[sgtnoodle]

The link you provided describes a simulation based on assumed vaccine effectiveness. It's also from 1 year ago. It doesn't seem to reflect any statistically backed insights into what's actually happened over the past year. Or am I missing something?

[sgtnoodle]

Trying to find some actual data, I googled "covid deaths by month" and I stumbled upon this: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

Notably, the "Growth Factor" plot looks qualitatively very similar from April 2020 until now. Before then, the data looks more noisy to me but not necessarily different on average. I believe folk started getting vaccinated in December 2020? Based on that plot, it doesn't look like the vaccine is helping much for the death rate. Maybe that data source is not legitimate, or maybe "growth factor" isn't the right metric to look at?

[Ambolia]

"Covid deaths" are also a very meaningless metric where every country or region does whatever it wants. Excess deaths would be a better metric, but also hard to remove from there all the damage done by lockdowns, stress generated on the population, and by hospitals stopping attending other diseases in some places.

[ziml77]

Why would you remove the excess deaths caused by hospitals not being able to handle non-COVID illnesses due to taking care of COVID patients?

[Ambolia]

Because those are dependent on the response to the disease, not the disease itself.

[sgtnoodle]

So what's the right available metric to look at that statistically quantifies the effectiveness of the vaccines? Or does one not exist?

[Ambolia]

Control groups. But most countries and trials seem decided to get rid of them as fast as possible.

[bonzini]

The current virus has a natural growth factor that is about 3x larger than the OG. So vaccines are at least 66% effective if they are keeping it at bay. Probably more since lots of countries have very low restrictions compared to last year.

[galaxyLogic]

According to the following graph deaths per 100,000 people are: 18 for unvaccinated 3 for vaccinated. at the peak of the graph between July and October 2021.

Doesn't that tell us that vaccinations help to significantly reduce Covid-deaths?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...

[sgtnoodle]

Thanks for the link. For fun I downloaded the referenced CDC dataset. One thing I noticed is that the fraction of deaths per case for the vaccinated population was higher than for the unvaccinated population until July, at which point it "snapped" to match for the rest of the dataset. It seems like a curious anomaly.

https://imgur.com/a/QGJqs0S

[dragonsky]

Where older and more venerable people being vaccinated early? They still are more likely to die if infected. Then a spread of vaccination to the general population. You would have to look at a breakdown of who was vaccinated at the time you saw the lower vaccine benefit.

[sgtnoodle]

I thought about that, but it seems like whatever changed must have happened nearly instantaneously. Looking at the plot, it's a rather pronounced step change.

[DenisM]

Reduce deaths? yes. But it tells us nothing about reducing spread.

[galaxyLogic]

Good point.

Theoretically it could be possible that non-vaccinated infect fewer others than those who are vaccinated -- because unvaccinated more readily die after which they can not keep on infecting others. Nevertheless the goal is not to reduce infections but to reduce deaths and serious illness.

Here's an article which says that vaccination does reduce the risk of you infecting others. But this effect diminishes over time quite fast. That would seem like a good reason to get the booster.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

[DenisM]

> Nevertheless the goal is not to reduce infections but to reduce deaths and serious illness.

Whose goal? There is no shortage of people and organizations that are trying to force others to vaccinate “to prevent spread”. As your link shows the effectives of this is dubious.

[galaxyLogic]

> Whose goal?

My goal. I assume also your goal. And I assume people who try to "prevent spread" do so because spread of Covid-19 causes death and serious illness.

There have been 799,276 Covid-deaths in the US during the short period it's been around. Almost 800k people dead. Dead. If there was no "Covid spread" those people would not have caught Covid and thus would not have died because of it.

To reduce Covid deaths and serious Covid illness you must try to reduce its spread. If you stop it from spreading you stop it from killing people.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/