[TedPetrou]

Does it also make sense that they are currently ranked #2 in the world in cases per million in the last week for countries with more that 1 million population?

This is even after a down week in cases. Next door Lebanon is seeing cases fall at the same or faster pace and they peaked at the same time as Israel. Lebanon has yet to start vaccinating.

Case fatality rate has not fallen either. You would expect a huge drop in CFR if the elderly were protected, but this hasn't been the case.

[xadhominemx]

It’s not that hard to understand. People usually die several weeks after exposure. Only 27% of the population has received both doses; a few weeks ago that number was much smaller. In addition, the ultra orthodox community has continued to flout rules on a nearly universal basis. I’m going to go check your comment history — pretty sure you’ll have been wrong about everything related to COVID so far.

Edit: shocked (not shocked) you were an early COVID vaccine skeptic, justified your belief with poor interpretation of statistics, and now that a huge amount of data have validated initial findings, you have instead decided to double down on your original gut feel!

[adventured]

> Edit: shocked (not shocked) you were an early COVID vaccine skeptic, justified your belief with poor interpretation of statistics, and now that a huge amount of data have validated initial findings, you have instead decided to double down on your original gut feel!

I won't defend the comment author's (apparent) anti-vaccine stance.

However, it's almost universally frowned upon to dig into HN users archives and lambaste them for things they've said in the past. That has been the case here for essentially the entire time HN has existed.

It's properly considered borderline cruel/mean and is entirely unnecessary. If there is something worth debating about what they said in their present comment, that should very obviously be the point of focus in the discussion.

In late 2018 some guy on here basically told me I was an idiot and had no idea about investing for predicting that Facebook's stock was a good investment after the irrational drop it had suffered at the time. I was right, they were wrong to an almost humiliating degree. Now, if I go dig up that post and follow that user around HN torturing them with their past comment/s, it would be considered to be in extremely bad taste in HN-etiquette. And I think it's easy to understand why: given the volume of comments and the long archives, HN would rapidly implode into just about the worst pile of garbage on the Internet if everyone went around hitting everyone else for things they said in the past, focus would shift to weaponizing the archives to attack users based on past comments (which would chill discussion dramatically and poison the well).

[xadhominemx]

I’m very happy to lambast vaccine truthers, and it’s good for the discourse to point out that individuals making incorrect vaccine skeptic comments were also making incorrect vaccine skeptic comments in the past.

[TedPetrou]

"Only 27% of the population received both doses". This is a misinterpretation. It's like saying 0.5% die of covid. The vaccinations (and fatality rates) are extremely stratified by age. Over 50% of the 70+ group received at least one vaccination by the third week of January and close to 85% have received both doses as of today.

[birken]

You said cases were high. Case counts are going to depend on how quickly the age groups with the most cases get vaccinated, which is generally the younger population. So it is going to take a while for case counts to fall.

Since a COVID death generally happens 5-8 weeks after exposure, what you'd expect is that once the high risk populations have been fully vaccinated, you'd start to see the death counts dropping 5-8 weeks later, and you'd start to see the hospitalization rates dropping 2-3 weeks later. Case counts are going to drop last because the high risk populations are not driving the majority of cases.

Also I don't understand what point you are trying to prove? We have detailed clinical trials about the efficacy of the vaccines. We have strong evidence to believe they work. If you are trying to interpret the data to show this isn't the case, you are probably misinterpreting it because it would be going against what we think we know with a high degree of confidence. It doesn't mean we couldn't be wrong, but it is much more likely you are just misinterpreting the data.

[wittyreference]

Israel's issue has been and continues to be a very large orthodox and ultra-orthodox community which has flouted all quarantine laws and appeals to vaccination, in a tiny dense country where said orthodox and ultra-orthodox can't be meaningfully avoided.

That said, their statistics regarding the symptomatic case rate speak for themselves.

[TedPetrou]

So you admit that total case numbers are not very good, particularly compared to a neighboring country that has not started vaccinating. Thats a good first step.

Scapegoating the orthodox jews? More than 92% of 70+ in Israel have received both doses of the vaccine. Are you blaming the high number of cases on this very small segment?

What happens when elderly all cause mortality is elevated substantially in 2021? This is the ultimate test for the vaccine.