Thread by @StefanKertesz

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 1/It's not easy to model because of many differences and probably a significant number of unmeasurable. But one thing to take some measure of the actual risks of drunk driving. One estimate is that every drunk driving trip has a 1/625 risk of crash. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 2/Most crashes don't involve loss of life. Among about 6m car crashes a year, only 36,000 people died in 2019, ie 6 deaths per 1000 crashes. So if you drive drunk 625000 times, crudely, there are 6 deaths (lower bound, due to assumptions)

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 3/It's reasonable to guesstimate that "drunk crashes are more lethal crashes"(someone has studied this; not me).. So let's assume a person who drives drunk 100000 times causes 10 deaths. But we know that's not the real math because no single person drives drunk 100k times a year

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 4/So lets assume 10000k persons all drive drunk once. Each time a crime. Each time prosecutable by law. And our best guess is there will be just one death from all of that, and perhaps it would be the driver herself. Are we still agreed driving drunk merited legal prohibition?

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 5/By my math, by the way, if one person drives drunk, they have no greater than 1/10,000th of a chance of causing a death. That is the scale of risk we are all willing to call "illegal and punishable by law, up to and including taking away a drivers license & fine"

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 6/The far harder side, which I certainly can't compute, is this: what is the actual scale of harm caused by a person not getting vaccinated? Immediately we run into problems of computation.

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 7/But I'll try. Alabama is 40% vaccinated. And we are running 20 or more deaths per day (often >35 in August) at a time when people could have been vaccinated, but weren't. Let's assume 95% were preventable by vaccine (ie 19 of the 20)

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 8/If you sense problems in this analysis right now, you are right. First, the idea that vaccines prevent 19 of 20 COVID deaths is based on protecting the person vaccinated. I am not the epidemiologist who can compute the death prevention among *others* for each vaccinated person

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 9/By sheer intuition, you can imagine that the impact of the decision of ONE person to not be vaccinated, like the impact of ONE person who cannot mount an adequate immune response, is also dependent on the overall rate of immunity already present in their community.

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 10/But in a rough & ready way we might say "at least 19 deaths per day, 6935/year, are perhaps "due to" that person not being vaccinated" in Alabama, and some number "more than that" result from unvaccinated retransmitting to the vaccinated people too. Call it 7500/year

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 11/I wish I could rapidly compute the number and percentage of Alabamians who were, on average, not vaccinated across the entire period where vaccines were widely available. It would be a better denominator than what I'm about to do. But for want of that....

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 12/Right now Alabama is dealing with the consequences of our poor vaccination rate as of 4-8 weeks ago, when roughly 34% of us were vaccinated. So the non vaccinated persons would count out at 3,234,000 not vaccinated (often because they were kids of course!)

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 13/Remember this was an illustrative discussion. Not a formal study! But if we want to count 7500 deaths in my state per year "due to" unvaccinated status, among 3234000 who were not vaccinated for the year, it's .0023. Or "for every 1000 not vaccinated, 2.3 people died"

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 14/Back to the comparison.
In 10,000 instances of drunk driving, there is 1 death (of course it could be the driver).

In a state like Alabama, for 10,000 not vaccinated, 23 die (of course it could be the unvaccinated).

The limits of this exercise should be obvious as...

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 15/If the drunk driver dies, we don't see them as having caused harm to others. But then again, they could have crashed into a business, injured and maimed countless others, deprived their own child of a parent. We have kept those all those "off the ledger".

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 16/If the unvaccinated person died of their own "choice" to be unvaccinated, we don't see them as having harmed others. But they could have transmitted to others, caused illness, lost income, & overloaded hospitals. And about that...

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 17/In Deep South states, the unvaccinated are contributing to overloaded hospitals. That means physical and emotional toll to clinicians, doctors, nurses, and their families. But also to other patients. Want your cancer removed? Bad timing: whas11.com/article/news/i…

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 18/Here is an 11-year old boy with cancer, unable to get in due to the "freedom" of others to not be vaccinated.

"It looks like a little boy with cancer sitting in a parking lot sick on a Saturday morning while everyone else exercises their rights." newsweek.com/indiana-covid-…

@conor64 @cultofphil @rhett_orackle @KennyGIsCool @benshapiro 19/Drunk driving ->risk to self & others. Scale of harm, in a very crude calculation: 1 death per 10,000 instances.

Not being vaccinated, if one has the option, invites risk too. Scale of harm: 23 deaths per 10,000 instances. Is it wrong to mandate vaccines? /fin