[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.