An average vaccinated 30yo now loses about 6 weeks of expected life from contracting COVID instead of 2 weeks, because of waning vaccine efficacy.
The counterfactual here is “you never get covid”, so I’d take this number with a large grain of salt. If, on the other hand, the counterfactual is “you get covid a few years later”, then the loss of expected life does not occur. Additionally, if you do get covid, you’re (probably) super immune for a while, which presumably increases your quality of life.
Using a counterfactual of “getting COVID a few years later and you balance out” is certainly tempting, but I don’t think that’s really how it would go down. Based on how vaccine efficacy wanes, reinfections occur, and new variants are introduced, my guess is that you lose all your immunity and more within 2 years, plus in the next decade we probably will develop increasingly effective drugs against it. Hard to sum everything up but my guess is that getting COVID causes a benefit that is less than half the badness. Probably I should make a best guess here and add it at some point in time but this is the type of factor of <2 that occasionally pop up on either side that I typically ignore.
If, on the other hand, the counterfactual is “you get covid a few years later”, then the loss of expected life does not occur.
What’s the intuition here? If we believe that infection confers less immunity than immunization, naively the counterfactual looks more like “get covid N-1 times” vs “get covid N times.” Rather than “get covid once now” vs “get covid once some time in the future”
The counterfactual here is “you never get covid”, so I’d take this number with a large grain of salt. If, on the other hand, the counterfactual is “you get covid a few years later”, then the loss of expected life does not occur. Additionally, if you do get covid, you’re (probably) super immune for a while, which presumably increases your quality of life.
Using a counterfactual of “getting COVID a few years later and you balance out” is certainly tempting, but I don’t think that’s really how it would go down. Based on how vaccine efficacy wanes, reinfections occur, and new variants are introduced, my guess is that you lose all your immunity and more within 2 years, plus in the next decade we probably will develop increasingly effective drugs against it. Hard to sum everything up but my guess is that getting COVID causes a benefit that is less than half the badness. Probably I should make a best guess here and add it at some point in time but this is the type of factor of <2 that occasionally pop up on either side that I typically ignore.
What’s the intuition here? If we believe that infection confers less immunity than immunization, naively the counterfactual looks more like “get covid N-1 times” vs “get covid N times.” Rather than “get covid once now” vs “get covid once some time in the future”