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Seattleshouldhaverun t1_itpovan wrote

They had to do a study to show this? Considering around 75-80% of the people that died were over 65 and in poor health it's not exactly rocket science to say if you were in good health you would probably not need to be hospitalized.

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KuriousKhemicals t1_itprhq6 wrote

It's hard to parse from just the abstract if they did their analysis correctly, but they did say they were looking for an "effect modifier" which I would interpret as an interaction effect. That is to say, vaccination is designed to reduce your hospitalization risk, and physical activity may also do this even in unvaccinated people, but the effect of having both on your side is more than just adding up the two factors individually.

Again, I can't tell from what I'm able to access if they actually showed that, but it sounds like that is what they are claiming.

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Fargeen_Bastich t1_itqihda wrote

They used the unvaccinated in each exercise group as the reference. If you open Table 2 you'll see there is no p-value for the unvaccinated in each group. So they did not compare someone unvaccinated who has a high level of exercise to someone vaccinated with a low level of exercise, for instance. (At least from what I could quickly see)

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apocalypsedg t1_itpxkqw wrote

We need to be super careful with drawing that conclusion from statistics like these.

For example, when it was said that 78% of those that were hospitalized were overweight or obese, it sounds like the risk of getting it as an obese person is approx. 4x higher than a healthy weight person. Only when you add the context that 73% of the population is overweight or obese does it become clear that the increase in risk is not that extreme, and healthy weight people are at greater risk than it initially seemed.

Credit to Hank Green for pointing this out a few days ago.

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elixirsatelier t1_itq1pxz wrote

Stuff like this has made politicized science into 99% bunk sorting and should be called out more forcefully in academics. This is a basic integrity failure that has become a norm.

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