Deaths involving Covid-19 by vaccination status, England
ons.gov.uk
ons.gov.uk
The most up to date data comes from Public Health England.
Public Health England published a report last week which gave us this data for the period of August 9th to September 5th.
It shows that of 2,381 deaths in this period, 1,659 or 69.7%, more than two thirds, were in the double vaccinated. Six hundred deaths or 25.2% were in the unvaccinated. This is very different to the ONS statistics as quoted in the press that 99% of deaths were in those not double vaccinated.
In the over-50s, the PHE report showed that 1,621 of 2,222 deaths or 73% were in the double vaccinated compared to 499 or 22.5% in the unvaccinated. Once you take into account the proportions of the over-50s vaccinated and unvaccinated this works out at a vaccine effectiveness against death of 68.1% – respectable, but a far cry from the kind of claims being made by the ONS.
It’s not clear yet how well vaccine effectiveness is holding up against serious disease. Data from Israel indicates that it may drop to 55% in the over-65s over six months. The age profile of Covid patients in the U.K. has also been rising again, which may indicate declining efficacy.
It’s depressing to see the ONS seemingly allowing itself to be used as a vehicle for the Government’s vaccine propaganda campaign.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-...
The Delta variant does change things a lot over the past two months, but that's a different story that will warrant additional study and likely a v.2 of the vaccine.
Propaganda is simply information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicise a particular political cause or point of view.
Anecdotally, my wife has been working covid ICU this month and to her it's not surprising. The people with breakthrough cases apparently have so many comorbidities that it's not surprising at all they'd get vaccinated with high priority but also have an immune system that doesn't do a great job learning new skills from the shots.
The people for whom the shot is least effective are the ones that get it the most.
But I get super annoyed when I see things like CNN reporting 99% of deaths since January were unvaccinated. I mean, duh, hardly anybody was vaccinated then and those first months were the highest death rates. I'd like to give them a pass because, hey, maybe it'll convince more people to vaccinate. But it also creates cannon fodder for anyone who is viewing it critically. Both sides are so stupidly irresponsible.
So we are likely looking at a sub-group that both has multiple comorbidities _and_ has had the longest period of post-vacination. Even assuming that the decay of effectivenesss is small over time it may be a contributor.
It's not that the vaccine is less effective for them. It's that they're starting with much poorer immunity, so even with the significant immunity boost provided by the vaccine, they still have significant susceptibility to the virus.
Without the vaccine, their numbers would look much worse than the unvaccinated.
they don't get counted
they bring the death count amongst vaccinated down.
and soon no treatment for the unvaccinated ?
Another nugget in there is that something like 95-97 of the population has Covid antibodies, from either disease or vaccination. I’m surprised actually that is is going as strong as it is still. I know antibodies are no silver bullet, but that means that a huge proportion of the country has either been sick already or had a vaccine recently. That seems as good as it can be for a “herd immunity” case, and yet infections are high. Hmm...
That is almost certainly wrong. Vaccine uptake in under-12 is 0% and vaccine uptake in young adults is low. There's no way to make those kinds of seroprevalence numbers work.
But then again, I seem to remember that the 97% number was not a fair enough random sampling.
The big caveat is that the sample population consists of blood donors, which may or may not be representative of the overall population.
And yes blood donors aren't representative of the general population due to selection effects.
The result of the report is that some form of immunity exists in 97%+ of the blood donors at least 17 years old, in the UK.
The most you receive is a cup of coffee and a biscuit.
“Analysis on the direct and indirect impact of the vaccination programme on infections and mortality, suggests the vaccination programme has prevented between 24.4 and 24.9 million infections and between 108,600 and 116,200 deaths”.
The preponderance of evidence shows that the covid vaccines are overwhelmingly effective and safe for the vast majority of people. Your alarmism and calling Government vaccination campaigns propaganda is contributing to the spread of an incurable but now preventable disease that is killing thousands of people daily and you should feel bad about that. You are a menace to society.
How else would you explain the fact they used old data? Incompetence?
Its clear the vaccines don't prevent much, you still catch, spread, and die from covid after being fully jabbed. This is what the report shows, and unfortunately been seen by myself through friends, and family.
Could calling people a menace to society do damage to a society simply because they are showing other points to your own?
I'm very glad for the vaccine, it allowed me to start acting a bit more like a human again.
But words like "overwhelming" and "fully preventable" are their own kind of evil. Even a risk reduction as high as 90% only means your previous risk is now a tenth of what it was, but not zero or anything close to it.
This means people should still be using other measures to stop the spread, and perhaps words like "overwhelming" and "fully preventable" are enabling cavalier behaviours that are detrimental. One might even go as far as saying that people who enable such detrimental behaviours are a menace to society?
See? It's quite easy to reverse the ad hominem. Best to leave it out of a conversation altogether.
The PHDA contains data on approximately 79% of the population of England aged 10 years and over and includes 85.9% of all deaths of residents in England that occurred between 2 January 2021 and 2 July 2021 and were registered by 28 July 2021.“
It was always expected that vaccination would be less effective in elderly patients. Some research is underway now to see if that can be improved by administering rapalogs.
68.1% efficacy against death is huge, and for that period is likely to be mostly delta variant, we can't just forget about Alpha variant which vaccine does amazing with, which the previous data shows.. not sure how this points to them being "government propaganda" campaign. Although I agree it's a bit disappointing they are not painting the full picture.
But people reading that "73% of new deaths were unvaccinated" would cause panic among people that don't understand you need to take into account ~90% of population aged >60 have been double vaccinated for a while now .
That seems like great news?
But overall, very positive results, certainly.
In the data they have they found that:
1. For all unvaccinated people, they had 38,964 covid-related deaths and 65,170 of other, non-covid-related deaths of unvaccinated people.
2. For all vaccinated people 21 days or more after second dose they found 458 covid-related and 57,263 non-covid-related deaths.
It doesn't matter when these were recorded (unless we want to account for Delta, but there is not enough data for this here).
So unless we are seeing huge increase in non-covid-related deaths of vaccinated people, this data suggests that vaccination makes it many, many times less likely that you are going to die of covid as compared to you dying to other things.
Which I think is wonderful news to see in actual numbers from a large sample of data gathered over longer period of time.
If that's is not a clear indication to you then I don't know what is.
So,50X to 100X reduction in deaths versus all-cause
I'm not disputing that the vaccines are effective at preventing death, but that doesn't mean that we can just point to any stat that looks good and celebrate without considering what it actually means.
Also there are more people vaccinated than not now so that would also skew the data to make a direct comparison look worse.
Unless it's happening within that 21-day window, which is the claim I've been seeing elsewhere for around a month now.
Because if you can't do that you can compare data even with the status and vaccination rates changing over time.
So even if we lump together all different cases at different times saying that person in this class of people had less than 1% of chance of dying to covid vs. another class where you had 30% of chance of dying to covid is a clear indication that one class was much more resistant to dying than other.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations
Vaccinated are less likely to die of Covid-19, but more likely to die? Not very reassuring.
It is also not surprising if healthy people are less likely to get vaccinated.
In unvaccinated people 37.4% of all deaths was from COVID (38,964/104,134)
In fully vaccinated people 0.8% of all deaths was from COVID (458/57,721)
This is all amazing news! However we still don't know how much worse the vaccines are against the Delta variant, since most deaths during the period were not from the new variant. It can't be too bad though.
We basically have a best-case scenario today and an awful lot of people don't care and still think it's doomsday. Vaccines are fantastic at reducing COVID to a cold, kids are at no risk, the overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk, vaccines are available, natural immunity is great, and ironically, vaccines DONT stop transmission. So, we're all gonna get it, anyone who wants to be protected can be, and unvaccinated people don't matter because COVID is already endemic and we're all gonna get it so we have a clear path towards herd immunity. This is great!
And here we are, instead making illogical and probably illegal rules that accomplish literally nothing, make everything worse, perpetuate irrational fear, etc. We scapegoat "the unvaccinated" and start this medical class warfare and just ramp up unnecessary hatred of each other. And worst of all, it doesn't protect anyone and probably will make COVID worse.
Are we having fun yet?!
People are very, very badly misinformed about their risks for covid. This makes it almost impossible to have rational, grounded discussion of public policy. If everybody is walking around thinking covid is a death sentence, of course they will beg of all the crap we are doing right now.
But even within the nuance the statistics are being used to support narratives that aren't always honest. Just look at the news that apparently 40-45% of COVID hospitalizations are actually people who were admitted for another reason and just so happened to test positive upon admission.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos...
This data changes the hospitalization narrative quite a bit.
> The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.
> The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
> This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.
Knowing that almost 50% of the hospitalizations in both children and adults that are classified as COVID hospitalizations aren't really for COVID totally obliterates the narrative in the media about how (mostly unvaccinated) COVID patients are overwhelming the hospitals.
This seems to be by design though.
If you are someone intelligent who wants to know about covid for real, you should read the conspiracy subreddit on reddit and also turn off the TV news. That's the actual truth, but people can't take it.
I could conclude that the latter camp was correct. Or that when you have competing versions of conspiracy theories, predicting different outcomes, one of them will always appear to be prescient after the fact. Then you can ignore the others that didn't pan out, and say that everything that's happened so far has been predicted by the conspiracy guys.
The fear is way, way worse than the virus.
What I've been looking for for a long time now is data on infection, hospitalization rates and mortality by vaccination status and age. They all get mixed and it's never really clear to me what the risk for, say, a vaccinated 40 year old or an unvaccinated 1 year old really is.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Of those children who died, the majority had serious underlying health conditions such as obesity or asthma.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7023e1.htm
This paper has some good recent data on vaccine effectiveness.
2 random examples:
[0]https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-941fc...
[1]https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italy-says-99-covid-dea...
Also, bucketing people who were vaccinated with previously infected makes sense as an additional lens to look at things through, but it seems odd that they then omitted reporting those group separately. I'm very curious how one did compared to the other.
No, it does not.
It compares chance of you dying to covid compared to all other possible causes.
This dimensionless number does not depend on relative population sizes.
So if in one population you get 458 deaths from Covid compared to 57,263 from all other causes and in the other population you get 38,964 from covid compared to 65,170 from all other causes, we can immediately tell that one population fared much better at least when it comes to your chance to die of covid compared to chance of dying to all other causes.
Just by the fact of being in one population than in the other you get (38964/(38964+65170)) / (458/(458+57263)) ~= 47 times less chance of dying to covid assuming rates of deaths to all other causes were the same between both populations.
So what are these population? To be in the better-faring population you had to be fully vaccinated for at least 21 days and the worse population was completely unvaccinated.
Now, I am pretty sure there are other factors that factor in that number 47.
It is likely that vaccinated people treat Covid more seriously and are more likely to practice social distancing, washing hands and be generally mindful of various things you do to minimize chance of getting infected. They might also possibly wait shorter amount of time before calling for help if they see signs. While this is pure conjecture on my part I think it is reasonable to assume this happens to some extent and reduces rates of infection within vaccinated population.
I think your math is off. What if the first population only has 458 people in it? 100% mortality for that population would obviously suggest you want to be part of the other population even if their total deaths were higher. The issue I'm calling out is that we don't know the size of each population. I certainly don't think vaccines increase mortality, I actually believe it has a large positive impact. The point is this data doesn't help us understand how impactful it really is and, given all the debate over this, if they'd framed the data with better context, this could actually be a very useful study in ending that debate.
I think your thinking is off.
How do you get 57,263 other deaths in a population of 458?
This data is not comparing population sizes. It avoids it by comparing your chance of dying to covid to something else that is supposed stable between populations -- chance of dying to all other causes.
We just need to know that population sizes being compared are large enough (as evidenced from the number of deaths included) to be statistically significant.
Vaxxed group is older, unvaxxed are younger.
i.e. groups are not randomly distributed.
They are going to have different risk factors and die of different things.
This showed up in British Columbia's health data that showed infections and hospitalizations way, way down for the vaxxed relative to unvaxxed, but the ratio between the two for actual deaths was not as extreme, because vaccinated population skewed older, more vulnerable, more likely to die even when fully vaxxed.
Should note that age-standardized mortality rates are included in the study.
We end up comparing the population at one point in time where there were lots of deaths and a low vaccination rate to another point in time where there were few deaths and a much higher vaccination rate. No doubt part of the reason why there are fewer deaths now is due to the vaccine. However, I suspect part of the reason is also not vaccine related. You can see this if you look at the raw data. There was a very high rate of deaths for the unvaccinated in the first few months of the year. But now there is a very low rate of deaths for the unvaccinated. However, this comparison is fraught with danger because there is a selection effect with a lot of vulnerable people opting into the vaccine leaving the unvaccinated population much less susceptible to the virus.
Also, it is important to note that data has been apparently truncated at a point where it paints a more positive picture for vaccines.
Personally, I think the vaccine has had very large impact for some vulnerable groups. For some other groups I suspect it has had a negligible impact. But I also think there has been a strong push to juice the figures to make the vaccines look better than they are.
Regardless of opinions on the topic. We (the UK public) have practically reached the 90% vaccination status.
Can we all just get back to life now. There's nothing else to do other than making this flu shot available to those at risk who want it.
Life is ultimately fatal. It's not about the destination it's the journey that matters.
And source https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/sars-cov-2-integ...
Vaccination is still great and I encourage everyone who can to get vaccinated, but the 640 people is drawing upon a much smaller population and time period.
I do wonder though, what's my risk of having serious symptoms in a breakthrough case? I know it's lower, but is it 10%? 5%? I have no idea.
As someone (aged 42 years) with grandfathers on both sides that died from heart issues in their late 40s, early 50s, the side effects of the vaccines are more worrisome to me than the virus itself. I'm preparing myself to be excluded from society and yet I've already had covid and recovered from it, because that's not an acceptable form of prevention.
Oh well, back to my hillbilly roots I guess.
> Breakthrough deaths
> Male 154 (61.1%)
> Female 98 (38.9%)
Do we still know why are men disproportionately affected by covid?
> Intriguingly, infection with SARS-CoV induces ACE2 down-regulation through binding of the viral Spike protein to ACE2, thus reducing ACE2 expression in the lung and igniting acute respiratory failure. Since COVID-19 and SARS patients share similar acute respiratory distress syndrome and a similar gender bias in disease susceptibility and case fatality rates, it is reasonable to believe that they share similar pathogenic mechanisms.
> Estrogen, the primary female sex hormone, has been observed to play a protective role in SARS not only by activating immune response but also suppressing directly SARS-CoV replication. To note, estrogen inhibits the activity or expression of different components of the renin–angiotensin system. In particular, estrogen is able to upregulate the expression of ACE2.
This study suggests about 0.5% of unvaccinated population requires hospitalization.
Obviously just one study, but across about six million people, seems a decent back of the envelope guess.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
And I recently discovered that the reporting of overwhelmed hospitals is somewhat misleading as well, as in the US hospitals typically operate at 80-90% capacity for financial reasons, especially ICU wings which are expensive to upkeep on standby. So when the news reports that hospitals $CITY are overwhelmed, that's can be as little as ≈10% increase in patients.
If anything good comes of covid, hopefully we can see some effort to improve surge capacity in the US, but I'm not holding my breath.
All in all, what I wanted to say is that the message to the masses is intentionally or not simplified, and it hides the nuances that everyone should apply to themselves. In my case, I have made drastic changes to better my health after a diagnosis of severe autoimmune illness more than a decade ago, and today am in much better health than I was then, so I have no benefit to expect from taking the vaccine.
Two sources:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Two weeks? What do you need to flatten the curve for? Here’s your mask, now wear two until we have 70% vaccination, and I’ll let you out of the concentration camp when we reach 90% vaccination. Now you just owe me two weeks for delta.
Some real-world data: https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/143741231155210240...
A Twitter thread from a scientist and vaccine researcher: https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/143814553785796199...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...
The article states that boys are 6 times more likely to get myocarditis than be hospitalized with covid. But such a claim is inherently biased. You have an extremely well followed population on the vaccine case, and a relatively poorly followed population in the infected case. As such, it should not be surprising when results like this are found; boys in that age range are 3-9 times more likely to get myocarditis from COVID itself than the vaccine: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133462-800-myocardi...
This is the same thing with wearing masks... you can't just look at the effect on the person wearing the mask, but also on other people around them.
Maybe it's not good faith, I don't know at this point.
So it’s dishearteningly easy to look at this situation from that point of view: “my government, and everyone currently exercising power, has had 18 months to do the dirty work of expanding health capacity, retrofitting buildings to make them safer in the presence of a virus (e.g. open-air supermarkets), and whatever else is necessary to help us all live how we’d like to during this time,” and instead they’ve not really tackled any of those things. We got the vaccine, which is a huge triumph, but beyond that it’s just “hey we need you as an individual to stay at home another couple years while we slack off and keep ignoring any opportunity for letting you live the life you did before.”
I know not all real world systems are as flexible as software systems, especially true of the Frankenstein healthcare system we have here. But it really is not hard for me to say “if this were my problem, I would solve it like an engineer, by building (more capacity, tools to make it easier to grow manpower in the areas they’re needed).” And then be upset at the people who are asking me to make my own life shit for another couple years so that they can avoid making life-long improvements to the systems that need it. Because if our roles were reversed here — if I were the one at risk of this disease — I would never ask of them what they’re asking of me. It’s just not how I think about the world or how I think about solving problems.
I think some people voicing GP’s comment really are doing it in good faith. People have different lived experiences that lead to radically different ways of thinking about the world and how to act within it. These disagreements will always exist. The pragmatist accepts that and says that of the range of possible solutions to your problem, the most successful is the one that can be grounded in this world where people disagree with each other and pursue their own interests.
It's like the trivial "my body my choice right?" gotcha attempt. Does that serve any purpose other than to rile people up who are already in an echo chamber?
Your phrasing of the point, "I'm frustrated with these mandates and may not agree with them for this reason" is fine. But coming at it from a place of articulated-genuine curiosity doesn't make any sense to me, today, given how long these conversations have been happening.
Coming from an engineering and entrepreneurial background, I can't help but recognize myself in your comment. I do feel like we should have done a "war effort" to improve our healthcare system and even our public buildings. I can agree it's not an easy task, but it seems 1000 times more productive than locking people at home. Plus, it would ready us for the next epidemic or pandemic. Now, if we get hit again, we're doing lockdowns again.
As for protecting myself versus protecting others, I do understand the logic. I haven't been living under a rock for the past 18 months. However, what I hear is that vaccinated people don't get very sick from Covid. If that is true, why do I need to be vaccinated as well? Aren't they already protected? Let's put this simply, my grand-mother is 84 years old and vaccinated. If I end up giving her Covid she will most-likely be fine. And even if I were vaccinated I could still catch and transmit Covid.
Once all at-risk people are vaccinated, haven't we "won" the war on Covid?
But I still wonder how you're not getting this. The vaccine greatly reduces your chances of getting sick, and getting stuck in a hospital, but it doesn't completely eliminate it. If everyone between 18-50 refused to get vaccinated, we would still see a surge in hospitalizations. Do you not understand the word "protected"?
Do you think that the utility of a young person getting vaccinated is zero? Or do you think it's just too small to be worth the inconvenience? I don't know why the conversation turns into "why do I have to do this" - can't we focus instead on why you aren't willing to help your community?
And again, has literally nobody addressed this in the last 18 months that you've read? I'm sure my tone is more hostile than I intend, but I'm really confused at this point.
of the ~7000 people that died of covid in the study ~1000 had no comorbidities. unfortunately this doesnt break down by vax status, but based on other studies ~90% of hospitalizations are unvaxed. So you can probably get an order of magnitude approximation for your metric.
Unfortunately though this isn't the only metric that should be considered because people with no comorbidities can transmit the virus to people with comorbidities, so you really want to take that into account.
The inflection point happens in the 40's or 50's:
People under 40 are 52% of the population and 2% of COVID deaths (11,212)
Which of course means people over 40 are 48% of the population and 98% of COVID deaths (529,402)
These numbers reflect only cases where the CDC knows their age. The stats are here, which has a nice graph showing just how outsized the deaths as people get older: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics (scroll to "Deaths by Age Group")
Covid is (literally) exponentially worse as you get older. But it's not really an issue for young, healthy people. Alas, not very many people can truly call themselves healthy, which is a concern in its own right.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Of those deaths, many had pre-existing conditions such as cancer, heart failure, obesity, and diabetes which drastically increased their risks. You'll have to do your own calculations on how that impacts your expected mortality rate.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
I encourage healthy adults to get vaccinated because the personal benefits outweigh the risks, and it can help reduce load on the healthcare system.
Any dose is best spent vaccinating an unvaccinated person, even if looking from a purely selfish point of view of already vaccinated population.
There is also still a lot of people that can't get the vaccine in less developed countries.
So if someone gets the vaccine and dies before the next shot, they are considered an unvaccinated death.
There are no opinions presented here, only facts. How you view these is up to you.
These may be facts, but are they actually useful?