I'll get the shots as soon as they become available for people like me - which unfortunately means it'll likely be the second half of 2021 before there is any realistic chance. My grandmother of 92 is scheduled to have her first injection in about a week, however.
By now I know quite a few cases, though none fortunately among the closest friends and family. Although in spring one colleague was in contact with somebody who tested positive after showing symptoms, a week later he developed a fever himself. He got tested, but it came out negative - but since he also experienced some loss of taste he now suspects it might have been a false negative (swab improperly taken?). If so, I actually shook hands with somebody who was infected, because he showed up to work before learning of his acquaintance's test result and developing symptoms himself.
I even know one really severe case, a neighbour of my parents. ICU, ventilator, induced coma - the lot. Once they brought him back out of coma he even got a thrombosis into the bargain, as is a fairly common complication with ICU CoViD patients. His wife and kids got sick too, though it's unclear who infected whom - fortunately their symptoms were mild enough to ride out the infection in quarantine at home.
There is one thing that bothers me a lot, and it relates to both the disease and the vaccination skeptics. They frequently argue that the risk of long term side effects of the vaccine is too high, and it is true of course that to date nobody can say for sure what complications there might be. Trials of the vaccines have simply not been underway long enough for very long term effects to be observable in the patients enrolled.
But how big is that risk actually? Severe complications from vaccines are pretty rare, the commonly cited example of the swine flu vaccine is seemingly one of the worst, and it affected about 500 people out of 90 million who took it. None of them died, but here in Germany 33000 people (and counting) have been killed by CoViD out of "only" 1.7 million officially registered cases. If you assume many infections go unreported and that some of the deaths were due to another cause or that you might never get CoViD if you pass on vaccination (putting the denominator at 80 million German inhabitants), the probabilities still favour getting the jab. Even if it's as bad as the swine flu vaccine, you'd have a higher chance of *dying* from a CoViD infection than of suffering a *non-fatal* complication from the vaccination. And again, this apparently represents a pretty pessimistic scenario, statistically speaking the chances of the CoViD shots being less dangerous than their swine flu counterpart are quite good.
Then there's the fact that a CoViD infection potentially comes with its own long term complications - not all of which are known at this point either. To me, even those which are sound plenty terrible enough - I love endurance sports and I love food, so a permanent loss of 20% lung capacity or altered sense of taste/smell would be intolerable to me. And that's not some theoretical risk either - the wife of the neighbour mentioned above retains a permanent "chemical" scent!
So before we even get to the question of contributing to herd immunity even if you legitimately assess your own risk from the disease as minor, getting the shot looks pretty sensible. Yeah, it's not clear yet whether the vaccines will stop transmission (nobody has investigated that properly yet, because verifying effectiveness took priority), but again chances are pretty good that there will be at least some effect. The flu shot is reportedly an example where transmission remains possible, but even in this case vaccinated people are somewhat less infectious. From what I gathered, it would therefore seem to be quite unlikely that the CoViD shots would offer no reduction whatsoever in spread.
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