And neglecting the fact that there is a large difference between the natural Reproductive Rate of Delta vs the effective reproduction rate due to masking, distancing and vaccinations.
Claims about a lot of things in this mess are highly contentious. Things that were flat out refuted are later accepted. Things are modified all the time. One piece of science is gospel, then ignored. Some science is censored. I am putting forward both my opinions and some data. I fully expect both to be disputed. I would be most surprised if I was 100% right. But I am not 100% wrong. I am not convinced the folks disputing me are 100% wrong either.
Are you talking about media coverage of science, where I might agree with you, or about actual scientists? There are limits and biases that prevent some funding and publication, as well as imperfect communication, but as a rule scientists neither censor nor ignore relevant information.
I don’t think the scientists at the front lines of research are censoring. But after that point there seems to be a lot of pressure to not rock the boat. Media is all over the place. Some are very lockstep to the official government lines. Others offer a wider range of opinions/facts. Many are just fringe. But I don’t take media articles as very factual unless they link to some reputable data. If there are no links, I will try to track down what they are saying to a source. But that can be a long winding road.
Trying to get a good match of data here in Canada that indicates case variants, hospitalization, and vaccine rates. A case variant timeline that coincides with the other two data is hard to find. Delta took over quite early and remains at almost 100% of cases. Also the data from start to present is difficult to correlate as to cases of vaccinated or not. It is lumped together from the very start, so it covers times when nobody was vaccinated till almost all areas are 75% or more vaccinated.
FFS it is not difficult. The provincial health authorities are publishing data. For example, every day SHA updates new cases by vax status, current hospitalizations by vax status, etc. A fine fellow on r/saskatoon has been collating that data into various charts every day. Here’s his latest post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/saskatoon/comments/r9ni98/dec_5_70_new_cases_15_in_saskatoon_0_deaths_45/
If you scroll to Page 5, you can see the rolling 7-day average new cases per day broken down by vax status. During our recent peak back in October, the average new case per day among vaccinated topped out at about 12/100k. For unvaccinated, it topped out at about 118/100k. The ratio has consistently been around 1 to 8-10. The hospitalization graph on the same page isn’t quite as lopsided, which should be no surprise given that the median age of the unvaccinated population is something like 10 years old. It’s still a 1 to 5-6 ratio without controlling for age, though. Control for age and that number will jump through the roof.
You can insist that the data on vaccine effectiveness isn’t clear if you want, but you are horribly mistaken and are ignoring overwhelming data that’s available practically anywhere you turn.
Ontario is slowing down the reopening because of the slight uptick in cases.
Neither I nor anyone I know, even the most enthusiastic lockdown supporters, have a stomach for more when we’ve done what was asked and the great majority of people have been vaccinated. It’s time to ramp up a lockdown for the unvaccinated and let the rest of us live.
To be fair, I don’t think most people believed that reopening was going to start in mid-Jan even before Omicron.
Yeah, speaking as a Toronto resident, I wasn’t expecting anything approaching pre-COVID openness until late Spring/early Summer 2022. We need to get through the inevitable (even without Omicron) winter surges.
Pretty sure we won’t be doing any actual return to lockdowns, but if there were some occupancy restrictions brought in (only x number of people per square footage in stores and so on), I expect them to be reasonable, and only in the really hard-hit areas of the province.
As always, that’s the price of being the grown-ups in the room. The anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have proven they won’t behave, so everyone else has to pay.
Agreed. Keep them out of public areas entirely. I note that in BC, where there have been a few employment mandates, the number of folks who decide to quit rather than vaccinate has been tiny - around 1%. In healthcare, many of these were part time workers, non-clinical fairly easy to replace (cleaners, food service) I say we’re better off firing this 1% - they were likely anti-social shitheads anyway.
The strong anti-vaxxers have indicated that they have no intention of working within societies rules. Fine. Then they can be removed from society.
Nothing from Public Health Canada yet but the Ontario Science Table published their projections for Ontario recently. Slide 6 is a lovely testament to vaccine affectiveness.
Worrisome from an ICU loading projection but it looks like it’s manageable. Most concern there is around how little slack is left amongst healthcare workers.
It’s the same kind of data we’ve been seeing for months now, and the anti-vaxxers still can’t figure it out. I don’t think one more chart emphasizing the same damn thing is going to make much of a difference.
Oh I know, I just like how clearly it makes the case 
Yet again, the media often gives fuel to anti-vaccine enthusiasts by stating “X% of cases are in the fully vaccinated”. This misleads people when the majority of people are vaccinated and because age cohort matters. Breaking things down along the lines of “being unvaccinated (as someone in this age cohort and place) increases your risk of hospitalization or ICU admission by X times” is much preferred.
I suspect that the math skills (particularly fractions, percentages, and statistics) are no better among journalists and editors than among the general population. Statistics never even came up when I was in school, and as an academic a truly distressing portion of my PhD-holding colleagues are absolutely flummoxed by fractions and percents.
Boosted!
If there is a common thread to antivaxxers, even ones whose other arguments are totally different, it’s a total failure or refusal to understand how statistics work.
What are they supposed to do, lie? It isn’t their fault that antivaxxers don’t get math. Such stories almost invariably do make mention of the percentage of people that are vaccinated. If people can’t look at such simple numbers and understand what they mean, what’s the media supposed to do?
Recently on Facebook there was one of those simple math quizzes: A=50+10x0+7+2 , solve for A. The answer is 59, of course. Fewer than half of adults get it. Now, a lot of people answer 9 because they just go left to right instead of following order of operations, and honestly, I guess you could make that mistake if you’ve been out of school a really long time. But a huge number of people answered 69 because they truly, honestly believe that sixty times zero is… sixty. Other answers included 0, 540, and 50. When told something times zero is zero, these people react with disbelief. Innumeracy is incredibly common. It’s a much bigger problem than illiteracy.
They do not have to lie, though statistics make it easy to mislead. The media is always talking about acting in the public interest. If vaccination is unhelpful they should say this too. Either should be in a format people are more likely to understand. Isn’t communication the essence of good journalism? If it is clearly helpful they could say why. “People who are unvaccinated end up in the ICU at twelve times the rate of those fully vaccinated. This is particularly true of younger people aged (whatever).” If they really want to add more, they could follow this and say “Because most people are fully vaccinated, the ICU should contain more people who are vaccinated, if the vaccine did not work well. But it does work well. 85% of Canadians are vaccinated yet they only account for 25% of those admitted to hospital.”
(I realize that some people have difficulty interpreting statistics, media might represent certain interests, yada, yada. What annoys me most is when the responsible officials fail to put things into the most clear and easy to understand terms. However, this will now all change simply because I have pointed it out.)
It’s not just an issue of the statistics, though. How they’re presented matters, because a lot of people are really lazy, and stop reading halfway through things. Take your example. What would be the Stupid Take-away if they only read, “Because most people are fully vaccinated, the ICU should contain more people who are vaccinated…”
And that’s what we’re seeing, really. The later, more nuanced explanation gets swept under the rug of “They expect more vaccinated people to get sick!!!”