Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States - European Journal of Epediemiology
( September 30, 2021; European Journal of Epidemiology )
"...At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people...
...Across the US counties too, the median new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the categories of percent population fully vaccinated (Fig. 2). Notably there is also substantial county variation in new COVID-19 cases within categories of percentage population fully vaccinated. There also appears to be no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated (Fig. 3)...
...The sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined, especially considering the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant and the likelihood of future variants. Other pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions may need to be put in place alongside increasing vaccination rates. Such course correction, especially with regards to the policy narrative, becomes paramount with emerging scientific evidence on real world effectiveness of the vaccines..."
Read the rest from the European Journal of Epidemiology: Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States
This is just one study, so I don't draw any conclusions from it. It's not what I would have expected when the vaccines received their emergency use authorizations, though.
For whatever it's worth, the journal had an impact factor of 7.135 in 2019. This compares to an impact factor in the neighborhood of 3.1 for PlosOne or 38 for Nature.
Check the #penny4thoughts tag to find other active conversations.
This study only compares cases over a single 7-day period (August 26 to September 1) to the previous 7 days (August 19–25). I am not sure why they “zoom in” so closely, or why this time period (or any short period) is useful. Other potentially confounding factors are things like: availability and cost of PCR tests, number of tests vs population, test positivity rate etc. It may be that more highly vaccinated areas also have better access to tests, and/or a population more likely to get tested, and that explains a lot of the difference.
Thanks for the comment. I have a feeling that the reason they zoomed in on two seven day windows might be the computational difficulty of accounting for the way that the vaccination percentage changes over time in each particular location. By limiting it to two consecutive 7-day periods, I suppose that they might have just used a single number for vaccination percentage.
If so, that would also mean that they're ignoring any changes in vaccination rate that may have happened inside that 14 day window.
I hadn't noticed before, but the authors also provide a dashboard with US data from April through October. I don't see an easy way to get a multi-month summary of the data, though.
I didn't know what impact factor was, and I didn't feel like taking time to understand the Wikipedia page, so I did a little more research.
Here's what made it clearer for me:
One interesting aside is that apparently the metric was initial created to guide purchase decisions by librarians (i.e. indicating the most read journals).
I found a chart, which seems out of date, but I think gives a valid general indication of what this journal's impact factor might mean in appropriate context: 7+ is very high.
Even though it seems low compared to the 38 for Nature, and one of American Cancer Society's journals—which landed a 435.4!—this journal scores in quite a high percentile in its discipline.
I checked this because - when I know nothing else about a journal - it gives me a crude estimate of the article's credibility. It can be argued that it's more about popularity than quality, but at least it's something.
And yeah, consistent with your chart, when I saw that it scored higher PlosOne, that suggested to me that it has achieved some minimum level of reputability.
I never knew of it, so thanks for including it!
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%.
In England the use of a mask is not necessary from what I have seen, recently changing the television they were playing a live football game and the stadium is full and more than 80% of the public were without a mask and implies that the bio security some countries do not take it seriously.
A few incidents made me question the effectiveness of the vaccine. Just as my sir was first infected with the coronavirus, he later became infected with the corona virus again after taking the vaccine. My aunt became infected with the virus after taking the vaccine, and she died. I am skeptical about the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Wow. I am sorry for your loss.
It seems to me that there is quite a bit of skepticism about the effectiveness of the vaccine, so you're not alone. I think it may be quite some time before conclusive data is widely available.
I always pray to Allah to protect us from natural disasters and epidemics. Because any disaster or epidemic directly or indirectly harms us, adversely affects the normal quality of life. Stay safe brother. Have a good day
The vaccines have not given the expected good results, apparently a third dose is needed, then they say that not for all, conclusion the virus is annihilating them, it is the right word, the unvaccinated like me, apparently we will be much better
I think that the reason for these increases is due to the presence of the delta variant, the relaxation of restrictions that sadly has been seen in many countries and the increase in travel. There are countries that go to the extreme of madness, and that have proposed the elimination of masks.
Among others, the covid caught science off guard, hence the improvised experiments.
The vaccine of Covid-19 can never prevent the affection of Corona Virus. So increasing Covid-19 is not related with vaccine. Thank you.
I think the Covid vaccine what we are taking is not enough effective to fight against Covid-19.