Why Admissions and Mortality are Still Showing Efficacy (and the way I measure for Vaccine Failure)

Tracking the Wrong Denominator Part 5

So I’m Just a Guy but even I can see an obvious question that maybe you are thinking to yourself: “If most of the ‘Unvaccinated’ are actually immune, then why aren’t the hospital admissions and mortality rates falling too?” First off, they kind of are. I prefer the Rate Delta charts for this, because they correct for up and down movement in general. If both rates go up or both rates go down, the Delta chart shows which rate is going up or down faster. It’s easier to spot the trends. So let’s start with Admissions.

So we had been in a bit of slide since Report 37, but had a bounce almost across the board this week (18-29 being the only group to continue on trend and under 18 has been bouncing between a delta of 3 and 4 more or less since week 36.) The biggest drops have been in the oldest age groups with the drops becoming more and more mild as the ages get younger. This is probably due to the relatively low rates to start with. But the big dips in the 70+ ages were looking very concerning for rates going forward. At the previous rate, there might have been negative deltas in the next couple of weeks in those older ages. By the way, both rates bounced, but Unvaccinated bounced by more.

Mortality is a similar story

No bounce here, we should expect that in the next week or two as Deaths lag hospitalizations.

There was a peak in Report 38 (deaths lag admissions) and it’s been falling in the two oldest cohorts since then. Given the lagging nature of mortality, we should expect a bounce in report 43 or 44 as well. The younger cohorts have so little mortality in general, that those rates are mostly unchanged with a slight drift downwards.

Okay so why do we still see all positive rate deltas here? If I’m right, then most of the Unvaccinated population is actually immune. More immune in fact than the vaccinated, so they should have a much lower hospitalization rate, so why are we not seeing that in this data?

What if we are just starting to see it in the oldest ages? Why there? Because the Prior Immune make up the largest percentage of all Unvaccinated cases in those age groups. Let me show you.

Okay, so this chart definitely needs explanation. The various shades of each color represent the percentage of the cases taken by that population. The top is the Prior Immune cases. But since it’s a range, there is overlap. I set the range for under 50 to 10-40 cases/100k and the range for 50+ is 50-100 cases/100k. So in the 18-29 group for week 42, the minimum number if Prior Infection cases is 310 and the maximum is 1240. That’s 5.9% of the 20,902 Unvaccinated cases in the age group for this week’s report. That’s the high end estimate. The low end estimate of 310 is 1.5%. There are between 17X and 67X as many cases in the Non-Immune portion of the population. The effect is mostly dwarfed. It isn’t until 60+ years old that we see percentages of the Prior Immune get high enough to start registering in the Admissions and mortality numbers. First 20% then 30% of the cases starting. Even if I go with high estimates (50-100 for under 50 and 50-120 for 50+)

The numbers simply move down in turn, even so under 50 is still in the 15% range at worst. The only way for the admissions and hospitalization rates to be affected are for a sizeable portion of the cases to belong to those with prior immunity. In the older ages, immunity overall is weaker and you have more breakthrough in both naturally immune and vaccinated. But we see that the admissions and mortality rates HAVE been turning down in precisely the ages with the highest proportion of potential cases in the prior infected.

But What is That Gray Area? And when are you going to talk about vaccine failure?

Fine, I’ll talk about it now. Those gray areas, I wanted to somehow relate the Non-Immune case rate to the Vaccinated case rate. This is how many times the Vaccinated Case Rate divides into my calculated Non-Immune Rate. It’s an area because there is a min and max estimate and the answer could be anywhere in between. It’s wildly different in different age groups, but a solid majority of them are on a significantly downward trend (pretty much only the 30-39s are holding steady). So even against the actually non-immune, vaccination is losing it’s impact. In the oldest ages, the rate is falling rapidly towards unity from 16x to 2x six weeks.

Edit: I decided to put a fixed range on this axis for all charts and I’m glad I did. Now the charts look much more coherent and you can see a very clear trend towards lower efficacy the longer out from the second dose we get. Only the 50-59 age group is slightly above the expected efficacy, but otherwise there is a gradual decline from 18-29 through 80+. Moreover you can see that the vaccine efficacy loosely tracks the percentage of the population that is Prior Immune. This is probably more a function of me using the Prior Immune population to calculate the Non-Immune rate.

This is my new gauge for vaccine failure. The moment those lines hit one, the vaccines aren’t worth a damn in that population vs a truly non-immune individual. If they go below one, well I’ll have to modify the way the chart works. Right now they would approach zero but never get there, so any value under one on THIS chart is a sign of TRUE negative vaccine efficiency.

I am thinking I should start releasing a weekly combination of my most useful charts, probably on a Sunday, let me know if that would be of interest to you. This chart would definitely be in that roundup. Let me know if there are other charts you’d like to see there.