Excess deaths in the age group 0-14 yo exceed the normal range for the first time since the start of the pandemic (Euromomo data).
It's currently at the level of winter 2019 (flu), but the "currently" refers to the latest week of full data, and that is week 48 of 2021, and it's known that child hospitalizations grew up fast in the last days of 2021.
.@MillunchickZ prompted me to verify an eventual link with children vaccination
These are the countries in descending order of excess children deaths. 🇨🇭 🇦🇹 (low child vaccination, high November cases) scores low; 🇪🇸 🇵🇹 🇮🇱 (high child vacc, low Nov cases) score high
1/2
2/2 That said, data on how many children were vaccinated & when and flu prevalence between children in those weeks are hard to find. And week-by-week data is rather noisy, so I don't think we can take any conclusion out of the above.
Does anyone have better data?
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
These are the top towns by 2020 excess mortality vs baseline
What happened in 2020 doesn't seem to have affected what happened in 2021 (what herd immunity? what harvest effect?)
Below, the chart for all Italian towns of significant size.
Again, no significant relationship between excess deaths in 2020 and 2021. (In the thread, I only consider towns whose baseline yearly deaths are >100/y)
Also, note that for 16% of Italian towns, excess mortality in 2020 and 2021 have both been lower than baseline (the bottom-left quadrant).
Possibly a sign that lockdowns don't cause excess deaths, the virus does?
Any herd immunity supporter who can explain why the hardest-hit Italian regions during the first wave still have more cases today *and* higher test positivity rates?
My hypothesis is that we’re still very far from herd immunity thresholds, and the further we are, the more “virus infrastructure” matters over natural immunity
(virus infrastructure = the demographic, cultural, infrastructure, connectivity factors that facilitate spread)
This matters because, if the hypothesis above is correct, the hardest-hit regions will be still hit hard for a long time, much longer than herd immunity supporters tell us.
Losing competitiveness (uptime, business desirability, fiscal solidity) compared to lighter-hit countries
Scenario: yesterday, I got a coffee with one of my best friends.
Here are some of the factors that influenced our risk of catching COVID.
1/N
2/ We decided to go to a small coffee shop, with 6 people inside.
We could have gone to Starbucks (60 clients), but by going to a coffee with 1/10th of the people, we cut our risk in 10, all other things equal.
2B/ (Actually, a bit less, because some of the clients in the Starbucks would have been too far away to infect us with the same likelihood of those around us. So, let's downgrade the risk reduction from 1/10 to 1/5.)
My book "100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late" is currently on a -37% off promotion. The idea is that you buy the book this week and read a chapter a day for the first 3.5 months of 2022.
Below, excerpts of the first few pages (I'll post more tomorrow)