Here’s vax uptake and waning among the elderly in the US and several European countries.
Note how that red "unvaxxed elderly" segment extends much further right for the US, with millions still vulnerable well into its summer Delta wave.
Far more severely waned second doses, too
And this is after the US got off to a big head-start, getting second doses into elderly arms well ahead of Europe.
(👀 second row of charts here)
But where the black line rose first, it stopped rising at a much lower level than leading European countries.
So what we’ve done in this story is combine all the data we have on age-specific exposure:
• Baseline pre-vaccine risk of severe disease by age
• Share of age group with x doses, and how much waning
• Vaccine efficacy against Delta and Omicron
• For every day of the last year
The result: population-weighted scores for exposure to hospitalisation over time
• Eng & US started rollouts earlier
• But soon overtaken by EU countries (US because rollout slowed, England because AZ)
• Boosters pushed exposure yet lower
• Omi’s immune evasion caused a bump
And that’s where we get these charts showing how one country’s hospitalisation toll might have looked if it had another country’s vax coverage.
We start with the observed data, here for the US, and then multiply it by the ratio between US and Danish exposure scores every day
We can also flip the comparison around and see, for example, how English Covid hospitalisations would have looked if we had US vaccination coverage.
The answer: much worse, coming quite close to last winter’s peak.
Another interesting counterfactual, as also calculated by @PaulMainwood last week for the Omicron period, is what would things look like without boosters?
In England, hospital occupancy would have (un)comfortably exceeded last winter’s peak.
And here’s England with Polish rates of vaccination 😬
There’s an extensive methodology box on our story, and full reproducible code on GitHub github.com/Financial-Time…
So, why does all of this matter?
Because of this chart.
Covid’s IFR in England has fallen steeply since last winter, but that wasn’t by chance, it was [largely] because of vaccines.
In countries with poor vax coverage, Covid will still be far more than twice as lethal as flu.
For example, here are CFRs for England, Portugal and the US (IFRs are only possible for England, thanks to the @ONS infection survey 🙏)
Just like in hospital exposure chart, poor US vax coverage means its CFR has stayed much higher until Omicron, and remains higher with Omicron
And while Omicron’s intrinsic mildness is good news for us all, invaluable data from France (via @nicolasberrod) shows that vaccines still do more to reduce Covid’s lethality than Omicron does.
This matches what we’re hearing more hospital doctors all over the world: even with Omicron, unvaccinated people remain at substantial risk of severe disease and worse
So as long as large numbers of elderly people remain unvaxxed or have waned protection, Covid will continue to be a major burden.
If we want Covid to be over, and to be able to get on with our lives, we need to get everyone vaccinated.
And as many have said, we must also remember Covid is much more transmissible than flu, so even though its lethality per-infection has fallen, the number of infections in any given year is still far, far higher.
It’s also worth noting that Omicron’s intrinsic mildness was a lucky strike for us. If the next variant is an offshoot of Delta, that gift would be revoked, and everything will rest on vaccines (and infection-acquired immunity) again.
Finally, a very interesting randomised controlled trial into vaccines’ impact on sporting performance concluded over the weekend, with striking results...
Researchers took elite athletes, matched on age and Grand Slam titles, and assigned them to one of two conditions:
Novax ⛔️
Needal 💉
Being unvaxxed was associated with:
• Extended periods of inactivity
• Loss of shared Grand Slam record
• Deportation
American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.
I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood.
Last week, an NYT poll showed Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.
Averaging all recent polls (thnx @admcrlsn), the Democrats are losing more ground with non-white voters than any other demographic.
People often respond to these figures with accusations of polling error, but this isn’t just one rogue result.
High quality, long-running surveys like this from Gallup have been showing a steepening decline in Black and Latino voters identifying as Democrats for several years.
The politics of America’s housing issues in one chart:
• People and politicians in blue states say they care deeply about the housing crisis and homelessness but keep blocking housing so both get worse
• Red states simply permit loads of new homes and have no housing crisis
And if you were wondering where London fits into this...
It builds even less than San Francisco, and its house prices have risen even faster.
That cities like London & SF (and the people who run them) are considered progressive while overseeing these situations is ... something
Those charts are from my latest column, in which I argue that we need to stop talking about the housing crisis, and start talking about the planning/permitting crisis, because it’s all downstream from that ft.com/content/de34df…
NEW: we often talk about an age divide in politics, with young people much less conservative than the old.
But this is much more a British phenomenon than a global one.
40% of young Americans voted Trump in 2020. But only 10% of UK under-30s support the Conservatives. Why?
One factor is that another narrative often framed as universal turns out to be much worse in the UK: the sense that young generations are getting screwed.
Young people are struggling to get onto the housing ladder in many countries, but the crisis is especially deep in Britain:
It’s a similar story for incomes, where Millennials in the UK have not made any progress on Gen X, while young Americans are soaring to record highs.
Young Brits have had a much more visceral experience of failing to make economic progress.
NEW: we don’t reflect enough on how severe the housing crisis is, and how it has completely broken the promise society made to young adults.
The situation is especially severe in the UK, where the last time house prices were this unaffordable was in ... 1876.
My column this week is on the complete breakdown in one of the most powerful cultural beliefs of the English-speaking world: that if you work hard, you’ll earn enough to buy yourself a house and start a family.
The last time houses were this hard to afford, cars had not yet been invented, Queen Victoria was on the throne and home ownership was the preserve of a wealthy minority.
After ~80 years of homeownership being very achievable, that’s what we’ve gone back to.