Who’s dying if so many vaccinated?

[Flossie44]

So if the vaccination rate is about 80%, who’s in hospital/dying? Is it the 20% unvaccinated?

Age is still the biggest risk factor, even with vaccination. Hospitalisation and death rates are the highest in the over 75s (ONS).

Latest figures for deaths from Delta = 1,798 total

1,091had been double dosed.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1014926/Technical_Briefing_22_21_09_02.pdf

Page 22

The new PHE reports out today have more detail now

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1016312/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_36.pdf

The attached shows the rates per 100,000 for deaths vax/unvax by age for weeks 32-35. Given the sheer numbers of vaxed people now, over half of deaths are in the vaxed group BUT the rates of death per 100,000 population are vastly different.

@PatriciaHolm

The new PHE reports out today have more detail now

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1016312/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_36.pdf

The attached shows the rates per 100,000 for deaths vax/unvax by age for weeks 32-35. Given the sheer numbers of vaxed people now, over half of deaths are in the vaxed group BUT the rates of death per 100,000 population are vastly different.

Seems like not being vaccinated increases your risk of death about 9x/ 10x depending on age.

I think overall we should accept that a huge section of the UK population is generally quite unhealthy and that is probably an indicator of who is dying from covid.

It seems to me that the government have gone all out for vaccination as the only way out of this when yes it will offer some good protection to some but not so much for others and lots of vaccinated people will still die because many people have a poor standard of health.

What I would like to know is why we have so many dying in the UK when countries like Japan have twice the population of the UK, an older population, a much higher population density, less than 50% of their population vaccinated but still less than 17K deaths from covid. That's less than the total deaths for London!!

I can only assume that the low levels of obesity and a generally healthier lifestyle/diet in Japan are something to do with this disparity.

I for one am angry that the government hasn't done more to push exercise/healthy eating as way for people to protect themselves from covid (and lots of other illnesses).

They've really missed a golden opportunity.

@ACreakingGateNeverStops

I think overall we should accept that a huge section of the UK population is generally quite unhealthy and that is probably an indicator of who is dying from covid.

It seems to me that the government have gone all out for vaccination as the only way out of this when yes it will offer some good protection to some but not so much for others and lots of vaccinated people will still die because many people have a poor standard of health.

What I would like to know is why we have so many dying in the UK when countries like Japan have twice the population of the UK, an older population, a much higher population density, less than 50% of their population vaccinated but still less than 17K deaths from covid. That's less than the total deaths for London!!

I can only assume that the low levels of obesity and a generally healthier lifestyle/diet in Japan are something to do with this disparity.

I for one am angry that the government hasn't done more to push exercise/healthy eating as way for people to protect themselves from covid (and lots of other illnesses).

They've really missed a golden opportunity.

It could be at least partially down to how covid deaths are classified - every country has a different way of counting a death as a covid death.

Just in from PHE

Sorry patriciaholm somehow I missed your post

@TheDailyCarbunkle but that's difference of well over 100K which is a worry in itself as if true either makes UK figures or Japans figures meaningless.

What part of vaccines aren't 100% are people not understanding?

@TheDailyCarbunkle

To be fair I think the propaganda around covid has entirely messed with people's heads. The narrative is that we must do everything possible - including destroying the economy and denying children an education - to avoid covid deaths and that the vaccine was the great saviour that would allow us to avoid the scourge of the Deadly Disease. I think in that context people are struggling to get their heads around a world where a certain number of deaths is just expected and not treated as a huge tragedy or national emergency.

I do find it interesting though that now people are talking about how it's the more elderly and vulnerable who die and that it's often 'with covid' rather than 'from covid.' That's always been the case, since the beginning of the pandemic and yet it wasn't acceptable to talk about the vulnerable being more likely to die back in 2020 because it was seen as dismissing them or not caring about their deaths.

Surely ultimately it was thought that the restrictions were the best way to protect the capitalist system and that it would have collapsed without them due to the sheer quantity of severe illness caused by Covid pre-vaccines leading to economic collapse. Well I always assumed that protecting the system, not lives, was the true priority of the powers that be. Unless you are going to believe in conspiracy theories and things like the New World Order, surely it has to be concluded that it was believed the actions taken were the best way to preserve the economy, not destroy it.

[quote ACreakingGateNeverStops]@TheDailyCarbunkle but that's difference of well over 100K which is a worry in itself as if true either makes UK figures or Japans figures meaningless.[/quote]
All data has its limitations - for example when looking at how many cases of covid there are in a country, you can count positive tests, which means that anyone who hasn't tested isn't counted and also that if everyone stopped testing tomorrow the number would drop to 0. 0r you can sample some of the population and extrapolate to the entire population. Both ways of measuring are inaccurate, it's just the type of inaccuracy that changes. Equally when you count deaths you have to have some sort of criteria. The UK's criterion is 'died within 28 days of a positive covid test' which is extremely broad and means that if I test positive for covid now, have it very mildly and recover but die of cancer in 28 days that's a covid death. It could be that Japan counts only deaths where covid directly contributed, which is a much stricter measure. Again, both are inaccurate in different ways.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

To be fair I think the propaganda around covid has entirely messed with people's heads. The narrative is that we must do everything possible - including destroying the economy and denying children an education - to avoid covid deaths and that the vaccine was the great saviour that would allow us to avoid the scourge of the Deadly Disease. I think in that context people are struggling to get their heads around a world where a certain number of deaths is just expected and not treated as a huge tragedy or national emergency.

I do find it interesting though that now people are talking about how it's the more elderly and vulnerable who die and that it's often 'with covid' rather than 'from covid.' That's always been the case, since the beginning of the pandemic and yet it wasn't acceptable to talk about the vulnerable being more likely to die back in 2020 because it was seen as dismissing them or not caring about their deaths.

Rewrite:

Surely ultimately it was thought that the restrictions were the best way to protect the capitalist system and that without them the sheer quantity of severe illness caused by Covid pre-vaccines would have led to economic collapse.

@everythingthelighttouches

Just in from PHE

Please can someone with a much better grasp of statistics than me explain to me (nicely please) why if 1119 people die (over 80 years of age) and out of these 928 are fully vaccinated and 155 are unvaccinated why the death rate per 100,000 is higher in the unvaccinated group (121.5 per 100K) compared to a rate of 36 per 100K in the vaccinated group.

Many more people in the vaccinated group died so why is the vaccinated death rate lower than the unvaccinated?

Surely ultimately it was thought that the restrictions were the best way to protect the capitalist system and that it would have collapsed without them due to the sheer quantity of severe illness caused by Covid pre-vaccines leading to economic collapse. Well I always assumed that protecting the system, not lives, was the true priority of the powers that be. Unless you are going to believe in conspiracy theories and things like the New World Order, surely it has to be concluded that it was believed the actions taken were the best way to preserve the economy, not destroy it.

That's an interesting take on it @BlueBlancmange but I'm not sure I follow the reasoning, if you're up for explaining it a bit more? The thing I don't get is: high rates of illness would have the effect of shutting down businesses while those people were ill. The data suggests that most of those people would recover and go back to work, so for individual businesses the shutdown would be temporary. By contrast, in lockdown, shutdowns last months. So essentially with lockdown the government created the situation that you say they were trying to avoid - businesses shut down - except they did it for a lot longer than would have happened otherwise, damaging businesses more. That's how I see it anyway.

@LivingDeadGirlUK (on page 2) I know! I clarified what I was getting at in subsequent posts.

Probably looks like I'm taking this too seriously, but after all the rows I've had with antivaxxers on here it rankles that I've accidentally sounded like I am one

If someone got knocked down by a bus and died but tested positive for covid a week earlier, would it be recorded as a covid death?

@Beautiful3

People die every day from all kinds of things. Unfortunately if they have covid as well as cancer/injury, then covid is put on the death certificate.

This is not always the case at all.

People are mixing up two different things.

The reporting system is recording people who have died within 28 days of having a positive covid test. They may or may not have died OF covid, but they did have covid at the time of their death. Similarly, some people have died from covid related complications after 28 days and these are not counted in the reporting.

The death certificate is different again. It is perfectly possible that someone had covid at the time of their death but their death wasn't caused by covid. Depending on the medic they may or may not mention covid as either a secondary or a primary cause of death.

My nana died last year. She had covid, but it wasn't the cause of her death. Covid is not mentioned at all on her death certificate. Dh sees a number of death certificates weekly as part of his job. Covid is not always mentioned, even when he knows the person had covid at the time. Sometimes, it is listed as a secondary cause, sometimes not mentioned at all.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

Surely ultimately it was thought that the restrictions were the best way to protect the capitalist system and that it would have collapsed without them due to the sheer quantity of severe illness caused by Covid pre-vaccines leading to economic collapse. Well I always assumed that protecting the system, not lives, was the true priority of the powers that be. Unless you are going to believe in conspiracy theories and things like the New World Order, surely it has to be concluded that it was believed the actions taken were the best way to preserve the economy, not destroy it.

That's an interesting take on it @BlueBlancmange but I'm not sure I follow the reasoning, if you're up for explaining it a bit more? The thing I don't get is: high rates of illness would have the effect of shutting down businesses while those people were ill. The data suggests that most of those people would recover and go back to work, so for individual businesses the shutdown would be temporary. By contrast, in lockdown, shutdowns last months. So essentially with lockdown the government created the situation that you say they were trying to avoid - businesses shut down - except they did it for a lot longer than would have happened otherwise, damaging businesses more. That's how I see it anyway.

Having so many people severely ill all at once would have affected the entire functioning of the system though, wouldn't it, even for a short period of time? Wouldn't it have been utter chaos with things like supply chains breaking down completely? Might it not have led to an unrecoverable collapse? I'm not an economist, so I don't know. But I tend to think ultimately pretty much everything comes down to maintaining the Capitalist system. And that somewhere ruthless calculations were made, not about saving lives, but about saving certain bottom lines.

Bear in mind that many people who are vulnerable to,covid have auto immune means that the vaccines may not work as well for them. Sometimes, for some vulnerable people, they won't work at all.

@Idyllic

If someone got knocked down by a bus and died but tested positive for covid a week earlier, would it be recorded as a covid death?

Yes. Also, if you're admitted to the hospital for an appendectomy and test positive for covid on admission then that's a covid admission, whether you're symptomatic or not. So a proportion of the admission numbers are 'double dipping' - counting people who would be in hospital anyway. Given that between 20 and 40% of covid infections occur in hospital, that's not a small proportion of the total.

@ACreakingGateNeverStops

Because there are now far far more people who have had a vaccine than who have not, so the percentage of those who have had a vaccine who have died is much smaller than the percentage of those who have not had a vaccine.

1,119 over 80s died. There are roughly 3.1m over 80s in the UK.

Of the over 80s, around 95% are vaxxed - that's around 2.95m.

So of those, 964 died -that's 0.033% , or around 33 per 100,000 (doesn't match PHE exactly as I'm rounding)

There are around 150,000 unvaxed, of whom 155 died; that's around 1%, or 100 per 100,000. As I say, my numbers don't match exactly because I don't know exactly the population numbers PHE are using, but I think it's close enough to show the point.

@ACreakingGateNeverStops I assume it is because many more people over 80 are vaccinated. So if you have 100 80 year olds, and 80 of them are double vaccinated. 10 of the 100 die and 6 of those were double vaccinated.

If you just look at the 10 that died more have died that were vaccinated than not, but if you look at the 100, 6 out of 80 died who were vaccinated, and 4 out of 20 unvaccinated, so a much higher proportion of unvaccinated people died.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

To be fair I think the propaganda around covid has entirely messed with people's heads. The narrative is that we must do everything possible - including destroying the economy and denying children an education - to avoid covid deaths and that the vaccine was the great saviour that would allow us to avoid the scourge of the Deadly Disease. I think in that context people are struggling to get their heads around a world where a certain number of deaths is just expected and not treated as a huge tragedy or national emergency.

I do find it interesting though that now people are talking about how it's the more elderly and vulnerable who die and that it's often 'with covid' rather than 'from covid.' That's always been the case, since the beginning of the pandemic and yet it wasn't acceptable to talk about the vulnerable being more likely to die back in 2020 because it was seen as dismissing them or not caring about their deaths.

First paragraph is a very bad faith poor grasp reading of what people were talking about

Second paragraph isn't much better

The difference is hospitalisation rates are nearly manageable right now, so you might not die of a fixable injury because all the medics are treating covid patients, or you might be able to access cancer treatment without risking dying of covid in an immune-suppressed state

No one ever wanted to crash the economy or said that covid was the only concern. People said that unless covid could be suppressed, nothing else was going to be achievable. And that is still very much true, whatever your friends might tell you.

Case numbers are rising - we're not seeing hospitalisations and deaths at anything like comparable numbers from pre-vaccination. As schools are now back doing whole school assemblies without masks () we'll see case rates go up further. Then we'll see how well vaccination is protecting the population and medical infrastructure as a whole, and whether we'll need more firebreaks or whatever while they vaccinate 16 &17 year olds. Then we'll probably have the same thing again next January.

Let's just hope we don't get another Delta-equivalent mutation before we've been able to bring herd immunity up and get rolling vaccinations in place.

But there's a huge difference between now saying people are dying with because they had these vulnerabilities, and people writing off vast swathes of the population last year because they had well-managed diabetes; broken limb in the last 5 years; learning disabilities; migraines; etc etc.

Did you ever even look at the report of what those pre existing conditions included?

@Idyllic

If someone got knocked down by a bus and died but tested positive for covid a week earlier, would it be recorded as a covid death?

For the published stats "Deaths within 28 days of positive test by date of death", yes. Total deaths recorded in the UK under this - 133,839.

For the published stats "Daily deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate by date of death", No, unless a Doctor decided Covid was a contributor to the death. Total deaths recorded in the UK under this - 158,418.