How is efficacy vs. severe disease strong if 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?
covid-datascience.com
covid-datascience.com
This was a great article. I remember reading a thought exercise about how statistics can mislead us - imagine a hospital with 20% patient survival and another competing hospital with 90% survival. Your intuition knowing only that information is that one hospital is better than the other, but then, the exercise has you break down the data based on patient age, reason for admission, etc. And it can be constructed that the "worse" hospital can actually better in every scenario of patient survivability even if in aggregate they are worse.
Simpsons Paradox is a reminder that our intuitions can be very wrong.
If they were not vaccinated because they were not deemed healthy enough to be able to handle the side-effects of the vaccine, then their inherent susceptibility to hospitalization is higher and the favorable comparison mostly indicates that the vaccinated population is healthier not that the vaccine is effective.
The vaccine might be effective, but to establish its long term efficacy requires people of similar health status assigned to vaccinated/not vaccinated groups. Of course, the control arms of the vaccine studies were busted about nine months ago, so that is not possible.
This is, in practice, _extremely_ rare. In countries with high vaccine acceptance, uptake in the over-80s group, where that sort of problem is most likely, is well in excess of 99%.
I am not sure N_vaccinated_over_80/N_total is germane to the issue.
>> out of 515 patients currently hospitalized with severe cases in Israel, 301 (58.4%) of these cases were fully vaccinated
That means, there are 214 hospitalized with severe cases of Covid19 who are not vaccinated. What matters is why those 214 people were not vaccinated. I am not sure any hints in that direction are available. According to the charts here[1], there is some indication that indeed the severe/unvaccinated combination is related to age but the data are presented in n/100K which means I would have to look up a bunch of numbers I do not know where to find to be able to impute something.
Those that are not vaccinated, in addition to standard mistrust, conspiracies and somewhat misplaced confidence that they won't get sick have also some original reasons "Israel is used like a lab rat for vaccine testing" and "1 year after vaccination you will explore"
I think it is important to add that although the vaccine is indeed effective against preventing severe disease, the same data from Israel does still show that the vaccine is not as effective against contraction of the disease (only 39% effectiveness).
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...
Natural infection is so much better at preventing subsequent infection/transmission, that we should be advocating for people who are not at risk to go out and aggressively live life. Unfortunately many are not in favor of that because they don’t understand that viruses, and hCoVs specifically, are an unavoidable fact of life (and, indeed, necessary for health at a certain level)
There’s not really a way to make vaccinating kids make sense given that the main benefit of vaccination is personal risk reduction only. Furthermore conditions like myocarditis, which happens in young boys who are vaccinated at incredibly high rates (relative to no vax), are incredibly concerning given that the risk of COVID itself is so utterly insignificant in children.
I have thought the same since the first numbers showing children as a group are at minimal risk. For the healthy, get it and be done with it.
For the first year I was deemed a worker in 'critical infrastructure' so I worked on the road. I got laid off and then got the virus and recovered on my own at home. I'm going to keep living it and the screaming Karens can shut themselves in for as long as they want.
Myocarditis is something around 2x as likely but that's like 2 in a million instead of 1 in a million. But you are comparing it to the wrong set. You are much, much less likely to get myocarditis from the vaccine vs unvaxxed that catch covid.
And in the current climate, the likelyhood of catching covid, especially as an unvaxxed person is rather high.
Good explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK7X_XlGB8
Imagine a world where there are 100 unvax and 9 million vaxed, now even if vaccines are 99% effective, you'd get 9M x 0.01 = 90k vax and sick.
They used the example of people wearing seatbelts. The vast majority of people injured in car accidents were wearing seatbelts. Because the vast vast vast majority of people in car wear seat belts.
I’d add that anyone who got vaccinated so that they can show proof of vaccination needs to understand that there’s no getting off the train. If you don’t get your booster you’ll be - gasp! - not fully vaccinated.
People get vaccinated to protect themselves and others around them - boosters will increase that protection. Proof of vaccination is about excluding those who haven't been vaccinated - it is they who are on the train, though they can get off it anytime they choose.
Current vaccines do not target mucosal immunity, but intranasal and inhaler delivery are being worked on in other vaccines.
Mucosal immunity would help reduce R0 and drive the disease to manageable levels.
For the general population, I don't think that's going to be much before January.
301 is count of cases in population. 5634634 is size of population. 100000 is his choice of scale.
the formula basically looks like NumOfVaxedPplSickPer100k * 100k / TotalVaxedPopulation
Is multiplying to 100k an arbitrary choice? If not then what does (NumOfVaxedPplSickPer100k * 100k) give you?
The frustrating thing is, there is no way to verbalize the meaning of this data, without immediately being labeled a 'bigoted right-winger'.
People just don't want to hear it. I tend to believe all people have the capability to understand this nuance. Unfortunately, they openly refuse, because it contradicts their perceptions.
It's honestly kind of scary.