Point being, we've focused vaccination on the most susceptible groups. Vaccinating even 15% of the total population means we've probably vaccinated ~90% of people aged 75+ (with that number being limited by health conditions that contraindicate vaccination).
There certainly was a large effort to reach the elderly first. For a host of reasons though the population was not vaccinated 100%. Issues with scheduling appointments, getting people to clinics, doubts over safety, etc. At some point the number of doses still coming in is increasing but the number of those for example 70+ began to dwindle and so it has to opened up so these doses can be put in people’s arms.
Good point. I just checked the paper, and it's true that the vaccinated population had proportionally more 60+ year olds (by about 3x).
As I read through this more, It's a bit surprising that out of 805,124 people (includes uninfected) under the age of 45, there were only 5 deaths. Haven't looked into the data for a long time.
A less effective vaccine pretty directly leads to higher death rates. I read in other news articles they didn't aggressively vaccinate older people like we did. Apparently a similar thing has happened in Hong Kong.
Because we are almost all vaccinated (95% of eligible adults) there haven't been so many deaths compared to other countries, but still more than Australia has seen so far.
The positive note is that we are already at 74% of over 65 w/ one dose, so hopefully we can push that to 85% and drastically lower deaths. Vaccine acceptance in 65+ is very high
Depends on how you define "primarily". Elderly and immunocompromised have always been at a much higher risk, but there were still thousands of young, healthy people who died in the pre-vaccine days.
Age is the main factor affecting outcome. The risk of death in the 70+ cohort was quite high before vaccination, but the risk in the 50+ population was also unacceptably high. Vaccines basically had the effect of shifting the curve to the right by 15-20 years, i.e. 70 years old vaccinated has the same risk as 50 years old unvaccinated.
After age, yeah, genetics, use of ACE inhibitors, coagulopathy, etc., account for a lot of the remaining risk of death.
Some good news is that lots of vulnerable people are choosing to get vaccinated when given the opportunity, so death rates should decline even if we screw the rest of it up.
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