The PHE paper presented to SAGE on vaccine efficacy waning is also published today. A quick run down of the paper, focussing on experience with Delta (orange dots).
For hospitalisation, the drop-off appears greater with AZ, though note the wide band of the latest point.
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Here we can see that there's a much more pronounced drop-off in the 65+ group. The AZ falls after 4 1/2months are of such an extent that I wonder what the rationale is for waiting 6 months for the booster dose?
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Note that whilst Pfizer looks much better in the 65+ analysis, once that is restricted to 80+, the drop off becomes more apparent with this vaccine too. Some of this may be because a proportion of this group had the 2nd dose after just 3 weeks.
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Turning to mortality, we can also see the waning effect, although it is less pronounced than for hospitalisation. Note that again it appears greater for AZ, although there is limited data at the longer durations.
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The greatest amount of data is for symptomatic disease, and we see that AZ efficacy falls to around 50% after 20 weeks, and around 70% for Pfizer at the same time period.
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A key point to note with efficacy is that the effect on numbers is determined by looking at the change in (100%-efficacy %).
So a fall, say, in efficacy against death from 95% to 90% doubles the numbers dying, (from 5% to 10%).
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Finally, I'd repeat that I'm puzzled why a six month gap is being mandated for original AZ recipients, given the evidence that efficacy against hospitalisation appears to be falling quickly before that point.
A great thread on the state pension and National Insurance.
For me, the trailed abolition of NI and thus its replacement by general taxation in terms of funding state pension benefits will have a major generational redistribution of tax.
It’s been the case that (in aggregate) at any one time the working generation funds the SPs of the retired generation above it.
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If the abolition of NI results in an increase (albeit smaller - else why bother) in income tax, whilst those in work will in total be better off, pensioners will be worse off.
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The Pensions & Lifetime Savings Association has updated its guide to living costs in retirement. The full report is well worth a read, and goes into a lot of detail.
One key point is that it assumes that pensioners own their home outright - probably reasonable now, but the shift to renting means that in future years that may become increasingly questionable.
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It focuses on retirement income, but note that other sources may be used to fund retirement, whether it be income from savings/investments, or gradual withdrawal of capital. Much more likely to be relevant for those aspiring to a comfortable lifestyle of course.
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UKHSA estimates that prevalence of COVID in England and Scotland has nearly tripled in the month since the ONS restarted its COVID infection surveillance.
Fortunately prevalence is lowest at the oldest, more vulnerable age groups, but is estimated at just under 6% in the 18 to 44 age groups.
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Prevalence is estimated to be highest in the London area, at just over 6% across the population. Note though that confidence intervals are wider due to lower sample sizes than in previous studies.
So with the news this morning that the earnings growth announced today means the state pension (SP) will very likely increase by another 8.5% next year, it's time to set out once again why the SP triple lock (TL) is such a bad idea.
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It's all down to cherry-picking the best of the three rates each year. I did a thread nearly a year ago, that hopefully sets out clearly how the mechanism inevitably means that the SP will grow over time against both earnings (E) and prices (P).
With BH's still distorting individual weeks' figures, the cumulative position gives a better view, with the latest CMI age-standardised analysis showing mortality 3.8% (of a full year's mortality) worse than its reference year of 2019.
Here's the mea culpa - it was only wrong by a factor of 13, but at least the post has been deleted rather than just corrected and left up, when experience shows that only a fraction of the original audience will see the correction.
So what are the true numbers?
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In E&W the peak week in 2020 was just under 9,000, and the second wave peak was pretty close to that number.
In total ONS has recorded 199,728 COVID related deaths in E&W since the pandemic started.