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RE: Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States - European Journal of Epediemiology
Conclusion:
This thing will continue on the path to a seasonal pathogen, and we'll need additional health and hygiene measures on a regular basis to mitigate the risk presented by the virus.
The big question remains: when will we "get back normal"?
I only saw a brief mention of hospitalization here, but presumably higher rates of vaccination equates to more time spent indoors unmasked in close proximity to more people—i.e. perfect conditions for passing the virus. You'd expect, though, that the strength of the sickness is reduced. That doesn't seem to clearly be the case in the cited case.
Ugh.
I like their closing paragraph, and especially the first sentence:
It makes the same point that you did, that this is on its way to becoming just another seasonal pathogen. This is a point which many opinion writers have been making since the start of the pandemic.
BTW, I missed this the first time, but noticed when responding to the comment from @tanveer741 that the authors provide a link to a dashboard with more complete data for the US. Of course, I can't be sure, but from eyeballing a number of the box plots over the course of weeks and months, it does look to me like >50% tends to have less new cases than <50%, but only by a small amount. I'd like to see an animation of all those box plots displayed in order by date.
Yeah, I found that chart too. I didn't take the time to understand it when I first came to it, though.
Since this is pretty much emerging data, it's tough to know what to take from it. It's sort of like looking at a month's worth of weather, and trying to extrapolate climate change trends from it.
For personal decision-making, I agree. In the area of public policy, though, the evidence should be clear and compelling before anyone even starts talking about mandates.
In general, I tend to agree with that stance. That's not necessarily best in all scenarios, though. In a state of emergency, this is one of the places I'm willing to make some allowances on that general approach.
Of course the question becomes: what qualifies a state of emergency, and how should the negative effects of being in a state of emergency affect the qualification?
I probably agree with this in principle, but in practice, I'm hard pressed to think of an (alleged) emergency during my lifetime that would qualify for this sort of expansion of power. Also, emergency grants of power should be temporary (which they almost never are, in my experience).
On the other hand, here are the metrics from October 7 (most recent available), sorted by percentage of counties with new cases:
Four of the top six counties are above 50% vaccinated, and another one is above 40%.