I think part of the point still is to keep the health care system from being crushed, and it is in fact struggling severely. Also, I’m okay with the idea of postponing my inevitable covid infection until it maybe morphs into something more tolerable. Isn’t that our general hope, that covid will become less deadly and perhaps less infectious over time?
I’ve yet to have my second cup of coffee and this isn’t a typical academic source, but I’d be interested in what others have to say about it. It appears to be nicely presented take about vaccine efficacy against hospitalization in Israel. I haven’t gone through the numbers yet.
However, while these numbers are true, to quote them as evidence for low vaccine efficacy is wrong and misleading. Sometimes, with observational data there is confounding of multiple factors that can make it easy to misinterpret simple percentages like this, and the current vaccination situation in Israel brings a perfect storm of confounding factors that lead to confusion if not thought through carefully.
In particular, the key factors here that contribute to this confusion are:
- High vaccination rates in the country (nearly 80% of all residents >12yr)
- Age disparity in vaccinations, including
- Nearly all older people being vaccinated (>90% of residents >50yr) and
- The vast majority of unvaccinated being younger people (>85% of unvaccinated <50yr)
- Older people are orders of magnitude more likely to be hospitalized with a respiratory virus than young people (residents >50yr are >20x more likely to have hospitalized serious infections than residents <50yr, and residents 90+ are >1600x more likely to have hospitalized serious infections than residents 12-15yr)
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Looks like a good article to me. Math checks out, and the language is clear. The author is a biostats professor at UPenn, not some anonymous rando.
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Oh wow, a real-life application of Simpson’s Paradox!
Sure seems like a lot of outlets took the outlying data from this Israeli study and ran with it prematurely.
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I thought it was someone who knew what the fuck they were talking about. I just know this is something I’ve been thinking has been true for awhile so I didn’t want to get caught confirming my own bias.
Sonny Chiba died of Covid :(
The thought has occurred that strong vaxx plus delta exposure might be the best path for an individual. Unsure of the societal implication, especially if it means being contagious for a few days.
I feel a moral obligation to not infect others.
So net, give me a booster and then a delta/lambda/whatever booster in 2022.
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https://twitter.com/matt_motta/status/1428422505958494212
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man that’s a lot of work for something super obvious. Don’t mean that as a criticism at all.
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I think lots of people have been skeptical of the Israeli data, with good reason. I’ve been trying to keep up with this, and it seems like there might be some truth to the declining efficacy story.
The issue is that vaccinations were distributed non-randomly, so that “amount of time since fully vaccinated” is correlated with “how old are you”, which is correlated with “how susceptible you are to infection”.
But you should be able to control for that (at least somewhat) by looking within age cohorts. And it seems like when you do that, you still get an apparent decline in efficacy over time. One example is here, but I’ve seen similar graphs elsewhere. (The underlying data is public.)
https://twitter.com/segal_eran/status/1427696623988117505
Now, you could argue that even within age cohort, the vaccine was still distributed on a risk-based priority, so that sicker individuals received their vaccines first. That would bias the results in the same way. But when you continue to see this pattern even after controlling for age, that provides stronger evidence for declining efficacy.
https://twitter.com/mlipsitch is a good follow on this.
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That’s good. Hopefully vaccination rates among adults will pick up again due to peer pressure.
UK vaccine takeup in the 18-29 group is lower than expected at 60%. I’m sure they’ll catch up when they wanna go abroad or hit a club.
There’s more to it though. As natural immunity spreads at basically an unknown rate (we only know the minimum infected), observed efficacy will drop as well.
This is all a textbook case of why observational data is so tricky to make decisions on.
Worth pointing out that some decay in efficacy over time is a pretty standard thing for vaccines:
Absolutely - this was the point that Nate was bringing up, and that he got roasted for. (I think his point was valid, and informative for the average person like me, but I guess he gave off the perception that he didn’t think professional epidemiologists were aware of it.)
This, too, and we get boosters for things like tetanus, so it shouldn’t be that surprising.
I think the issue with the booster news is that lots of people (or at least me) thought that finally after dealing with this for more than a year, widespread vaccination was going to get life back to normal. And the fact that we might need boosters–while not terrible or even inconvenient on its own–is yet another in a long line of delays in getting back to normal.
Everything continues to suck.
Yes, this was 100% the problem. He was being a dick about it for reasons I can’t understand.
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Nate got roasted 100% for his assumption that he was the one who figured this out, not for stating that it existed.
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Everything will continue to feel like it sucks so long as your goal is “back to normal”. Move the goalposts.
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Probably a more convincing argument during
a time period where spread isn’t so high that “don’t call 911 please” and “just writhe on the library floor while we sort out your treatment” aren’t occurring.
I think the people Andy Slavitt talked to have it mostly right. For the next few years, check the COVID forecast like the weather forecast. When we had 90 cases in the whole state of MA like in July, go out and live mostly as normal. When we are clearly riding a wave like now, n95 up everywhere.
Boston just went back to indoor mask mandates, I expect that in place at least until
kids get vaxxed. No outdoor one yet, but that was only for respiratory illness season last year, so maybe a November event again.