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?
As the 4 RNA-vaccinated guests were symptomatic, you can be sure they're contagious too.
Note CDC stopped asking states to collect data on non-severe vaccine breakthroughs. So if these study authors had followed the CDC, they would have just reported the 2 hospitalized patients
Also today, Pfizer RNA vaccine found to be only 70% effective in Israel study (compared to 88% in England and 80% in Scotland)
Correction: Fatal case was not the groom, or at least not specified as the groom. Thanks to @gshashank9798 for pointing out my mistake.
@gshashank9798 BTW goes without saying that outcomes would have been much much much worse if 40% of the people at the wedding were not vaccinated (the US national average). We need to get >85% vaccinated to reach herd immunity, but until then, the already vaxxed need to exercise caution.
DeSantis spokesperson defending Florida's don't ask policy: "It’s almost unheard of for a vaccinated person to get seriously ill with Covid-19. Therefore, people who are vaccinated should not be worried about getting infected from those who aren’t.”
So CDC that's what happens when you tell people that serious breakthroughs are very rare. You give the unvaxxed another rationalization why they don't need to get vaccinated.
It's now official: Israel says Pfizer efficacy is 64% for symptoms from Delta, lower than the UK's 88%. 93% for severe disease.
Maybe reassuring if everyone around you is vaxxed and healthy. Not so fine if you care for someone unvaxxed or sick.
Now say we average out the various measures of Pfizer efficacy on Delta (88% England, 80% Scotland, 64% Israel) to get 77%. We can then estimate that instead of 4 vaxxed people getting sick, there would have been 4/0.23 = 17 people sick if nobody at the wedding were vaxxed.
Many are asking if the 64% is symptomatic disease only or all infection including asymptomatic.
Must always consider mechanism and data quality in COVID19 curve. Factors Topol misses: (1) UK cases started rising early June, and deaths lag by 1mo (2) cases in the other countries cited may be underreported, increasing the death/case ratio (Russia curves esp make no sense)
Another thing to consider is if Topol included precisely those countries that have the highest death/case ratios to make a contrast with UK, then he would have filtered in exactly those countries that are underreporting their cases.
Kind of frustrating that Topol would continue to make the same mistakes in data interpretation (no mechanism, no awareness of data quality, no awareness of selection bias)
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.
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.”
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.