits covid. You must apply the probabilities to that initial assumption as well. Probability of having covid * probability of transmitting covid * probability that the person you transmit to has series harm done.
>Also vaccine requirements aren’t anything new
This is an argument that I've also seen but think appeals to "well we've been doing something similar already." I don't think that justification holds much water, especially in this time period where we are questioning a lot of foundational social assumptions.
To your direct question about bar for acceptance, I think people can generally establish a good bar, but they have to be given accurate probabilities, and those have been hidden from us in favor of vague fear mongering.
