**diabetes without complication (whatever that means) had an aRR < 1, as did asthma, which early on had been thought to be a risk factor but has never been shown to be.
Thanks, that’s was very interesting. It looks like “diabetes without complications” means diagnosed diabetes but well-controlled blood sugar and no other diabetes-related issues.
As for anxiety disorders (and, i suspect, dementia), severe covid damages the brain, and i bet that those are too a large extent just a marker of serious covid, rather than a casual factor.
Yes, but I’m betting that both are exacerbated by severe, life-threatening covid infections.
I admit that I’m strongly influenced by anecdotal evidence in this. My uncle died of covid early in the pandemic. His presenting symptom was sudden-onset dementia. In a span of a week he went from the guy everyone asked for advice to a man who didn’t know what was going on in very fundamental ways. They did a covid test in the ER only because it was rampant and they were offering tests to everyone.
Before he died he also developed more typical covid symptoms, like pneumonia. And my aunt had had a dry cough for a week or two. But it damaged his brain before it did much damage to anything else.
(My aunt died of covid shortly thereafter. But i suspect she really died of a broken heart, and covid just happened to be handy by when she gave up on life.)
Yeah, at his zoom memorial a bunch of people talked about soliciting and following his advice literally in the three weeks immediately prior to my cousin taking a confused and disoriented old man to the emergency room, where he tested positive for covid. And his wife had had fairly obvious mild covid symptoms for the prior week or two.
It commonly infects the nerves that we use to smell things, and those nerves are a direct pathway to the brain.
Huh, but this article says that’s probably not how covid gets into the brain. Interesting
It also says the brain is often infected before the olfactory nerve.
Shows efficacy against severe disease in the 80-100% range for all ages, but obscured by different levels of vaccination across age groups (seniors much more likely to be vaccinated, but also more likely to have severe disease).
Note the severe disease rates by age support that vaccinating an 80 year old brings their risk down to about the same as an unvaccinated 50 year old, and so on.
This data doesn’t clear up whether this is a “frequency” (fewer cases) or “severity” (less severe illness when infected) improvement, or a little of both.
Other data suggest the CFR is holding steady, meaning it would be frequency, but again it’s not clear if cases are really lower or if they are being counted differently post-vax.
In the Israeli dashboard they show cases (not just serious cases) and the count of cases in nearly identical for vaxxed vs not. Since about 2/3 of the country is vaxxed, it implies that the vaccines are reducing frequency of infection. Assuming there’s no bias in who gets tested between vaxxed and unvaxxed, which may be tenuous.
So, with the usual limits of imperfect data, I’d say frequency is coming down. I didn’t download the Israeli data to try teasing out severity.
“Dr Roller Gator” made a very crude prediction model using Israeli data about 2 weeks ago (basically something like \text{deaths} = \beta \cdot \text{14-day-lagged-cases}) to test this hypothesis.
So far, his predictions are holding up fairly well, suggesting the same conclusion you’ve drawn (vax lowers cases, but not CFR), subject to your caveat that there’s no bias in testing (or defining a “case”) between vaxxed & unvaxxed.
Seems hard to believe a vaccine, which is biologically designed to help combat a virus (i.e. reduce severity), would just help on the frequency front, so seems almost compelling evidence of bias in testing/case defining? Such as unvaccinated being tested for any sniffels while if you’re vaccinated then you figure you’re fine unless it gets really bad?
Is this true of these vaccines, though? I thought they were designed to try to neutralize the virus.
But perhaps you’re right, since they’re designed to target the spike protein, which is what does the damage, and may not prevent the virus from replicating (& being transmitted to others) ?
The vaccines do reduce severity, inasmuch as they lower the number of severe cases by 90% or whatever. They turn severe into mild or asymptomatic. That’s a Good Thing.
But, if you’re unlucky enough to be hospitalized for COVID, the vaccine doesn’t improve your odds by 90%.
With hospital beds filling up in parts of the country, keeping people out of the hospitals with vaccines has some side benefits as well.
I did a similar analysis using data from my state for death and infection. (I don’t have “severe cases” or hospitalization by age, so I couldn’t do that.) And I found that the vaccine appears to be highly effective at preventing death, but only somewhat effective at preventing “tests positive”. There’s not a lot of data, yet, but I expect to be able to refine the analysis in the next few weeks.
I think this jibes with the recent Moderna child study data (that the efficacy for children against “tests positive” was < 40% and their disclosure that it was not worse than what they saw in adults - I posted this somewhere around here), but does not agree with the Israel data, which then suggests that Israel may be testing differently between vaxed & unvaxed.
I guess maybe there’s still the questions of whether “tests positive” should be considered a “case” when not accompanied by symptoms, and whether the jabs increase the likelihood that “tests positive” has no symptoms. Also whether “tests positive” = “can transmit to others.”
Some of these questions may be somewhat academic, but I think there are potential policy implications.
Interesting that amongst breakthrough cases, the rate of deaths to hospitalized (or death before hospital) is quite high.
If we use as the numerator (1587 - 341) = 1246 deaths from Covid and the denominator (8054 - 1883) = 6171 hospitalized or death from Covid, that gives a mortality rate of 20.2%*. Certainly breakthrough cases do skew higher in age than all covid hospitalizations, but it would appear that being vaccinated does little to reduce your chance of death if you are unlucky enough to be hospitalized.
Your post says 8/8 tweet, the picture has 8/15 data. Is there a typo somewhere?
Also curious, the exposure is per 100K population (I think), but over what period? Entire pandemic? Trying to figure how 0.5% severe case rate per 100K pop at highest age relates to severe case rate per case.
