I will get downvoted... but really, 60% of the hospitalizations come from vaccinated population, does that really count as "incredibly effective"? Is that really what people were hoping for when Pfizer & Moderna announced 94%+ effectiveness?
In addition to the clear example of Simpson’s paradox presented here: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-... , I offer you the following intuition: if only 4 people in Israel were unvaccinated and 2 were in the hospital with 2 vaccinated patients, would you consider the vaccine effective? It’s important to look at the right numbers.
You're getting down voted because you're falling into a statistical fallacy. For example, If 100% of the population was vaccinated, by definition 100% of those in the hospital would be vaccinated. That gives you no information on the effectiveness of the vaccine itself.
>the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) was nine times more than the rate among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) was a little more than double the rate among vaccinated people in that age bracket.
in principle you shouldn’t be downvoted if you’re adding to the conversation, and whilst i don’t agree with your overall thesis, i think you have a valid concern.
the OP’s statistics line up with the assertion that vaccines are certainly effective. if they weren’t, we’d expect to see similar proportions of vaccinated peoples hospitalised with covid.
certainly, the vaccines have lost some of their efficacy. it can probably be attributed to “slow” rollout, and - probably more significantly - vaccine hesitancy/denial. israel’s high rollout percentage is relatively meaningless in the global context, unfortunately. the virus has more chances to interact with vaccinated individuals. in a similar fashion to not finishing antibiotics, it was inevitable that the virus would mutate to overcome the existing vaccines at some level.
at this point, our only hope is that vaccines will at least make the virus less lethal. it’s not the ideal outcome, but given everything that’s happened thus far, i think it’s the best we can hope for.
If 100% of all people are vaccinated that 100% of all hospitalization would be from vaccinated people. That says nothing about effectiveness of the vaccines.
78.8% of the population we're talking about here are vaccinated.
I got vaccinated over 6 months ago. I'm getting my booster later today. It seems that those who were vaccinated more recently are more likely to be protected against delta as well.
The vaccinated folks are mostly old people and people with comorbidities, and the unvaccinated are mostly young and healthy people, so you're not comparing like for like.
You're misrepresenting the situation. As the article says, only 58% of the population is vaccinated. Only 78.8% of the eligible population is vaccinated.
Not sure what “sterilising immunity” is but the vaccines appear to reduce likelihood you will get Covid (not completely make you immune). If you then get it you are much less likely to end up in ICU or die, you may go to hospital though.
That's news to me, I seem to remember news stories from last year that people were being infected multiple times and the immunity from having endured COVID-19 was not actually that good. Quickly trying to look this up with 'covid-19 reinfection' as query (trying to avoid confirmation bias in that search), the top hit on DDG is the USA CDC which writes:
> Among Kentucky residents infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, vaccination status of those reinfected during May–June 2021 was compared with that of residents who were not reinfected. In this case-control study, being unvaccinated was associated with 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with being fully vaccinated. --https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm
Reinfection occurs much more frequently if you don't get vaccinated, if I am reading this right. Not sure I'd call "natural" immunity "also" or "incredibly" effective.
> The good news is that among Israel's serious infections on Thursday of this week, according to Health Ministry data, the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) was nine times more than the rate among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) was a little more than double the rate among vaccinated people in that age bracket.
Under 60 is not a specific enough age group for comparison of vaccinated vs unvaccinated cases. A 55 year old and a 12 year old have vastly different odds of serious disease, so much so that an unvaccinated 12 year old is less likely to get severe disease than a vaccinated 55 year old.
This easily could be biased by the older end of that range being significantly more vaccinated than the younger end.
If you want to compare vaccinated efficacy, look for 10 year age group comparisons. Anything else is really leaving you wide open to misleading interpretations.
Notwithstanding any fallacies that may exist (can you point out a specific one?), the best available scientific evidence suggests that natural immunity is much stronger than the vaccines against COVID:
"Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection". https://archive.is/RlwBc
Here's a very quick summary of what I linked above: In Israel it would be easy to look at the data and conclude that vaccines are providing ~67% efficacy against severe disease/death.
But, once the data is broken down into buckets that help address confounding variables (i.e. different vaccination rates among different age groups), things look very different. All of a sudden efficacy numbers are looking better than 90% for a lot of people.
This will similarly matter a great deal as people try to figure out how long vaccines provide protection. The groups that got vaccinated the earliest in many places were older people and health care workers -- groups which start out at higher risk, and also have a higher probability of less effective immune response to vaccines (older people).
As a result of that, it will be easy for analysts that don't consider that issue to under-estimate the effective time period of vaccines.
The archive.is link you provided isn't working for me at the moment, but to address your statement in the context of the above framework:
The group of people most likely to have been infected with the virus are not the same as the group of people most likely to have antibodies as a result of immunization. In many places, there are a lot more younger people who have gotten infected with the disease than older people. There are other socioeconomic and behavioural differences too.
Given that young people tend to have a more effective immune responses to begin with, and given that they have been shown to have better outcomes after being infected with this virus, it's easy to see a way to incorrectly conclude that stronger immunity results from infection-acquired antibodies, even if the opposite may be true.
In short: Apparent differences may be better explained by the fact that it's a different group of people who have been infected vs those who have not been infected.
We have no idea how complete "known to have recovered" is where as the vaccinated population is well known.
It also doesn't say how "known to have recovered" as well as vaccinated is being calculated.
I'm also not sure what the relevance is given the comparative deadliness of the vaccine and "natural" immunity.
Edit: That's actually another statistic issue. You need to consider the "known to have not recovered." The population of "known to have recovered" is itself a biased selection of those with stronger immunities than the general population.
Depressing to read all the anti-vax and pro-Covid comments on this generally enlightened forum while much of the healthcare system of the southern US is being overwhelmed by un-vaccinated Covid patients.
I am not arguing against vaccination or saying you dont have a valid concern.
But I think we need to also make sense of scenarios like for example India. Has only 9.2% of fully vaccinated and if you look at the daily infection rates it dropped dramatically.
I've stopped trying to attribute infection rates to other statistics, especially individual ones. There seems to be very little rhyme or reason to the incidence. Sometimes there is a very clear mistake made, like in the Netherlands they opened up night clubs and bars and suddenly we had the fastest-growing wave so far and anyone outside of 15-25 years old wasn't even participating. But most of the time it's really not so clear what is causing or preventing infections without rigorous research. At a minimum, one should also be looking at test rates and incentives to not get tested (needing to go into quarantine iirc in many countries, having to pay €40 just for a single low-quality nose test as of Oct 1st in the Netherlands, those sorts of things), since merely the incidence does not tell the full story. Then there are weather changes (temperature, humidity, time spent meeting others indoors vs. outdoors), avoidance of close contact or travel, face mask requirements, adherence to rules and recommendations, etc.
i'm amazed at the number of people still believing high vaccination rates will get us rid of the covid, despite all the evidences of the previous year pointing in the opposite directions (people getting infected multiple times in a short period, variants mutating the spike protein a lot, and more recently vaccinated people still proven to be both carrier and transmitter of the virus). The final nail in the coffin being country-sized experiments like israel, showing no sign of any kind of victory over the epidemic.
What surprise me most is the slow rate at which government adjust their strategy.. As an example, my country (france) still is deep in its "vaccine pass" controversial measure, splitting the country in half, and the government seems to show no sign of hesitation or even doubts whether it really is the best thing to do... They're running this strategy based on 6-months old assertions, and half the population doesn't seem to notice it.
> That means only 58% of Israel's total citizenry is fully vaccinated. Experts say that's not nearly high enough.
58% isn't that much higher than most other countries. France actually has a higher vaccination rate at 61%! So I'm not sure what you think the "country-sized experiment" is.
that's a very different take on the situation than what israel experts were saying just a few months ago. They reopened everything thanking the vaccine for that, and being happy of being the first country to heavily bet on mass vaccination.
(note that the country is closed to people who don't have a pass, and people have to quarantine when they arrive).
It looks a bit like they're changing the narrative now that the next wave is coming, saying vaccination rates aren't high enough after all (i'm curious to see one expert provide a definitive number on the "good enough" threshold, based on models or anything else, but maybe 100% it is ?)
1. 21.2% of the population (unvaccinated people older than 12) make up 40% of the hospitalizations. It's even more stark when you remove the immune compromised from the statistic.
2. For the delta-variant we need a higher vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. Estimates vary, but most put this around 85%.
3. While vaccinated people still can get sick (and why won't they, the immune system can only start to act after encountering the pathogen), but... the time of being infectious is lower and (see above) hospitalization and death rates are much lower.
Upon (very basic) scrutiny the numbers from Israel point to the high efficiency of the vaccines not the opposite.
> 2. For the delta-variant we need a higher vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. Estimates vary, but most put this around 85%.
That's not how herd immunity works. You don't set a moving goalpost out of nowhere. We should be measuring R instead, and I suspect R is hardly impacted by vaccines at least for the Delta variant.
sure, i'm not talking about preventing vulnerable people from getting a serious case. This part seems to be working just fine, even in france. Hospitals aren't saturated anymore (except in some islands were people didn't vaccinate themselves for various reasons).
It seems to me that life could already be "back to normal" here, simply making sure old / obese people get regular shots.
It's the long-term strategy of wanting to get everyone a vaccine, including children who have close to 0 risks, in the hope of getting rid of the virus that i'm talking about.
Green pass in France is not a health measure but a politics one. They will stop it if they think thats going to prevent macron be re elected and keep it if it will help him be reelected.
There are not one valid health reason to let people not wear a mask if they are vaccinated (if you believe mask works as the governement thinks)
> Preliminary research in Israel suggests booster shots significantly increase protection against the coronavirus a week after a person receives the third dose.
Which research? Thanks NPR for citing your sources?
Some information on which groups among the fully vaccinated are seeing a serious breakthrough infection.
>As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older.
>comorbidities were more frequent in patients with vaccine breakthrough infections in comparison to a large case series on unvaccinated hospitalized patients - including hypertension, diabetes, heart failure, chronic kidney diseases, chronic lung diseases, dementia and cancer. Moreover, 40% of the patients were immunocompromised.
So the serious infections are concentrated in those who are older, immunocompromised, or those who have other conditions already known to be linked to having a more serious case.
Readit News
78.8% of the population above 12 are vaccinated. The remaining 21.2% make up about 40% of all hospitalizations.
The vaccines are incredibly effective and the situation in Israel does by no means indicate that they are not.
Edit: Fixed 11.2% to 21.2%.
From the article. Emphasis is mine.
the OP’s statistics line up with the assertion that vaccines are certainly effective. if they weren’t, we’d expect to see similar proportions of vaccinated peoples hospitalised with covid.
certainly, the vaccines have lost some of their efficacy. it can probably be attributed to “slow” rollout, and - probably more significantly - vaccine hesitancy/denial. israel’s high rollout percentage is relatively meaningless in the global context, unfortunately. the virus has more chances to interact with vaccinated individuals. in a similar fashion to not finishing antibiotics, it was inevitable that the virus would mutate to overcome the existing vaccines at some level.
at this point, our only hope is that vaccines will at least make the virus less lethal. it’s not the ideal outcome, but given everything that’s happened thus far, i think it’s the best we can hope for.
78.8% of the population we're talking about here are vaccinated.
Can we pelase just automatically downvote all posts starting like this?
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If you vaccinate 100% of the total population, you'll find that 100% of hospitalised and dead patients have been fully vaccinated.
TL;DR: This is only concerning if one doesn't properly grasp statistics. Most of us (self included) fail at this.
I don't know much about mRNA vaccines, but do mRNA vaccines induce sterilizing immunity?
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
https://twitter.com/jsm2334/status/1427465566210695178
> Among Kentucky residents infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, vaccination status of those reinfected during May–June 2021 was compared with that of residents who were not reinfected. In this case-control study, being unvaccinated was associated with 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with being fully vaccinated. --https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm
Reinfection occurs much more frequently if you don't get vaccinated, if I am reading this right. Not sure I'd call "natural" immunity "also" or "incredibly" effective.
Deleted Comment
This easily could be biased by the older end of that range being significantly more vaccinated than the younger end.
If you want to compare vaccinated efficacy, look for 10 year age group comparisons. Anything else is really leaving you wide open to misleading interpretations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
Someone that's done some analysis using the above mental models: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
"Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection". https://archive.is/RlwBc
But, once the data is broken down into buckets that help address confounding variables (i.e. different vaccination rates among different age groups), things look very different. All of a sudden efficacy numbers are looking better than 90% for a lot of people.
This will similarly matter a great deal as people try to figure out how long vaccines provide protection. The groups that got vaccinated the earliest in many places were older people and health care workers -- groups which start out at higher risk, and also have a higher probability of less effective immune response to vaccines (older people).
As a result of that, it will be easy for analysts that don't consider that issue to under-estimate the effective time period of vaccines.
The archive.is link you provided isn't working for me at the moment, but to address your statement in the context of the above framework:
The group of people most likely to have been infected with the virus are not the same as the group of people most likely to have antibodies as a result of immunization. In many places, there are a lot more younger people who have gotten infected with the disease than older people. There are other socioeconomic and behavioural differences too.
Given that young people tend to have a more effective immune responses to begin with, and given that they have been shown to have better outcomes after being infected with this virus, it's easy to see a way to incorrectly conclude that stronger immunity results from infection-acquired antibodies, even if the opposite may be true.
In short: Apparent differences may be better explained by the fact that it's a different group of people who have been infected vs those who have not been infected.
We have no idea how complete "known to have recovered" is where as the vaccinated population is well known.
It also doesn't say how "known to have recovered" as well as vaccinated is being calculated.
I'm also not sure what the relevance is given the comparative deadliness of the vaccine and "natural" immunity.
Edit: That's actually another statistic issue. You need to consider the "known to have not recovered." The population of "known to have recovered" is itself a biased selection of those with stronger immunities than the general population.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
But I think we need to also make sense of scenarios like for example India. Has only 9.2% of fully vaccinated and if you look at the daily infection rates it dropped dramatically.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/india-covid-c...
What surprise me most is the slow rate at which government adjust their strategy.. As an example, my country (france) still is deep in its "vaccine pass" controversial measure, splitting the country in half, and the government seems to show no sign of hesitation or even doubts whether it really is the best thing to do... They're running this strategy based on 6-months old assertions, and half the population doesn't seem to notice it.
58% isn't that much higher than most other countries. France actually has a higher vaccination rate at 61%! So I'm not sure what you think the "country-sized experiment" is.
It looks a bit like they're changing the narrative now that the next wave is coming, saying vaccination rates aren't high enough after all (i'm curious to see one expert provide a definitive number on the "good enough" threshold, based on models or anything else, but maybe 100% it is ?)
1. 21.2% of the population (unvaccinated people older than 12) make up 40% of the hospitalizations. It's even more stark when you remove the immune compromised from the statistic.
2. For the delta-variant we need a higher vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. Estimates vary, but most put this around 85%.
3. While vaccinated people still can get sick (and why won't they, the immune system can only start to act after encountering the pathogen), but... the time of being infectious is lower and (see above) hospitalization and death rates are much lower.
Upon (very basic) scrutiny the numbers from Israel point to the high efficiency of the vaccines not the opposite.
And last, what would have us do instead?
That's not how herd immunity works. You don't set a moving goalpost out of nowhere. We should be measuring R instead, and I suspect R is hardly impacted by vaccines at least for the Delta variant.
It seems to me that life could already be "back to normal" here, simply making sure old / obese people get regular shots.
It's the long-term strategy of wanting to get everyone a vaccine, including children who have close to 0 risks, in the hope of getting rid of the virus that i'm talking about.
There are not one valid health reason to let people not wear a mask if they are vaccinated (if you believe mask works as the governement thinks)
Which research? Thanks NPR for citing your sources?
- There are 21.9 hospitalized in severe condition per 100K vaccinated above the age of 60.
- There are 225.9 hospitalized in severe condition per 100K un-vaccinated above the age of 60.
Vaccines are incredibly effective, you are 10 times as likely to be hospitalized in severe condition if you are above 60 if not vaccinated.
>As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-...
and
>comorbidities were more frequent in patients with vaccine breakthrough infections in comparison to a large case series on unvaccinated hospitalized patients - including hypertension, diabetes, heart failure, chronic kidney diseases, chronic lung diseases, dementia and cancer. Moreover, 40% of the patients were immunocompromised.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210713/Israeli-study-of-...
So the serious infections are concentrated in those who are older, immunocompromised, or those who have other conditions already known to be linked to having a more serious case.