Living the Pandemic - Here We Go Again

 For the past few months, we've seen the Delta strain of the SARS virus almost completely take over.  Our vaccines, however, seem to be working quite well.  Cases are dropping slowly, hospitalizations seem to be mostly (>70%) made up of the unvaccinated, and in BC, over 77% of the total population has been vaccinated.  Kids from 5 to 11 years old will be getting their vaccinations starting this week, and life for many has started returning to something more like normal.  The Canadian border has been open for several months now and PCR test requirements prior to returning from short trips (<72 hours) have been dropped.  As of November 8th, the American land border crossings opened to fully vaccinated individuals.

Halloween passed with this cute little picture expressing a pretty accurate message.

This week, though, a new Variant of Concern emerged in Africa.  It's been officially called the Omicron variant and has already shown up in Hong Kong, several places in Africa as well as Israel.  This post from Your Local Epidemiologist lays out what is known at this time and, more significantly, what is NOT known.  For instance, we don't know if this is more virulent than Delta.  We don't know if our current crop of vaccines will be as effective against it.

In the meantime, "social media" has been running with the usual mix of misinformation, disinformation and lies.

From "freedom and personal choice":

Jan Gordon  Did you know God gave us free will to make our own decisions?

To complaints about how well "Big Pharma" is doing from these vaccines:

Jessi Miwa  Remind us again how many 2020-21 billionaires were made from this “free” jab…

To conspiracies about how the new variant came into existence:

Juan L Martinez  This is why they came up with the new variant lol 

Mary Kay  Hey they have the variants all planned out!! Looks like we are ahead of schedule!! LOL!! The South African mutation wasn’t supposed to be announced until May 2022!

Apparently it's taken a pandemic to bring all the crazies out of the woodwork.

Misleading Reporting 101

 In the category of Misleading Reporting 101....

News outlets still aren't reporting COVID case numbers in an honest or informative way. This article references BC's case numbers and also mentions the percentage of hospitalizations for both vaccinated and unvaccinated.

https://www.cbc.ca/.../covid-19-update-nov-17-1.6250821

So, from this article and other data I know that 77% of BC population has been vaccinated (33% unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated). Also that 70% of those hospitalized are unvaccinated and that there were around 400 COVID patients hospitalized. And that's where they left it. I also checked BC's population to find it's around 5.2 million.

This DOES NOT paint an accurate picture.

As the following article in The Hill clearly shows, that kind of data is misleading unless you view it correctly. One proper strategy is to calculate the number of hospitalizations (or deaths) per 100,000 from each subgroup in the whole population (about 400,400,000 vaccinated and about 171,600,000 unvaccinated). Note this last group also includes children who can't be vaccinated yet. That is about to change quickly in the coming weeks.

https://thehill.com/.../569730-covid-19-vaccines-work...

So, taking the numbers from above, my calculator tells me that the number of unvaccinated hospitalized cases is 0.16/100,000 and the number of vaccinated hospitalized cases is 0.03/100,000. My calculator then explained to me that the number of unvaccinated hospitalized cases is 5.3 times the number of vaccinated hospitalized cases. Numbers from the original article nowhere make that clear.

Unvaccinated people are at least 5.3 times as likely to end up in the hospital as vaccinated people. As children get vaccinated in the coming weeks, expect to see that number increase simply because kids haven't been getting sick that often, they aren't often hospitalized from this disease and yet there are about 360,000 of them between the ages of 5 and 12 here in BC.

Media reports need to do better than this.