Probably Dance

The CDC continues to issue very puzzling guidelines about the coronavirus. The most recent strange recommendation is that even if you already had covid, you should still get the vaccine. Which… makes no sense?

Let’s assume our goal is to reduce the number of deaths. Currently in the US, something like 26 million people have tested positive for SARS-CoV2, and roughly 440,000 people have died of COVID19. I’m using these terms to make a distinction: Not everyone who gets the virus will get sick, and not everyone who gets sick will die. Let’s be generous and assume that 100 million people got the virus so far, then mortality rate is 0.44%.

What do those same numbers look like for people who already had the virus before? Obviously the first number, the chance of getting the virus, should be roughly the same. But your body has fought this virus (or a very similar virus) before, so your chance of getting sick is much lower. For a long time it was uncertain whether you can get sick a second time at all, but now there are enough confirmed cases. How many of those have died? At least one, who was on chemotherapy at the time. Let’s estimate the number at 10, which would get us to a mortality rate of 10/26,000,000 = 0.000038%.

Should we really be giving people with that second risk the vaccine when not everyone in the first group has had a vaccine yet? Either the CDC worked with different numbers that are ten thousand times bigger, or their goal is not to reduce the number of deaths. What could that other goal be?