> But the statistics themself are fact. ex: number of case and hospitalization for vaccinated people vs unvaccinated people.
I wish that as so.
The ‘factual’ statistics can be stretched however one wishes.
For example, what does it mean to be vaccinated? Or, for that matter, what does it mean to ‘hospitalized’? Does it mean Covid symptoms necessitated hospitalization? Or, perhaps, everyone in the hospital who tested positive? Does it include ‘recovered’ patients who, for unrelated reasons, are still in the hospital, albeit no longer in a Covid ward?
Etc.
The statistics for this entire fiasco have been garbage. I wish it were not so.
> If you look at the raw numbers nearly twice as many of the hospitalized are vaccinated.
This doesn't mean what you think it means. Imagine if 100% of the population were vaccinated, what percentage of the hospitalized would then be vaccinated?
> I personally read it as 4 separate readings being shown.
The uncooked data (meaning, total case numbers) are available. Do the math yourself. You'll see you are wrong.
You can also see that of the 34705 people who has a case, 1166 were hospitalized. Of the 321868 people who were fully vaccinated and had a case, 2409 were hospitalized. Ergo, those vaccinated and who get a case are fare less likely to be hospitalized.
> without the raw data
You'll never have access to the rawest of data as that includes personal medical information that isn't supposed to be public.
> We can certainly say that the data is not being provided in a straightforward, accessible way to the public
The government data sources were more straight-forwarded than the interpretations you linked to.
I had no problem with the data, other than it being more technical than I can easily understand.
> we also have unknowns around the data collection
Which is irrelevant to the thesis that those with two shots are more likely to be infected than those with no vaccinations.
Even if the thesis is correct, the analysis purportedly demonstrating the link is clearly wrong.
And the thing about medical data is there will always be unknowns.
> Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated.
Again, the fact that the numbers don't reconcile still stands, and without clarifications, that table and any references are meaningless.
From page 7:
- Rates Admitted to Hospital per 100,000: All adults, Fully vaccinated: 39.0
- Northern Ireland population: 1.9 millions
Expected admitted in the whole N.I: (39 * 1900 / 100) = 741
- Total admissions: All adults, Fully vaccinated: 493.
The numbers 741 and 493 don't match.
The rest of the table is inconsistent as well; for example, the proportions between fully and non vaccinated, between the rate per 100k (right), and the absolute values (left), are inconsistent between each other.
Futher, on the second page:
> During this 4 week period there were 790 hospital admissions, 36 (4.6%) of which had received a third dose.
The number 790 and 36 are other two who add to the pile of inconsistency. Until everything is explained with exactness, that report is essentially garbage.
> And I'm sorry, I thought this was a thread about Ireland?
In absence of correct data about N.I., the CDC report is a reasonable source, also by mean of being considerably larger scale. It can be acceptable to refute it when referring to Northern Ireland, but in this case valid data is required.
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Additionally, about this:
> Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated. This is not an indictment against the vaccines, they prevent hospitalization, but the sheer number of vaccinated people still means they're the majority in the hospitals and ICUs, and the unvaccinated are a minority across the board.
This is a common mathematical mistake; see conditional probability notions.
To explain the mistake using extremes, if all the population except one was vaccinated, and one not vaccinated, hospitals would have 100% of vaccinated people, but the conclusion that because of that being vaccinated is less effective than not being vaccinated, is wrong; one needs other variables to make this conclusion.
> Eleven patients died of Covid in the first half of September at his hospital in Mount Pleasant, population 16,000. Typically, three or four nonhospice patients die there in a whole month.
So, the rate has gone from 0.0002 to 0.0013. Yes, that is more than twice the rate. But is it statistically significant? What did they go to the hospital for, and what other co-morbidities did they have? Does the hospital test vaccinated people on entry for COVID, as they do for non-vaccinated? And do they continue to test vaccinated people at the recommend cycle threshold (28) and non-vaccinated people at higher than the recommended rate (40+)?
Without context, it is very hard to draw conclusions from these statistics that constantly wash over us like flood water over a sunken bridge.
> The only data that is somewhat reliable in this pandemic is COVID deaths.
I agree,, especially as you included the word “somewhat”. We have pretty good numbers on people who died in hospitals, but people who died at home appear to be seriously under counted.
Additionally, consequential deaths are currently invisible. These are people who died, say, ecause the coronavirus crowded out their access to hospitals. There’s been a drop in ER visits for things like heart conditions. Some of those people would have recovered fine anyway but some may have arterial blockage that will kill them. You don’t Want these numbers in the primary statistics (as they say nothing about control of the pandemic) but you do want these very hard to track numbers to understating future capacity planning, ethical procedures, and long term economic consequences.
> I’m frustrated we knew the infection and death rates were exaggerated by faulty PCR testing and financial perks for hospitals impacted by cases they could attribute to COVID.
You can be frustrated without making up claims. Infection and death rates were not exaggerated. Death rates were higher initially due to the ramp up in proper treatment. Infection rates were subject to selection bias which skewed the denominator early on in the pandemic.
> But all of the reliable evidence is that if you’re vaccinated, boosted, etc., the chance of you being seriously ill from catching COVID is really no more likely than the flu.
Citation for your health claims?
> And statistically, everyone is going to get it eventually.
>They are overflowing because of the unvaccinated.
Source for this claim? Asking because I see stats being thrown around constantly: unvaccinated are 97% of ICU patients, etc. The only problem is, there's no data to back it up.
I've followed sources to the very end to try and locate this data but it doesn't exist. Most lazily point at the CDC but even they openly admit the data isn't reliable because they aren't tracking breakthrough cases correctly.
> "People are still falling ill and filling up hospitals, and these are primarily the unvaccinated"
> Most of the stats claiming this are heavily manipulated
Are you saying the states taking the extraordinary steps of rationing hospital care because of capacity problems don't really have full hospitals but are letting patients die based on manipulated stats? That...is an extraordinary claim that needs some support more than vague handwaving.
> They are still delusional, since the risk of COVID infection even in the young and healthy is still greater than vaccination risk
Statistics don't matter if you don't know your own personal risk. For an individual the risk of a negative outcome is binary, not 0.00001%. That's what people who talk about stats fail to realize over and over again. You won't convince anyone with stats.
>Secondly, no, covid capacity really is the problem, because for the last year and a half...<a bunch of non quantitative opinion based unprovable emotional gish gallop stuff I didn't read.>
Bullshit.
Actual data says that Covid patients in ICU take up between 8% to 20ish% of admissions.
COVID is not causing the curve to be need flattening.
The medical system is.
Maybe they shouldn't fire medical professionals who got immunity through COVID infection instead of the vaccine.
> Why are stats like that not shared? That seems like very valuable information. Hospitalization rates should be one of the main stats being shared, imo.
Because it’s in the neighborhood of 15% worst case needing hospitalization. You’ve already got enough people blowing off quarantine measures, so no one is terribly eager to share that of the people who DO get the virus, 85% don’t require hospitalization. I get the reasoning from a public policy perspective, but I agree that information should be made a bit more easily accessible.
> You get that the hospitals were being overrun by people dying of covid, right?
When I looked up the (official) statistics for my country, Germany, for the peak period in 2021, the percentage of covid cases in hospitals was about 5%. The news at that time made it seem as if it were 95%.
> This is misinformation pulling on the heartstrings of the non-logical. Most people who caught covid would have died if they caught the normal flu...like every other year.
Even if that were true, I fail to see how it is relevant.
We demonstrably have massively more people dying from COVID than die from normal flues, so either COVID is more fatal than normal flu, or we have a massive amount of people catching COVID who would not have caught normal flu.
> The truth, real truth, is EXTREMELY hard to ascertain
It’s really challenging for me to speak in a way that’s unarguable. For example, instead of saying “COVID is now…”, saying “I read an article that says COVID is now…”.
The first sentence is arguable, the second is unarguable because it’s my personal experience. How often do you read articles or reporting that state unarguable truths?
Even a slight tweak from “COVID cases are spiking…” to “The NY Department of Health released data showing an X% increase in reported COVID cases statewide” makes a lot of difference in how I perceive the potential bias or truthiness of the content I’m reading.
I wish that as so.
The ‘factual’ statistics can be stretched however one wishes.
For example, what does it mean to be vaccinated? Or, for that matter, what does it mean to ‘hospitalized’? Does it mean Covid symptoms necessitated hospitalization? Or, perhaps, everyone in the hospital who tested positive? Does it include ‘recovered’ patients who, for unrelated reasons, are still in the hospital, albeit no longer in a Covid ward?
Etc.
The statistics for this entire fiasco have been garbage. I wish it were not so.
They certainly aren’t ‘facts’ as you suggest.
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