Implications of suboptimal Covid-19 vaccination coverage in Florida and Texas | Hacker News Reader

Implications of suboptimal Covid-19 vaccination coverage in Florida and Texas

thelancet.com

6 pointsthis_steve_j10 comments

Heh, I bounced between urban Florida and Texas during the pandemic.

Our Florida neighbors had an "anti mask party" where the whole point was to show up in protest of masks. The street was packed with cars. And they weren't even stereotypical "Florida man" kinda folk, I would describe them as free spirits, very liberal and relatively wealthy for our neighborhood.

Meanwhile, I have other family that refused vaccines because they were "not Christian." A seperate, nonreligious Texas in-law works as a nurse, and they are anti vaccine. And again, this is urban Texas which is far more liberal than the rural areas.

...The study postulates the "two states could have averted" the high toll, but honestly, it feels like a miracle the vaccination rate was as high as it was. Local governments pushed vaccines pretty hard.

There’s probably a relationship between the severity of a pathogen’s disfigurement and uptake of vaccines among the people who don’t get routine medical care.

The study authors concluded: collectively, these two states could have averted more than 95,000 hospital admissions and 22,000 deaths had they reached the vaccination coverage achieved by the top five states and continued at the same pace from October 2020 until August 2021.

Did they correct for COVID deaths by motorcycle accident, gunshot wound, and heart attack? I don't think a vaccine would have prevented those deaths.

> As the CDC report notes, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.” In other words, 94 percent of Americans who have died from coronavirus from the week ending February 1, 2020 to the week ending August 22, 2020 had, on average, almost three comorbidities that played a role in their death.

> Anecdotally, there are several stories of cases in which people with COVID-19 had deadly heart attacks, yet these cases were coded as COVID-19 deaths. In one extreme case, a Florida man who died in a motorcycle crash happened to also have COVID-19 at the time, yet was coded as having died from COVID-19, not because of the motorcycle accident.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/514915-is-us-covid-19...

More than 1.2 million people died of Covid in the US. Motorcycle accidents could not have accounted for more than 6,000 of those. We have good estimates of excess deaths (deaths over the expected numbers of heart attacks and other causes), that suggest the 1.2 million is an underestimate.

But we desperately need an honest, transparent, review of coding versus reality.

There was a (lancet?) submission reviewing autopsies, but that was rejected. It came to some pretty stark conclusions, so it was either questionable outright, or perhaps getting too close to the truth. I hope the former, but I can’t help but wonder if it might be the latter.

At present, data is too opaque. And it’s not the kind of data that can be shared openly — too personally identifying, and too private. So I can see why it’s not happened. But at the same time, there’s too much politicisation to take the current figures as a reliable indicator. So something needs to happen.

It is not clear to me how desperate the need is. It is not hard to find examples of things that, at first glance, seem clearly nonsensical. But some examples may be miscoded and corrected later, while other examples are simply misunderstandings of the common use of the code. This seems to be the primary strategy for election deniers. But even if a tree is actually a large bush, forests still exist. We can predict with reasonable accuracy how many people will die of the most common causes, because the numbers are big. That is the strength of excess death estimates. I do not think there is much disagreement over most of these statistics by people who understand the estimation process.

There was a bit of a 180 in FL during 2021. One week the governor was announcing mass vaccinations at retirement communities, and the next week he was with volunteers giving shots of monoclonal antibodies at libraries and nurses protesting the vaccine requirements at their workplaces (presumably health clinics).

As the year progressed, there was a collective run on Ivermectin horse paste at the farm & feed stores, no wait to get a Delta booster vaccine at Walmart, and no small number of death threats being made against public health and local officials who retreated from the “liberal” mask and vax talking points.

Also, the lines were very short at Disney World.

Can we get a (2021) in the title?

If I can find a way to do that I will, and certainly for future submissions. Thanks!

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