I think you put on your tinfoil hat by mistake there buddy.
None of the numbers you provided have any sort of relevance to the links you posted. Net breakthrough deaths, as far as I can tell, is not a real metric. And only 4 million people have died of covid globally to begin with...
> What terminology would you recommend for getting the number of people who died from Covid19 after being fully vaccinated against Covid19?
"Breakthrough deaths" not "Net breakthrough deaths"
Your post is flagged and unreadable now but I'm pretty sure you were claiming 8 million breakthrough deaths. That's obviously wrong because it's two times larger than the total number of deaths globally among all people.
> Since the CDC do not report these as a time series, but they just overwrite the most recent numbers, I linked to snapshots of the same page over time[2]. If there is an arithmetic error, I would like to know
Your error comes from failing to compare to the right control group. Vaccinated people have a tendency to be much higher risk than the unvaccinated. Notably, no children are in this group. You're getting fooled by bayes law here. The baseline risk of people who were vaccinated was on average much higher. 80% of people over 75 are vaccinated. Less than half of people under 30 are.
And on top of that are missing the bigger picture that the most conservative estimates I've seen suggest 79% of deaths are among the unvaccinated. Combine that with the previous statement about who is getting vaccinated and you have a very clear picture that vaccines are drastically helping reduce death rates.
Net implies you are counting positives and subtracting negatives. As in, net lives saved vs. lives lost. Subtracting the 341 people who got breakthrough and died of irrelevant reasons does not make this a "net" metric.
You're right I must have missed the "/" symbol. But the point remains that your comparison is irrelevant and ignoring very bright signals that the vaccines are effective. The rise in percentages are not as noteworthy as you imply as we're dealing with very small numbers to begin with.
> 1 : free from all charges or deductions: such as. a : remaining after the deduction of all charges, outlay, or loss net earnings net worth — compare gross. b : excluding all tare net weight. 2 : excluding all nonessential considerations : basic, final the net result net effect.
Note (2): "excluding all nonessential considerations". In calculating the rate of deaths from Covid19 among those who are fully vaccinated against Covid19, the people who were infected from Covid19 but did not die from it is "nonessential consideration".
There is nothing wrong with using "net" here. Don't hang your hat on it.
If anyone is willing to think, the increasing rate is problematic, because, naturally, there is a lag between when one is vaccinated and infected. Another lag between infection and hospitalization. Another lag between hospitalization and death.
Update: CDC just updated the numbers. The rate of death from Covid19 among those fully vaccinated against Covid19 now stands at 8.6/million. Deleting previous comments about updates not being made.
> compare current deaths of vaccinated individuals vs unvaccinated individuals
That'd be a nice change from the cumulative totals everyone is using. Do you know where I can find those data?
Also, note that the people who haven't yet had their second shot or people whose second shot was less than two weeks ago are counted as "unvaccinated".
> Your math is pointless.
It would only be pointless if we didn't care about correctly estimating the risk of serious illness or hospitalization from Covid19 among the fully vaccinated.
Given the entirety of the current information, it is reasonable to believe that people who's at greatest risk for suffering seriously or die from Covid19 are going to be in that situation with or without a vaccine.
All deductions would include deaths avoided by the vaccine.
If there are ten poisoned people, and you give them all an antidote, then one dies of poison and one dies from a stab wound; the net effect was eight lives saved. If the antidote killed one person you might argue it was net seven lives saved.
Google "Net breakthrough deaths". You are not describing a real metric. You would be better off describing this as "total deaths from covid among vaccinated individuals".
> If anyone is willing to think, the increasing rate is problematic, because, naturally, there is a lag between when one is vaccinated and infected. Another lag between infection and hospitalization. Another lag between hospitalization and death.
Because we can actively compare current deaths of vaccinated individuals vs unvaccinated individuals, and compare them to our bayesian priors as you tried to imply you were comfortable with. If the vaccine is a flat 50% reduced chance of death, and you vaccinate the highest risk population, you might still see the vaccinated population having a higher death rate even if vaccine is working perfectly.
By comparison, in some years the influenza vaccine is under 40% effective. 0.9 deaths per 1 million is amazing (especially given the likely age profile).
In April the vaccination rate was much lower. In a hypothetical situation where 100% of people are vaccinated, all Covid deaths will be vaccinated people.
With so small numbers if vaccinated people dying we should expect that deaths per million to jump around depending on regional outbreaks for a while.
Neither. In April, the rate of death from Covid19 among those fully vaccinated against Covid19 was 0.9/million.
By August 9, it was at 7.5/million. CDC used to provide updates every Friday for the preceding Monday. The rate increased with every report.
The last update was on August 13. So, I wondered why they had not updated on Friday this time.
I see now that they just posted an update since this thread started[1] and after the approval was announced. This will increase my posterior belief that the update had been held back to happen after the approval announcement for political reasons.
I don't think this is news to anyone. There is increasing evidence that the length of protection vaccination gives is less than ideal - hence the need to booster shots.
> I see now that they just posted an update since this thread started[1] and after the approval was announced. This will increase my posterior belief that the update had been held back to happen after the approval announcement for political reasons.
It came out on a Monday instead of a Friday. There was zero evidence of any political interest in the date of the release of this data before, and there are thousands of potential explanations for any delay. But sure.
In my home state, Massachusetts, .3% of the total population has died of Covid-19. If you make a safe assumption that not 100% of people have been infected you can make a very basic assumption that the infection fatality rate is around .5-2%.
Even if we had that data it wouldn't be a fair evaluation of vaccine efficacy. The elderly are the most vaccinated demographic, have the highest number of breakthrough infections, and have the highest mortality rate. There are too many confounding variables.
Just to add on to what you're pointing out, the existing UK data[1] makes this even more obvious. Technically it reports that about 2/3s of the total deaths were of vaccinated people (402 fully vaccinated deaths, 253 unvaccinated), even though only about 1/3 of cases are in fully vaccinated people (47,008 vs 151,054). But this is totally expected because the vaccinated rate in the >50 age range is extremely high, and they account for practically all the deaths (from those groups the <50 age range only accounts for 60 deaths, with 4/5 of those in the unvaccinated population). In that >50 population, there were way more vaccinated cases than unvaccinated (because the rate is so high), so if you calculate the CFR for just that age range it's actually about ~6% for the unvaccinated and only ~1.8% for the fully vaccinated, so in reality those who got the vaccine had much better outcomes even though when combining both age groups it looks like it was much worse.
