To Vaccinate or Not---The Rat Flu Odyssey Continues
I’m a big data/statistics guy. For anyone interested at looking at actual transparent/raw numbers and data (CDC doesn’t really report stats like this, only adjusted ratios) the UK does a pretty good job with their weekly reports.
https://www.gov.uk/government/public...llance-reports
I’m not really sure what restrictions on unvaccinated people there are over there (don’t seem to be many from my understanding), but it is interesting that it appears that boosted, vaccinated people are more likely to catch Covid (2x) for pretty much every age group (anyone over 30). I’m looking at incidence rates of infection per 100,000 people (who are either vaccinated or unvaccinated). This is based on crude data alone.
For the week 2 reports and prior, anyone over age 18 who was vaccinated with 2 doses were 2x more likely to catch Covid. These numbers are pretty much Omicron exclusive it looks like.
Perhaps that can be chalked up to behavioral differences? At this point in time though I think most people who aren’t vaccinated likely don’t care too much about the risk and are not taking many (if any) extra precautions. Although travel to the EU being restricted for non vaccinated could explain some of it (people traveling more likely to catch Covid). The footnotes also give some other logical explanations - I.e. people who are high risk in the first place being more likely to have gotten vaccinated. Although I think for pure case numbers, unvaccinated people may be more likely to get tested? And vaccinated more likely to chalk symptoms up to a common cold, or be entirely asymptomatic and therefore not counted as a case. Or the fact that unvaccinated people are more likely to have had a prior infection and some natural immunity, which would drive rates lower.
It’s questions/confounding variables like those that make data interpretation very difficult and coming to conclusions ~impossible without more rigorous data information to cross compare.
The data does show that vaccination/boosted significantly reduces the chances of being hospitalized or dying from Covid (~3-6x less likely depending on age group) at the very least.
Page 34-38 of the Week 4 report has the best tables to look at. They switched from considering two doses as fully vaccinated in those tables for the week two report and prior, to three doses, from week 3 onwards.
There’s a lot of other interesting data in those reports about seroprevalence and other things too.
As an anecdotal report, I know a ton of friends (mostly in their 20s, but some older folks as well) who are vaccinated or vaccinated + boosted who have gotten Covid in the past two months. Everyone has been fine though, just a bad cold pretty much.
