In the time of vaccines, breakthrough cases, and Delta, we are still hugely underestimating COVID's overwhelming age skew. dwallacewells writes
Photo-Illustration: Nicolas Ortega In mid-September, King County, Washington, in which Seattle is located, released an eye-popping slide about vaccine efficacy and breakthrough prevalence: Vaccines had reduced the risk of infection from COVID sevenfold, county data showed, and reduced the risk of hospitalization and death 41-fold and 42-fold, respectively.
Graphic: Courtesy of the UK Coronavirus Dashboard That is a logarithmic chart, which means that the y-axis scales exponentially — a change from one to ten looks to the untrained eye like a change from one to two). That means a huge variation is concealed by presenting mortality risk data in logarithmic form. A chart of the same British information presented linearly .
Although vaccines do substantially reduce the risk of infection, too, breakthrough cases are not terribly uncommon, accounting for perhaps as many as one-quarter of all new infections these days, as the CDC estimated in Los Angeles. But they are overwhelmingly mild, and in the rare cases when they do grow severe, they tend to be among the old and very old.
According to that data, an unvaccinated 10-year-old, who may look like the very picture of COVID vulnerability heading into the school year, faces a lower mortality risk than a vaccinated 25-year-old, whom we might today regard as close to safe as can be. In England, the incidence of hospitalization among unvaccinated kids was lower than that of those vaccinated aged 18 to 29, and in recent weeks, the hospitalization rate among kids ages 5 to 14 has been only about one per 100,000.
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