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Comment by silent_cal | Hacker News Reader

Then why did this trend only emerge in April? The population of young people being vaccinated has increased since then.

There are all kinds of possible explanations for this. If you look at this heatmap of vaccine uptake by age and time (you'll need to select second dose)[1], you'll see that the uptake percentage is fairly uniform across all age groups below 60 e.g. in March, but goes up fast for 55-59 in April, meaning the "10-59 + Second dose" group became older on average during that time. My best guess is that the uniform distribution early on was from healthcare workers; later on, the age-prioritized vaccination rollout changed the distribution.

There's a reverse trend that coincides with an increased uptake in younger groups: The age-specific death rate for "10-59 + Second dose" in June was 2,8 and went down to 2,4 in September.

One thing to keep in mind: When we're talking about the 10-59 age group on their second shot prior to April, that's only a population of 800k with a total of 16 deaths reported between January and April. Confidence intervals for this period are very wide and the upper confidence limit in the ONS data is quite close to what they're reporting e.g. for September.

[1]: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations?areaTyp...

If it's all due to age, then why did the vaccinated group (older) have a lower death rate than the unvaccinated group (younger) prior to April?

It does not seem unlikely to me that the group of health workers that made up most of the vaccinated group prior to April generally has a lower death rate than the unvaccinated group, which would have contained most aged 50+ at the time (vaccine uptake was <6% for the 50-59 group at the end of March).

More importantly, COVID also accounted for more than 30% of deaths in the "10-59 + Unvaccinated" group between January and April (2,761 of 8,665), as this was around the time the third wave peaked. As one would expect, this didn't really affect deaths in the vaccinated group.

I don't think anyone should attempt to draw conclusions from such a small group that is not at all representative of the whole population (in general and within the 10-59 age group).

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