Thought of the Day - November 21 2021 - By the Numbers

Now the massive case increases seen in Europe over the last month (that is exceeding last year's peak) are manifesting into deaths. Europe now accounts for 60% of cases and of deaths worldwide.

Meanwhile as mentioned last week, the US is now going into its next wave (you heard it here first). Cases are now up by 30% over the last two weeks.

Concerning vaccine effectiveness, here is an interesting graph from the US. It shows that the unvaccinated are six times as likely to become an official case and once symptomatic are twice as likely to die.

Test Positive Death

BC's numbers are a little different.

The chance of getting infected in BC is an order of magnitude less if you have been vaccinated, rather than just six times reported in the US. While a bit higher it is still in the same ballpark.

But note, the chance of death is 46 times less. This is very strange as it is much higher than the 12 times shown in the US. Looking at the UK October data, as with the US they are also reporting that the unvaccinated are about 12 times as likely to die. This also lines up with some of the other Canadian provinces; New Brunswick for example is also 12 times. This means, once symptomatic, in BC the unvaccinated are four times more likely to die here than in the US, the UK or in provinces such as New Brunswick - so there must be something else going on here in BC.

I thought one explanation could be that some provinces, including BC, used this "Age Standardized Rate" scale. This is used when the age distributions are different between compared populations. However, if anything this should skew the data the opposite way as the higher risk groups are more likely to be vaccinated.

Here in BC, this data also shows that once in the hospital the vaccine does nothing for you, in fact, you are more likely to die if you were not vaccinated. This actually makes sense, but only if an Age Standardized Rate was not used as more older people are vaccinated than in the younger demographic.

All very strange.

I guess the only thing we can conclude is that either BC is reporting differently than other parts of the world, or we have an even greater pressing need to introduce better therapeutics and care.

The week's shout-out goes to Nunavut. Unlike the other territories, they did very well during this last wave and currently are COVID-free - the only place across Canada, the US and Mexico.

Cheers

Cliff