This data is out of date. The cut off is July 2nd, it doesn't take into account delta, or the fact not a high amount of people were vaccinated at that point.
The most up to date data comes from Public Health England.
Public Health England published a report last week which gave us this data for the period of August 9th to September 5th.
It shows that of 2,381 deaths in this period, 1,659 or 69.7%, more than two thirds, were in the double vaccinated. Six hundred deaths or 25.2% were in the unvaccinated. This is very different to the ONS statistics as quoted in the press that 99% of deaths were in those not double vaccinated.
In the over-50s, the PHE report showed that 1,621 of 2,222 deaths or 73% were in the double vaccinated compared to 499 or 22.5% in the unvaccinated. Once you take into account the proportions of the over-50s vaccinated and unvaccinated this works out at a vaccine effectiveness against death of 68.1% – respectable, but a far cry from the kind of claims being made by the ONS.
It’s not clear yet how well vaccine effectiveness is holding up against serious disease. Data from Israel indicates that it may drop to 55% in the over-65s over six months. The age profile of Covid patients in the U.K. has also been rising again, which may indicate declining efficacy.
It’s depressing to see the ONS seemingly allowing itself to be used as a vehicle for the Government’s vaccine propaganda campaign.
Anecdotally, my wife has been working covid ICU this month and to her it's not surprising. The people with breakthrough cases apparently have so many comorbidities that it's not surprising at all they'd get vaccinated with high priority but also have an immune system that doesn't do a great job learning new skills from the shots.
The people for whom the shot is least effective are the ones that get it the most.
Yeah it's kind of ridiculous both sides skewing statistics. (Granted, it's ridiculous that there are "sides" to this thing at all).
But I get super annoyed when I see things like CNN reporting 99% of deaths since January were unvaccinated. I mean, duh, hardly anybody was vaccinated then and those first months were the highest death rates. I'd like to give them a pass because, hey, maybe it'll convince more people to vaccinate. But it also creates cannon fodder for anyone who is viewing it critically. Both sides are so stupidly irresponsible.
>>The people for whom the shot is least effective are the ones that get it the most.
It's not that the vaccine is less effective for them. It's that they're starting with much poorer immunity, so even with the significant immunity boost provided by the vaccine, they still have significant susceptibility to the virus.
Without the vaccine, their numbers would look much worse than the unvaccinated.
Also it is very likely that the people with most comorbidities where vaccinated earlier, so have had the longest period of post-vaccination.
So we are likely looking at a sub-group that both has multiple comorbidities _and_ has had the longest period of post-vacination. Even assuming that the decay of effectivenesss is small over time it may be a contributor.
Glancing though the report you linked, it says 55-70% reduction in symptomatic disease after 1 dose and more after 2. Higher effectiveness against severe disease, hospitalisation and death. For delta, they quote a 10-15% drop of effectiveness after two/one doses respectively. That seems in line with the “official” line and different to your numbers? Or am I reading you wrong?
Another nugget in there is that something like 95-97 of the population has Covid antibodies, from either disease or vaccination. I’m surprised actually that is is going as strong as it is still. I know antibodies are no silver bullet, but that means that a huge proportion of the country has either been sick already or had a vaccine recently. That seems as good as it can be for a “herd immunity” case, and yet infections are high. Hmm...
> Another nugget in there is that something like 95-97 of the population has Covid antibodies
That is almost certainly wrong. Vaccine uptake in under-12 is 0% and vaccine uptake in young adults is low. There's no way to make those kinds of seroprevalence numbers work.
The PHE report measures both antibodies from natural immunity, and antibodies from (vaccine or natural infection or both). (They don't have a vaccine-only measure.) The former is in the 20% range, depending on age. The latter is in the 97%+ range, again depending on age, reaching essentially 100% for older people.
The big caveat is that the sample population consists of blood donors, which may or may not be representative of the overall population.
You appear to have missed the conclusions of the report:
“Analysis on the direct and indirect impact of the vaccination programme on infections and mortality, suggests the vaccination programme has prevented between 24.4 and 24.9 million infections and between 108,600 and 116,200 deaths”.
Seatbelts are highly effective at preventing car crash deaths, but if everyone wears seatbelts then 100% of people who die in car crashes will be seatbelt users.
It was always expected that vaccination would be less effective in elderly patients. Some research is underway now to see if that can be improved by administering rapalogs.
I think your analysis doesn't account for the fact that the majority of double vaccinated people are also at far higher risk of covid to begin with. There was an interesting article about this (Simpson's Paradox, as it's known in the world of data analysis) recently: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-... -- the overall trend is reversed when the data are grouped properly.
The preponderance of evidence shows that the covid vaccines are overwhelmingly effective and safe for the vast majority of people. Your alarmism and calling Government vaccination campaigns propaganda is contributing to the spread of an incurable but now preventable disease that is killing thousands of people daily and you should feel bad about that. You are a menace to society.
Propaganda is simply information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
How else would you explain the fact they used old data? Incompetence?
Its clear the vaccines don't prevent much, you still catch, spread, and die from covid after being fully jabbed. This is what the report shows, and unfortunately been seen by myself through friends, and family.
Could calling people a menace to society do damage to a society simply because they are showing other points to your own?
Indeed. I also thought the ad hominem at the end was uncalled-for and unnecessary.
I'm very glad for the vaccine, it allowed me to start acting a bit more like a human again.
But words like "overwhelming" and "fully preventable" are their own kind of evil. Even a risk reduction as high as 90% only means your previous risk is now a tenth of what it was, but not zero or anything close to it.
This means people should still be using other measures to stop the spread, and perhaps words like "overwhelming" and "fully preventable" are enabling cavalier behaviours that are detrimental. One might even go as far as saying that people who enable such detrimental behaviours are a menace to society?
See? It's quite easy to reverse the ad hominem. Best to leave it out of a conversation altogether.
“The PHDA dataset was used in order to calculate the ASMRs by vaccination status and Table 3. One of the main strengths of the linked PHDA is that it combines a rich set of demographic and socio-economic factors from the 2011 Census and 2019 Patient Register with pre-existing conditions based on clinical records. This unique dataset was linked to NIMS and Test and Trace to allow us to analyse how ASMRs differ by vaccination status, when people were infected relative to vaccination, and examine the characteristics of people by vaccination status and infection date.
The PHDA contains data on approximately 79% of the population of England aged 10 years and over and includes 85.9% of all deaths of residents in England that occurred between 2 January 2021 and 2 July 2021 and were registered by 28 July 2021.“
I think there are a couple points you missed:
From that Table 5. in the PHE report, younger ages 20-59 are having less deaths still than unvaccinated. It is a clear pattern from this table the younger you are - the better off when double vaccinated.
68.1% efficacy against death is huge, and for that period is likely to be mostly delta variant, we can't just forget about Alpha variant which vaccine does amazing with, which the previous data shows.. not sure how this points to them being "government propaganda" campaign. Although I agree it's a bit disappointing they are not painting the full picture.
But people reading that "73% of new deaths were unvaccinated" would cause panic among people that don't understand you need to take into account ~90% of population aged >60 have been double vaccinated for a while now .
There is literally nothing dishonest in this report, and yet you seem very eager to call it propaganda.
The Delta variant does change things a lot over the past two months, but that's a different story that will warrant additional study and likely a v.2 of the vaccine.
I haven't said there is anything dishonest about the ONS report, simply that the data is out of date.
Propaganda is simply information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicise a particular political cause or point of view.
Facts like these don't matter to the COVID-obsessed. Turns out that screaming 24/7 for 18 months at people they're going to die messes with their cognitive abilities. Go figure! And here I thought doing this would keep us calm and rational.
We basically have a best-case scenario today and an awful lot of people don't care and still think it's doomsday. Vaccines are fantastic at reducing COVID to a cold, kids are at no risk, the overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk, vaccines are available, natural immunity is great, and ironically, vaccines DONT stop transmission. So, we're all gonna get it, anyone who wants to be protected can be, and unvaccinated people don't matter because COVID is already endemic and we're all gonna get it so we have a clear path towards herd immunity. This is great!
And here we are, instead making illogical and probably illegal rules that accomplish literally nothing, make everything worse, perpetuate irrational fear, etc. We scapegoat "the unvaccinated" and start this medical class warfare and just ramp up unnecessary hatred of each other. And worst of all, it doesn't protect anyone and probably will make COVID worse.
Linked is a fascinating dataset showing exactly what you are talking about. The average american thinks if they get covid, their odds of dying from it around 10%. In younger age brackets this is almost 1000x wrong.
People are very, very badly misinformed about their risks for covid. This makes it almost impossible to have rational, grounded discussion of public policy. If everybody is walking around thinking covid is a death sentence, of course they will beg of all the crap we are doing right now.
There have been a bunch of surveys similar to this that are all strong evidence of how disgraceful the messaging has been from politicians, health departments, media, etc. But the real problem with surveys like this are asking people what the "average" chance of death or hospitalizations are. We know that the risk from COVID are highly stratified by things like age and obesity and pre-existing conditions, so "average" is wildly inadequate as a measure to describe the real world. A statistics course explaining the difference between normal and Pareto distributions would go a long way in bringing many people back to reality. Alas...
I just recently recovered from a breakthrough case (double jab Moderna) and the fear was absolutely the worst part. You scrutinize every breath. Check your oxygen constantly. Sit around wondering if tomorrow is the day you go to the ER. Or maybe it’s day 10. Sit around completely isolated from friends and family wracked with a fever and try not to lose your mind.
Of course. The conspiracy guys has been the ones who have been correct through this pandemic, predicting every escalation, and the coming response.
If you are someone intelligent who wants to know about covid for real, you should read the conspiracy subreddit on reddit and also turn off the TV news. That's the actual truth, but people can't take it.
I remember last year, before the US elections, some of the conspiracy guys said "Just watch, after the election COVID will magically go away. This was all a ploy to make Trump look bad.". Others said "COVID will be around forever, the government will never give up emergency powers".
I could conclude that the latter camp was correct. Or that when you have competing versions of conspiracy theories, predicting different outcomes, one of them will always appear to be prescient after the fact. Then you can ignore the others that didn't pan out, and say that everything that's happened so far has been predicted by the conspiracy guys.
Line of reasoning doesn't seem to account for ICU occupancy levels & reduces outcomes to simply "lived" vs "died" without looking at sub-outcomes under "lived" category.
You're right. There is more nuance. For instance, many of the concerns about "long COVID" are legitimate.
But even within the nuance the statistics are being used to support narratives that aren't always honest. Just look at the news that apparently 40-45% of COVID hospitalizations are actually people who were admitted for another reason and just so happened to test positive upon admission.
The article references two studies. One was looking at pediatric populations and the other adult populations:
> The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.
> The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
> This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.
Knowing that almost 50% of the hospitalizations in both children and adults that are classified as COVID hospitalizations aren't really for COVID totally obliterates the narrative in the media about how (mostly unvaccinated) COVID patients are overwhelming the hospitals.
> kids are at no risk, the overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk
What I've been looking for for a long time now is data on infection, hospitalization rates and mortality by vaccination status and age. They all get mixed and it's never really clear to me what the risk for, say, a vaccinated 40 year old or an unvaccinated 1 year old really is.
> AND IF EVERYONE HAD JUST GOTTEN VACCINATED NONE OF THIS WOULD BE HAPPENING AND WE WOULD BE BACK TO NORMAL.
We can't know that. You are assuming. For all we know, if everyone got vaccinated the virus could have mutated around it faster, leaving us at square one.
Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. You did that repeatedly in this thread and that's not cool.
Even if you don't feel you owe the people you're disagreeing with better, you owe this community better if you're posting here.
It is one of thousands of comments we've moderated.
Picking two random points to contrast is the extreme of sample bias. You can make anything look like anything that way. As it happens, though, we've moderated that other commenter in exactly the same way as this one.
Could you please stop creating accounts to troll HN with? It's tedious.
Perhaps, but you also don't get what I am saying. If we vaccinated everyone, the virus wouldn't be eradicated because animals can be hosts. Because of that, the evolutionary pressure put on the virus by everyone being vaccinated could result in the virus mutating enough to evade immunity. The same thing happens with flu every year.
You're having an argument with someone who isn't me.
If you vaccinate everyone then the near perfect VE against severe disease and hospitalization keeps people out of the hospitals and keeps them from falling over. And that is sufficient.
I never said anything about eradicating the virus or eliminating all infection and transmission. But at that point THEN you have hit the point where "its just a flu" arguments can kick in and the virus can do whatever the hell it wants to and the hospital system won't fall over.
And due to T-cells and cross-reactive T-cells (and the persistence and lack of waning of T-cells as shown by the SARS-CoV-1 17+ year T-cell persistence) then any future mutation which achieves immune escape from Nabs should still just be "flu" rather than "COVID-22" or whatever.
Get everyone vaccinated first, then we're basically done with it as a pandemic. Then you get what you want, which is living with an endemic virus, but one which will have much less disease burden than it currently has in the unvaccinated population.
Or put simply, to stop the waves of nearly 100% unvaccinated people dying in hospitals, just vaccinate everyone. No unvaccinated people, no hospitals falling over.
> Or put simply, to stop the waves of nearly 100% unvaccinated people dying in hospitals, just vaccinate everyone. No unvaccinated people, no hospitals falling over.
Half of the people getting hospitalized are not getting hospitalized for COVID. They are just testing positive for COVID.
And hospitals nearly always run near capacity. And their capacity is also determined by staffing, which is going down because nurses don't want to get vaccinated against a virus they are probably immune to.
All factors matter. You can't just claim vaccination would be a panacea, even if it appears that way.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've done it repeatedly lately (e.g. this comment, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28514075). It has the effect of destroying curious conversation, which is what we're trying for here.
Tolerating the spread of false and manipulative information and opinions does much worse things than destroying "curious conversation." As i said - society is sitting on a high horse with its choice to tolerate nonsense for the sake of "guidelines" and inclusion and that has proven detrimental for everyone but the undertakers.
Do you have a button in the admin panel that will save the next person who believed that they're part of the "overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk?"
Maybe so, but that doesn't make it ok to post name-calling rants on divisive topics, which is directly against HN's rules. If you want to do something about false information, there are ways to do that which don't break the HN guidelines. As a bonus, they're also more likely to be persuasive (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I've noticed that when people use phrases like "the spread of false and manipulative information and opinions", they generally just seem to mean "I think X is wrong and I feel strongly about it" (because such comments generally contain no information to disambiguate what they're saying from the latter). In other words, phrases like "manipulative information", "dis/misinformation", and so on, are generally pejoratives that express an intensified feeling. If we take such statements at the level of their components, i.e. "X is false" and "I feel strongly", it's easier to see how to deal with them in the intended spirit of this site:
X is false – patiently provide better information and explain how it is correct;
I feel strongly – take responsibility for regulating one's own feelings rather than venting them into language that blasts the opposing side.
There's nothing wrong with strong feelings, but it's important not to let them morph into aggression towards the perceived source of the feeling, such as by calling people who disagree with you stupid, and so on. We can't have that here because it destroys conversation. When other people who also feel strongly get hit with that, they respond in kind—where "in kind" means escalating, because it always feels like the other person is doing worse. That's how we get a downward spiral and we're trying to avoid that here (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&da...).
I guess you could say that, but this isn't really "news". There have been a variety of studies[0][1] over the past 6 months from various countries showing the remarkable effectiveness of covid vaccines. Just some people apparently don't want to believe it.
Because there are articles showing the vaccines are not effective and even dangerous as well. We can't hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time.
I don't think this is a particularly interesting stat without a baseline of what % of people fell into that category. Since this is computed over the time period January 2 to July 2 and mass vaccination didn't really take off until the spring, you wouldn't have a large number of people in that category until near the end of the study period.
I think you need to read it again. Especially table 1.
In the data they have they found that:
1. For all unvaccinated people, they had 38,964 covid-related deaths and 65,170 of other, non-covid-related deaths of unvaccinated people.
2. For all vaccinated people 21 days or more after second dose they found 458 covid-related and 57,263 non-covid-related deaths.
It doesn't matter when these were recorded (unless we want to account for Delta, but there is not enough data for this here).
So unless we are seeing huge increase in non-covid-related deaths of vaccinated people, this data suggests that vaccination makes it many, many times less likely that you are going to die of covid as compared to you dying to other things.
Which I think is wonderful news to see in actual numbers from a large sample of data gathered over longer period of time.
If that's is not a clear indication to you then I don't know what is.
Yes although the vaccine was given first to the most vulnerable people (ie more likely to die from other things) so this still doesn't give a clear sense of the improvement. No one is doubting the effectiveness of vaccines (ok a bunch of idiots, but not me) but this isn't the most helpful stat to assess the relative improvement.
The elderly were prioritized in getting vaccinated, and they have a higher baseline death rate. So it's still not clear what it means that the # of non-covid deaths in (1) and (2) is roughly the same.
I'm not disputing that the vaccines are effective at preventing death, but that doesn't mean that we can just point to any stat that looks good and celebrate without considering what it actually means.
Wouldn't that just point to the vaccine being even better than the stats suggest (by just looking at ratio of deaths of vaccinated / unvaccinated) since the vaccinated group would be the more vulnerable in the first place.
Also there are more people vaccinated than not now so that would also skew the data to make a direct comparison look worse.
The data you mention provides extremely strong support for vaccine effectiveness in preventing death. The single data point in GGP post is quite useless, as GP points out.
> So unless we are seeing huge increase in non-covid-related deaths of vaccinated people, this data suggests that vaccination makes it many, many times less likely that you are going to die of covid as compared to you dying to other things.
Unless it's happening within that 21-day window, which is the claim I've been seeing elsewhere for around a month now.
In unvaccinated people 37.4% of all deaths was from COVID (38,964/104,134)
In fully vaccinated people 0.8% of all deaths was from COVID (458/57,721)
This is all amazing news! However we still don't know how much worse the vaccines are against the Delta variant, since most deaths during the period were not from the new variant. It can't be too bad though.
As stated in the report, “ the characteristics of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations are changing over time, which limits the usefulness of comparing counts between the groups.”
It is still useful to be able to answer "What was your chance of dying of covid compared to all other types of deaths based on your vaccination status".
Because if you can't do that you can compare data even with the status and vaccination rates changing over time.
So even if we lump together all different cases at different times saying that person in this class of people had less than 1% of chance of dying to covid vs. another class where you had 30% of chance of dying to covid is a clear indication that one class was much more resistant to dying than other.
Yes, what is the the overall mortality rate for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. Ballpark estimates looking at the vaccination rate over time, it seems like vaccinated people had almost double the mortality rate of unvaccinated.
UK had strict age-banded rollout, starting with the eldest. By the end of this study, I had just had my first dose (I'm 27, and I booked it as soon as possible). It's not at all surprising that older populations were more likely to die.
Depends on the demographics of who gets vaccinated and who doesn't. If the elderly get vaccinated at a higher rate, it seems normal that vaccinated people would have a higher non-covid mortality rate.
It is also not surprising if healthy people are less likely to get vaccinated.
Wouldn’t the original study depend on demographics as well? If the young get vaccinated at a higher rate, it seems normal that unvaccinated people would have a higher covid mortality rate.
Defined in the glossary. It seems to mean where the person had an active covid infection at time of death, and excludes people who recovered from covid but died anyway.
This data needs to be framed against the % of the population that was vaccinated at the time they contracted the virus, right? Otherwise, for all we know, the vaccine could actually increase mortality if the % vaccinated was smaller than the % of deaths that group represents. I'm assuming that isn't the case but hard to make meaningful conclusions about efficacy without that context. The apparent efficacy of vaccination is at the very least somewhat inflated because between Jan and July is when everyone got vaccinated, I'm assuming in England, like here in the US, basically no one was vaccinated in Jan, Feb.
Also, bucketing people who were vaccinated with previously infected makes sense as an additional lens to look at things through, but it seems odd that they then omitted reporting those group separately. I'm very curious how one did compared to the other.
> This data needs to be framed against the % of the population that was vaccinated at the time they contracted the virus, right?
No, it does not.
It compares chance of you dying to covid compared to all other possible causes.
This dimensionless number does not depend on relative population sizes.
So if in one population you get 458 deaths from Covid compared to 57,263 from all other causes and in the other population you get 38,964 from covid compared to 65,170 from all other causes, we can immediately tell that one population fared much better at least when it comes to your chance to die of covid compared to chance of dying to all other causes.
Just by the fact of being in one population than in the other you get (38964/(38964+65170)) / (458/(458+57263)) ~= 47 times less chance of dying to covid assuming rates of deaths to all other causes were the same between both populations.
So what are these population? To be in the better-faring population you had to be fully vaccinated for at least 21 days and the worse population was completely unvaccinated.
Now, I am pretty sure there are other factors that factor in that number 47.
It is likely that vaccinated people treat Covid more seriously and are more likely to practice social distancing, washing hands and be generally mindful of various things you do to minimize chance of getting infected. They might also possibly wait shorter amount of time before calling for help if they see signs. While this is pure conjecture on my part I think it is reasonable to assume this happens to some extent and reduces rates of infection within vaccinated population.
I think the problem with this report is the headline figure is due to an apples and oranges comparison. The big number of deaths is mostly due to a point in time where LOTS of people were dying from Covid19 in the UK.
We end up comparing the population at one point in time where there were lots of deaths and a low vaccination rate to another point in time where there were few deaths and a much higher vaccination rate. No doubt part of the reason why there are fewer deaths now is due to the vaccine. However, I suspect part of the reason is also not vaccine related. You can see this if you look at the raw data. There was a very high rate of deaths for the unvaccinated in the first few months of the year. But now there is a very low rate of deaths for the unvaccinated. However, this comparison is fraught with danger because there is a selection effect with a lot of vulnerable people opting into the vaccine leaving the unvaccinated population much less susceptible to the virus.
Also, it is important to note that data has been apparently truncated at a point where it paints a more positive picture for vaccines.
Personally, I think the vaccine has had very large impact for some vulnerable groups. For some other groups I suspect it has had a negligible impact. But I also think there has been a strong push to juice the figures to make the vaccines look better than they are.
The problem with this generalization is that the vaxxed/unvaxxed populations are ultimately very different.
Vaxxed group is older, unvaxxed are younger.
i.e. groups are not randomly distributed.
They are going to have different risk factors and die of different things.
This showed up in British Columbia's health data that showed infections and hospitalizations way, way down for the vaxxed relative to unvaxxed, but the ratio between the two for actual deaths was not as extreme, because vaccinated population skewed older, more vulnerable, more likely to die even when fully vaxxed.
Should note that age-standardized mortality rates are included in the study.
>>> So if in one population you get 458 deaths from Covid compared to 57,263 from all other causes and in the other population you get 38,964 from covid compared to 65,170 from all other causes, we can immediately tell that one population fared much better at least when it comes to your chance to die of covid compared to chance of dying to all other causes.
I think your math is off. What if the first population only has 458 people in it? 100% mortality for that population would obviously suggest you want to be part of the other population even if their total deaths were higher. The issue I'm calling out is that we don't know the size of each population. I certainly don't think vaccines increase mortality, I actually believe it has a large positive impact. The point is this data doesn't help us understand how impactful it really is and, given all the debate over this, if they'd framed the data with better context, this could actually be a very useful study in ending that debate.
> I think your math is off. What if the first population only has 458 people in it?
I think your thinking is off.
How do you get 57,263 other deaths in a population of 458?
This data is not comparing population sizes. It avoids it by comparing your chance of dying to covid to something else that is supposed stable between populations -- chance of dying to all other causes.
We just need to know that population sizes being compared are large enough (as evidenced from the number of deaths included) to be statistically significant.
Note this does assume that you are not immortal and will eventually die. If you’re holding out hope for Mr Bezos to discover an anti-aging elixir, you might interpret these stats more pessimistically.
I wonder how many of those unvaccinated people were people that for some reason could 't be vaccinated? Like immunocompromised patients that already have a higher risk of dying? This seems like an important factor?
UK recommendation was that immunocompromised people be vaccinated; they were prioritised, in fact, so ~all of the immunocompromised people would've been vaccinated for most of the time period.
No, they can generally take it, and most jurisdictions recommend it and prioritise them. There is some question of how effective it is in immunocompromised people; some appear not to produce very many antibodies for long after vaccination (though that's not all that great a proxy for efficacy).
Very important for thise people, but nut much for population statistics. And immunocompromised people can generally be vaccinated, the question which is still open is how effective the vaccine is for them.
There is a bit of a statistical artifact here: the number of person-days of people with both doses in the UK is very small during this period. Most adults had no doses or one dose for most of this period.
Vaccination is still great and I encourage everyone who can to get vaccinated, but the 640 people is drawing upon a much smaller population and time period.
You are mis interpreting the data, there were 640 Covid deaths among those who received both doses, not 640 participants. There were also 68,733 Non Covid deaths among that cohort. Not to mention everyone who didn't die.
I'm definitely not saying there are 640 participants, just that the size is unknown. Non-Covid deaths is a poor proxy of the population size, as that population is older because of how the vaccination programme worked. I don't think I'm making an interpretation, just pointing out the unknown
When I look at the first table I see a number of 220k non Covid death overall compared to 60k after the 2nd dose. Assuming those non Covid cases are constant over time I would assume the sample size is still bigger than 1/4. while not perfect that doesn’t look like „not enough samples“ to me.
I didn’t say “not enough samples,” only that the population size of fully vaccinated people is not known, and that it changed in the observation period. Therefore, computing mortality rates is not possible, no denominator
I don't understand, there were over 50k non-covid deaths in the twice vaccinated and around 500 covid deaths. That sounds significant, or is it due to the age distribution of twice vaccinated?
Apart from the fact that the data are not up-to-date with the newly emerged variants. The high correlation with unvaccinated and death may also be caused by third factors. The main one is that getting vaccinated is not a random event. It says something about the people in addition to the willingness to get vaccnated, especially in current divided atomosphere. The unvaccinated may do much more dangerous things like make contacts with more people, and not applying other measures that could lower the risk of contract COVID such as wearing a mask.
Death rate from covid, or death rate from heart problems and blood clots in their lungs?
As someone (aged 42 years) with grandfathers on both sides that died from heart issues in their late 40s, early 50s, the side effects of the vaccines are more worrisome to me than the virus itself. I'm preparing myself to be excluded from society and yet I've already had covid and recovered from it, because that's not an acceptable form of prevention.
You do realize the 'bloodclots' issue was with the astrozenica (sp?) vaccine, that was never approved here, and it was with only a handful of cases in women? Your risk of a second, more severe case of covid is *massively* higher than the risk of serious side effects from the vaccine.
I have no idea who that is, but I suspect it's a one off anecdote. Come to me with published studies in a respected journal that suggests bloodclots from the vaccine are a major problem
> Intriguingly, infection with SARS-CoV induces ACE2 down-regulation through binding of the viral Spike protein to ACE2, thus reducing ACE2 expression in the lung and igniting acute respiratory failure. Since COVID-19 and SARS patients share similar acute respiratory distress syndrome and a similar gender bias in disease susceptibility and case fatality rates, it is reasonable to believe that they share similar pathogenic mechanisms.
> Estrogen, the primary female sex hormone, has been observed to play a protective role in SARS not only by activating immune response but also suppressing directly SARS-CoV replication. To note, estrogen inhibits the activity or expression of different components of the renin–angiotensin system. In particular, estrogen is able to upregulate the expression of ACE2.
Would need to see this compared to cardiac events in unvaxed group, given Covid seems to cause many of those same symptoms. Comparing it to baseline levels from pre-covid, would be disingenuous.
Like big pharma will allow a control group to exist for this stuff... they still have immunity from anything that happens as a result of vaccines, right? Are you asking why yet, at this point?
Not to mention at this point zero evidence there's any connection between those alleged deaths and any vaccine. After all, it's a regular thing for people to die of heart disease.
I have been looking for one number. Maybe someone can help me. What is the mortality rate for unvaxxed healthy adults between the age of 18 and 50? I can’t help but be dubious that this group needs vaccination.
In healthy individuals? Very small. In the USA, a not very healthy country, only 3,728 of 529,402 deaths occurred under the age of 29. (38.7% of the population, 0.6% of the deaths.) I was expecting it to be much higher just based on obesity and diabetes and other comorbidity rates alone.
The inflection point happens in the 40's or 50's:
People under 40 are 52% of the population and 2% of COVID deaths (11,212)
Which of course means people over 40 are 48% of the population and 98% of COVID deaths (529,402)
These numbers reflect only cases where the CDC knows their age. The stats are here, which has a nice graph showing just how outsized the deaths as people get older: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics (scroll to "Deaths by Age Group")
Covid is (literally) exponentially worse as you get older. But it's not really an issue for young, healthy people. Alas, not very many people can truly call themselves healthy, which is a concern in its own right.
Personally surviving is only one of the reasons you should get vaccinated. It also helps reduce the prevalence of covid in the community in general, which will prevent other people from dying, not just the person who is vaccinated.
This is the same thing with wearing masks... you can't just look at the effect on the person wearing the mask, but also on other people around them.
I am confused at how people are still asking questions like this, seemingly in good faith. The point of masks and vaccines and even staying home as needed, is not specifically to prevent healthy 18-50 year olds from dying. It's to limit the spread to everyone else, bunging up hospital capacity, killing off old folk needlessly, and causing local governments to freak out and impose restrictions because their hospitals are at capacity.
Maybe it's not good faith, I don't know at this point.
If you’re on this site, you probably work in an industry where it feels like very large things can get done in 18 months. I remember in February 2020, before anything reached the US, watching China build a new hospital in all of 10 days. I have some vague understandings of “all-hands-on-deck” govt projects of the past. FDR’s WPA jobs program, etc.
So it’s dishearteningly easy to look at this situation from that point of view: “my government, and everyone currently exercising power, has had 18 months to do the dirty work of expanding health capacity, retrofitting buildings to make them safer in the presence of a virus (e.g. open-air supermarkets), and whatever else is necessary to help us all live how we’d like to during this time,” and instead they’ve not really tackled any of those things. We got the vaccine, which is a huge triumph, but beyond that it’s just “hey we need you as an individual to stay at home another couple years while we slack off and keep ignoring any opportunity for letting you live the life you did before.”
I know not all real world systems are as flexible as software systems, especially true of the Frankenstein healthcare system we have here. But it really is not hard for me to say “if this were my problem, I would solve it like an engineer, by building (more capacity, tools to make it easier to grow manpower in the areas they’re needed).” And then be upset at the people who are asking me to make my own life shit for another couple years so that they can avoid making life-long improvements to the systems that need it. Because if our roles were reversed here — if I were the one at risk of this disease — I would never ask of them what they’re asking of me. It’s just not how I think about the world or how I think about solving problems.
I think some people voicing GP’s comment really are doing it in good faith. People have different lived experiences that lead to radically different ways of thinking about the world and how to act within it. These disagreements will always exist. The pragmatist accepts that and says that of the range of possible solutions to your problem, the most successful is the one that can be grounded in this world where people disagree with each other and pursue their own interests.
Thank you for your answer. I was asking the question in good faith.
Coming from an engineering and entrepreneurial background, I can't help but recognize myself in your comment. I do feel like we should have done a "war effort" to improve our healthcare system and even our public buildings. I can agree it's not an easy task, but it seems 1000 times more productive than locking people at home. Plus, it would ready us for the next epidemic or pandemic. Now, if we get hit again, we're doing lockdowns again.
As for protecting myself versus protecting others, I do understand the logic. I haven't been living under a rock for the past 18 months. However, what I hear is that vaccinated people don't get very sick from Covid. If that is true, why do I need to be vaccinated as well? Aren't they already protected? Let's put this simply, my grand-mother is 84 years old and vaccinated. If I end up giving her Covid she will most-likely be fine. And even if I were vaccinated I could still catch and transmit Covid.
Once all at-risk people are vaccinated, haven't we "won" the war on Covid?
I 100% agree that we should have done and should still do more to prepare for this and future pandemics.
But I still wonder how you're not getting this. The vaccine greatly reduces your chances of getting sick, and getting stuck in a hospital, but it doesn't completely eliminate it. If everyone between 18-50 refused to get vaccinated, we would still see a surge in hospitalizations. Do you not understand the word "protected"?
Do you think that the utility of a young person getting vaccinated is zero? Or do you think it's just too small to be worth the inconvenience? I don't know why the conversation turns into "why do I have to do this" - can't we focus instead on why you aren't willing to help your community?
And again, has literally nobody addressed this in the last 18 months that you've read? I'm sure my tone is more hostile than I intend, but I'm really confused at this point.
It's just unreasonable to me that we're 18 months into this, and they haven't heard the point articulated that it isn't to prevent their death specifically, but their neighbors death and the overwhelming of the healthcare system. These discussions were fine for a long time, but at this point GP et al must be ignoring these points on purpose because they don't like the answer.
It's like the trivial "my body my choice right?" gotcha attempt. Does that serve any purpose other than to rile people up who are already in an echo chamber?
Your phrasing of the point, "I'm frustrated with these mandates and may not agree with them for this reason" is fine. But coming at it from a place of articulated-genuine curiosity doesn't make any sense to me, today, given how long these conversations have been happening.
How can we be 18 months into a global pandemic and so many people still not understand that diseases are contagious and “healthy” people who manage to avoid dying from the disease still spread it and also take away healthcare resources from other people who need treatment for any number of injuries and maladies?
I doubt you will find that one number anywhere. The CDC estimated a mortality rate of 0.06% for the 18-49 age group, but that doesn't account for health status.
Of those deaths, many had pre-existing conditions such as cancer, heart failure, obesity, and diabetes which drastically increased their risks. You'll have to do your own calculations on how that impacts your expected mortality rate.
of the ~7000 people that died of covid in the study ~1000 had no comorbidities. unfortunately this doesnt break down by vax status, but based on other studies ~90% of hospitalizations are unvaxed. So you can probably get an order of magnitude approximation for your metric.
Unfortunately though this isn't the only metric that should be considered because people with no comorbidities can transmit the virus to people with comorbidities, so you really want to take that into account.
Sure, THAT group may not need it to survive a covid infection, but it is not just about surviving a covid infection. It is about reducing covid in general so we can get closer to normal sooner.
This is normal now. There is no pharmaceutical product which provides sterile immunity. There is no population where transmission has been eliminated. Vaccine As A Service is the new business model. Or if you like gallows humor:
Two weeks? What do you need to flatten the curve for? Here’s your mask, now wear two until we have 70% vaccination, and I’ll let you out of the concentration camp when we reach 90% vaccination. Now you just owe me two weeks for delta.
There is a big problem with groups based solely by age; in truth, if you are metabolically unhealthy, either by diagnosis or have a suspicion you might be (if you're living a typical western lifestyle, chances are you are - 88% of american adults are metabolically unhealthy, look it up), and unwilling to make the necessary lifestyle changes, there is a possibility that vaccination might benefit you, but even there there is a spectrum, with factors increasing such as taking medication, being chronically stressed/depressed, not sleeping well, etc.
All in all, what I wanted to say is that the message to the masses is intentionally or not simplified, and it hides the nuances that everyone should apply to themselves. In my case, I have made drastic changes to better my health after a diagnosis of severe autoimmune illness more than a decade ago, and today am in much better health than I was then, so I have no benefit to expect from taking the vaccine.
There is, especially related to Covid: metabolic health (see https://www.unc.edu/posts/2018/11/28/only-12-percent-of-amer...), which of course correlates to immune system health. There is only one definition of physical health, and that is the proper functioning of one's bodily processes, with the functioning of the immune system as the centerpiece.
Same here. None of the data feels quite transparent. There seems to be a major taboo around supposing that beyond the R0 value which tends to overwhelm local hospitals during outbreaks, covid is actually not a serious concern for the vast, vast majority of <50, not obese/overweight people.
And I recently discovered that the reporting of overwhelmed hospitals is somewhat misleading as well, as in the US hospitals typically operate at 80-90% capacity for financial reasons, especially ICU wings which are expensive to upkeep on standby. So when the news reports that hospitals $CITY are overwhelmed, that's can be as little as ≈10% increase in patients.
If anything good comes of covid, hopefully we can see some effort to improve surge capacity in the US, but I'm not holding my breath.
With essentially zero short-term side effects of vaccination, compared to a significant (if not large) short-term mortality and medium-term morbidity from Covid, it is absolutely lunatic to not get the vaccine unless you have specific immune/allergic/blood conditions.
The article states that boys are 6 times more likely to get myocarditis than be hospitalized with covid. But such a claim is inherently biased. You have an extremely well followed population on the vaccine case, and a relatively poorly followed population in the infected case. As such, it should not be surprising when results like this are found; boys in that age range are 3-9 times more likely to get myocarditis from COVID itself than the vaccine: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133462-800-myocardi...
I'm looking forward to a 3rd vaccine dose if it's offered! The UK govt are looking to offer a Pfizer bosster, regardless of 1st & 2nd dose vaccine types. Mixing looks very effective.
Unfortunately it doesnt work that way - the infrustructure required for the mass production doses (pfizer, moderna) is pretty huge and third doses will be avilable in most regions long before 'everybody else' has the proper infrustructure in place. For this, it isnt purely zero sum.
Yes. For those at risk, a booster seems like an excellent idea. Hopefully there aren’t any downsides to widespread rollout. Downsides being ade or the increase in vaccine evasive variants. For the latter of those I am more concerned about waning efficacy than a booster, but who knows. It’s all one big messy experiment.
The most up to date data comes from Public Health England.
Public Health England published a report last week which gave us this data for the period of August 9th to September 5th.
It shows that of 2,381 deaths in this period, 1,659 or 69.7%, more than two thirds, were in the double vaccinated. Six hundred deaths or 25.2% were in the unvaccinated. This is very different to the ONS statistics as quoted in the press that 99% of deaths were in those not double vaccinated.
In the over-50s, the PHE report showed that 1,621 of 2,222 deaths or 73% were in the double vaccinated compared to 499 or 22.5% in the unvaccinated. Once you take into account the proportions of the over-50s vaccinated and unvaccinated this works out at a vaccine effectiveness against death of 68.1% – respectable, but a far cry from the kind of claims being made by the ONS.
It’s not clear yet how well vaccine effectiveness is holding up against serious disease. Data from Israel indicates that it may drop to 55% in the over-65s over six months. The age profile of Covid patients in the U.K. has also been rising again, which may indicate declining efficacy.
It’s depressing to see the ONS seemingly allowing itself to be used as a vehicle for the Government’s vaccine propaganda campaign.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-...