Covid-19 breakthrough data
coronavirus.health.ny.gov
coronavirus.health.ny.gov
I'm fully vaccinated and boosted, and I had what I suspect is Omicron about 10 days ago. I had a mild fever (approaching, but not reaching 101), a sore throat, sneezing and nasal congestion for 3-4 days, and I tested positive with an over the counter rapid test. Overall, it was like a very minor cold. My girlfriend also tested positive, and she had no symptoms at all.
I never got any "official" test (I didn't want to put additional strain on the health care system), so my case was not counted in any official stats. If I hadn't tested positive, my girlfriend would not have even tested, and her case would have been totally unknown.
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-case-rates-vaccination-...
The number --- 871 cases per day per 100,000 unvax'd, for the week preceding 1/10-- is an amazing rate (7 day average). It tells us that 6.1% of the unvaxxed population became a case during a 1 week period. This doesn't count people who were infected and did not test or did not test in a way that got reported.
Your point about whether mild infections are slipping through is interesting. Probably the vaccinated have more paucisymptomatic infections. The unvaccinated and vaccinated probably test at different rates (which way? required workplace testing of unvaxxed vs. unvaxxed more likely to be deniers who don't want to test). Etc. So there's some confounds here, for sure. But boy that 871 per 100k number is fascinating.
Without reinfection (which we don't suspect is likely for Omicron-following-Omicron), it certainly can't stay at 6% of the population per week for long. I doubt they have spotted more than a third of infections.
The sources section says:
> Sources: California Reportable Disease Information Exchange; California Department of Public Health, California Immunization Registry; the U.S. Census Bureau, 2015-2019 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.
So the the numerator (number of cases) from the reportable disease database and/or department of health data (which probably includes vaccination status, or alternatively is matched against the registry). The denominator for the rate amongst the total population is the population estimate from the census bureau. The denominator for the rate amongst vaccinated comes from the immunization registry.
The rate against the unvaccinated? There is no count of them, so instead you subtract the number vaccinated from the population. The problem is that both of those are estimates, and as they get closer the error on that denominator goes through the roof. So the rate amongst the unvaccinated becomes meaningless.
As an example, take a hypothetical place with around 100 people. Might actually be anywhere from 98–102, that is ±2%. If you've got a very high vaccination rate (yeah!), say there are 96 people on the immunization registry. You could have anywhere from 2 to 6 people unvaccinated. You'd report 4, but the error is now ±50%, which is huge. And when you use that as the denominator, you get very different answers. (OTOH, of half the village was unvaccinated, 50±4% is a much smaller error!)
[1]: https://globalnews.ca/news/8480752/ontario-covid-pcr-testing...
I haven’t seen such absurd lines lately in NYC, but I also don’t see any compelling reason for most people to go get an official test.
I bet Google & Facebook have enough metadata to measure it more accurately.
I personally know of a dozen or so unreported positives (both tested positive and presumed positive), compared to two reported positives.
Here’s my local area - note the scale!
https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
And the US CDC program for this national effort: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/surveillance/wastewater-sur...
If unreported cases are 10-50x reported cases, then the hospitalization and death rates become minuscule. And then it means we might actually be closer to natural herd immunity.
Point taken about balancing this with a right to privacy though and I think that’s why no one is seriously pushing for reporting at that level and why it is optional to report your at home test results. The use case of contact tracing is long gone.
But, there are many valid, non-authoritarian reasons for wanting data as granular as possible with a new virus.
The CDC has published data on this multiple times... Vaccination seems to be more protective than a past infection. A past infection is approximately equal to a single dose of a two-dose vaccine.
e.g. CDC MMWR August 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm "These findings suggest that among persons with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, full vaccination provides additional protection against reinfection. To reduce their risk of infection, all eligible persons should be offered vaccination, even if they have been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2."
The CDC issued a false press release misrepresenting the conclusions of this study, at https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...
That's the sort of thing that destroys the CDC's credibility.
CDC credibility seems intact here, but online anti vaxxer credibility continues to decline…
Reinfections is the key word here indicating the study is about reinfections. You’re assuming it’s about initial infections. If they didn’t repeatedly say the word “reinfections” in the press release, you might have a point, but the reality is the CDC summary is accurate, as is the headline message that people will get stronger protection if they get vaccinated.
You're arguing that someone who already knows what the study says can re-interpret the statements in the press release as being true, by adding a few additional qualifiers like "among the already infected" here and there, on the assumption that they were just omitted for brevity. But the intended reader, who doesn't already know what the study really says, will read the statements as written, and will receive a false communication.
There’s no need to “add qualifiers” - simply to not remove them.
Read the second sentence of the first paragraph. It says two things, the first of which is false.
You're arguing that the press release is fine, because although it contains false statements, it also contains some true statements.
But hospitals are currently overwhelmed with mostly voluntarily unvaccinated people. My advice is don’t break your arm or get in a car accident or have a heart attack right now - it could be lethal because health care resources are at a breaking point (in the US).
lacking nurses because they were already sparsely hired in efforts to maximize profits over patient comfort pre-pandemic,
of those that were working the field; many have left their job to make 5 times more money as a traveling nurse elsewhere (?) - many have left the job because they find it too stressful for the benefits it offers them - and many are out sick.
Does anyone think that hospitals are going to raise what they pay nurses now? are we going to invest in nursing in ways that gets lots more to choose it as a career path because X and Y things are going to be so much greater for them in the future?
I'm not holding my breathe that hospitals are going to change the pay rate for the most missed resource, or that they will hire twice as many as they've had in the past.. and that the future of nursing is going to be any better - so we better hope that treatment pills become a thing.
>But hospitals are currently overwhelmed with mostly voluntarily unvaccinated people
This has been the narrative for a while now, but as vaccination rates increase the ratio of vaccinated:unvaccinated hospitalized patients is approaching and surpassing parity. And some not so recent government data from the UK[0] (I haven't seen any media report on it) suggests that for a number of age ranges, vaccinated individuals have a similar death rate per person-year, i.e. vaccines are not doing nearly as much as claimed. This data is pre omicron.
0. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... - check table 7 in the spreadsheet. Maybe I'm misinterpreting something?
Parity as in 1:1? Because I’m pretty sure raw counts and case rates are still nowhere near parity. You mentioned data by age ranges as well.
This commentary on a new study is pretty good: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1482501951065661440?s=21
Pointing to this recent study: https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3Ahospitals+intitle%...
https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3Ahospitals+intitle%...
2022 death rates are still high, nearing 2000 people killed by COVID-19 daily. We can hope that due to the death toll hitting mostly the unvaccinated, plus omicron being a somewhat milder than Delta, we won't possibly be able to hit the same high death rates all year long.
https://www.census.gov/popclock/
https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=PEPNATMONTHLY2021.N...
See the charts shown on https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-real... for a simple visual example.
https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3Ahospitals+intitle%...
Estimate is the key word here. It's really difficult for me to trust official figures given that omicron appears to be spreading virtually unabated across the world regardless of vaccination rates. There's far too much political (state and corporate) pressure to paint a "safe and effective" picture.
As others have pointed out, people in the US are simply not reporting breakthrough cases. There is no incentive. The majority of my fully vaccinated remote workers at have recently tested positive, presumably for omicron. Yet our small startup has still chosen to announce mandates for all, including remote workers. This all feels a lot more like blind faith than science at this point.
It is really hard to find stats. “Vaccinated” is such a difficult term because it can encompass J&J from nearly a year ago for example. I see some breakdowns by vax supplier vs hospitalizations.
Really would like to know how many people who have taken the booster have died from covid ideally with age data.
* https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2115624
0.16 versus 2.98 per 100,000. 90% reduction.
Source - https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
The answer seems to be extremely few boosted deaths, especially under 80. You are at more risk unvaccinated in your 40s than boosted in your 80s.
At more risk from Covid19 during first eight weeks after the booster, yes.
But you're at more risk from other shit. And maybe even from Covid19 after eight weeks.
I'd personally really like to know what the metric would be if (hypothetically, just for analysis) the vaccine was a placebo. For example, if the people who get the vaccine are generally more able to work from home, then the metric would still be significantly above zero.
Just for clarity, I believe that the vaccine is effective, but I question the measurement methodology.
Many other confounders cannot easily be controlled for, but is there any reason to assume that they're correlated with the outcome? It could be that vaccinated people are more careful in terms of meeting other people.
At any rate, we had big RCTs at the beginning that demonstrated efficacy against the then prevailing variant (alpha, I assume).
It'll be tricky to repeat an RCT at this stage.
In some countries there's a formal labor law for doctors notes after X days that is known by all and which might mean your doctor checks and registers the case(?) in other places it is total discretion if a manager demands a note but rarely does in places that aren't shift work oriented.
Given two people who WFH the vaccinated one can conveniently eat in a restaurant and go to the gym while the unvaccinated needs to get take out or is getting regular tests. I think vaccinated people have much more interaction with the virus unmasked in an indoor environment but much less likelihood of ever being tested when having light or no symptoms.
In some countries (the US is an example); there's a social class aspect to vaccination; highly educated people are more likely to be vaccinated, and also more likely to work from home.
However, if this was a big factor you'd expect vaccines to appear dramatically less effective in near-universal-vaccination countries, like Portugal. That doesn't seem to be the case.
To overcome this, you'd need an RCT. But you're unlikely to find either a) unvaccinated people that want to be vaccinated, yet would be ok to get a placebo instead, or b) unvaccinated people that don't want to be vaccinated yet would be ok to get a vaccination instead.
Also interesting that this data treats 14-days+ after last shot as fully vaccinated, so presumably two-shot and three-shot people are both treated as “fully vaccinated”.
> Fully-vaccinated people may have received additional or booster doses, which are not specifically accounted for in this analysis.
Making a vaccine is more straightforward (ie we expect to be able to) when we know there is a response by our own immune systems - hence we expected to be able to make a COVID vaccine (although the time scale is still an amazing accomplishment - thanks 20+ years of mRNA research!). And we are still working on a vaccine for HIV.
You're right though: If you look at it only through the lens of individual incentives, the official test has no upside. One of the huge problems with governments' responses to this pandemic is they are not closing these loopholes. People will take the most convenient option, not necessarily the one benefiting public health. To align individual and societal incentives, governments need to make not-isolating when infectious more inconvenient/costly than isolating.
All stick no carrot huh
Since the booster stays effective ~10 weeks, it could be possible that you don't need to get an additional booster between March-June. ( depends on a lot of variables ofc. I'm currently vaccinated and not boostered and not immediately planning on taking a booster based on the previous variant for a "relatively" harmless virus for vaccinated people)
Or conceivably in a year they have two vaccines, one is more suitable for those that are recovered, the other more suitable for those who never had it. Which one will they give you?
Edit: not false tests; true negative tests.
If you are double vaxed and get infected it make zero sense to also get a booster unless you have an immune system issue.
We have antivaxers in Switzerland as well, (quite a few saddly). However they have to dig very deep in the conspiracy bucket to fight their stance. Natural immunity is not talked about by the antivaxers but this doesn't mean the state gives natural immunity the same level of protection as vaccinated. If you have natural immunity you only get a 6 month certificate vs a year if you are double vaxxed. After that you need to take a anitbody test to get a 3 month extension or the booster shot. 2G+ is only valid if you had covid less than 4 months ago or the last shot.
Secondly you have realised first hand that vaccines passes give a false of sense of security.
I got Covid Original Flavour(tm) before vaccines. I got "lucky"--high fever for a little over 2 weeks, swelling in places that I never knew could swell, and my stamina shot to shit. It's taken me a year to put myself back together.
I went and got both vaccines and a booster, thanks.
I have a relative by marriage who is an anti-vaxxer and is about the same age and about the same healthiness as I was. He got Covid. He played Russian Roulette and lost. He's currently on ECMO and would be DEAD if he hadn't lucked into getting the last ECMO bed for 400 miles. And, when all is said and done, it's going to take probably years of therapy for him to be even a shadow of his former self.
And now we're starting to see that Covid increases the chances of Type-2 diabetes in children. So, the whole "Vaccines have more side-effects in children than Covid" (which was never actually true anyway) now has enough cases opposing it that we have medically valid data.
You can persist in anti-vax as a shibboleth for whatever social group you're in. However, nothing factual was ever on your side, and the evidence continues to mount against you.
The only "good" thing about Omicron is that it is so contagious that it will solve the anti-vax problem by itself. In 60 days, there will be no point in restrictions, anymore.
How many other people do you know who that didn't happen to? Remember, everyone who got it in 2020 was unvaccinated. And if we're to accept this anecdote, then we also need to accept all of the anecdotes about the vaccine harming people.
> And now we're starting to see that Covid increases the chances of Type-2 diabetes in children.
Really? Last time I heard about that, it was because someone forgot to control for weight or BMI, and doing so made the whole effect disappear.
Well, I know of 27 people in my circle who got Covid. 2 are dead. 1 is currently on ventilation. 2 went on ventilation and recovered and have been in therapy every since. 3 have severe long Covid that is impacting their lives detrimentally. 7 have mild long Covid (myself included) that we probably should just classify as "viruses do more damage and take longer to get rid of than we thought". So, that leaves 12 who are basically fully recovered--and most of those were post-vaccination.
Of course, this leaves out people who got Covid but either didn't get tested or were so mild that they didn't notice.
Let us contrast this to the vaccine: Out of all the people I know of who got the vaccine (probably 50+) as well as people who participated in the testing phase (7 of them) I know this many who had any symptoms from the vaccine after 2 weeks:
Exactly zero.
And, since vaccination, I know of this many vaccinated people who have had to even go to the hospital let alone be ventilated or die:
Exactly zero.
I'm sure someone, somewhere has had a bad reaction to the vaccine. Anaphylaxis is a thing.
However, if I apply a statistical analysis even to my weak anecdotal data, I'm going to come up with a strong signal.
[1] https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/...
This isn't possible. If it were true, NYC would have collapsed during the Omicron wave due to bed shortages.
(edit: just checked the UK's stats over the past month: infections have peaked at 200k/day, 5x the baseline rate over the past few months. Daily deaths have doubled but not yet peaked, suggesting Omicron has at most a 2.5x reduction in severity -- usual caveats apply, this is very coarse data, IANAE etc)
Source?
Search for "hospital but not the ICU". Look above it for ICU stats. For "Not in ICU", it can be argued that even 10% is an overstatement. The author of the article, meanwhile, doesn't provide any sources whatsoever.
Another interesting piece of data was recently removed from Got-t of Alberta website, but you can see it here: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-government-of-albert...
(739/0.2) / (2050/0.8) = 1.4
If one normalizes instead by the actual number of unvaccinated cases and vaccinated cases as reported further down on that page, one gets
(739/1456) / (2050/8079) = 2
Chances of not being hospitalized with Covid:
Unvaccinated: 99.9%
Vaccinated: 99.99%
Instead of providing a useful picture, the report compares two tiny numbers from each group and makes it a point to amplify the differences.
We don't always care about relative risk reduction when the absolute risk is considered negligible. That is how we narrow focus and decide on what to spend our limited resources.
And also, the absolute risk is very dependent on age.
- More people get vaccinated: A
- Less people remain unvaccinated: A' (=1-A)
- More people get infected: B
B/A' will of course grow more rapidly than B/A
This is a very bizarre assertion.
Given that, the vaccinated spread covid, even with no symptoms, vaccination status does not limit spread.
No amount of vaccinated people, will end the pandemic.
Note that, to spread covid, it must be replicating in the body. Therefore, as it is replicating in the vaccinated, it will continue to mutate and evolve.
There will never, ever be an end to the pandemic, due to existing vaccines.
Ever.
That being said, vaccines have stopped effectively ended viruses before, e.g. polio (again, for counter examples please refer to my comment about reasonable definitions). Therefore it's clear that vaccines can achieve this effect, and really what lies in question is how hard is it?
So, I think there are people who study this stuff, and I think it's also probably pretty complicated because there are a lot of variables as well as unknowns. E.g. how effective is the vaccine, how contagious is the virus, how does it spread, the incubation period, for how long is it contagious, etc..
Ok, bearing all that in mind saying
> No amount of vaccinated people, will end the pandemic.
Is itself a bizarre assertion. Maybe in your gut it seems that way, but that's not really how we know stuff in real life. The author even said
1.) if there were enough vaccines for everyone for
2.) 3-shots of protection and
3.) if people took them
Then the pandemic would be over... I think that more or less makes sense. I'm not saying it's realistic, because #3 seems to be the problem in countries that have enough vaccines for everyone (like the USA).
In any case, he's a doctor, I think he knows more than you do, I trust his reasoning is based off well-informed assumptions, and you're just convinced that it could never happen.
So do you care to elaborate how "No amount of vaccinated people, will end the pandemic."? If 100% of people were vaccinated, would that not end the pandemic? I think it comes down to the numbers, so how do the numbers support your argument?
I think universal N95/KN95/KF94 masks would bring R0 below 1 (even without vaccines), but with animal reservoirs, even that's no longer a long-term viable strategy.
The trillion dollar question is long COVID and impacts of COVID on the brain, both with and without vaccines.
You've glossed over very important parts of my post. I did edit it within 3 minutes of posting, so you may be responding to an alternate.
My point is:
- the current vaccines do not stop spread due to, and in the vaccinated
Everyone agrees on this.
- for spread to occur, the virus must replicate, therefore it can mutate even in the vaccinated
This is just viral 101.
- therefore, current vaccines cannot stop spread and mutation, therefore they cannot stop the pandemic
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
IF we had been able to vaccinate 90%+ of the world by the start of last summer, this pandemic had a good chance of ending. Delta made it much more difficult, and Omicron crushed that option.
"it's possible for a variant to come out that gets around all vaccinations every time, so therefore vaccines can't stop the pandemic" means that you definitely failed Viral 101.
This is a third order effect, not first. They do not reduce transmission, instead they increase immune response, thus reducing replication, thus reducing transmission.
This is a vital point here.
Second, please take care. At no point did I ever say "vaccines don't reduce transmission". That is a general statement, mine was specific, about current covid vaccines only.
Covid is a unique beast, able to spread for weeks without creating a strong immune response, and therefore, symptoms. Other viruses seem to spread much later, and typically only when symptoms are shown.
This is what makes covid so spreadable, dangerous. It may also be why successful spread is difficult to stop even when vaccinated. After all, this happened with delta too.
EDIT: going to add here.
COVID is in mice, deer, dogs and cats as a minimum, and other mammals are strongly suspected.
A recent HN story cited a paper, where a researcher believes covid jumped from human to mouse, mutated to omicron, and jumped back to human.
So, regardless of the spread and mutation happening in the currently vaccinated, we have spread and mutation in other mammals. Including ones in our homes.
Think on that a bit, please people.
That's literally what is meant by "vaccines reduce transmission". Vaccines are not some nanobots that form a forcefield around your body preventing viruses from getting to you.
The cause is vitally important, when you are abridging my statements, skipping cause, and attempting to make point by debating effect only.
Even quite a small hole in vaccination may be a problem, though; very highly vaccinated countries like Ireland are seeing ICU pressure primarily from the 5% or so of unvaccinated adults.
Covd19 has been endemic for two years now. And it will be endemic until we find better vaccines. At that point, we'll probably be ready to wipe out the flu as well.
(Edited - asimpletune above said it more eloquently than I did!)
Further, appealing to authority is a logical fallacy. The facts count.
What's misleading is to pretend that a product, sold as a "vaccine", sold as originally possessing many of the commonly-understood qualifiers of the use of that term, turns out in reality to possess none of them.
It does not vaccinate against the disease. It does not vaccinate against being infected, harmed or killed by the disease. It is for all intents and purposes, not a "vaccine" by any prior widely-accepted definition.
These "vaccines" limited effects at reducing symptoms (the only remaining claim of late), do not even persist more than a week or two before beginning to wane to nothing. These are at best therapeutic drugs, not vaccines.
That is, they are - broadly - failures. Quibbling about ever narrower definitions of what constitutes the failure bears little useful relevance to the unfortunate reality, instead only seeming to facilitate manufacturer public relations.
It reduces the chances of all three, and _dramatically_ reduces the chances of the last two. That's what vaccines do. Now, it's not a _great_ vaccine. There are a couple of magic bullet near-100% effective vaccines (for instance, only 3% of people with the MMR vaccine exposed to Measles will get Measles, and the smallpox vaccine is 95% effective), and there are some... less effective ones (assuming the right strain is targeted the flu vaccine is 40-60% effective at preventing infection, and reduces chances of death somewhat).
Hopefully better vaccines will become available, but for now we are where we are.
I mean, if you want to say "only things with >90% efficacy at preventing infection are vaccines"... okay, but what do you want to call all the vaccines that that excludes?
> These "vaccines" limited effects at reducing symptoms (the only remaining claim of late), do not even persist more than a week or two before beginning to wane to nothing
Eh? Where are you getting that? It does look like efficacy vs _infection_ diminishes rapidly (at least for two doses; insufficient evidence to say anything with great certainty about three doses so far), but a two-dose course from last year remains quite effective at preventing severe outcomes (though less effective than three doses).
> These are at best therapeutic drugs, not vaccines.
They're not therapeutic drugs at all; if you give the vaccine to someone who _currently has covid_ it won't help them (at least for that particular case of covid).
> That is, they are - broadly - failures.
In Ireland, we have about 95% adult vaccination. Most of our current ICU cases are unvaccinated under-65s; there are almost no vaccinated under-65s, and a small number of vaccinated over-65s (essentially all over-65s are vaccinated). I would not call this a _failure_, at all. If the ICU rate was the same in the general population as in the unvaccinated population, ICU capacity would be exhausted and people would die needlessly. Preventing that is a success.
Meanwhile in Queensland which had suffered 29 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, the health minister just announced that 7 more people died overnight, and they were all vaccinated - but not "boosted". Ie, two shots of, as the Pfizer CEO put it, a vaccine of "limited effectiveness, if any". So there we have it, two shots and not three and you're dead, apparently. Who's clogging up the ICU's there?
And have a look out of the proverbial window. Almost everywhere there's more cases, more hospitalisations and more deaths. That is, if the vaccines worked: they'd work.
But they haven't, and don't. In many places we're in a worse position than before we had them.
That is, they're failures.
Meanwhile things that do actually work, and even have their mechanisms of action completely understood underlying why they work, are sidelined, suppressed or even banned.
If indeed in Ireland you have "95% vaccination", why do you have any cases, hospitalisations or deaths? If it doesn't work at 95% take-up, when does it work? How can the R-value even do anything remotely ICU-clogging with a single digit percentage? On the surface, it doesn't add up.
But a little deeper, and it maybe begins to... because when you're counting "vaccinated" people, be sure not to mix up who is "vaccinated" and who isn't, according to the latest shift in the goal posts. In some places for example, if you have been "fully vaccinated" but not had a third shot, you're considered "unvaccinated" again, and will die in that category. Further, were you "fully vaccinated", by whatever definition, but have only been so for 14 days, and die, in some places indeed you'll also die considered "unvaccinated".
Or to put it another way, how many of the people dying and clogging ICU's never had any shot at all, and how many did?
And why?
Even if we set the bar at death I guarantee someone would step up and say: "Yes, but they would've died even sooner without the vaccine! Oh come ye let us praise it". The religious fervour is bizarre. Let's face it - the vaccines are a bit shit.
> These findings demonstrate that such cases and hospitalizations have occurred in New York State, but at levels substantially lower than among unvaccinated people
Of course, one could argue that New York State doesn't make a large scale statistic, but it's still far from being anecdata.
Make a claim. Provide the evidence.
Otherwise you're just one of the people that refuses to accept reality.
It is not reasonable to ask for "evidence" for his observations, either, as that is impossible to provide. Not even the article posted here provides any evidence, you just chose to trust them as an institution.
He did not write an article for publication, it is just a comment in an internet forum. It is absolutely OK to report personal experiences in that context.