Weekly Update for Week 9

2 Dose/3 Dose gap continues to expand

A quick word before we start. I want to make it entirely clear that while I don’t care what “side” anyone takes on Russia/Ukraine (or maybe more realistically, Russia/NATO with Ukraine as the Proxy) - Othering the Russian people (many of whom are protesting this war) by cancelling their internal payment systems (Apply Pay being cut off for instance) - is analogous to othering the Unvaccinated and wanting to restrict their lives. It is totalitarian and it invites violence against them for the crime of not following the “officially sanctioned narrative”. We of all people should be very wary of deciding which people are allowed to live and not based on arbitrary decrees made by our media and political class. We know they don’t tell the truth about COVID-19 let’s not let our Gell-Mann Amnesia get the best of us.

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With that out of the way, let’s look at the last three weeks of 2 Dose case rates against 3 Dose rates

It’s pretty clear here that the pattern is happening across ages and continuing. The overall case rates are falling, but the 2 Dose rate is falling faster than the boosted rate. As predicted, 70-79 has joined the other cohorts in having a lower 2 Dose rate. This is not something I expected 2 weeks ago, but it seemed pretty clear it was going to happen as of last week (nearly level wouldn’t have been unexpected given the relatively slow move).

This is surprising to me mostly because the 70+ year-olds have been mostly boosted for quite a long time. There shouldn’t be much if any Immortal Time Bias pushing cases into the 2 Dose regime. There has been though - it’s not clear why. But it is all swinging the other way now but mostly opposite the booster timeframe (the more recently boosted have the largest swing).

We continue to also see major drops in case rates over all categories due to Omicron receding across the UK. Notice that the booster rates in 80+ is effectively 0% (it’s 3.5% in 18-29 year-olds).

On the other hand, we see that Boosted Case Rate Multiples are higher than they have ever been (remember this is normalized by the “Unvaccinated” case rates for each report. The 2 Dose rate multiple is falling in all ages aside from the 18-29 cohort. I am still awaiting an answer from the UKHSA - I didn’t expect a response by now, but I just want to be clear I am still waiting on that data.

Log scale admissions still show that boosters have an effect. The 2 Dose rate is higher than unvaccinated and boosted rate is lower. However you can start to see that from 30-49 the 2 Dose rate is falling very quickly and nearing the boosted rate from 2 weeks ago.

The multiples show even more apparent efficacy.

Log scale Mortality also shows similar trends.

The most interesting issue here is that this week’s boosted 18-29 year-old rate just fell through the floor. You can see here that the 2 Dose rate delta to “Unvaccinated” increases with age. Remember again, this is Log Scale so those increases are rather large in absolute terms.

Interesting here we see some 2 Dose mortality rates spiking, especially 18-29. This is the relative ratio between “Unvaccinated” and everything else. So even falling rates are showing spikes in the ratio. This is likely because unvaccinated rates are falling faster (very possibly due to their smaller denominators causing bigger rate changes with smaller numbers of case changes).

This is a cumulative update week so I’m just going to post the Log Admissions/Mortality Per Positive Test charts without comment.

I will note that the mortality in the most vulnerable groups are getting very close between Unvaccinated and 2 Dosed.

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Cumulative Rates continue the same pattern. Vaccinated Cases, Admissions, and Mortality continue to dominate the overall numbers. It’s not getting closer, it’s getting further away.

You will notice that admissions and mortality are mostly lower in younger ages, but that nearly all the cases are in the older ages. Nothing changed here. Even Omicron being much more likely to re-infect a previously infected individual hasn’t change this accumulation.

Obviously we can see that for hospitalizations and deaths, the RATES of admission and death are lower, (not true for cases) and so the overall percentage is actually disproportionate on the unvaccinated side. But to claim that some major percentage of hospitalizations and death overall is unvaccinated is clearly untrue. It’s been MOSTLY vaccinated people in the hospitals and mostly vaccinated deaths. This is only untrue in the younger age brackets and the overall number of admissions and deaths is much lower and also the gaps are relatively small.

Guard yourself against being sucked into any narrative. Use data and critical thinking to remain skeptical. It’s okay to develop a theory from the data and try to follow it, but be ready to discard it if the data don’t fit.