Until we have challenge trials, how do we know whether or not other variables, such as natural herd immunity and seasonality are not also significant contributing factors to the 'substantial reduction'?
Because its still winter and herd immunity from natural infections is a gradual process not a steep cliff? At the very least it seems like those factors could be accounted for.
There have been several new variants that have popped up lately, many able to spread rapidly, and some showing the same mutations but developing them independently.
With the rapid spread of some of the variants, it would be foolish to assume that what we are dealing with now is the same thing as what we are dealing with before, and we really don't know enough about the new variants. Maybe they are spreading, but not making people sick enough, increasing herd immunity.
It's difficult to account for these things because the same time these new variants started exploding is the exact same time we shifted resources from random testing to mass vaccination.
Seasonal viruses often peak before the official end of winter. The key date may be the winter solstice in late December when sun exposure reaches its minimum.
Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday were both events where many people that were diligent about quarantine protocol for the past year decided to break protocol "just this once" because it involved the two primary holidays for gathering with loved ones.
I think it has been shown that standard corona seasonality shows the same shape of all case loads we have seen?
That is, most of the recovery we saw last year going into summer could potentially be explained by regular cycles of similar viruses in the areas. The impression being that that could also explain or current recovery.
It is not an argument against vaccination. And I haven't seen people pushing we have heard immunity, yet. But the stark drops we are seeing do seen surprisingly sharp.
"the stark drops we are seeing do seen surprisingly sharp"
Surely that suggests an unnatural cause, such as millions of vaccine doses being rolled out, specifically targeting the most vulnerable (LTC residents) and those most likely to catch/spread the virus (medical profession, first responders, front line workers)?
The argument is, if that were the case, it would be sharper than the natural charts of corona viruses otherwise.
To be clear, I first saw this pushed by some epis on Twitter as caution to get to hopeful that we are seeing the vaccines as a resounding success so early in their rollout. It is expected that the vaccines are needed, but the dramatic drop was pushed as likely unrelated.
I will try and dig up the tweets. Could be they have changed their minds with more data.
Also, my first sentence was a question as I am not sure that is what the opening post meant.
Could it be that there's a strain that results in largely asymptomatic cases and there is not enough data on those people? That could result in a decline now due to competition, or the slope of the line is historically wrong due to invisible statistics.
I know there has been some trouble identifying antibodies in people who were exposed months ago. So if you aren't really sick, you only get counted (maybe) if someone in your circle gets really sick.
I do know that sometimes graphs with weird dog-legs are caused by either graphing the wrong derivative[1], or because there are more populations and someone is either being devious or is unaware.
[1] Developers are by and large flummoxed by S-curves for progress. An S curve for distance maps to a bell curve for velocity. If the sums don't make sense, look at the rates, or the rate of change. Don't keep staring at the S trying to fit trend lines.
The numbers from Israel seem to show the 60+ age group that has been vaccinated with two doses is seeing a sharp drop in hospital admissions compared to the under 60 group that is still mostly unvaccinated. This should rule out the herd immunity and seasonality arguments.
I would have expected even lower hospital admission numbers for the 60+ population, I mean taking into consideration that almost 80% of them have already been vaccinated.
Overall, the average hospital stay for COVID-19 for all ages is 22.4 days, just over three weeks. The length of stay is slightly longer, 23.5 days, for regular hospital admissions and shorter for ICU patients at 16 days, likely because ICU patients go on to die in the hospital.
That's based over thousands of patients.
> Patients in their 50s, who make up the third largest group of hospitalizations at 17.8% of all admissions, have, to date, had the longest average hospital stays at 27.5 days on average.
> Older patients have slightly lower average stays than middle-aged Hoosiers — again, likely because they are more prone to die in care than younger patients
> The average stays for patients in their 30s is 16.4 days
Because you look at similar cohorts at the same time. So if group A has received the vaccine, but group B has not, and they're being observed during the same time/geographical area, and the groups are sufficiently randomized otherwise, then you would expect to capture the effect of any other confounding variables.
Given the large number of people vaccinated so far, and the magnitude of the effect it's pretty safe to say that the vaccine is causing a significant reduction in hospitalizations independent from the broader background trend towards lower prevalence of the disease overall.
Sounds like cherry picking to me. Doctors know if you have been vaccinated when making this decision. I.e. perhaps 90% of people with 1 dose who are admitted are serious enough to need intensive care vs a small percentage of non-vaccinated patients admitted more often as a precaution.
I guess everyone here thinks double blind trials are for fools?
cases:mortality would be a weebit less influenced by placebo and it would be hard to reach numbers like 80%..
IMO, there's no way a significant number of discussions between doctor and patient are not going to reach different conclusions about whether to go to check in to a hospital or wait a few more days based on a significant fact like a jab 3 weeks ago.
Isn't there also a confounding factor that the vaccinations were largely introduced following the thanksgiving and christmas infection events. Even without a vaccine, I would have expected hospitalizations to fall approximately 1 to 1.5 months after the Christmas holiday.
Basically, we had many clusters of fresh unburnt tinder (the household covid pod) and the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday was a perfect event for many people to "just this one time" break quarantine protocol, leading to the many infections we saw. That's a 2-3 week increase in direct hospitalizations from those events, and then you have another 2-3 weeks of indirect hospitalizations impacting the remaining members of each covid pod. Anecdotally, I've personally witnessed this happen as I know fare more people that acquired immunity from becoming infected during the holidays than for most of last year.
Depends on where you live, in the Midwest the peak was more around Halloween in October. You can hardly find Thanksgiving in any data (and then you probably have to squint and ignore proper statistics) By Chirstmas/new year things were clearly in decline. Other areas of course have different results.
The vaccines seem to have an impact, but it is hard to be sure. There are a lot less old (>65) in the new infected list, which used to dominate the list. The younger groups seems to be be about even by age group. However there are many potential confounding factors, and I haven't done a proper statistical analysis so I don't want to claim something.
We don't, but a challenge trial wouldn't change that.
Best you could do with a challenge trial is to get faster to the results we already have. These vaccines work. We know that. This is just observational data supporting that what works in trials also works in the real world (which is not particularly surprising).
That's the clinical trials, but it should be reasonably straightforward to do observational studies on COVID hospitalizations cross-referenced with vaccine status.
There are plenty of millions of people who haven't yet (or won't ever) get vaccinated to serve as a control.
This WSJ article mention herd immunity. Covid spread really fast, so herd immunity through a combination of the large amount of people that already had covid and vaccination of the vulnerable should make a big difference.
Give up trying to have any reason or rationality about this.
The world wants this mass hysteria. I'm starting to think it's not even about Corona virus anymore. Everyone has an agenda. From the remote workers to the politicians to the news media to the people getting unemployment.
You just have to let the madness pass as it looks like it's making progress towards being behind us.
