If you're right, we're in for some unpleasantness this fall in northern U.S. Boosters full steam ahead, smack into what is surely about to be a seasonal upswing. Don't need a crystal ball, just looking at fall 2020 and expecting the same. Duck and cover!
and there's a perversity where mandates/rollouts may have been timed to coincide with a peak - to attempt to ride the decline as a veneration of said measure
So Walensky overrules the CDC panel clearing the way for boosters for pretty much everyone over 18. This is science.
The Northeast is about to become ground zero for death and destruction as these absolute morons unleash a booster campaign right as their season begins. If your thesis holds true and the boosters amplify risk significantly (during a period of rising trends), we are all in big trouble.
Which means they are going to use this as an excuse to clamp down on us Canadians even further, and the hysterical shrieking will get even louder. I may have to go on a social media fast just to maintain my sanity.
Just the first, but it recurs with boosters. Seems to be due to the length of time between doses: the first two are close enough together that the immune system is still in "responding to vaccine" mode when the second dose is administered, but it has largely reverted to normal by the time of the booster.
Thank you. Much appreciated. Im in Canada, where in BC they have spaced out dosing ( due to early supply issues) . I wonder having an 8-12 wk between dose 1 and 2 will show a difference in occurrence then. Some physicians have said an increase in spacing reduces side effects but it’s all now very confusing.
So Israel's boosters, coming in late summer/autumn is not the worst time but the US rollout as the northern states enter their peak season could be catastrophic?
Great analysis. You could have stayed closer to home and compared Canada (late to vaccinate) with the US and UK (both early to vaccinate). Those results support very strongly the hypothesis that timing of vaccination is very important.
"further, while sweden and denmark practically touch, their key population centers (stockholm and copenhagen) are 4 degrees of latitude apart."
Not sure if this is relevant. Latitude is not a very good proxy for climate, reason for which the French king made the mistake of telling his subjects to colonise Quebec, which, according to the map, was at the same latitude as France (they did not anticipate the harsh winters there).
I may be wrong but Copenhagen and Stockholm being both on the Baltic Sea, the climate there should be fairly similar (i.e. wet and cold shitty weather)
This is following up his correlation of latitude of state capital with cases and hospitalizations. (2 orders of magnitude higher correlation than vaccination rate)
"neither showed any real rise in all cause deaths last year"
I count over 6000 extra deaths since the start of the pandemic. That's a big enough pile of bodies to call real. The bar graph shows a downward trend with an uptick in 2020.
I made another plot that includes seasonal baseline, but haven't been updating it. The COVID peaks were abnormally large. https://pasteboard.co/7BVwLNxiwyhR.png
Your bar graph also shows the rise in 2020 after a five year decline.
yes, but to a level that was perfectly normal over the last 5 or so years and after an abnormally low year in a series that exhibits strong mean reversion from outliers because of the effects on vulnerable cohort size.
the simple fact is this:
if you had swapped 2020 for 2018, 17, or 16, no one would have noticed.
2020 was absolutely average in comparison to them.
that's a massive win in a time when many place (like the US) saw a 25% excess death figure.
you seem determined to find a crisis where none occured.
I went into this analysis thinking COVID panic was overhyped and that is still my view. But there is a significant mortality signal that shouldn't be ignored or obfuscated.
Adjusting for population growth would only make sense if the demographic that grew was not young. I've been hearing a lot about immigration in Sweden, and immigrants tend to be younger and have more kids.
2020 is clearly an outlier on the all-cause mortality graph that I made, with 3x as many deaths in the COVID peak as the 2018 flu peak. Then there was another unusually large peak going into 2021. There is no summer peak.
I did visit Twitter earlier in the year, and it was pretty clear that a number of voices were working hard to show graphs that made the 2020 rise in Sweden seem like noise. That is not science.
“I would be very surprised if the U.S. data don't turn out to be ultimately very similar to the Israeli data,” - Anthony Fauci, according to Politico.
From https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/14/covid-israel-data-vaccine-efficacy-511777
Perhaps Fauci will finally have a prediction come true?
He'll trip across the truth three same way I tripped on my fan's cord in the middle of the night on my way to the bathroom.
What happened in Mongolia? They were doing fine until they started injecting people.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/mongolia/
If you're right, we're in for some unpleasantness this fall in northern U.S. Boosters full steam ahead, smack into what is surely about to be a seasonal upswing. Don't need a crystal ball, just looking at fall 2020 and expecting the same. Duck and cover!
Right, or if they don’t boost, they may luckily avoid large spikes by virtue of coincidentally pushing vax during their low spring season.
and there's a perversity where mandates/rollouts may have been timed to coincide with a peak - to attempt to ride the decline as a veneration of said measure
So Walensky overrules the CDC panel clearing the way for boosters for pretty much everyone over 18. This is science.
The Northeast is about to become ground zero for death and destruction as these absolute morons unleash a booster campaign right as their season begins. If your thesis holds true and the boosters amplify risk significantly (during a period of rising trends), we are all in big trouble.
Which means they are going to use this as an excuse to clamp down on us Canadians even further, and the hysterical shrieking will get even louder. I may have to go on a social media fast just to maintain my sanity.
It's unclear whether boosters will have the same effect as first doses. I believe it's primarily first doses that are expected to cause such surges.
According to Gato's data, that does not seem to be the case based on what we saw in Israel.
Have you seen this? Looks like a complete different reporting system through WHO reporting way more adverse reactions than VAERS.
https://www.redvoicemedia.com/2021/09/millions-of-adverse-drug-reactions-listed-for-covid-19-vaccine-on-who-website/
"pushing vaccines (and seemingly boosters) during periods of peak disease appears ill advised."
That,s what Vanden Bossche said feom the beginning.
Nice Freudian slip:
"excess ----morality---- bottomed and rebounded in both places right about when vaccination campaigns started to gather steam in late feb."
Loving the content, cat man.
Im sorry if I missed this, but is the immune suppression period limited to only post dose one or both doses? Many thanks.
it seems to be mostly dose one.
however, worryingly, dose 3 (booster) appears to act like dose one.
this seems likely to be related to the interval between dosing and the high antibody levels post D1 when you take D2, but not D3.
Just the first, but it recurs with boosters. Seems to be due to the length of time between doses: the first two are close enough together that the immune system is still in "responding to vaccine" mode when the second dose is administered, but it has largely reverted to normal by the time of the booster.
Thank you. Much appreciated. Im in Canada, where in BC they have spaced out dosing ( due to early supply issues) . I wonder having an 8-12 wk between dose 1 and 2 will show a difference in occurrence then. Some physicians have said an increase in spacing reduces side effects but it’s all now very confusing.
Me encanta la claridad de las explicaciones del Gato Malo.
So Israel's boosters, coming in late summer/autumn is not the worst time but the US rollout as the northern states enter their peak season could be catastrophic?
it was/is a bad time for israel. that was a seasonal peak period for them.
they spiked from july-oct last year.
I agree excess morality did bottom but not in Denmark or Sweden and hasn't come back yet.
Please don't add the missing T!!! Hopefully it 's AWOL status will give others' a good chuckle of what one may call ad Freudian slip.
I chuckled haha
Thanks for all the analysis. More pairwise analysis here:
https://bit.ly/3i1NleO
Great analysis. You could have stayed closer to home and compared Canada (late to vaccinate) with the US and UK (both early to vaccinate). Those results support very strongly the hypothesis that timing of vaccination is very important.
"further, while sweden and denmark practically touch, their key population centers (stockholm and copenhagen) are 4 degrees of latitude apart."
Not sure if this is relevant. Latitude is not a very good proxy for climate, reason for which the French king made the mistake of telling his subjects to colonise Quebec, which, according to the map, was at the same latitude as France (they did not anticipate the harsh winters there).
I may be wrong but Copenhagen and Stockholm being both on the Baltic Sea, the climate there should be fairly similar (i.e. wet and cold shitty weather)
But latitude = distance from sun
This is following up his correlation of latitude of state capital with cases and hospitalizations. (2 orders of magnitude higher correlation than vaccination rate)
"neither showed any real rise in all cause deaths last year"
I count over 6000 extra deaths since the start of the pandemic. That's a big enough pile of bodies to call real. The bar graph shows a downward trend with an uptick in 2020.
Plot: https://pasteboard.co/gyFGT5URamE7.png
plotting "excess death" that way can get extremely misleading around seasonal deaths and depends a lot on baseline assumptions.
i think you're misreading the data and the baseline.
sweden had one of the lowest all cause deaths per capita years in its history as a nation last year
https://twitter.com/jhnhellstrom/status/1348923657754652672/photo/1
and this year to date looks much the same.
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F61bf3a9c-3e20-4c74-92f7-c21d970bb080_1074x663.jpeg
and hospital usage was unusually low.
https://twitter.com/HaroldofWorld/status/1440793340899774466?s=20
For a long article on 'how selecting the baseline makes a difference' see: https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01/07/the-many-ways-excess-deaths-overdodlighet-can-fool-you/
I made another plot that includes seasonal baseline, but haven't been updating it. The COVID peaks were abnormally large. https://pasteboard.co/7BVwLNxiwyhR.png
Your bar graph also shows the rise in 2020 after a five year decline.
yes, but to a level that was perfectly normal over the last 5 or so years and after an abnormally low year in a series that exhibits strong mean reversion from outliers because of the effects on vulnerable cohort size.
the simple fact is this:
if you had swapped 2020 for 2018, 17, or 16, no one would have noticed.
2020 was absolutely average in comparison to them.
that's a massive win in a time when many place (like the US) saw a 25% excess death figure.
you seem determined to find a crisis where none occured.
So I updated the plot, and the conclusion that COVID-19 caused a lot of excess death in Sweden is unchanged. https://pasteboard.co/4uu4G3z7XXs6.png
I went into this analysis thinking COVID panic was overhyped and that is still my view. But there is a significant mortality signal that shouldn't be ignored or obfuscated.
Two more weeks: https://pasteboard.co/kw64pqLEZIUM.png
you're not even adjusting that for population growth and that kind of overly smoothed baselining ALWAYS shows misleading peaks.
you're really mishandling the data here and mistaking shifted seasonalities for actual excess deaths.
modeling as you are means that a summer (vs a winter) pandemic will always look huge because it's vs a traditionally low baseline.
what you really need to know is AUC.
try following @haraldofworld
he can show you how to do this for real.
Adjusting for population growth would only make sense if the demographic that grew was not young. I've been hearing a lot about immigration in Sweden, and immigrants tend to be younger and have more kids.
2020 is clearly an outlier on the all-cause mortality graph that I made, with 3x as many deaths in the COVID peak as the 2018 flu peak. Then there was another unusually large peak going into 2021. There is no summer peak.
I did visit Twitter earlier in the year, and it was pretty clear that a number of voices were working hard to show graphs that made the 2020 rise in Sweden seem like noise. That is not science.