Brief thread on vaccines vs variants (vaccines are winning 💉💪):

[Some] people keep pointing to rising cases in places like Chile and Canada as evidence that the vaccines aren’t working.

That’s completely contradicted by the data coming out of those countries
First, an update from Chile, where cases, ICU admissions and deaths are now all falling among the elderly, who were prioritised for vaccination (while still rising or stable among younger, less-vaccinated groups).
Chile is one of the clearest examples worldwide:
• Rates were on exactly the same path among young & old before vaccines
• They then diverged, with the elderly (💉) faring better
• If deaths among 70+ had stayed on the same path as the 0-59s, 1,500 more people would have died
Chile’s resurgence has been bad. It’s horrible to see so many young people in ICUs.

But vaccines have already saved 1,500 lives there. That’s the equivalent to 5,000 in UK or 26,000 in US.

Chile has had a bad resurgence, but vaccines have prevented it being much worse.
Some have also pointed to Canada and asked how it could be seeing surging cases, ICU admissions and deaths despite 1/3 of the population having had one or more doses.

Again, you have to break things down by age:
Canada’s third wave has been much more muted among the elderly, who were prioritised for vaccination.

Cases and ICU admissions rose much more slowly, and began falling earlier. Deaths have also climbed much slower among the elderly.
To reiterate: do not point to a resurgence at the aggregate level and say "see, vaccines aren’t working against new variants".

Dig beneath the surface, and you’ll see vaccines are winning the battle against variants, preventing things from being much worse.
If Chile and Canada were even further along their vaccination rollouts, the recent resurgences would have been even more muted than they already are. Thousands more lives would have been saved.

But the vaccines that *have* been administered are working well.
We also have new data from @GuptaR_lab, showing that the mutations in the Indian variant are no more able to escape antibodies than either the Brazilian or South African mutations, and we already know the vaccines are working against those two
And in one recent case, a scare-story about immune-escape from the Indian variant turned out to be precisely the opposite: it strongly suggests the vaccines are working against this variant, too
Over recent weeks the UK has reopened substantially. Schools and shops are open, and outdoor eating and drinking have returned.

Yet in my "Covid endgame" chart, that rise in mixing hasn’t pushed us back into the "outbreak growing" quadrant. Cases continue to fall.
Of course, things can change. We only know what we know today.

But there is no evidence yet that we should be overly worried about the positive, vaccine-driven trends in places like Israel and the UK being reversed.
I understand the cautious frame of mind that says "but cases of new variants in the UK are going up, we can’t rest yet".

But:
• These numbers remain tiny
• The "surges" in P.1 and B.1.351 failed to materialise
• We have no reason to believe these variants escape the vaccines
So my advice would be: keep *watching*, but don’t keep *worrying*.

Every piece of evidence we have says the vaccines will get us out of this, and it’s just a matter of getting them to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.
Further reading:
• The FT’s vaccine tracker (free to read) ig.ft.com/coronavirus-va…
• The situation in Canada ft.com/content/4b6f52…
• The vaccines are working ft.com/content/d71729…

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More from @jburnmurdoch

5 May
Quick mini-thread on the Seychelles:

There has been a surge in cases in the last few days, but as we’ve often seen lately, when you dig beneath the surface this is consistent with the vaccines working as advertised.
• More than half of people in the Seychelles are fully vaccinated. The rest are mostly unvaccinated (very few with just one dose)
• But only one-third of active cases there have been vaccinated
• So that means the unvaccinated are roughly twice as likely as the vaccinated to have been infected, which is completely in-line with the 50% efficacy reported for Sinovac (the main vaccine in use in the Seychelles)
Read 6 tweets
1 May
Brief interlude from Covid content today

I recently decided work wasn't busy enough (lol) and set out to build a garden table from scratch. Easily one of the most rewarding things I've done.

Here's a step-by-step, starting with ~60m of wood arriving, too big to bring indoors 😅
So the race was on to cut the wood small enough to bring inside before any rain.

Lots of sawing, some with a circular saw until neighbours complained (not unreasonably), and then hand-saw for the rest.

Super useful tool here for calculating cuts: kurraglenindustries.com.au/linear-cutting…
With everything cut to size, next step was sanding down all edges to make sure nobody would sit on a splinter.

Unfortunately the electric sander also proved unpopular with neighbours, so I hand-sanded 40-odd planks 😅

Then it was a case of waiting for optimal painting weather.
Read 12 tweets
21 Apr
NEW thread: here’s the latest data on how vaccines are fighting Covid.

My India tweets earlier were grim, but these are more optimistic

Vaccines are working in the UK ✅, working in the US ✅, and contrary to alarmist reports, they’re working in Chile ✅ ft.com/content/d71729…
First, some more detail on the UK.

Cases, hospital admissions and deaths have fallen steeply among all groups (the 'restrictions effect'), but have fallen furthest and fastest among the older, most-vaccinated groups (vaccine effect).
(For anyone wondering why the UK deaths lines are getting bumpy, that’s a good thing:

The numbers are now so small — 20 Covid deaths per day — that random variation starts making things look noisy)
Read 17 tweets
21 Apr
NEW: a deep-dive into the situation in India, where a devastating second wave is overwhelming hospitals and crematoriums, eclipsing global records as it goes ft.com/content/683914…

250,000 new cases every day, and test positivity is soaring suggesting many are still missed
To put this into a global context, much has been made of the resurgences in Europe and North America over recent weeks, but India’s wave has accelerated straight past all of them.

The situation there really is beyond what we’re seeing anywhere else worldwide.
In many parts of the country including the capital Delhi, cases are doubling every five days. Compared to the steady rise seen in the first wave last year, the current climbs are almost vertical.
Read 10 tweets
16 Apr
NEW: the variant thought to be responsible for fuelling India’s grim second wave (B.1.617) has been found in the UK, and numbers are rising relatively quickly in Britain.

Story from @AnnaSophieGross & @JasmineCC_95 ft.com/content/a55eb7…

Quick thread on caveats:
1) Numbers are very small (<100 sequenced cases so far), which means random variation and patterns in testing can play an outsized role in driving the overall trajectory.

We can see this with the Brazilian and South African variants, whose trends are anything but established.
2) We have vaccines now, so key question is not just "is B.1.617 spreading fast?", it’s also "do the vaccines work as well on B.1.617 as they do on B.1.1.7?"

We don’t know the answer to that yet, but with vaccinations rolling out in India, I suspect we’ll start to find out soon.
Read 7 tweets
13 Apr
Surprised by pushback to Boris Johnson’s comments that restrictions have played a key role in reducing UK Covid rates.

Why do people think rates have fallen among unvaxxed groups?

I always felt "lockdown effect" was implicit in these charts, but here it is explicitly labelled
Of course, it’s very difficult to know exactly how big the lockdown effect is for several reasons, but we can now see from dozens of other countries how B.1.1.7 sends rates rising without restrictions, even among the age groups who have been mostly vaccinated.

See France:
Same is now clear in the US, too:

With minimal restrictions in much of the US, hospitalisations have been rising again among under-50s as B.1.1.7 has taken hold.

Vaccines produce the gap between those lines, but without restrictions in place, the lines can bend back upwards.
Read 8 tweets

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