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John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
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18 Mar, 5 tweets, 2 min read
NEW: I saved this one up for the US morning, because it’s a big "good Covid news" moment for our friends across the Atlantic

A "vaccine effect" is now clear in US data, with hospitalisations falling faster among the old (mostly vaccinated) than the young ft.com/content/78bb2c…
This divergence can’t just be explained by the elderly being more cautious: we did the same analysis for the second wave last summer/fall, and back then rates among the old actually fell slower & less far.

Now they’re falling faster. What’s changed? They’ve been vaccinated 💉💉
Hospitalisations are clearest sign of vaccine doing its work, but we can see similar patterns in cases & deaths if we make the same comparison:

Second wave, no vaccines: rates fell slowly & less far among the old

Today, with vaccines: rate of decline among elderly has caught up
Another positive picture comes from nursing homes, which led the US vaccine rollout:

Last summer/fall, rates took longer to decline in nursing homes and deaths fell slowly.

This time, rates began falling earlier — shortly after vaccination — and have dropped further
Here’s the full story from me and @kiranstacey ft.com/content/78bb2c…

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More from @jburnmurdoch

John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
10 Mar
@LyricalFalls Sorry but this take is so tiresome.

In dataviz, painting as honest & clear a picture as possible is about showing as much context as poss, not a zero y-axis.

Here, 20 years of context are carefully built up to show typical range, then we see how 2020-21 has diverged from that.
@LyricalFalls Extending the y-axis to zero would make the picture less clear. That’s all it would do. No added clarity. No added information.
@LyricalFalls Every tiny design detail in this chart is about maximising information and minimising risk of misinterpretation.

Gradually showing the context, changing the lower extent of the chart to make clear it’s not a hard floor, using light gridlines instead of a dark baseline.
Read 7 tweets
John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
9 Mar
Once again as I set out to collect Covid-related data for multiple countries (in this case vaccine coverage), I find myself marvelling at how much better the UK data is in terms of granularity, frequency & clarity. PHE & NHS really are world-leading in a lot of this stuff.
Plus a very big shout-out to the @opensafely team in this case, who are doing amazing work in this space that — from what I can see — is unrivalled elsewhere.
To be fair part of the issue here is many countries simply don’t collect data on race — in any context, not just Covid — which is ... quite something.

As someone once said, "what’s counted, counts". I guess if you don’t measure health inequalities, you won’t find any 🤷‍♂️
Read 4 tweets
John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
3 Mar
NEW thread: Vaccines vs Variants

Vaccine effect is increasingly clear in France 🇫🇷🎉, with rates of cases, hospitalisations & deaths all falling among people aged 80+ while rising among younger groups

Could this change attitudes among Europe’s most vaccine-hesitant population?
As ever, we’ve run the same analysis for the previous rise and fall, to make sure rates don’t always decline fastest among elderly.

And as ever, they don’t: after France’s autumn peak, rates fall more slowly among 80+. More evidence that what we’re seeing now is due to vaccines
You’ll notice that although the French vaccine effect is clear on all metrics, this is in large part because rates are *rising* among younger groups.

The rate of decline among France’s elderly is much less steep than in the UK, but the contrast against younger groups is larger.
Read 13 tweets
John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
25 Feb
NEW: it’s a while since I’ve done a big international Covid thread, but this one feels important.

The first six weeks of 2021 have gone rather well in terms of humanity’s fight against Covid.

As well as the rollout of vaccines, global cases halved(!) between Jan 11 and Feb 18
It’s worth looking beneath the surface at what has driven that steep decline, as it’s far from a one-size-fits all explanation.

In some countries — the UK being the most striking — restrictions have done a lot of the heavy lifting, and this is about adherence as much as policy.
But elsewhere — particularly India & South Africa — the scale of previous waves means levels of natural immunity are *much* higher than anything we’ve seen in UK or elsewhere in developed world.

In these areas, antibodies & T-cells will have done a lot more of the heavy lifting.
Read 17 tweets
John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
22 Feb
Brief thread on vaccine passports and combatting hesitancy:

There’s been lots of chatter lately about vaccine passports. I get why lots of people think they’re a good idea, but one thing in particular strikes me as a big problem:

The stark racial divide in vaccine hesitancy.
Knowing what we do about rates of hesitancy (and measured vaccination rates 👇) among different ethnic groups, vaccine passports would amount to telling lots of non-white people "sorry you can’t come in here".

I don’t know about you, but that feels ... not good.
This is not to condone vaccine hesitancy, or to condescend and say "well it’s okay for them, considering everything".

Obviously we need to continue combatting vax hesitancy wherever we find it, *especially* among ethnic minorities among whom infection risk is also higher
Read 6 tweets
John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
22 Feb
NEW: data from Scotland shows a single dose offers very strong protection from hospitalisation, including among people aged 80 and over.

Vaccinated elderly people 81% less likely to be admitted to hospital than their unvaccinated peers

This is very good news(!)
More good news: data from @PHE_uk on people in England aged 80+ shows solid and rising protection from a first dose of BioNTech/Pfizer, with second dose boosting efficacy to over 85%

These data are for protection against infection, not hospital. The latter will be even higher 😀
Finally, more PHE data, this time from healthcare workers (aged under 65) shows very strong and long-lasting protection from infection among this age group after a single dose.

As before, protection against hospitalisation will be even stronger.
Read 5 tweets

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