Tragic as it is, the current US wave of COVID-19 cases, brought about by the combination of insufficient vaccination, premature openings, & more infectious Delta variant, would be far worse had we not vaccinated a substantial proportion of our population. Especially OLDER people.
As @_stah & @jonahfleish were among the first to notice (others are starting to notice it now), while US cases and hospitalizations are still rising, it looks like hospitalizations may peak before cases.
IF THIS HAPPENS, it will be good news among the ongoing tragedy.
To understand why the relative timing of cases vs hospitalization peaks is a REALLY BIG DEAL right now, you need to think about age-specific mortality and vaccination rates.
Iowa Department of Public Health tells the Des Moines Register they've had to throw away >80K doses of mRNA vaccine, and may need to throw away many more doses by the August unless demand picks up.
News reports about the ongoing surge have caused some increase in demand recently, but demand is still far below what it was in April.
About 70 thousand people age 65 and older in Iowa have either only had one dose of a COVID vaccine or have not had their first dose.
If you know somebody age 65+ who isn't fully vaccinated, please encourage them to get the shot.
Because Twitter doesn't allow fixing typos, I've deleted a thread and am retweeting a cleaned up version
1/n
I noticed a sudden change for Delaware in both @_stah's graphs of US States and the MIT DELPHI Group's epi model.
The MIT DELPHI model currently projects that between now and the middle of October, Delaware will have more than five times as many COVID deaths per capita as Arkansas, which made no sense to me because (1) Delaware's vax numbers are better than most States and (2) no DE County
@AndreasShrugged Now am seeing false analogy of vaccines to antibiotic/antiviral resistance. My research on evolution of drug resistance helped put five antiviral drugs on the market, so I can explain the difference in a short thread.
@AndreasShrugged Direct-acting Antiviral or Antimicrobial drugs put a NEW selection pressure on the bugs, one that would not exist in the absence of the drugs.
Vaccines trigger the SAME mechanism as natural immunity does, so viruses would be under selective pressure to evade immunity ANYWAY.
@AndreasShrugged With SOME viruses, infection triggers stronger immune response than vaccines. NOT with this virus: by every available measure, the COVID shots now authorized by US, UK, and EU evoke a STRONGER immune response than natural infection and appear to work better against variants.