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The vaccinated and the unvaccinated

The New Neo Posted on by

Some COVID statistics to ponder.

ADDENDUM:

A recent study from England with some interesting data can be found here. I can’t find any discussion of which vaccines were involved (if you see it, please let me know). But I have read that until fairly recently, a lot of people were receiving AstraZeneca, and I know that is a type of vaccine considered significantly less effective than those used in the US.

An excerpt:

Participants who reported being vaccinated were at substantially reduced risk of testing positive compared with those who reported not being vaccinated. For round 13, prevalence of swab positivity among those unvaccinated was three-fold greater for all ages at 1.21% (1.03%, 1.41%) compared with 0.40% (0.34%, 0.48%) among those reporting two doses of vaccine (Table 3). The ratio of prevalence for unvaccinated to vaccinated individuals for round 12 was similar with a prevalence of 0.24% (0.18%, 0.33%) in those unvaccinated compared with 0.07% (0.05%, 0.10%) in those reporting two doses. However, these estimates conflate the effect of vaccination with other correlated variables such as age, which is strongly associated with likelihood of having been vaccinated and also acts as a proxy for differences in behaviour across the age groups. Specifically, in England, few children and young people under the age of 18 years have been vaccinated, while few over the age of 65 years remain unvaccinated. We therefore restricted the analyses to those aged 18 to 64 years (n = 64,415 in round 12, n = 57,457 in round 13), which permitted direct contrast of infection rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. At these ages, we compared swab-negatives with i) all swab-positives and ii) the subset of swab-positives who were symptomatic, that is reporting one or more classic COVID-19 symptoms in the month prior to testing (fever, loss or change of sense of smell or taste, new persistent cough). After adjusting for age, sex, region, ethnicity and index of multiple deprivation (IMD) [14], for all swab-positives, we estimated vaccine effectiveness (VE) in round 12 of 64% (11%, 85%) and 49% (22%, 67%) in round 13. For those with symptoms we estimated VE of 83% (19%, 97%) in round 12 and 59% (23%, 78%) in round 13.

Comments

The vaccinated and the unvaccinated — 115 Comments

  1. So, what was the vaccinated rate in the 40,000?

    I hesitate to point out that we are at 110k new positives/day in the US- a significant fraction of those have to be vaccinated breakthrough cases to be that high already in August. It isn’t like even half the population is unvaccinated, and the percent vaccinated in the older cohorts over the age of 60 is even higher than the population as a whole since people under 30 are largely still unvaccinated. I will just lay it out right here- by December, the vaccinated will account for 80% of the new cases each day, and that the number will be over 100K if testing is still at present levels.

    Now, will deaths be corresponding? I don’t know, and will wait for the data- some of which we are already getting today.

  2. However, I will also point out something else- we did this same lauding of states like Massachusetts last year at about the same time, only to see the northern tier of states catch up to the South in cases and deaths by November. We already see the northern tier starting to catch up, but another month will be needed to prove this conclusively.

  3. Deaths crossed over the 500/day yesterday in the US- those deaths are still stratified into people over the age of 70 as always, and most of those people have been vaccinated- literally forcefully vaccinated in hospitals and nursing homes. The CDC could break out this data for us- they have all the data, but they haven’t so far- they want to talk about deaths that occurred this Spring rather than the ones occuring now. When it is finally forced out of them, we will likely find that a majority of the people who died in August of COVID were vaccinated.

  4. Kevin Roche has continually pointed out that as time goes on even if all over 70 are vaccinated the death age will return to the same older people as the beginning only at lower levels because well, they are older and sicker and die more.

    Plus we could be seeing that this group will be tested more in hospitals, nursing homes, etc. so they could now be double winners as dying after being vaccinated WITH Covid not FROM Covid.

    Over testing is the problem.

  5. It still bothers me that we’re not finding out what a “case” of COVID represents. Is it a symptomatic case? An asymptomatic positive test? Hospitalization?

    The scary statistics are meaningless unless we have that context.

  6. Plus, the vaccines were way oversold by the same old losers that have been tormenting us for 18 months so they have a big time incentive to undersell problems with the vaccine.

    Hence, the ‘some variant will evade the vaccine story’ which magically gets them off the hook for the overselling.

  7. Yancey Ward:

    Of course a significant number of those who are newly diagnosed via blood tests (some of whom are asymptomatic and many of whom have only mild symptoms) are among the vaccinated. I don’t think anyone is alleging that is not the case. The question is: what percentage? How contagious are they compared to the unvaccinated? How serious are their cases compared to the unvaccinated? Those are the important statistics, and it’s very difficult to get straightforward data on it.

    However, you write:

    …we are at 110k new positives/day in the US- a significant fraction of those have to be vaccinated breakthrough cases to be that high already in August.

    Although I believe a significant fraction are indeed among the vaccinated (as I already wrote), the numbers don’t mean that HAS to be the case. The vaccination rate in this country is presently about 50% (I did a search and a number of articles say this). In some regions and states it is higher and in other regions and states it is lower. But overall, that means that about half of the approximately 330 million people in the US are unvaccinated, making it 165 million unvaccinated people. So every single one of the newly-diagnosed could easily be among the unvaccinated, especially in places with a higher percentage of unvaccinated people.

    A recent study from England can be found here. An excerpt:

    Participants who reported being vaccinated were at substantially reduced risk of testing positive compared with those who reported not being vaccinated. For round 13, prevalence of swab positivity among those unvaccinated was three-fold greater for all ages at 1.21% (1.03%, 1.41%) compared with 0.40% (0.34%, 0.48%) among those reporting two doses of vaccine (Table 3). The ratio of prevalence for unvaccinated to vaccinated individuals for round 12 was similar with a prevalence of 0.24% (0.18%, 0.33%) in those unvaccinated compared with 0.07% (0.05%, 0.10%) in those reporting two doses. However, these estimates conflate the effect of vaccination with other correlated variables such as age, which is strongly associated with likelihood of having been vaccinated and alsoacts as a proxy for differences in behaviour across the age groups. Specifically, in England, few children and young people under the age of 18 years have been vaccinated, while few over the age of 65 years remain unvaccinated. We therefore restricted the analyses to those aged 18 to 64 years (n = 64,415 in round 12, n = 57,457 in round 13), which permitted direct contrast of infection rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. At these ages, we compared swab-negatives with i) all swab-positives and ii) the subset of swab-positives who were symptomatic, that is reporting one or more classic COVID-19 symptoms in the month prior to testing (fever, loss or change of sense of smell or taste, new persistent cough). After adjusting for age, sex, region, ethnicity and index of multiple deprivation (IMD) [14], for all swab-positives, we estimated vaccine effectiveness (VE) in round 12 of 64% (11%, 85%) and 49% (22%, 67%) in round 13. For those with symptoms we estimated VE of 83% (19%, 97%) in round 12 and 59% (23%, 78%) in round 13.

  8. No, Neo, it really does have to be a large fraction- if it weren’t the CDC would be crowing to the Sun about it. In any case, this is just how large numbers work- you literally won’t see such discrimination in numbers given that the cases and positive rates are similar to last year when no one was vaccinated and the vast majority of people still hadn’t been infected and developed natural immunity. That pool of unvaccinated and uninfected previously gets smaller and smaller by the day.

    However, I am willing to wait until December to revisit this. Like Griffin above, the real problem we have is the overtesting- we are overtesting by at least 1 magnitude, and maybe 2. This “pandemic” never ends if we continue to test the way we are testing.

  9. Yancey Ward:

    You need to be careful there. Did they die of COVID or with COVID? That is especially important to know of the elderly. These days, I am pretty sure that everyone who is hospitalized is tested for COVID as a matter of course, no matter what the reason for the hospitalization. If they die of something else, I believe they are still considered to be a COVID death if they have tested positive at any point during their hospitalization.

  10. At some point, we will all have to recognize that the everyone will get infected with and recover from COVID, and perhaps multiple times in the coming decades.

  11. Neo, we can follow the excess mortality at the CDC- those numbers are still above 5% excess deaths. Now, I agree that the number for dying of COVID are overstated, but they aren’t terribly overstated, and given the political incentives of the various health official and the present administration, I would wager they are less overstated today than they were last year.

  12. Neo, that paper demonstrates that the newly infected are large fraction of the new infections (and I didn’t say majority). In short, the vaccines probably wane quickly in effectiveness- we are taking about just a handful of months for results like that in the study from England. If this same study is done on a similar population 6 months from now, I predict the vaccinated are no different than the unvaccinated/uninfected. This will only get worse as the virus mutates. I don’t think the vaccines can stay ahead of the mutations- they certainly don’t for flu vaccines. The present vaccines were designed for the alpha variant, and the next boosters will probably come out for the Delta variant just as the Delta variant disappears natually replaced by something else.

  14. Yancey,

    But it’s not only vaccines it’s natural immunity also which is almost certainly better against the variants too.

    I have no idea how effective the vaccines are or for how long but I know we have never done this level of (flawed) testing of any virus ever so we don’t know if any of this is unusual or may be just the natural way these things run there course.

  15. Just to be clear- at some point this Winter, the people who have been vaccinated and/or infected with COVID and recovered will be 90+% of Americans. If we are still seeing 100K/day new cases, then it will be conclusive proof that the vaccines don’t prevent infections or infectious people from spreading it. I hope deaths are a lot lower this Winter than last, but that might not be the case either, or it might be the case that any lowering is simply due to the deaths of the most vulnerable in the last year.

    Look, I am not anti-vax. I think if you are over the age of 60, the potential pluses outweigh the potential minuses. However, what I am not is optimistic that vaccines against rapidly mutating respiratory viruses are likely to be successful. In the end, the best defense is going to be exposure to COVID and its progeny multiple times.

  16. Yancey Ward:

    You are mixing apples and oranges. I will try one more time to explain what I am saying.

    I am NOT saying that it is the case that there are no vaccinated people among the new COVID cases. And I agree with you that if that were indeed the case, of course the medical people and the press would be hammering it home.

    I am talking just about the numbers. You wrote this:

    …we are at 110k new positives/day in the US- a significant fraction of those have to be vaccinated breakthrough cases to be that high already in August.

    No, the numbers don’t prove that must be true. That number, 110,000, is .00066 of the number of unvaccinated people in the US. We don’t know how long the present spike will continue, but let’s say (just for the sake of argument) that we had that many cases diagnosed every day for the next 90 days. That would be approximately 10 million cases, which would be .06 of the number of unvaccinated people in the US. Six percent, in other words. I see no reason why something of that sort couldn’t happen. Half the population unvaccinated is a large enough reservoir to spread a disease, plus (as I already wrote) in some areas the percentage of the vaccinated is lower.

    And no, the case numbers are NOT similar to last year when people were unvaccinated. Look at the charts here for cases per day and you will see what I’m talking about. And deaths are not even close. Remember also that testing is much more comprehensive and available than it used to be and that will account in part for more positive cases as well.

  17. Griffin,

    I wrote comments like that last year when testing was still limited to 40K/day. People were telling me COVID was unlike anything ever in the past- just look at the explosive spread of new cases I was told. I pointed that we never tested any disease at even 40K tests/day in the past. Crickets. I had hoped the Biden Administration would see the political benefits in ending this insane level of testing, but I was badly wrong about that.

  18. Yancey Ward:

    And I agree with you about testing. There is no disease that has ever been tested in this way.

    I do think – as I wrote the other day – that the present administration sees some benefits in keeping fear levels up.

  19. Neo,

    That 110K is coming from a population that is 50% vaccinated, and probably another 25% that has been infected and recovered from COVID, or who are not susceptible to the virus already. You take you pick of which specific population those 110K/day people come from, but statitistically, it is all but certain that the 110K come from all the subgroups listed above. What isn’t statistically likely is that the 110K are 90% from exactly the unvaccinated and the naturally unimmune. This becomes increasingly unlikely with each passing day since that unvaccinated/uninfected/naturally immune group becomes smaller every day.

    And we don’t really have to guess- we already have data that the vaccinated can get infected- that is the entire point of the Provincetown data. That is why I asked about the vaccination status of the 40,000 visitors- it isn’t enough to just examine the positives and their vaccination status- you need to know the vaccination status of all the people who were in the pool- I would guess it is similar to the vaccination status of the country as a whole- 20K were vaccinated and 20K were not. What seems to be happening is that they want to imply that 90%+ of the people in Provincetown that week were vaccinated- I don’t believe that is even possibly true- it will be much closer to 50% than it is to 90%.

  20. There is also a lot of evidence, both empirical and anecdotally from hospitals, that those hospitalized are having shorter stays and even that may tainted by the five day Remdisivir treatment (which seems to be less effective as was sold by the way shockingly) which makes the hospital story less grave than the panic porn people want to portray.

    Also, this has now been going on for 18 months how can any hospital not have all kinds of surge capacity (even more than they already had previously) ready to go?

    I suspect they do but there is little incentive to point this out when you can hype the fear to the hilt.

  21. I am just looking at the gross numbers and the positivity rates and comparing to the same dates last year. Either the tests are picking up an inordinate number of false positives that they didn’t pick up last year, or the vaccines aren’t affecting those gross numbers very much. This is all else being equal reasoning, of course, but there it is. At some point, all of the new positives have to be drawn from the vaccinated/recovered pool- in other words, at some point reality has to be acknowledged.

    As for deaths, we are still about half the rate from this same point last Summer, so that is good news, but we are still on the left-hand side of that graph- we could still reach the same 1000/day reached early last August, but just later in the month. See here. The various graphs are titled and listed at the bottom. See specifically the normalized new cases and the 7day averages of new cases and new deaths. You will have use the scroll functions to see all the graphs.

  22. One simple stat that needs to be made widely available is how those hospitalized came to be a Covid ‘case’. There are three possible ways for the most part’

    1) Hospitalized FROM Covid.
    2) Hospitalized for some other reason test positive so WITH Covid’
    3) Infected while in the hospital.

    Knowing 2) and 3) are very important for any understanding of the hospital situation.

  23. Yancey Ward:

    As I explained several times now – no, it is not “all but certain” from the numbers that it would be the case.

    It is highly likely, though, and it happens to be true as well.

    By the way, vaccines are not usually (maybe even not ever) 100% effective against disease. For example, those vaccinated against chickenpox can still get it, but at a much lower rate and much milder cases. And the vaccinated can also get shingles, although again at much lower rates.

  24. Griffin, I have written that same comment more than once in the last 18 months- you still can’t get that data from the CDC even though they surely have it.

  25. I confess I’ve found the Covid discussions so confusing that I’m not sure what it even means to be diagnosed with Covid beyond someone with a clipboard checked a box on a piece of paper and turned it in.

  26. Yancey,

    Still seems to be lots of issues with PCR test threshholds which greatly effects ‘cases’.

    I mentioned it a couple weeks ago but the golfer Jon Rahm tested positive in early June had mild symptoms then recovered but because of the Olympics he had to be tested again at the end of July and he was still positive though had been symptom free for weeks. He is supposed to only count as one ‘case’ but what if he hadn’t been tested the first time then tested positive in July? He would have tested positive with no symptoms. Have to think there have been literally millions of people like that.

    The data is all corrupted.

  27. huxley,

    My interest in this at this point is almost purely the fact that they use this info to justify their authoritarian measures so it is important for people to push back and that is why DeSantis is so good.

  28. Neo, it is 95% certain that the fraction of new cases being vaccinated people is at least 20%, and is probably closer to 50% than to 20%. The population that is vulnerable to infection as judged by vaccination/recovery status is less than 3/10ths of what it was last year at this same time, and yet we have more cases/day than we did at this exact same point last year, even adjusted for testing levels.

    You can choose which option you like to explain this, but the obvious one is that the vaccines don’t really prevent infections- they may or may not prevent deaths, but the data for that still isn’t in for this particular wave.

    I take this as the easiest way to explain the CDC’s sudden reversal on masking- they have the data in their hands, and some of it has been leaked out- but I can’t believe they would die on the masking hill if the vaccines were really very effective at preventing infections. Why do you suppose they suddenly recommended that the vaccinated wear masks again? I don’t think these people are stupid- this is a direct contradiction of what they were saying just 3 months ago- something changed, and I promise you that it isn’t because half the country like wearing masks. I think they are stupid to believe masks work, but I think they clearly believe the masks work, so their change in recommendation has to have a basis somewhere in the data they are seeing.

  29. But, like I wrote earlier- I am willing to revisit this in December. If we go over 200K/positives day when 70% of the population is vaccinated and 90% are vaccinated or recovered, then I will say I was right.

    If cases this December are under 100k/day, then I will admit the vaccines prevented infections to a significant degree, and they are outstandingly effective if new cases are under 50K/day in December. However, Fauci himself is predicting we will be over 200K/day in the coming weeks, which I take as an admission that the vaccines are failing, at least from Fauci himself.

  30. Vaccines may also lead to milder symptoms as well as lesser chance of death.

    Less ‘dry kindling’ also a factor in lower deaths probably a factor too.

    Again they OVERSOLD the vaccines but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a positive affect on things.

    But by overselling they further diminished public trust which was low before this. What percentage are gonna get a third, fourth, fifth booster shot? For what?

  32. I believe that I just read that app. 193 Million have received one dose, about 163 Million two doses. Of the 330 Million in the US population, what is the number of people under 12? Does the 330 Million include illegal aliens?
    As I believe everyone on this comment section know that you can do anything you want with stats.

  33. Upon what basis can any of the data be trusted to even be remotely accurate?

    Griffin correctly points to the 800lb Gorila in the room; “The data is all corrupted.” [my emphasis]

    And neo identifies the obvious motivation for the corruption of the data.

    “I do think – as I wrote the other day – that the present administration sees some benefits in keeping fear levels up.”

    And the “benefits” are obvious as well.

    Every federal government agency is lying. About everything. Nothing they say can be accepted at face value. Indeed, whatever they say is far more often than not… exactly the opposite of the truth. The only time they tell the truth is when it supports their narrative. But because they’re inveterate liars, there’s no way to tell their lies from when the truth serves their purposes.

    They’ve lost all legitimacy and forfeited not only any benefit of the doubt but also any further obligatory deference to their nonexistent ‘authority’.

  34. Once this “pandemic” became a useful thing for politicians, especially those on the Left, to gain power worldwide all data on it became corrupted and all that comes from that “data” follows the GIGO rule.

  35. I’m going to repeat here some data from ground zero of the delta variant outbreak: The ratio of unvaccinated to vaccinated among those hospitalized for Covid in Joplin, Missouri in July was eight times the ratio of unvaccinated to vaccinated in the general population of Joplin.

    Now that’s not corrected for age or sex or anything, but to a first order approximation, it shows that the vaccines are 87.5% effective at keeping you from being hospitalized with Covid. That, probably not coincidentally, matches the effectiveness found in the scientific study Neo posted last week.

    So while we are seeing breakthrough cases that result in hospitalization and death, the data show that the vaccines provide a great deal of protection, even against the delta variant.

    A second data point: We’re seeing a lot more serious cases of Covid leading to hospitalization or death in the 20-40 age group than we did with the original Wuhan variant. That may be because the vaccination rate in Missouri is 80% among those over 65 but only about 50% among those 25-54, but nevertheless the hospitals are seeing it.

    That is leading to the average age of Covid death being 63 in July 2021 compared to 88 in March 2020, a 25-year decrease.

  36. It still bothers me that we’re not finding out what a “case” of COVID represents. Is it a symptomatic case? An asymptomatic positive test? Hospitalization?

    A case is any positive test for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A “confirmed case” is a positive PCR test while a “probable case” is a positive antigen test.

    At some point, we will all have to recognize that the everyone will get infected with and recover from COVID, and perhaps multiple times in the coming decades.

    Let’s hope not, as that would result in millions of dead Americans. Reaching herd immunity without vaccination with the original Wuhan variant would require 1.4 million dead Americans. Doing so with the delta variant would require 2.0 million.

    The present vaccines were designed for the alpha variant…

    No, they were designed for the original Wuhan variant. I’m not aware of any vaccine or booster specifically for any of the later variants.

    Of the 330 Million in the US population, what is the number of people under 12?

    Backing the number out of the CDC vaccination data yields 48 million of the 331 million Americans are under 12.

  37. mkent:

    I agree that the vaccine seems highly protective in important ways.

    I want to add that the average age of death going down is another data point indicating that deaths are occurring disproportionately in the unvaccinated. But the number of deaths per day is still very low compared to the peak of the pandemic.

    The same principle holds for the fact that a higher percentage of younger people are among the hospitalized. But in most areas, the number of hospitalized is still low compared to the peak.

  38. If they get a truly “ clean” vaccine that does not use or has not used fetal cells in testing, then I would likely take it, unless I already had the virus. I would like to take the anti body test to find out.
    Talked to a 60ish year old guy this week I had previously done some work for . He had Covid last year, before the vaccines came out , and almost died. He is carrying around his antibody test results to show people who try to make him mask up. Seems to be planning to get his anti body test every six months or so. If they drop, then he will take the vaccine. That seems to be his plan.

  39. The purpose of a vaccinated person is to one protect that person, but two create a dead node for the virus.

    If infected person interacts with vaccinated person there should be no transmission.

    The point Ward is making is that if in August 2020 we had 110k cases a day with no vaccine and in August 2021 we have 110k cases day with 50%+ vaccinated plus recovered. Then it cannot be true that covid is transmitting mainly through the unvaccinated non recovered population.

    The mistake Ward is making is that it presumes the virus transmission rate has remained. If the disease has mutated to be far more infectious then it can achieve the higher transmission rate with a small population.

    That is the claim about the Delta.

    Of course nobody bothers checking if the US has Delta or some other variant on the regular.

  40. There was a discussion on another blog about testing for “had COVID, recovered, have antibodies”
    I snipped some notes, in case anyone is interested.

    (Most recent comment)
    Antibody test update:
    If you call LabCorp, they’ll tell you they won’t do an antibody test without a doctor’s prescription. However, if you go to their website (same link posted yesterday), they offer two choices, one of which is to use their doctors. All you need to do is answer some questions (do you have COVID, symptoms, been with someone who has lately, have a fever, etc.), and soon you’re “eligible.” Merely a matter of creating an account and paying their doctors $10 by credit card after that. You can then either make an appointment online or just walk in. I’m set for Monday. Three days after the visit, you can check your results at their website.
    https://patient.labcorp.com/covid-19-antibody-test

    (Mid conversation comment)
    https://www.labcorp.com/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/individuals/antibody-test
    use above link to order antibody test online without Dr. request. Use the number they email you at any labcorp location. Get stuck. Get results 1-3 days. If you don’t have Labcorp Account, create one.

    (Original information posted)
    https://www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/services/covid-19-antibody-testing $38
    LabCorp for $10
    https://www.labcorp.com/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/individuals/antibody-test

  41. Will:

    If that is the point Yancey Ward is making, then it’s irrelevant. The COVID rate has gone up and down in each location and has also varied greatly among different locations at different times, even long prior to vaccination. So the rate in August 2020 in Missouri doesn’t tell you much if anything for comparison.

    What date to choose for comparison? You can’t just choose a date or a place. Go here for Missouri and look at the graph entitled “Daily New Cases.” It’s been going up there now, but it was far higher last winter. And last winter it was far higher at the peaks than it is now for another state such as NY, which had two huge peaks, one occurring much earlier (spring of 2020) and one occurring like the Missouri one, last winter.

    There also is much more testing of anyone who has had any contact with a person testing positive, and this will pick up more asymptomatic and very mild cases than before, so the rates will go up as a result of that. Note also that the daily deaths have not been going up in Missouri along with the cases. That is true of New York as well (and New York’s case rate, while rising, is not going up much and is nowhere near its earlier peaks).

    In addition, Yancey Ward and I were not discussing who is transmitting the disease. We were discussing who is being diagnosed with it. Those two things are not exactly the same, although of course they are related.

  42. I can’t find any discussion of which vaccines were involved (if you see it, please let me know).

    From page 8 of the REACT study (boldface mine),

    Estimates of effectiveness against serious outcomes of greater than 90% have been reported for those who have received two doses of either BNT162b2 [23] or ChAdOx1-S [24] vaccines. This is in keeping with our observation of a weakening of the association between infections and hospitalisations and deaths from mid-February to early April 2021 when Alpha variant was dominant. However, in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26].

    It doesn’t exactly answer the question, but the first mentioned vax is the Pfizer one, and the second (ChAdOx = Chimp Adenovirus Oxford) is the AstraZeneca one.
    _____

    Figure 2 in the REACT study, way down near the bottom speaks to the age distribution, and sort of separates out the Alpha variant (round 12) from the Delta variant (round 13).

    Something I thought about months ago, is that if the primary vaccination motive is to protect the most vulnerable, then a nation would proceed as we have (more or less). However, if herd immunity or creating the most valuable “dead nodes” (as Will mentions) is the most important, then we would have vaccinated people ages 12 – 40 first since those folks are the most mobile and probably engage in more indiscriminate human contact.

    Something I read suggested that we should have vaccinated everyone with one dose of the two dose vaccines, then circled back for the second dose after most everyone had the first one. That may have helped slow down the spread.

  43. I think what they are trying to say in that paragraph from page 8 I posted above is that in round 12 with Alpha dominant, only a tiny percentage of those testing positive ended up in the hospital, maybe because the vax was working especially well. In round 13 and Delta dominant, testing positive meant a much larger percentage of those will be hospitalized. Then they list the possible explanations.

  44. But the number of deaths per day is still very low compared to the peak of the pandemic.

    Overall, yes, but it’s starting to get there in the areas hit hard by the delta variant. While that variant is only starting to hit the population centers of St. Louis and Kansas City, the statewide death toll in Missouri hit 131 Covid deaths over the last three days.

    But in most areas, the number of hospitalized is still low compared to the peak.

    In most areas, and with your very high vaccination rates, I think that will remain true in the Northeast. But southern Missouri is seeing hospitalization rates quite a bit higher than during the peak, and it’s having an effect on the statewide numbers.

    https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/4168200/?utm_source=showcase&utm_campaign=visualisation/4168200

    With such strong regional differences in vaccination rates, I suspect (hope) this delta variant outbreak will remain regional and not national. Strangely, it seems the regions least susceptible to this outbreak are the ones taking the most aggressive actions against it.

    If the disease has mutated to be far more infectious then it can achieve the higher transmission rate with a small population.

    It has. The R0 for the original Wuhan variant was about 2.5. For the alpha variant, it is about 4.5. For the delta variant, it is about 6.5.

    The implications of those numbers are 1) the disease can progress through a population much faster than before, and 2) it takes a higher percentage of acquired immunity (either through getting the disease or the vaccination) to achieve herd immunity.

    Of course nobody bothers checking if the US has Delta or some other variant on the regular.

    They’re checking. A percentage of samples from infected patients has the virus isolated and sequenced. It’s how they knew fairly early that the outbreak in Missouri was the delta variant and not some other variant.

  45. I’m not worried, and frankly tired of the whole thing. The vaccine looks to be effective and the number of deaths is not moving much. AFAICT, the delta variant is likely to naturally vaccinate the unvaccinated. More risky than the vaccines, but not so much as the alpha variant.

  47. “If infected person interacts with vaccinated person there should be no transmission.” Will

    That prompts my yet to be answered question; what threat to the vaccinated are the unvaccinated?

    Is it not true that the younger the unvaccinated person, the less the threat?

    Is it not true that everyone who wants the vaccine has now had plenty of time to be vaccinated?

    So isn’t it true that the unvaccinated have made the decision to risk infection with whatever the personal consequence?

    If all of that is true, then what medical basis are there for restrictions?

  48. This from the REACT study was interesting and addresses vax effectiveness, Delta, defining a positive test result, and whether the tests are too sensitive.

    Cycle threshold values
    We analysed Ct values associated with positive results among vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals as a measure of viral load and as a proxy for infectiousness. For all positives in round 13, at ages 18 to 64 years, median Ct value was higher for vaccinated participants at 27.6 (25.5, 29.7) compared with unvaccinated at 23.1 (20.3, 25.8) (positive defined as N gene Ct <37 or both N gene and E gene positive, Methods) (Table 7, Figure 3). The higher Ct values among vaccinated people indicate lower infectiousness, consistent with transmission studies conducted when the Alpha variant was dominant, in which vaccinated individuals were at substantially lower risk of passing on infection [15]. However, as a secondary analysis, we reduced the Ct threshold for positivity, representing strong positives with greater infectiousness. As the Ct threshold for positivity was reduced, the difference between medians for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals became smaller. However, at the same time our estimate of vaccine effectiveness increased to 54% (29%, 71%) at a Ct threshold of 35, plateauing between 57% (32%, 72%) at a Ct threshold of 33 and 58% (33%, 73%) at a Ct threshold of 27 (Table 7, Figure 3).

    So even with Delta (round 13), Ct moves from 23.1 for the unvaxed to 27.6 for the vaxed. That is a factor of about 22 times more viral load in the unvaxed compared to vaxed. That sounds like a lot, but may not be huge. There may factors of a 100 or 10,000 difference between patients; I wouldn’t know.

    What’s a positive test result? … positive [is] defined as N gene Ct <37 or both N gene and E gene positive.

    Yikes! At least it is not Ct < 40 or 41, but that is a very low bar. The original failed CDC developed RT-PCR test tested for 3 genes, not two. (If you look at the section at the bottom of page 10 on calibration of testing methodology, you can see that they actually run the PCR cycles up to at least 47 cycles in some cases.)

    Perhaps because the researchers are cognizant of the testing issues, they re-ran the data using a Ct positive test threshold of either 27 or 33, and they claim that it still shows good (not great?) vaccine effectiveness.
    ____

    The Alpha variant is not the original Wuhan-Italy strain. Yes, it is the first letter in the Greek alphabet, but for some inexplicable reason it was assigned to the U.K. variant which became a big factor in Jan. or Feb. 2021, if I recollect correctly.

    mkent,
    I take it that the Delta variant causes more severe illness than the U.K./Alpha strain. But is Delta more severe than the original Wuhan-Italy strain? Was Alpha much less severe than Wuhan-Italy?

  49. It’s interesting that the narrative has been slowly moving toward the original lab leak occurring in September or October 2019.

    Back in September 2019 it was noted (i.e. people saw bulletins on notice boards in Post Offices) that there was a temporary stoppage of mail deliveries from Wuhan to Hong Kong. This went on for a few weeks and then back to normal. At the time, nobody gave much thought to it except in trying to read the tea leaves in the context of the Hong Kong Protests which were then at their height.

    Obviously everyone was on the lookout for any sign of borders being closed or Internet going dark, so the stoppage of Wuhan mail got noticed.. Wuhan being *the* major ground transport logistics hub for China ever since the first railways were built in China (pretty much why the successful rebellion against the Qing kicked off in Wuhan). But the mail kept coming from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou.. everywhere else… so people shrugged. Either a glitch or the government had noticed that protestors were reliant on some product they were buying on Taobao that was mainly shipping through Wuhan hub… Who knew? And anyway it was minor compared to the cloud of teargas down the street.

    But that was probably it. They knew something was out and about by late September.

  50. There are various R0s for the Delta variant, including mkent’s 6.5. Here is a summary which explains Covid in terms of the Delta R0, in this case 5.7:
    _____________________________________

    The R0 for COVID-19 is a median of 5.7, according to a study published online in Emerging Infectious Diseases. That’s about double an earlier R0 estimate of 2.2 to 2.7

    The 5.7 means that one person with COVID-19 can potentially transmit the coronavirus to 5 to 6 people, rather than the 2 to 3 researchers originally thought.

    Researchers calculated the new number based on data from the original outbreak in Wuhan, China. They used parameters like the virus incubation period (4.2 days) — how much time elapsed from when people were exposed to the virus and when they started to show symptoms.

    The researchers estimated a doubling time of 2 to 3 days, which is much faster than earlier estimates of 6 to 7 days. The doubling time is how long it takes for the number of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths to double. The shorter the time, the faster the disease is spreading.

    With an R0 of 5.7, at least 82 percent of the population needs to be immune to COVID-19 to stop its transmission through vaccination and herd immunity.

    https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-number#covid-19-r-0
    _____________________________________

    A doubling rate of 2-3 days! It seems the vaxx prevents people from dying at that rate, but nonetheless that’s a shocking number.

    Theoretically it means we will surpass the peak number of new cases per day last January (~300K) within a week. (We are now at 130K daily new cases.)

    I’m not clear how that relates the vaxxed and unvaxxed.

    If so, the bright side is the Delta will burn itself out within a few months and drive the US close to herd immunity or better.

    Unless I am missing something and I probably am.

  52. @Huxley:

    I’m with you on the glass-half full argument that it’ll push populations closer to herd immunity faster than vaccination will.

    Leaving aside all the worries, about non-sterilizing vaccines and the mutational pressure they themselves place on the virus, I say (in my best Ozzy Man Voice) “Let ‘er rip!”.

    The politics and mass psychoses, and elite failures, and as yet not even remotely fully-understood implications of mass adoption of social media in last 15 years just go to make up one big ugly Gordian Knot. Have at it, Corona-chan!

  53. I took a moderately hard look at R0 numbers in December perhaps. Before the U.K. variant. Back in March/April 2020 there was consensus that R0 was about 2.5. By December, Wikipedia and others said that while there were older lower numbers, they felt that the original Wuhan/Italy strain really had an R0 of about 6.0. Research cited included a paper from Los Alamos, and there was one in France, and another in some other western Euro nation.

    This is the same old crap. The Loma Prieta earthquake started at 6.9 and ended up at 7.1. Tropical storm Sandy eventually migrated to become a hurricane after an extensive search located one unusually high wind speed measurement.

    So after they decide that the original covid strain really had an R0 of about 6, then came Alpha and Delta. So what is the R0 for Delta? It can’t be 12 or 15 or 20. Better go back to the correct R0 for the Wuhan/Italy strain of R0 = 2.5. This is now the number our Flying Walensky is using.

    mkent says that R0 for Delta is 6.5. OK, it probably somewhere between 4.5 and 7. Wait until we are agonizing about Lambda or Zeta variants, and then look back at the R0 for Delta.

  54. Zaphod:

    What do you make of the Chinese numbers for Covid? I imagine you’re at least as cynical as I am, probably more.

    I’m sure they didn’t knock the numbers down to essentially zero after March 2020. But what did happen?

    Did they end the lockdowns, get back to work and let the elders die?

  55. Will, I am not making a mistake when I assume the R0 is the same- I want real proof that is higher before I take it as a given, and there isn’t real proof. There are claims that it is higher, but every single one of those claims is based on the model that the vaccinated can’t transmit the virus– that is how you come up with the double R0 for Delta vs Alpha. It is a classic beg the question fallacy, and I don’t play that way. And Tommy Jay is right- the R0 for the older variants is undergoing a revision downwards for exactly the reason he implies- you can’t double an R0 of 6 to 12, so you halve the 6 and then double to 6. It is highly reminiscent of temperature data revisions to my eye.

    Look, the previous estimates of R0 were also model driven- they aren’t doing experiments here- they are taking the positives, assuming a factor scale for people who are positive but don’t get tested, and then estimate an R0. They do the same thing for Delta, but now assume half the population can’t transmit the virus- this is where the doubling shows up.

  56. The numbers of deaths/day in the Summer 2020 wave peaked on August 12 at 1077/day- cases/day peaked 20 days earlier on July 23rd at 66,500 (lower testing levels, though). As of tonight, deaths had climbed 100% from the recent trough to 525/day, but we are still on the left, ascending side of the curve- cases haven’t peaked yet- if they peaked today, you won’t have seen the peak in deaths for another 3 weeks. This wave is offset in time by about 3-4 weeks from last year, but it looks the same to me otherwise.

    If I were predicting based on the curves right now, cases will likely peak in this wave by next weekend, and deaths will peak 20 days after that. On present trends, unless testing reaches 3 million/day, cases will likely top out at about 125K/day in the moving average- there is already indication that the top is starting to round and turn over- the 2nd derivative is less than zero right now when smoothed out. The moving average of deaths/day will probably top out around 750-800/day by the end of the month.

    However, I also expect the seasonal rise to start again in by mid September. If we continue to test at 2 million day like we did last Winter, cases/day will again go over 200K.

  57. In fact, we set a new record in tests/day on the 7 day moving average- topped over 2 million for the first time.

  59. @Huxley:

    I don’t for a moment believe the official case numbers out of China. Back during the initial post-Wuhan lockdown period there was a guy on Twitter who ran a regression and was posting the next day’s official figures for a week or two before they cottoned on.

    That being said, I’ve no doubt China had it pretty much under control from mid-2020. Easy enough to see container traffic picking up and air pollution (which had disappeared for a while) wafting back over the fence from the rest of the Pearl River Delta.

    Never even completely eradicated, but certainly no kind of pandemic for many months.

    The Delta thing will be interesting as they do seem to be doing a lot of targeted lockdowns and compulsory testing — the chatter on this had been hovering around zero but has ramped up appreciably in the last month.

    Macau had 4 imported cases from Xian the other day and instituted compulsory testing for *everyone* in Macau. This was last week.

    If Delta really runs amok in China they won’t bury it. Too late for that now. Besides it’s ‘Imported’ so ‘not their fault’. At this stage in the game I might be inclined to trust their case metrics *more* than those coming out of the West. The CCP and its organs have zero need to invent excuses to widen their powers. They have all they want already and have a clear and coherent way of thinking about Power. They’re not good. But they’re arguably saner than any Western ruling elite.

    But we shall see. CCP might be this or that, but Gnon always has the final say.

  60. Well, this is disturbing, or sounds like it might be.
    I understand that, once a treatment is known to be safe and effective, the placebo group is given it as an ethical matter; however, at this point, those factors may not be known yet – that’s how I read Sundance’s concern.
    Any comments from the medical fraternity here?

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/08/06/this-is-nuts-moderna-and-pfizer-intentionally-lost-the-clinical-trial-control-group-testing-vaccine-efficacy-and-safety/

    The Moderna and Pfizer vaccine tests were conducted, as customary, with a control group; a group within the trial who were given a placebo and not the test vaccine. However, during the trial -and after the untested vaccines were given emergency use authorization- the vaccine companies conducting the trial decided to break protocol and notify the control group they were not vaccinated. Almost all the control group were then given the vaccine.

    Purposefully dissolving the placebo group violates the scientific purpose to test whether the vaccine has any efficacy; any actual benefit and/or safety issues. Without a control group there is nothing to compare the vaccinated group against. According to NPR, the doctors lost the control group in the Johnson County Clinicial Trial (Lexena, Kansas) on purpose:

  61. Some other articles to digest.

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/08/07/pathologist-dr-ryan-cole-delivers-concerning-message-about-covid-vaccine-and-long-term-impacts/

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/08/06/cdc-director-makes-case-vaccination-passports-are-futile-vaccines-do-not-prevent-covid-infection-or-delta-variant-transmission/

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/08/06/new-york-city-protest-against-mandatory-vaccination-passports-monday-august-9th-noon-at-city-hall/

    It can well be argued that New York City’s requirement for a vaccine passport is the canary in the coal mine; the test scenario to see how much real opposition exists to government mandated vaccination policies. Citizens across the nation nation are starting to realize how severe this issue has become.

    There is no other hill to stand upon if medical freedom is taken away.

    What is ‘freedom‘ if government can force you to inject a substance in your body? What is ‘liberty‘ if the government can force you into an unwanted medical procedure in order to live in society. The issue here is not simply a forced injection.

    There is no way for us to comply ourselves out of tyranny. If we accept the government can forcibly mandate you to undergo a medical procedure, under any circumstance, as a condition to live and function in society, then we have conceded the very cornerstone of liberty. The New York City vaccination passport must be stopped.

    Chaser:
    https://notthebee.com/article/someone-made-posters-pointing-out-how-the-vaccine-mandates-affect-people-of-color-the-most-and-they-are-the-funniest-thing-youll-see-all-day

    Brilliant.

  63. Well, this is disturbing, or sounds like it might be.

    I am not in the medical fraternity, nor was I disturbed by what is normal practice. Some folks signed up for the trials because they would get the vaccine. The medical people commenting at Instapundit didn’t seem perturbed either.

  64. Got a relation in NYC. Had to be hospitalized, put on a ventilator. Since the type is shoved down past the gag reflex, strong sedation is required, as well as for other issues.
    Immediate problem was shutting down of windpipe and lungs, which was scary and caused him to seek medical help.
    He’s been extubated. My sister says his cognition, which had lost the memory of several extremely difficult events in the preceding year, is recovering.
    No idea what his issue was. Not Covid. A nurse said that if they shaved him all over–he has a beard–she’s pretty sure they’d find an insect bite.
    He’s weak and sore and it’s possible his lungs may not be 100%, although 90% is pretty certain.
    Point is, you don’t need Covid to screw you up. Being put on a “venthilator” as Cuomo would say, can screw you up pretty well.
    Before a heart op some years ago, I needed some kind of look around from the esophagus inward. There is a kind of topical anesthetic which tastes like bad cherry liqueur, of which there apparently was marginally too little. A very bad time with gagging, hacking and heaving.
    It was said in some quarters that for a lot of folks with Covid a face down position and 100% or maybe 80% O2 would have been sufficient with fewer side effects. But the political fighting over whose fault it was we didn’t have venthilators in quantity made their use imperative. After all, not only Supreme Court Justices read the papers. So do doctors.

  65. That being said, I’ve no doubt China had it pretty much under control from mid-2020.

    Zaphod:

    I’m trying to understand from graphs like Worldometers why it appears that the US has done such a poor job in per capita deaths compared to India, China and other places.

    Are our numbers inflated? Are theirs understated? Did they make contact tracing work? Were we hit by more dangerous variants? Are their immune systems tougher? Etc.

    When I compare countries and states, it’s often difficult to understand why the numbers vary so much.

  66. Huxley,

    It’s Potemkin numbers all the way down. How can we even calculate the trends if we can’t trust the numbers? And yet, plenty still do trust them, at least enough to make the attempt. God bless them.

  67. It’s Potemkin numbers all the way down.

    Fractal Rabbit:

    I share your concern, though I doubt the data is entirely unsalvageable. I can only hope future historians will find ways to reconstruct what happened.

  74. huxley,

    Sadly, ‘future historians’ is probably the way to bet. It will likely be decades before the truth is sussed out of the official epidemiological hogwash.

  75. So the number of cases are based on testing using what cycle threshold analysis. The depth of the analysis represented by the number is greater the number. Thus in the US a depth of 40 is used in 48 states, with only FL and Kansas using the latest secientic info calling for a depth of 30 because the 40 one gives too many false positives since it can ID almost any organic as covid.

  76. @huxley:

    “I’m trying to understand from graphs like Worldometers why it appears that the US has done such a poor job in per capita deaths compared to India, China and other places.
    Are our numbers inflated? Are theirs understated? Did they make contact tracing work? Were we hit by more dangerous variants? Are their immune systems tougher? Etc.
    When I compare countries and states, it’s often difficult to understand why the numbers vary so much.”

    I think US Numbers are inflated for a bunch of reasons including partisan politics and perverse cause of death reporting incentives, and no data analysts being willing to ruin their careers dumping the raw data on the threshing room floor and having at it.

    That said, the US is full of obese very unhealthy people. And lots of ‘skinny-fat’ types with undiagnosed T2D (A T2D clinical diagnosis is when drunk walks into the pool of light under the lamp post and Medicine says: “He’s lost his keys.” — testing for uncontrolled blood sugar is easier than testing for hyperinsulinaemia or even better dynamic insulin response curve type.)

    There are probably also racial issues — it may affect some more than others. Might come back to this.

    Downstream of that, likely also cultural issues — clear from Australian experience (despite the censorship) that Delta is harder to contain in the (why the #$%^ are they even there?) Iraqi / Afghan ‘Refugee’ population. They don’t do personal space.. they engage in social and religious swarming behaviour, and they have habit of not showing up at the hospital with sick elderly relatives until far too late because they know they will not be allowed inside during Covid… and for non-white non blonde-beast ice-people, it does not compute to not have a good old cram the room full pile-on wailing and ululating session around a relative’s death bed. This is real.

    I’d imagine that Black and Hispanic attitudes toward sickness and death have some subtleties which play into this in the USA. Black Funeral Parlors are not a huge thing (even today, often the wealthiest Black in any given small town or city in the South started out running a Funeral Home or was born into a Mortician Dynasty which has diversified) just because Evil Whitey would refuse to sell D’Quintavious a blinged out casket with integral boom box. Hell, he *can’t refuse* today. More’s the pity.

    Looking at Asia:

    The first wave (that we know of) China numbers are certainly false and too low. Now that the cat is out of the bag and there’s far less panic and the government has had 18 months to observe every possible type of other governmental Covid failure mode, I’ll be interested to see how the impending Delta Wave is handled in China. Once they get onto something, they’re far more competent than the US system. You just have to face that. There are penalties for failure (not as melodramatic as some Tom Clancy would have it, but nevertheless you don’t fail upwards in China)… and (Gordon Chang grifting wishful thinking aside) they’re not facing a cold or hot Civil War either. Stuff mainly gets done. Let’s see.

    For sure by the metric of lockdown hours and personal movements restrictions since mid-2020, China has done much better than much of the West.

    I like Singapore as a test bed. Has an interesting racial mix and a highly efficient no bullshit and largely transparent government. You don’t argue with the PAP in SG —> you take them on they will #$%^ you six ways from Sunday. But still they mostly live and die by their governance / quality of life records rather than by the whip and the gun. So far they’ve done very well. I’d keep a good watch on their Delta Wave graph.

    Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand graphs interesting. Both avoided earlier waves before Delta. Both have public health systems down at the neighbourhood / rural levels which while not blinged out first world standard are still staffed by and attended by folks a bit further up the evolutionary tree than you’ll find at many of your DMVs and other local treatment and data gathering bodies in much of the USA. If Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia show ca. 1% CFR then that’s probably more reliable than the US reporting system would report if transplanted into those countries.

    I’m told that the health system in Sri-Lanka is not bad. It’s like a cute little non-shit-smeared mini-India with more coconuts per capita. Indian tourists who go there think it’s paradise by comparison. Their numbers worth watching. Seem to be having a second uptick.

    Indonesia and Philippines are just such basket cases on so many levels that it’s interesting to see the number of cases but quality of data has to be a big concern.

    All this is just a way of saying I don’t know. Nobody does. It will take years to tease it all out and even then much of the work cannot be done in the West because involves taboo topics like racial genetic susceptibility, cultural behaviours, government dietary advice, technocratic infallibility, etc.

    Like many of us I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that it might target some races more than others. The huge confounding factor here is that North East Asians are generally healthier anyway due to better diets (this will change for the worse… but still good) and have been through some pretty tough Darwinian Filtering within the last hundred years — total war, famine and pestilence. Gene pool has been filtered and strained more already.

    I rarely say anything coherent, and cannot do so here. But throwing out these random thoughts anyway.

  77. Zaphod:

    Thanks for giving it a try.

    It’s unfortunate that the pandemic data has been politicized and perhaps Covid is an especially complex disease. Maybe smallpox was simpler because it would flat kill 30% and burn out, then reappear later.

    I’d still like to know what the Chinese were doing and what were the real results. I tend to believe they are willing to live with more suffering and death than we are. That’s a crowded country and not one with great sanitation, as I understand.

    The cases and death graphs for Vietnam were shockingly high:

    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/viet-nam/

    Is Delta especially tough on the Vietnamese? Were they using contact tracing and got overwhelmed?

    Maybe there are hundreds of regional Covid stories that must be considered separately. Maybe the data has been so heavily massaged for hundreds of reasons that it’s near-impossible to analyze.

  78. @Huxley:

    Like you I was a bit surprised by Vietnam’s rocket like takeoff. It could just be that they dodged earlier waves and therefore Delta had more available frail, ready-to-decompensate people to kill. In other countries many of these folks would have been knocked off last year.

    Or could be something else. Not a colossal amount of intermarriage between Vietnamese Vietnamese, the various other races (e.g. the Mon — fascinating folk with long history pop up here and there in SE Asia), and the Vietnamese Chinese. So some genetic susceptibility data might come out later. Much later.

    I got off Twitter last year partly because don’t want Twitter cross-site tracking me and partly because lowers my Chinky National Security Law targeting profile (They got nothing against Inward-looking Ethno-Nationalists and everything against Twitter-style Universalist GloboHomo Poz Superspreaders) and consequently stopped following an American academic tweeting from Saigon. He had been working at the Shenzhen campus of Peking University teaching economics and got hounded out for being too outspoken. Had no problem landing a gig in VN. Anyway he talked a lot about public health measures and their effectiveness in Saigon. Seemed to be very efficient and very strict. I think Delta is just so very transmissible that it overwhelms any and all contact tracing systems if there’s any slip up.

    Transmissibility is one thing. CFR for Delta is another thing. There’s no doubt it has higher R0 than earlier variants. Might well be less dangerous than earlier variants. But all the platitudes about viruses evolving to be less fatal apply to “In the Long Run”.

    Even counting the bodies properly is too much for us in the West. And certainly in much of the Under-developed World. I think the Chinese might have better numbers. But why would they tell anyone? Never Interrupt your Enemies…

  79. Here’s an interview which makes some good points IMO and concludes with uncertainty:
    ____________________________________

    What are you looking at?

    Near where I live, Los Angeles County’s more vaccinated than Florida — it’s above average, not average, as Florida is. And it’s going through a big spike in cases and hospitalizations. And there are other indicators like that around the country, where just because you’re at higher vaccination levels, it’s not holding up as well as we’d like to see.

    So where do we go from here? That is the unknown. Eventually Delta will pass through, though maybe it’ll come back, as we’re seeing now in other countries. But what things look like in the meantime, I think it’s a real uncertainty.

    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/too-many-people-are-dying-of-covid-19-right-now.html#comments

  80. It could just be that [Vietnam] dodged earlier waves and therefore Delta had more available frail, ready-to-decompensate people to kill. In other countries many of these folks would have been knocked off last year.

    Zaphod:

    That sounds like a definite factor and another reason to consider the multi-regional nature of Covid.

    I’m also annoyed that the effectiveness of masking and social distancing, as in real life, don’t seem to be nailed down yet by science, at least so far as I can tell.

    As well as a sturdy cost-benefit analysis of our Covid social engineering.

  81. Re masking and insane levels of enforcement, here’s a data point from Shanghai last month:

    https://youtu.be/v5S3YGXQ85Q

    Looks to me like everyone there is a Shanghai Resident. In normal times would be far larger crowds of rubber-necking uncouth rural hinterland riff-raff tourists. As different and unmistakeable as chalk and cheese.

    I’ll keep an eye out and see if can spot anything more recent which reflects a ramping up of precautions against Delta variant.

  82. Shanghai a bit more:

    http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202108/04/WS610a8324a310efa1bd666ab3.html

    At this stage, would you really trust CNN or the NYT more than the China Daily?

    Bit more on Delta in China:

    https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/chinas-delta-driven-covid-19-clusters-expand

    Border security stressed in epidemic prevention
    http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202108/04/WS610a5867a310efa1bd666a7c.html

    Who woulda thunk?

    And a bit more from State Media:
    https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3144287/it-time-china-ease-pandemic-controls-and-learn-live-virus

  83. I don’t subscribe so I can’t read past the headline, but … this sounds ominous.
    Currently the vaccine is under an EUA (emergency use authorization).
    If FDA approves the vaccine then are all bets off? Can they prevent me from entering a grocery store?

    Epoch Times: “Fauci Expects ‘Flood’ of COVID Vaccine Mandates After FDA Approval”

    My Chinese wife notes that in China they’re tightening again. Domestic flights are being cancelled.
    Her brother is not allowed to go into the hospital to visit their 90s year old Dad. Instead, the brother sends his cell phone in and a nurse holds the phone so they can have a video chat. (How sending his phone in is sanitary … is beyond me). So perhaps it is more than madness just in the US.

    I’ve seen references to Mexico going through a crisis some months ago. The reports say Mexico threw caution to the winds and did mass application of Ivermectin. And the infection ramp-up did a ramp-down all on its own. But I haven’t seen a full description, just snippets.

  84. Zaphod:

    Shanghai looks beautiful…

    I read stuff like this from your cidrap link and wonder, could this be true?
    ______________________________________________

    Yesterday, officials in Wuhan reported three Delta variant cases, marking the city’s first local cases since May 2020, according to Reuters. They announced plans to test nearly 12 million people for the virus, and some areas of the city’s industrial and technology zone were sealed off.

    https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/chinas-delta-driven-covid-19-clusters-expand
    ______________________________________________

    Wuhan has a population of 10+ million and is the city where Covid started. Could it really be true they have had zero Covid cases in almost 18 months? Is that true of another similar-sized city outside of China in the world?

    As to Shanghai:
    ________________________________________

    A residential community in Shanghai’s Pudong district was announced as a COVID-19 medium-risk region on Tuesday following the emergence of a new case on Monday.

    This latest case [08/03/21] is the city’s first in six months.

    The patient is a 53-year-old male who handles cargo flights for a foreign airline company at Pudong International Airport. He did not leave Shanghai in the last 14 days.

    http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202108/03/WS6108e669a310efa1bd666536.html
    ________________________________________

    Current population of Shanghai is ~28 million. Have the Chinese really licked Covid to this extent? How?

    Why is no one asking this question?

  86. @Huxley:

    “Current population of Shanghai is ~28 million. Have the Chinese really licked Covid to this extent? How?
    Why is no one asking this question?”

    If your Transnational State Religion (GloboHomo Universalism) forbade you from asking this question of your Managerialist Elite Self, well then would *you* ask it? Doubly-so if the answer might make *you* and your buddies look bad.

    Have a look at graph for Macau for last year. Somehow the world’s largest gambling and prostitution hub managed to resist the temptation to keep the good times rolling and closed off and hunkered down.

    Have a look at the numbers for Hong Kong. It took a while for the Hong Kong Government to plug all the overseas travel and quarantine leaks — because they can’t act without orders from Beijing .. and Hong Kong is sealed off from China right now anyway. Hong Kong is where all the legal/financial stuff gets done, so they had every incentive not to totally close it off — unlike China proper.

    But Hong Kong Quarantine been tighter than a budgie’s posterior since the springtime and things pretty quiet. Anyway look at the absolute numbers even at peak of waves cf. population 7.5M here. At least pre-Delta is eminently possible to get a grip on Covid without gulags, bayonets or tanks if you are competent. The West simply is not. This really has been my epiphany over last 18 months. Very disappointing. I am supposedly a White Supremacist, after all :). Still is possible China might get humbled by Delta. Too early to say.

  87. Griffin:

    Please knock off the Socratic questioning/suggesting and say what you have to say.

    Maybe I’m small-minded but it really drives me crazy.

  88. huxley,

    Jeez, chill man! In the US we are averaging 2 million tests a day what if we did we zero tests a day? We would have no new ‘cases’ even if we had lots of infected people.

    I’m sure that is a part of what China has been doing the last year. Maybe not zero but few tests.

  89. Zaphod:

    Similarly, I’m not looking for homework.

    I guess you’re saying that no one is asking the China question in the West because the elites don’t want it asked.

    I guess you’re saying that Covid can be beaten with sufficiently strong, competent measures, but what those measure are, specifically, remain unclear.

  90. I can’t claim to be 100% certain… but everything I see coming out of China re testing always says ‘Nucleic Acid Test’. I don’t think they are doing any of this bullshit PCR amplification set to 11 ‘testing’ at all now. Think they stopped doing this very early on.

    In other words their system is capable of figuring out that PCR tests are nonsense fantasy and adapting in less than geological timescale to desist from doing them and muddying the epistemological waters.

  91. Griffin:

    I guess you are saying that China is suffering similar case/death numbers to the US, but stopped testing people or noticing the corpses died of something a lot like Covid.

    Although they were somewhat honest at the beginning and are now owning up to a few cases today.

  92. @Huxley:

    Yes and yes.

    Is it so difficult to accept that a country like China can be ruled by an unpleasant bunch of folks and be competently governed at the same time? Especially where national bio-security is concerned. Shouldn’t be any more difficult than grokking that your country is governed incompetently by an unpleasant bunch of ruling elite.

    The true Covid situation in China today is probably slightly worse than the official reports state. The true Covid situation in the USA… How would you even begin to know apart from what you can see around yourself with your own eyes?

    The lab leak was likely a $#%^up by one of the many tentacles of Leviathan not subject to daily oversight from the very top of the leadership tree.. This should be bleedingly occam-wise most obviously likely. Once it got out and became a nationwide problem, the Eye Of Sauron got focused on it and there was no clowning around and they got on top of it and stayed on top of it.

  93. Zaphod:

    I’m skeptical of cranked PCR numbers too. And if dear Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR and all-around weirdo, hadn’t died a year before Covid, he would agree.

    What’s your sense, being in thick of it? Is Covid a minor disease that Western elites are ramping up for their own nefarious purposes?

    Seriously, I can’t tell. I only know two people personally who’ve had Covid. Although according to current stats about one out of nine Americans have had Covid.

    My sister worked as a nurse in a retirement village and she says she saw plenty of people get Covid, and if they were old, die of it.

  94. Is it so difficult to accept that a country like China can be ruled by an unpleasant bunch of folks and be competently governed at the same time?

    Zaphod:

    I can go there. But you have yet to specify exactly what those unpleasant folks are doing that worked.

    Please understand that I can’t tell what’s going on, I’m bugged about it, and that’s my agenda here.

  95. OK Huxley, I did your Worldometers Homework for you:

    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china-macao-sar/

    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china-hong-kong-sar/

    Macau is Just Casinos and Whores and Asian Gangster Money Laundering Hub. Big business, but got shut off in a heartbeat end of January 2020 when Covid went Nova in Wuhan. Pissy little airport most people enter by land or by sea. Quarantine and testing regimes for the very few people allowed in and out since then have been very strict. Otherwise life went on fairly normally.

    Hong Kong is financial gateway to China. One of busiest international airports in the world. Harder to shut down quickly as Important People need to keep laundering their money … err… I mean The Wheels of International Finance Must Keep Turning. But as I said, quarantine and entry restrictions got really tightened up in April/May and life here continues fairly normal except for surgical masks in public places being theoretically compulsory.

    Again.. let’s see what Delta does. but for up until now it’s been beat.

    You can’t do this in the West. Western governments can’t look at (say) India and say “OK. No Indians.” Or by the time the wailing and kvetching is done and a decision can be made, it’s already too late. Out here there is none of that stupid bullshit. Country gets some new virulent strain, it immediately goes on the Immigration Black List until things calm right back down again.

    I posit that 99% of the Chinese success is simply being able to make decisions quickly and get them implemented without a whole lot of crap about ‘Muh Racism’ or ‘Muh Civil Rights’. And I maintain against the slings and arrows of Outrageous Om that the average Chinaman has more Civil Rights in practice than the average White American Male in 2021. Who gives a #$%^ about Theory?

  96. Zaphod:

    So you are saying that China filtered its borders with immediate, extreme prejudice and that’s what made the difference?

    But jeez, how did they handle the tricky bit after it spilled out of Wuhan into most of China? Did welding people into their apartment buildings handle that?

  97. @Huxley:

    My sense is that it’s probably minor for most people but can be very bad news for a small number of otherwise apparently healthy just plain genetically or hidden pathology unlucky younger people.

    It’s certainly very bad news for the very old, the morbidly obese, and people with underlying conditions treated primarily by medication— of which there are many — particularly in the West.

    I am surprised that there hasn’t been mass death in Old People’s homes in Hong Kong or Macau. This could be because authorities have done a very good job of keeping Covid almost entirely out of these places or it could be that Old People here are much healthier.

    Certainly Hong Kong longevity statistics suggest the people here are very hardy. I think there is some survivor effect here. The very old survived the Japanese, Civil War, famines, you name it. They’re tough cookies.

    So many confounding factors.

    Hong Kong is only 50% fully vaccinated as of this week, so if Delta takes off will know more. Keep watching this space.

  98. @huxley:

    Don’t imagine welding people into apartments made much difference. I do imagine that the entire country hunkering down did make a difference. Within 48 hours of Wuhan lockdown, every village in China had shut itself off from its neighbors. Things were pretty intense for two or three months.

    China is not totally ruled from the Top Down. Local leaderships have huge amount of power and authority. In normal times they have to worry about next level up. When some mass panic event took place, they acted locally and dealt with next level up after the fact. And got judged after the fact on Results (as they knew with some confidence whilst in the thick of it they would be). Not prosecuted for Civil Rights Violations (with insanely disproportionate mandatory jail terms) by ambitious DAs who never got their hands dirty with Real Life.

    Processing this stuff is a real paradigm shift. It took me a while too.

  100. @Huxley:

    Yes Re Borders. But more so with local control of movement at village and city neighbourhood levels after the Wuhan Lockdown panicked the rest of China.

    Borders bit slower probably because of stroke of Machiavellian Genius in letting the rest of the world have a taste of it and doing a real time live action experiment in the comparative study of Models of Governance.

    Morality of previous para is a distraction here. I’m purely interested in What Works.

  101. @Huxley:

    Welcome.

    China had colour-coded QR code testing status cum contact tracing apps to regulate travel and entry to sites within a few weeks of Wuhan lockdown going all over the country.

    Everyone in China has a smartphone. Everyone uses QR codes all the time anyway — it’s what drives WeChat Pay and Alipay which are ubiquitous. Average IQ is higher… no large ethnically aggro sub-literate underclasses..(Uighurs can Read… just they better not read the Koran :P) even the old folk use smartphones to keep in touch with grandkids. Boom. Done. The Panopticon has its advantages. Obviously can bite you on the ass, too… but then becomes a question of just how hard you have to try to get your ass bitten. You generally have to try harder in China than the NYT or Tucker Carlson would have you believe.

  102. @Huxley:

    Just in:

    “Coronavirus: China tests tens of millions as second wave of virus hits 17 provinces
    China records 94 more locally transmitted cases, including 41 in flood-ravaged Henan province
    Rescue under way in eastern archipelago after social media cry for help from sailor reporting 13 crewmates ill but refused permission to dock”

    https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3144336/coronavirus-china-tests-tens-millions-second-wave-virus-hits-17

    When they say things like “tests tens of millions” they mean like starting today. Maybe take until tomorrow or Wednesday. But they’ll all queue up and get tested and it’ll get done. Not talked about or blogged about or pundited about or the subject of articles about trannies affected most or the intersectional injustice of it all. Just Done. Whitey can’t just Do with Dispatch in 2021. Apparently that’s Nazi or something.

    Then the sick get quarantined. If there’s are neighourhoods or cities look a bit iffy, they get quarantined en masse. And everyone else goes about their regular business.

    That’s how they licked it and kept a lid on it. At the risk of repeating myself and to cover my ass, let me say again that it remains to be seen whether or not the more transmissible Delta variant will be so amenable to these control methods.

  103. Zaphod:

    Yes, we read about that sort of approach in China not long into the pandemic. The government’s methods were reported widely.

    What one thinks about the Chinese approach depends what your goals are and depends what your values are, and what you’re willing to risk for what you’re willing to gain.

  104. @Neo:

    Values…

    Seems that you had an election brazenly stolen in the USA and there have been significant inroads made into personal freedoms and privacy in many Western countries.. both not unconnected to what we have been ideologically brainwashed to consider to be our more ‘humane’ and ‘civilized’ approaches to the Coronavirus. Not to mention the economic and other psychological depredations. In the longer term, the last 18 months will, I think, go down in history as the period when mass loss of faith in Western institutions and elites became irreversibly a given.

    There were two new cases of Covid-19 reported in Hong Kong today. Two. Out of 7.5M people. Both imported and caught by testing at the border. We all know here that I rather enjoy being contrarian and argumentative… but I absolutely mean it when I say that apart from the inconvenience of having to wear the flimsiest available cheap as chips 3-ply disposable surgical masks to get on a train or go to the supermarket, life has been normal for the past year. Just dull as dishwater because unable to hop on a plane to go anywhere — and even if I could go anywhere, chances are that I’d be subject to far more arbitrary and unpredictable Covid Panic officiousness when I landed wherever than I get here in Hong Kong.

    There is something seriously wrong with Governance in the West today. We can argue until the cows come home what is wrong or how things got to this point, but systemic failure is there for all to see. This is what I keep hammering home.

    Meanwhile the Chinese are zapping back and forth on their high speed trains and not being mugged or beaten up while they do it, mirabile dictu.

    So who today lives in the pages of Animal Farm?

    Incompetence is Freedom.

    Fraudulence is Competence.

    Losing is Winning.

    Fauci is Always Right.

    We are all the Same.

    But some colored Criminals are prosecuted much less than Other Criminals.

  105. Enjoy your CCP until they change your CCP. The cows will come home for thee.

    Carry on carrying their (flood) water.

  108. “In the longer term, the last 18 months will, I think, go down in history as the period when mass loss of faith in Western institutions and elites became irreversibly a given.” Zaphod

    This. I don’t know about “mass” but for some of us, yes. The precursor being the 3 years of utilization of the government to lie about and attack President Trump. Russia Hoax to pandemic election malfeasance.

  110. You see Mr. Z is healthy now with his excellent bicycles, excellent heredity, and excellent cuisine, and none of that will change and he will never grow old in the CCP. Now the reason he will never grow old may come as a shock to Mr. Z, but change may come to the CCP. And then even Mr. Z may no longer be of use to the CCP.

  113. Neo. Don’t know about Kuwait. I’ve seen it said the Polynesians evolved to be “burly” as a defense against hypothermia during their endless voyages. Western ships kept you dry, mostly, while the Polynesians were frequently damp for long periods while afloat. And when the sun does down and the wind continues, things could get unpleasant. Dangerously so. So said the theory.

    Then again, what is “fat”? When I got out of OCS, I was 6/2″, 205. I was in such good shape that the fearsome requirements of Airborne School were a joke. By some tables, I’d have been overweight. My father was a notably fast end at UConn at somewhat slighter build and found, years ago, he’d have been “overweight”. But, he said, he got down to the required weight by VE Day.

    So, combining the two grafs, it’s possible that the Polynesians are “burly” and not in good odor with the BMI gurus without having a morbid cast to their situation.

  114. Yes, we read about that sort of approach in China not long into the pandemic. The government’s methods were reported widely.

    What one thinks about the Chinese approach depends what your goals are and depends what your values are, and what you’re willing to risk for what you’re willing to gain.

    –neo

    I missed articles on the Chinese approach. If anyone has some good links handy, I’d appreciate.

    Given how poorly the US was doing with lockdowns, etc. I assumed once Covid was off and running, we could only somewhat delay it and have to wait for a vaccine or herd immunity. So I assumed the Chinese were mostly lying.

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