Thought of the Day - February 21 - By the Numbers

Cliff Fraser
Feb 21, 2021
3 min read

Updated: Aug 6, 2021

The world has had over 110 million official COVID cases. The big story though is how new cases around the world are dropping. Dramatically.

Globally new cases are now below 400,000 a day when they were over 700,000 a day just a month ago.

The issue is why. Sure lockdowns have turned the tide in some countries, but the reductions are higher than expected and are not all aligned with the level of lockdown. Take the US for example from 190k a day a month ago, and 70k now.

Vaccines? Nope. Little more than 2% of the world population vaccinated, and lead countries that are close to 50% still not seeing significant reductions in new cases.

The interesting part is that many explanations are diametrically opposed, for example:

Testing?:

A) We Are Reaching Herd Immunity: There is a view that we are seeing the effect of herd immunity in some regions. Testing in the early days was not available and poorly conducted thus many cases were missed and false negatives reported and so some countries, and certainly many regions, are reaching herd immunity.

B) We Have Stopped the Case-Demic: The recommendation from back in January is that PCR tests amplification cycles need to be reduced as too many false positives are being reported, moreover less sensitive Rapid Antigen tests are now being used, thus the drop in cases is that we have simply stopped the "Case-Demic" ( Thought of the Day - September 3 - Are We Getting a "Case-demic" ) by running less sensitive tests.

Prevention?:

A) People Are Following Recommendations: Hundreds of millions of people made new years-resolutions to avoid getting COVID at all costs and are now following government guidelines.

B) People Are Following Their Own Path: No longer trusting that authorities will fix this, hundreds of millions of people made new years-resolutions to start using a cocktail of preventives.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues for the next month and if so proper understanding of the driver is found - maybe it is a mix of all of the above.

While I mentioned that vaccines are not yet having a noticeable effect on world cases, the good news is starting to come out concerning their effectiveness, and risk of side effects.

The number of people vaccinated in Israel is now around 50% (earlier reports claimed they were at 80% but these took the number of shots divided by the population, thus people who had had their second shot were double-counted).

Vaccine Effectiveness: Data from Israel indicates while the chance of getting COVID increases for the first week after your first shot, after 21 days the vaccine is even better than advertised some 90%+ effective. This increases to 95% after two shots. Moreover, after two shots you are almost 99% less likely to have a severe case.

Vaccine Risk: In the US 1,170 people who received the COVID-19 vaccine have died. This is great news! Not for the people that passed away, but this represents 0.003% of the people vaccinated or half the rate that people die in the US in the first place. Even more remarkable as a significant proportion were those vaccinated were high risk - the elderly and first-line responders.

Not sure how I missed its introduction but WHO has a COVID-19 dashboard ( https://covid19.who.int/ ).

One of the charts re-illustrates that COVID is a "western-world", "first-world", "NA-Europe and a bit of South-America", call it-what-you-like, pandemic.

"By population" shows this even more starkly. In short, you are five times more likely to have died from COVID in Canada than in Asia or Africa. And if you live in Quebec, who are at the North American average, ten times as likely.

Having a quick look across Canada this week. Saskatchewan is now the hot-spot. Nunavut and Newfoundland re-entered the fray, as of late, with more new cases. Quebec, who never really leaves the fray, is starting to improve.