COVID-19: Chapter 7 - Brags, Beats, and Variants

The Lutherans I know are all pretty smart, science believing folks.

What would you have guessed?

This might have been covered already, but is there any reason for someone who hasnā€™t been vaccinated yet and is offered the 1 shot vaccine to not take it and wait for the 2 shot version?

The amount of open-for-everything going on around here is pretty frustrating. My fully vaxed partner went to a dinner and live music at a local bar for our friendā€™s birthday. I skipped since Iā€™m only half vaxed and didnā€™t feel like packing into a crowded bar was wise. I picked her up at midnight and the fucking streets were mobbed with people. Bars were packed and there were zero masks or social distancing. I assume most of these people were <30 so very low probability of vaccinations too.

I would be really interested to find out the demographics of who is still dying of COVID in the US on a daily basis. Our deaths are way down, 7dma down to around 800, but seniors and people with comorbidities in most states have had the vaccine available to them for over a month now. Is it seniors and people with comorbidities who werenā€™t able to get the vaccine? Is it seniors and people with comorbidities who were unwilling to get the vaccine? Is it normal healthy young people who are still dropping from it? I think this would be a really important thing to know. Especially if itā€™s healthy young people who are dropping, or people who have refused to be vaccinated, publicizing that could help with vaccine hesitancyā€¦

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Guy at airport last night mentioned he had travelled weekly through the whole pandemic. He still wears his GD mask to travel even though he been vaxxed and he doesnā€™t think they do anything and they are stupid. Something about using a fishing net to stop a mosquito. I couldnā€™t quite make it out.

Huh. Travelled for a whole year with a mask on during a pandemic and didnā€™t catch Covid. Itā€™s a mystery.

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Looking for better data, but as a quick data point mean age of death in MA last week was 77. It was low 80s pre vaccine. So would say, at least here, the clear majority still unvaccinated older people but skewing a bit younger than before as weā€™d expect. They used to publish full distribution data but either they stopped or made it less than easy to find forā€¦reasons (or Iā€™m just dumb, always possible)

It is unfortunate that we canā€™t use unmasking as an incentive for people to get vaccinated (because it looks like thereā€™s very little risk), however it would instantly be abused by deplorables I guess who pretended they had been vaccinated.

I guess the key datapoint that is impossible to get is how many of those old people refused to get vaccinated versus how many were unable to get an appointment. Still, a reduction from low 80ā€™s to 77 is not insignificant.

Eh, I think it is more than that, donā€™t think the science supports unmasking with case counts at current levels and population vaccination levels of 15-20 percent . Not easy for any individual vaccinated person to start a new cluster, but vaccine levels+large raw number of vaccinated+variants make this unwise even without the inevitable deplorable nonsense. I doubt even the vaccinated get unmasked until well into 2022

Yeah, probably no way to get to that unfortunately. MA reasonably good on the appointment front for that age group, but after a bumpy start and deaths lag. Probably need a little more time for a better view. Deaths down about 2/3 off recent peaks, but cases heading back up again so we will see. Hopefully lower deaths next peak but probably skew much lower

I agree as a general public policy that masking should be the last of our measures to go, since it is the least costly (as opposed to social distancing which is quite costly).

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https://mobile.twitter.com/TheAngryEpi/status/1378837935689146368

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This is extremely good news actually.

Unintentional injuries are up though, which is weird. Could be from more drinking and drug use?

Lawn darts made a major comeback in 2020

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Are causes of death confined to one specific box (e.g. could someone be in the COVID category and also the cancer category if the reason for the death was thought to be the combination of the two)?

Just curious about some of those categories that have massive year-over-year increases.

SHOCKED

How long a wait are we talking? I might wait a couple of days max. But I donā€™t even have a compelling reason for that.

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Yes, quote from the article below:

Increases in unintentional injury deaths in 2020 were largely driven by drug overdose deaths.

Also linked to methodologies below

The article references this as the source Provisional Mortality Data ā€” United States, 2020 | MMWR which links to NVSS - Instructional Manuals in reference 2 (ā€œNational Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics System. Instruction manual, part 2a: instructions for classifying underlying and multiple causes of death, ICD-10ā€) for the guidelines in classification. Feel free to slog through that if you are interested!

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Ehhh Iā€™m a little skeptical on this, Iā€™m guessing overdoses arenā€™t counted as suicides always? Overdose deaths were up pretty big during the pandemic.

Edit: never mind it was explained above on how they categorize ODs