Sorry gotta go against Fauci on this one, just as I did in March 2020 on masks. If you don't want to be a breakthrough infection and pass on the virus (vaxxed still have ~20% the chance of unvaxxed with Delta) and you're highly exposed, then wear a mask. Simple, cheap, convenient
👏LA's Ferrer "We have enough risk and enough unvaccinated people for Delta to pose a threat to our recovery. And masking up now could help prevent a resurgence in transmission. This is a precautionary recommendation, given that we don’t have all the information we wish we had.”
Ferrer said there’s “increasing evidence that a very small number of fully vaccinated individuals can become infected with the Delta variant and may be able to infect others.”
CA HHS: “The data is clear: Nearly all new COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are preventable. The vaccines work and they protect us."
Right now... the Delta wave only began last week. It has a long way to go, and remember hospitalizations lag cases by 2 weeks
"The state Department of Public Health said there are “enough people vaccinated against COVID-19 that the system is not at risk of being overwhelmed if cases increase.”"
The goal should be to reduce disease as much as possible, not just to the point of meeting hospital capacity
Good news; Dr. Fauci has clarified that, although he's fully vaccinated, he might wear a mask in places with low vax rates. nytimes.com/live/2021/07/0…
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CDC advice that vaccinated should feel comfortable spending all the time they want indoors and unmasked with the 50% unvaccinated population while Delta surges through their communities doesn't sound so reassuring now, does it?
This thread, and probably the one it refers to by Topol, should be pulled. The study did not look at transmission from vaxxed people at all. Topol wrote "91% efficacy of blocking transmission of infection" when he should have just written "91% efficacy of blocking infection"
Actual results: 91% refers to the reduced infection of vaxxed people, similar to the 95% in clinical trials. All of this is pre-Delta. So kind of non-news.
OK! Finally found data on breakthrough cases by each vaccine type. Includes hospitalizations and deaths too. Numbers currently too small to make any conclusions, but worth keeping an eye on this space, especially those curious about J&J efficacy: oklahoma.gov/covid19/newsro…
Yes these Oklahoma Health Dept reports are excellent. Here's the # of breakthrough cases up to last week by manufacturer. I ran some Fisher's exact tests. The difference between J&J and Moderna case numbers comes up stat sig. Nothing else does (small #'s means low stat power)
If we get more #'s, we can run more stat tests to see if any of these differences become statistically significant (not more than 5% probability of being due to chance). But even better would be if we can find numbers from more populous states. Please help look if you have time!
Some observations from the UK:
• Vaccines provide ~95% protection against death from Delta
• Deaths in vaccinees are in older people with preexisting conditions
Numbers as we expect for AZ and RNA vax, as is breakthrough severity risk factors
J&J is still expected to be a bit less efficacious. So rather than conclude everything's ok and that's the best we can do, I take it as certain people can use a booster if they are high-risk
We can do a back-of-envelope calculation for the expected impact. We’re predicted to get 30M cases, 1M hospitalizations, and 100k deaths in the next wave among unvaxxed. If our vaccines are 90/95/95% effective on these measures, and half of people are vaccinated, then...
The US at large is now in positive growth for COVID-19 cases, as are exactly 25 states. This reverses a trend of decreasing cases in most states until last month. I'd love for the "no surge" prediction to be true, but it's looking like math is winning over wishful thinking again.
Was going to do the J&J news later, as it's actually the same info I presented yesterday, but need to correct some mistakes about it that are going around Twitter already.
Most importantly, J&J did *not* report its vaccine is 85% effective on Delta.
The press release was a bit confusing. In the section on Delta, it says "in the ENSEMBLE trial, Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose COVID-19 vaccine was 85 percent effective against severe/critical disease and demonstrated protection against hospitalization and death."
You might think that some trial demonstrated 85% efficacy against Delta, but that's not correct actually. ENSEMBLE was the trial finished in January that showed 85% efficacy against severe disease, back when Beta and Zeta were going around. That's mentioned in the next sentence.