And Another Scare Story

They keep on coming, wave after wave.

Unvaccinated people who catch Covid are up to 60 times more likely to end up in an intensive care ward than those who have been jabbed, startling figures reveal.

And the difference that vaccination makes to the chance of needing intensive care is starkest among older people – who are more likely to suffer serious Covid illness in the first place.

Although that sounds scary, let’s put some context into the equation. During the first wave, there were no vaccines and a lot of people died. However, the kill rate was around 1%, so a bit more than that were hospitalised (very similar figures to seasonal flu). The media made it sound worse by quoting raw figures without context. You and I might call that lying by omission – or just lying. Currently that figure is 5% of hospital admissions – so not really very much at all. That the envy of the world ^TM couldn’t cope was largely due to it being a bit shit. However, I digress. Covid works a bit like flu although its target demographic is more sharply defined – the elderly with end of life ailments and younger people with co-morbidities. And, contrary to the narrative, we are mortal beings and we do, actually, die when our time is run. All of us. And respiratory disease is a common cause of death among the elderly. It happens every winter.

Of course, the media has plastered images of ‘healthy’ young people who have died or been taken to ICU, but bear in mind that these are rare and the media is very good at taking rare examples and amplifying them in order to sell a narrative and all of this before anyone could have performed a post mortem examination, so we don’t know if these people had an unknown co-morbidity to put a bit of perspective on the story.

The fact remains, if you catch covid regardless of vaccination status, you are 99% likely to survive. Indeed, the likelihood is that you will not even be hospitalised because the vast, vast majority of people who caught it, even at the height of the first wave, did not end up in hospital. They were confined to their beds for a few days or even a couple of weeks. Some suffered post viral syndrome – but again, see that media amplification of a condition that occurs with seasonal flu. They gave it a scary new name and presented it as a foregone conclusion to a bout of covid without any evidence to confirm that it is an inevitability, which it isn’t.

Omicron is a mild variant. All the evidence tells us this. Whether you are 60 times more likely to end up in ICU is a meaningless figure without context. The reality is that 60 times a small figure is a slightly larger small figure. The reality is that you will more than likely suffer cold-like symptoms and get better without ever seeing the inside of a hospital, let alone ICU or a coffin.

Figures from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC), which covers units in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, show that between May and November the rate of admission for double-jabbed Covid sufferers in their 60s was just 0.6 cases per 100,000 people per week.

But among people of the same age who remained unvaccinated, the rate was 37.3 per 100,000 per week – equating to a relative risk about 60 times higher.

See what I mean? This is blatant scaremongering. Ignore it and carry on. Looking at the comments below the piece, it seems that people aren’t buying the bullshit, which is nice. How long before the comments disappear, eh?