Singapore deaths and cases spike with 88.5% vaxxed | Hacker News Reader

Singapore deaths and cases spike with 88.5% vaxxed

ourworldindata.org

49 pointssyrusakbary34 comments

I might be missing it, but the data here seems to show just cases, not deaths. According to Singapore's Ministry of Health, hospitalizations and severe ICU cases continue to be disproportionately made up of unvaccinated individuals[1]. Similarly, the population that's dying is overwhelmingly unvaccinated[2].

[1]: https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19

[2]: https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/update-on-loc...

They have deaths further down the page (it's a very long page).

Indeed! Thank you for pointing that out. It looks like the death statistics match up with the MOH's, so at least there isn't anything hinky about the data itself.

Is 14 deaths a day really a "spike"? Like obviously Singapore had ~0 deaths a day for a long time, so I guess it's a big increase percentage-wise.

They have a peak case rate of 3,700 a day, and a peak death rate of 14 a day (visually it looks like this is at the peak, but it's possible it could go higher). This is a ration of 264:1. Compare to Florida, which peaked at 21,00 case and 400 deaths a day, a ratio of 52:1 in the recent wave. It seems like Singapore's high vaccination rate is paying major dividends.

Small country. Young population. Superb medical facilities easily rival most parts of USA. Free covid healthcare (covid cases are handled by government) so people not going die at home due to scare of medical bill. Swift regulations to control social distancing. It is an island with near zero illegal immigrants. About 85% vaccinated with either Pfizer and Moderna considered the best available vaccines in the world at this moment. They begin 3rd jab before FDA final approvals. About 20% got 3rd jab. Death due to Covid is about 0.2%, the best in western world (probably the entire world just that non western countries stats aren't that readily available or trustworthy to further compare). I think only perhaps Taiwan is doing better. 14 deaths a day to Singaporean probably is spike just like an Asian in school getting A- require immediate remedial classes.

There isn’t a nation on Earth like Singapore, a single city-state with an extremely dense population and ability to deploy measures because of their government structure.

Not saying you are wrong, just that a comparison of peak Singapore (now), to peak Florida (not now) is perhaps not the whole story.

> Is 14 deaths a day really a "spike"?

If you take it relation to their 5,7 million inhabitants it is par on course with most European countries in their spikes with few exceptions that are higher or lower.

I think it's safe to say that this pandemic was relatively low key compared to the plagues that have actually decimated humanity in the past, and we've learned there isn't a coordinated political response that resolves it. Even with previously unimaginable co-ordination technology available to us to handle it via the internet, contactless payments, food and everything delivery, remote work(!), and other utterly alien concepts to any previous time in human history that might have encountered a plague, the outcomes predicted in antiquity are the same.

I said at the beginning of this that there are only three options, because there have only ever always been three options, and they were recorded in of all places, the old testament (Samuel, but would be interested in other tradition's books as well), as a way to make sure humans had the answer to pandemics ready at hand from pre-antiquity. In the event of a pandemic, humanity is given the option of a) try to resist it with our human abilities and get 7 years of economic famine which destroys the wealth of generations, b) three months of war as a result of forfeiting your leadership role to focus on pandemic response, or c) a short period of deaths and loss of people who were vulnerable to it. The western world chose option a, China and India (and oddly, Sweden) appear to have chosen option c.

Pandemic policy has nothing to do with biology at this point, if it ever did. It's just polls about what the most fearful (or worse) will accept. What we also know is that vaccine passports have nothing to do with biology either, and authorities are using this to institute a para-governmental internal passport system in their countries. If people want to hum and haw about how the real problem is the unvaccinated on a farcically authoritarian island citystate with 90%+ immunity, they are welcome to. However, if Singapore can't solve this, it's not a problem with a political solution.

So my understanding is that cases are rising due to Delta (even amongst vaccinated), which correlates with every other report I've seen. However I couldn't see in this report, what percentage of reported deaths (14) were unvaccinated vs single/double jab recipients?

The takeaway seems to be that, when borders open in Australia for my case, I'm very likely to catch covid; I don't so much mind catching it as long as I don't end up in the ICU or dead over it though (and ditto for everyone else in the country of course).

I think it is becoming clear that nearly everyone on the planet will catch it, eventually. Vaccinated rates of transmission are not as favorable as they were when the vaccines were brand new, but the impact on severity of symptoms still seems to be holding up (both from datasets like this and my own anecdotal witnessing among friends). So, it's "keep calm, get vaccinated, and carry on", I think.

That information seems to be listed in this report[1]. The TL;DR, if I understand it correctly, is that a single vaccinated person appears to be dying every other day on average, versus approximately 5 vaccinated people every single day. So that's a tenfold difference.

[1]: https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/update-on-loc...

This is the relevant quote. Population wide fatality rate for non vaccinated individuals is about 9x higher.

> Over the past 7 days, the number of fully vaccinated and non-fully vaccinated cases who are critically ill in the ICU are at 0.5 and 5.4 per 100,000 population respectively. Over the same period, the number of fully vaccinated and non-fully vaccinated cases who died are 0.1 and 0.9 per 100,000 population respectively. Among seniors aged 60 and above, the number of fully vaccinated and non-fully vaccinated cases who are critically ill in the ICU are 1.9 and 48.0 respectively. The number of fully vaccinated and non-fully vaccinated seniors who died are 0.4 and 9.2 respectively.

> Population wide fatality rate for non vaccinated individuals is about 9x higher.

Given that there are 8 vaccinated people for every unvaccinated one, isn’t that about 72×?

No, the numbers are already normalized by the population counts.

Aha. Read it as “(0.5 and 5.4) per 100,000 population”, not as “0.5 per 100,000 (vaccinated) population and 5.4 per 100,000 (unvaccinated) population”

Thanks.

Map shows Sweden with what looks like the second-lowest rate of new cases in Europe, just after Spain. Of course, it could just be that the newest wave is slower to reach them, but everyone other nation in Scandinavia is quite a bit higher.

It's not just who had the most cases previously, though, because Belgium is very high again. Curious.

Differences between countries may be partly attributable to differences in method of counting.

Certainly in 2020, Belgium counted “even suspected cases of COVID-19 in the national death toll, regardless of whether the deceased person was tested.”, while others counted only confirmed cases (can be very low if you don’t test much) or ignored deaths in nursing homes (https://www.dw.com/en/belgiums-coronavirus-overcounting-cont...)

Guaranteed to be at least partly that, I would think, although I was expecting that between western European countries it would be relatively similar. One could look at number of deaths per capita to compensate somewhat, although that leaves the question of whether or not true survival rates could also be different.

USA's CDC estimate of the ratio is that the actual number of cases is 4.2*nbr of positive PCR tests. Which means that we only catch about 24% of the actual number of cases.

I would think also that countries like Italy which had big waves early have a more serious undercount (for total cases in the pandemic) as compared to countries which first got it somewhat later, when PCR tests were more generally available.

They had many deaths at first but I think the Swedish strategy can hold up quite well.

More evidence that the “anti vaxxers,” as they were smeared, were correct that we don’t actually know everything about the vaccine’s long term efficacy.

With only short term effectiveness, at best, nobody can clearly explain why I need to vaccinate my young children who have a 6x risk of myocarditis from the vaccine than from COVID itself.

Did anybody ever claim we know everything about the vaccine’s long term efficacy? Viruses mutate.

Also, myocarditis risk is way overblown, and I haven’t seen any claim it’s higher for the vaccinated than the non-vaccinated, when (and that’s as good as certain to happen) they get infected.

I don't keep these things close by so I don't actually have a source, but on a past hackernews discussion I came across the trial data for the pfizer vaccine in young children. The outcomes between unvaccinated vs vaccinated children was basically a wash of almost no benefit, but there was 1 case of myocarditis in a male participant for the vaccine with none for unvaccinated.

So, terribly low data points, but at best it was no benefit for a vaccine, and at worst there were heart issues in young male children who took the vaccine. If the vaccine showed a huge benefit for the children it would be easily seen as a calculated risk, the issue is that the vaccine did not have a clear major benefit to outweigh the possible risk.

Because most children don't have a severe case of covid-19 doesn't mean that there is no benefit overall.

For once because there are only few severe cases it is much more difficult to assess that there is a benefit. Like if for unvaccinated children 1 in 10_000 has a severe case but for vaccinated it's 1 in 100_000 that's gonna take a while for studies to verify.

There are no reasons to believe that the benefits for society are less than for vaccinated adults. Like less time being infectous and less infectous to begin with.

But yes that has to be weighted against possible detrimental issues but how is that different to any other trial study for a vaccine?

> But yes that has to be weighted against possible detrimental issues but how is that different to any other trial study for a vaccine?

It's not different. That's why it's being taken seriously when the trial shows more negative results than positive. Instead of picking and choosing to only listen to the trials that suggest to roll out the vaccine to everyone.

being a person in the most vulnerable category for developing myocarditis from the vaccine (and in general), i felt like i should add some of my experience with researching this topic.

SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to make a person 18 times more likely to develop myocarditis than if they never got sick [0]. other sources suggest that number is much higher:

"Across all ages, the risk of myocarditis was almost 16 times higher for people with COVID-19 compared to those who aren’t infected. The myocarditis risk is 37 times higher for infected children under 16 years and seven times higher for infected people ages 16-39 compared to their uninfected peers." [1]

okay, so let's take a step back. the global prevalence of myocarditis has previously been found to be ≈ 22 of 100 000 patients (annually) [2]. i haven't found any statistics of annual ratio's for young men developing myocarditis in general, but all reports read that those numbers are higher. the recent israeli study found that male vaccine recipients between the ages of 16 and 19 were found to have developed myocarditis in 13.73 cases per 100,000 people. so what does this tell me? for me, it shows that the risks of developing myocarditis are in general, scary -> post-vaccination, similarly spooky -> post-covid, terrifying.

still though, some arguments for younger people (closer to the age group parent comment may be referring to) suggest that "the risk of developing myocarditis might be increased more by the vaccine than by the disease, particularly because children rarely develop severe COVID-19" [3]. this is merely conjecture, but i'm assuming that the source would define developing myocarditis as a severe COVID-19 case. otherwise, it would not be very relevant.

most of the research i've done for myself reach a similar conclusion for children (under the age of 18): the risks of getting vaccinated outweigh the risks associated with COVID-19 if a person has at least one COVID-19 comorbidity.

for me, i decided to get my third-dose because i felt that although the chances of developing myocarditis seem to increase with the number of vaccinations you get, the benefits still seem to outweigh the risks. and finally, this is not a new phenomena and from what i understand, it is a natural reaction post-vaccination. the increase in the possibility of developing myocarditis has been a spook (albeit, a real risk for some people) associated with vaccination for a long time now. [2] [4] [5]

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22328081/

[1] https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/16388?autologinche...

[2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.115.30657...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y#ref-CR4

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6437672/

[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4751718/

Don't look at cases only but also at deaths.

We know now that the vaccines don't protect that well at preventing covid-19. Partly because they weren't developed for the delta variant that's currently most prevalent.

But we do know that it reduces both the length of the infection and the time an infected person is able to transfer the virus and more importantly it works very well at preventing severe cases and deaths.

The numbers I remember from Germany are that an unvaccinated person is 8 times more likely to land in ICU than a vaccinated person.

> The numbers I remember from Germany are that an unvaccinated person is 8 times more likely to land in ICU than a vaccinated person.

In my state (Saxony), 90% of patients in intensive care beds are unvaccinated. Just under 60% of the population is fully vaccinated here (lowest rate in Germany). That means that the unvaccinated are in fact "overrepresented" in intensive care by a factor of about 22.

I've seen that number as well but Saxony also has the lowest vaccination rate of all the Bundesländer in Germany, so you would expect there to be a much worse ratio of unvaccinated to vaccinated in the ICU as the relationship is not linear (which throws off a lot of people).

You'd think that 50% vaccination rate accounts for something but it only halves the speed of the spreading of the virus which doesn't help that much for an exponential rate (I hope my math checks out :-).

There is lot of obvious suppression of anything that goes against what the ruling class is pushing for. People notice.

Cumulative cases are still below 4.3%, so about 7% of the population hasn't had the opportunity to build up immunity through infection or vaccination yet. I guess they'll either hit the herd immunity threshold soon or we get to find out that 100% is still not enough.

I’m wildly suspicious of vaccination rates that are anything but the mRNA vaccines at this point. I’m a bit disappointed the mRNA manufacturers can’t create new strains to match delta and others now that the original strain is less dominant.

They have already made variant specific vaccines, but they are still in trial phase [1].

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/08/09/covid-vaccines-delta-variant-...

A little depressing that these anti-vax stories keep getting greenlit on HN.

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