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The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

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Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#101

Post by basch »

arbuge wrote: post #90

Most news articles I see focus solely on the number of vaccinated people when estimating how far away countries are from herd immunity, which seems odd to me. Left out in the discussion seem to be the unvaccinated but already infected. As far as I know, prior infection confers at least some degree of immunity. It may also be the case that those inclined to be skeptical of vaccines were also the ones who exposed thems…

Not as sensationally reported is that, fatality rate (the proportion of people who die of those who tested positive) appears to be falling slightly, and is at its lowest in 2+ months.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/map

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#102

Post by felipellrocha »

arbuge wrote: post #90

Most news articles I see focus solely on the number of vaccinated people when estimating how far away countries are from herd immunity, which seems odd to me. Left out in the discussion seem to be the unvaccinated but already infected. As far as I know, prior infection confers at least some degree of immunity. It may also be the case that those inclined to be skeptical of vaccines were also the ones who exposed thems…

> Left out in the discussion seem to be the unvaccinated but already infected. As far as I know, prior infection confers at least some degree of immunity.

We don't know how much, though. There are cases in which vaccine performs better than a natural infection, there are cases in which the vaccine performs worse than natural infection. Without time for a study, it's impossible to know where we lie with Covid.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#103

Post by majormajor »

neither_color wrote: post #64
0xTJ wrote: post #20

This gives me hope for Canada, where I am, won't face too many issues even as we slowly start to tick up from the bottom since major reopening happened, allowing indoor dining etc. In the last week, we've passed the UK in number of fully vaccinated people, but that's going to be slowing down as we start running of people who got their first dose during the big surge in shots here. Unfortunately, at 64% of the total p…

Since when is Texas a pejorative? By itself it would be a world top-15 economy, and its pandemic performance was not an outlier or exceptional. If anything it, along with Florida, demonstrated that extremely strict lockdowns don't correlate to better outcomes. Nothing like Alberta.

The numbers I've seen are that death rate per capita has been lowering California than Florida so far, so while I think investigation should be done about about "were the outcomes so much better to justify whatever additional cost[0]" I haven't seen anything suggesting that public health measures haven't had any effect.

We should, of course, also wait until things have actually settled down and we don't keep having more periodic surges...

[0] how costly, exactly, things have been is another question that needs more investigation, especially for all types of interventions. E.g. if, after 2022, nowhere in the US institutes another Covid mask mandate or lockdown, all the folks hysterical about how "Covid is just an excuse for democrats to take your freedoms away and never give it back" should rethink a few things.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#104

Post by sprkwd »

zarzavat wrote: post #10
Wolfenstein98k wrote: post #2

Important and underexamined question. What happened in the UK?

Choose your own adventure, coronavirus edition. You have coronavirus symptoms. During the middle of a surge in cases, the government has announced that all coronavirus restrictions have ended and everybody can go back to normal. The vast majority of older and vulnerable people have been fully vaccinated. Do you: A: get a test and risk having to isolate B: not get a test and live your life like normal as the governmen…

Anecdotally, everybody I know has deleted the app from their phone so they can’t get pinged and live their life reasonably normally.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#105

Post by raphlinus »

jkhdigital wrote: post #88

> thanks to widespread vaccination of the elderly, however fast this disease spreads it will ultimately inflict a much, much smaller death toll than earlier waves, because vaccination has probably eliminated 90 percent or more of the country’s total COVID-19 mortality risk. This claim does not appear to be grounded in any factual basis: A double-blind randomized trial for an mRNA vaccine with 44k participants showed…

That is a dramatic misrepresentation of that preprint. The number of deaths is small enough that it is hard to draw inferences from it, and that was not the endpoint of the study. Rather, the key finding is a vaccine effectiveness of 97% against severe disease.

A preprint that did address deaths[1] found a vaccine effectiveness of 98.7% against death. This is not consistent with your claim of "no evidence."

[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.21.21255873v...

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#106

Post by mariodiana »

neves wrote: post #98
danenania wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh fun: the game where everyone puts their pet biases forward in an attempt to explain the behavior of a poorly understood complex system. It reminds me of the financial news. "Commodities markets are spooked as backlash to latest Justin Bieber video mounts!" In all seriousness, apart from the vaccination rate and strictly enforced lockdowns, I have yet to see an explanation for cases going up or down in a particular…

There's a lot of evidence about what worked what didn't work. Dozens of countries and well organized societies responded well to the pandemic.

I remember reading that the deaths in countries corresponded pretty tightly with obesity levels in the population. If that's true, that throws lots of "evidence" right out the window.

Edit:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-obesit...

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#107

Post by de_keyboard »

drcongo wrote: post #19
gsnedders wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure it's quite this simple; look at the overall case by specimen and age demographics graphs on https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=natio... (England only, because the data for rUK isn't available). Note the peak is around a week _prior_ the end of the school term in England (23 July), and this is true across basically all age groups.

Most of England's private schools broke up one week prior to the state schools.

Most children don't go to private schools.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#108

Post by bawolff »

arbuge wrote: post #90

Most news articles I see focus solely on the number of vaccinated people when estimating how far away countries are from herd immunity, which seems odd to me. Left out in the discussion seem to be the unvaccinated but already infected. As far as I know, prior infection confers at least some degree of immunity. It may also be the case that those inclined to be skeptical of vaccines were also the ones who exposed thems…

> Adding those two populations together would seem to indicate that most Western populations are already at herd immunity by this point

That's assuming that nobody who got covid later got vaccinated (or got it before the vaccine kicked in). That seems like a very unrealistic assumption to me. On the other side, there are probably a lot more cases than are reported.

You're right that it almost certainly matters for heard immunity, but i think you need a much more complex model to know how much of an effect it has.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#109

Post by dtech »

jkhdigital wrote: post #88

> thanks to widespread vaccination of the elderly, however fast this disease spreads it will ultimately inflict a much, much smaller death toll than earlier waves, because vaccination has probably eliminated 90 percent or more of the country’s total COVID-19 mortality risk. This claim does not appear to be grounded in any factual basis: A double-blind randomized trial for an mRNA vaccine with 44k participants showed…

This does not seem like a useful source to draw this conclusion. 14/15 persons of both group died, but I do not see whether it was related to Covid. edit: 2 unvaccinated people with covid died 1 vaccinated. Point stands.

45.000 people is simply too small a number to draw such a conclusion. However, we are currently collecting a large amount of worldwide data, and that shows very strong reduced mortality and hospitalization on the vaccinated population. This is much higher quality data to draw conclusions on.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#110

Post by jkhdigital »

glorppe wrote: post #93
jkhdigital wrote: post #88

> thanks to widespread vaccination of the elderly, however fast this disease spreads it will ultimately inflict a much, much smaller death toll than earlier waves, because vaccination has probably eliminated 90 percent or more of the country’s total COVID-19 mortality risk. This claim does not appear to be grounded in any factual basis: A double-blind randomized trial for an mRNA vaccine with 44k participants showed…

While this is a literal interpretation of all-cause mortality from the paper, I’m not sure this is the right take away. There was such a dramatic reduction in overall cases in the vaccination group that deaths are probably more statistical noise in both groups than being tied to covid one way or another. Currently deaths and cases have diverged dramatically in the population and this might be more indicative of the r…

In this study the vaccine reduced Covid-19 infection rates by like 90%, and essentially eliminated severe cases. This is great!

But the same number of people died in each group. So vaccines do not reduce Covid-19 mortality, period. Does this mean vaccines are a waste of time? No, of course not! It just means we should be precise and correct in the claims we make based on statistics, and not fudge them to say things that sound good but are not true.

EDIT: Fair enough, I'm making the same sloppy mistakes... this study doesn't say anything, positive or negative, about vaccine effects on mortality. But it certainly doesn't support the journalist's claim. It does support the claim that vaccines dramatically reduce infection rates and severity, which is great and reason enough to get vaccinated.

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