Thread by @lisa_iannattone

Dead people can't die twice.

I decided to try to visually represent the concept of "hybrid immunity" to try to show why it's a misleading concept that has the overall effect of hiding the bodies and the magnitude of the damage covid infections leave behind. Here's what I mean🧵

These are made up stats for illustrative purposes only, meant to simplify the concept of hybrid immunity and help make sense of the fact that there are studies showing hybrid is more protective but also studies showing that more covid infections= more total risk of illness/death.

Now when comparing hybrid immunity vs vaccination only, you might get a result like this, where covid is more deadly/dangerous in the vaccinated only group than in the vaccinated+infected group. So you might conclude that hybrid immunity offers better protection. Does it though?

What we need to remember about the hybrid immunity group is that to become the hybrid immunity group, they had to first be the vaccinated only group. And *dead people can't die twice*. So the hybrid group is actually the vaccinated-only group *after selecting out the dead people*

So actually, if you were to follow the same group of people from vaccination to the end result after 2 infections, the total number of deaths in that group would be higher after 2 infections than after 1 infection.

There's some published data on 3 infections and no surprise, your total risk after 3 is even higher. The more times covid passes through, the more people end up with a new chronic illness, disabled, or dead. Even if subsequent infections harm less people than the first one.

Only counting the damage from the second infection has the effect of hiding the bodies, the sequelae and the disability from the first. But by definition, you can't achieve "hybrid immunity" without a first infection. So those numbers are baked in and should be disclosed.

To recap: despite "hybrid immunity" seeming more protective, your *total* risk of ending up disabled or dead keeps rising with each infection. Which means the honest way to discuss hybrid immunity is to count the *total* number of dead and disabled people it creates.

And the honest conclusion of such a discussion would be that covid infections should be avoided, even if previously infected. Leadership concerned about the health of their population would be aiming to keep everyone's total number of infections as low as possible.

"Hybrid immunity" through mass infection may be the current strategy of choice for many countries, but it's not a PH strategy. Public health = preventive medicine. Mass infection/reinfection doesn't prevent harm, it causes it. Mass infection is not a public health strategy. /end

One last thought, the fact that widespread hybrid immunity through mass infection necessarily requires a portion of the population to die or be disabled by a covid infection is the reason articles like this are so disturbing.
cbc.ca/news/health/ca…

Hybrid immunity is played up and celebrated with no mention at all that to achieve it 20,000 Canadians had to die in 2022 (the deadliest year of the pandemic for 🇨🇦), 1.4 million Canadians have LC, and our hospitals had to learn to function in a permanent state of semi-collapse.