Covid-19 are unrelated to vaccination in 68 countries and 2947 counties in US | Hacker News Reader

Covid-19 are unrelated to vaccination in 68 countries and 2947 counties in US

link.springer.com

3 pointsmrfusion8 comments

It's impressive how well they can find lack of evidence when they look hard for it.

The fact that there is a strong correlation is undeniable. Here are 3 links with charts that show the connection strongly.

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-deaths-among-older...

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/soaring-covid-rates-i...

And, one of the most striking to me, vaccination vs cases of counties in California:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/briefing/gavin-newsom-rec...

That said, epidemiology is complex, and an attempt to reduce it to one factor is not valid.

ETA: Carl Bergstrom weighs on with additional insight into why this paper is bullshit: https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1444732537792708608

> The fact that there is a strong correlation is undeniable.

> That said, epidemiology is complex, and an attempt to reduce it to one factor is not valid.

And yet most of the people hospitalized in BC are unvaccinated so vaccination does make a difference. I believe the situation is the same in other areas.

Some suspicious things about this paper:

- while one author has authored many papers, the other has none and comes from a secondary school - while they don't come right out and say it, it seems they are arguing against vaccine passports, and lockdowns as they don't mention those in the summary as mitigation efforts

- the summary reads like talking points for anti-lockdown crowd, it even says that we should treat covid like the flu at this point

- one of the cited references is also widely cited by the anti-vaxxer crowd, the reference saying that natural immunity is better than vaccine-acquired immunity (reference 8) and the paper has not been peer-reviewed

- they are mis-representing data from at least one of their references (10: Improving communications around vaccine breakthrough and vaccine effectiveness.) This CDC presentation has a chart showing that there is a greater risk of hospitalization for the unvaccinated but they chose to use the next slide titled: "Increasing percentage of vaccinated persons among those hospitalized in COVID-NET".

- I could go on but I don't want to waste any more of my time on this

Where's the control for people getting tested in a different county than where they live?

Who reports the new case? The county in which the testing center operates? What about counties with poor testing coverage?

I'm finding too many hanging methodology questions here.

The key, I thought, is to correlate the load on the health system NOT the sheer case load. If everybody gets a COVID-cold that puts them in bed for a day or two vs. today’s situation the world will celebrate. In Canada, unvaxed are flooding hospitals, threatening the need for triaging cases. Hasn’t triage started in a few us areas?

If you take a signal and add a lot of garbage, you may fool some people.

If you take out all countries from Africa where statistics about testing is questionable and 3 outliers Israel, Mongolia and Malaysia then you restore the signal.

Israel and Mongolia both vaccinated very quickly a large amount of people so sudden surge can be expected in both countries. Malaysia appears to be in the situation where Israel was in the beginning of the year - they got hit by a wave before vaccination was ramped up.

Anecdotally, I'm double vaccinated and I caught it after the schools went back. I am currently infectious, have a head cold and a low grade fever that I fix with tylenol occasionally. I will be happy with that.

Thank you pfizer!

The vaccinated cases are going up, presumably because we weren't protected against delta, but I, as far as the medical people know, have antibodies for delta and whatever was in the pfizer jabs that I got

The issue with Delta appears to be that viral load is a lot higher compared to other variants. So you get hit by a lot of it so some of it can start replicating before it is cleared out of your body.

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