I'm not sure how you assess that he is conflating numbers to tell a narrative. Pueyo discusses fatality rates in the article, specifically that the vaccines appear to still be highly effective at preventing deaths (though much less so for infections) and that countries with high vaccination rates are not seeing high death rates even when infections are growing.
The only area where he says deaths are getting worse are for the unvaccinated: that fatality rates may be significantly higher for unvaccinated individuals due to a faster replication rate of the virus and therefore a much higher viral load.
I quoted it, the author warns that we should expect India-level deaths in Europe (that's the clear read from showing mass burning of bodies in India, talking about deaths in India, and saying "if you think Europe or the US will be spared").
But then shows infections growth (not deaths) to prove the point, so yeah it's conflating infections with deaths.
The article specified that high death rates might be expected for developing countries with low vaccination rates, not countries with high vaccination rates.
> So Delta, like Alpha before it, is both more transmissible and more fatal. Both of these effects have the same root: the virus is much better at binding to human cells, so it reproduces much faster.
> Are people dying more then? Not in Britain.
> But Delta is very hard in developing countries, especially in dense urban areas where the poor are forced to work but live in close quarters with many others. India, Argentina, Tunisia, South Africa, and Indonesia are very sad examples of this.
that's not the impression i got at all. the words did not say, "will be spared from the identical outcome as India" and it is obvious that US / EU have better vaccination/ medical infrastructure compared to India. The phrase is a qualitative expression only for the purposes of a blog post, this is not a medical journal article.
The problem I have with this article isn't the data, it's unclear what it tries to convey at all.
The first part of the article is an exposé of the evolution of the epidemic, transmissibility and fatality rates. Fine, but at this point, I haven't read any thesis, question, point, claim or argument he would like to answer or prove. It's just a wall of data.
Halfway through, he finally asks the million dollar question "How good are vaccines against Delta?"
That's where he has to retreat to the fact that any data about large populations available is limited:
> The best data we have is from Israel, which used Pfizer.
He then mentions percentages from an article from marketwatch.com and a briefing from technical briefing from the UK government, and goes on to extrapolate several claims based on those sources.
The takeaways in the latter part of his article are generic and have been repeated at nauseam by the medical community and health policy experts at large.
Thomas Pueyo isn't a medical or policy expert. He's a data analyst / publicist. Sure, he's entitled to write musings on his blog. But I don't regard him as an authoritative source because he's able to compile online graphs and stats into an piece which seems to be easily digestible on the surface level.
The only area where he says deaths are getting worse are for the unvaccinated: that fatality rates may be significantly higher for unvaccinated individuals due to a faster replication rate of the virus and therefore a much higher viral load.