I'm agnostic about how dangerous the vaccines are; the signal is awfully noisy. Boy, oh, boy, though, I'm having a hard time seeing any doubt about their efficacy against serious illness. That's not a noisy signal.
I'm still completely uninterested in forcing anyone to get vaccinated or boosted, but I'm glad we did. We're exactly at the age when it makes sense.
At my age, per this chart, there is no statistical benefit to a booster. That makes it all downside.
ReplyDeleteThat might well be how I looked at if I were you.
ReplyDeleteMatches my anecdotal experience. I'm a critical care nurse so have taken care of lots of covid patients. Even now we are seeing mainly unvaxed with serious disease. The vaxed covid patients are those with cancer or other problems, or with mild illness who present due to other diseases.
ReplyDeleteFeel free to speak up more often, Tom.
ReplyDeleteI got the numbers for our county yesterday, where I am a volunteer firefighter. Omicron has been here for weeks. Hospitalizations are only a third of what they were last year, however. Nevertheless the hospitals are still somewhat stressed due to a labor shortage: regional hospitals are running short of personnel from nearly a hundred workers to over a hundred and fifty, especially nurses. Some of this is because nurses have become 'traveling nurses,' going off to where the crisis is worse and therefore pay is better. (One can hardly blame them for that, and it is probably a good market response to allocating scarce nursing resources anyway.)
There's a clear spike for the 60-69 group compared to the other groups (interesting drop after 69...), but what the graph also makes clear is that it's an extremely tiny risk of needing what ICNARC says is "critical care."
ReplyDeleteHowever, even at 3+ times the rates for the adjacent groups, 3+ times almost nothing remains right next to nothing. I fully understand the decisions of folks to not bother with getting vaccinated, whatever their rationale. The risk of anything serious just isn't there. And for all the hype about "needing" to get the booster shot, the chart makes clear what a waste of time that is.
On the other hand, I also fully support the decision to get vaccinated; the vaccines do seem to lessen severity in those cases between symptoms presenting and actually needing serious care: it's just no fun being sick.
Eric Hines
I thought the drop in the 70+ stats was odd, too.
ReplyDelete@ E Hines. the dropoff after 69 is because of lower population. 75-80 were never born. The others are already dead. Not likely of covid, but cumulatively over the years.
ReplyDeleteI don't see what you mean about next to no risk for critical care being part of the graph. Critical care usually means high death rate from acute illnesses, all of which are rather rare. A large increase in that is always concerning. Hospitals seldom design for more than typical capacity for anything, for good economic reasons. But that also means it is easy to exceed expectations. I worked in an acute hospital for decades that worked its way down to about 150 beds with improved community and followup care. Then the Powers decided that if we just forced everyone to cut corners more by closing a 24-bed unit, and we went to people waiting in ERs around the state for the next seven years on waitlists. The waitlist hovered around 24 the first four years, but as population grew, the waitlist grew as well. It compromised care at both our hospital and the sending hospitals. The margin matters at hospitals.
@ Grim - it is tough on hospital staffing because of a turnover of people out for quarantining, which they have decided is a necessary cost regardless because of both patient and co-worker safety. Even though they come back in a relatively short period of time, there is another batch who got infected.
@AVI — while that is also a factor, these were described as open positions. We are actually short around a hundred people per hospital.
ReplyDeletethe dropoff after 69 is because of lower population. 75-80 were never born.
ReplyDeleteThe population sizes are wholly irrelevant. The numbers in the graph are rates, as the y-axis label makes clear: 41 cases per 100,000 population vs 11 per 100,000. The rate drop-off is interesting.
I don't see what you mean about next to no risk for critical care being part of the graph.
You may think that likelihood of "critical care" approaching zero is worth getting excited over; I do not. To the extent that presents an actual risk, it comes from the hospital's decision to cut those corners you described, not from any Wuhan Virus-related medical factor. If Government wants that risk reduced, it needs to get out of the way of the businesses and let the markets run their course. Those business/government decisions have no bearing on the medical need for vaccination; it's strictly a hospital-as-partial-victim/government mandate artificially created need.
Eric Hines
I wonder if the 'rate per 100,000' numbers are based on the number of people in each age/vaxx-status combination group (which would be the right way to do it), or rather on just the number of people in each age category?
ReplyDeleteWould certainly hope it's the former, but I've seen so much bad data analysis that have to wonder.
I wonder if the 'rate per 100,000' numbers are based on the number of people in each age/vaxx-status combination group....
ReplyDeleteThe ICNARC report is here (I think it's the one Mainwood is referencing in his tweet): https://www.icnarc.org/Our-Audit/Audits/Cmp/Reports , and follow the COVID-19 Report link.
Mainwood's tweeted graph seems to be one he created from his own analysis of the ICNARC report and data.
ICNARC's explanation of its normalization to per 100k numbers begins on pg 44-ish of their report, and it strongly applies (although the explanation isn't explicit on this point) that the normalization is per age/vax status group, not per total population.
Eric Hines
E Hines...thanks!
ReplyDeleteI would expect that there's a cumulative culling through the 60-70 age range that means those that live to 72 or so are more likely to keep living for a while, and those who don't, well, didn't. Self selective group in some sense.
ReplyDeleteI've always been interested in the immunological status of the elderly--increasingly so as I've now hit 65. On the one hand, our immune systems are old and wise to lots of different pathogens. On the other, in some if not most of us, it just quits working as well: it may be good at recognizing the intruder but bad at mounting a counteroffensive. So I find it easy to imagine that part of what's going on is a brutal sorting of the elderly crowd into the ones that did and didn't make it through the first two years of the pandemic. Is the effect strong enough to produce this graph, though? That's a pretty wild drop-off in the last column. Of course the deaths from the disease are also highly concentrated in that last column, so maybe it's plausible. It would be great to see some solid research in the area.
ReplyDeleteThe Israeli data doesn't show any such drop-off:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-efficacy-vs-severe-disease-be-strong-when-60-of-hospitalized-are-vaccinated
...see the table Israel Active Cases, September 2, 2021
I wonder if either the UK data is an outlier or there's something we don't understand about it.
never use the stats of the same government culling the population, to determine if they are culling the population or not.
ReplyDeleteIt's a lesson people will learn just as they did with the main sewer news. It is not a matter of bias or a slight slant in the news.