A 900-person Covid delta cluster in Massachusetts includes 74% vaccinated people

My asthma Doc says just that [Moderna/Astra], should be available by October, just in time for your US Government funded flu shot, sure to be no shortages this year, thank you Qnuts/Nazi wankers…

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FWIW, my wife has a symptomatic case right now – we’ve got our 2d dose of Moderna 3/28, so have been fully vaccinated since mid-April. Symptomatically, it’s mostly a sort of low-grade flu, with a dash of moderate allergies. My son (vaccinated) and my daughter (not yet able to get vaccinated) have show no signs and I came up negative.

And she caught it one of the most vaccinated jurisdictions on the planet – were at 90%+ fully vaxxed around here.

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leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.

That’s kinda odd to throw in Ebola, which transmits via contact and not aerosol. (Why not compare it to the notoriously aerosol-tranmitted measles?)

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Or diarrhea / dysentery? The visual just might shake some Qnutters/Gop’ers to their senses…

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Provincetown is known for having a strong gay culture, and recently I’ve come across men who were there jokingly referring to the outbreak as the gay flu or the gay cold. I would ordinarily not repeat such a joke myself, but it explains at least some of the demographic imbalance.

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I wonder if he can be sued for criminal negligence?

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Something is seriously wrong with either the data or the analysis here, obviously so, though I can’t figure out exactly what.

Every study about delta and vaccines show that the vaccines retain a majority of their efficacy against delta, though estimates of the exact protection vary. It definitely doesn’t make you more vulnerable. That would be a truly bizarre result and out of line with all the data we have.

I tried to look up the vaccination rate in Barnstable county and can’t find it, it seems maybe they don’t report as consistently as the rest of the state? So if the study of the cluster is using the state database as it claims, how is it catching the vaccinated? This would suggest 74% is a serious underestimate of the vaccinated in the cluster, which makes things even weirder, unless the local vaccination rate is actually somehow so high that almost all the potential hosts were vaccinated? Or am I supposed to believe there’s an extreme level of risk compensation (or some informal enforcement of only letting the vaccinated join gatherings) going on such that the unvaccinated are staying super-careful at home and only the vaccinated are out getting exposed? Or there’s just a serious sampling error in which of the new cases are being studied and we should ignore the 74% number entirely?

I would also note that the local daily new cases peaked on 7/22 and had already fallen to 7/14 levels before Ptown reinstated its mask mandate, and continued to decline immediately after. In other words, the decline started showing up in test results too early to be a result of the mask mandate. This strongly reinforces what we already knew, which is that when breakthrough infections occur, they have much lower R0 than do infections among the unvaccinated. This point seems completely absent from public discussion of this outbreak and what it should mean for policy.

The fact that none of the public discussion seems to be even asking these questions is disturbing. Either the results are real and need to prompt a major reanalysis of huge, core questions about how covid spreads, or the results are highly suspect and should not be the basis of changes in policy recommendations.

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Maybe not insanely optimistic. Provincetown–which is a well-off bastion of the LGBTQ+ left–is, at least according the town itself, nearly fully vaccinated. (“Provincetown has among the highest vaccination rates in the Commonwealth, with nearly all residents age 12 and older fully vaccinated.”). Anecdotal reports suggest that despite the infection cluster, the vaccines are doing exactly what they’ve been advertised to do–keeping symptoms on the level of the cold or flu among those who have received the vaccine.

Apparently this is the case.

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Maybe overall, but for some reason that’s not what happened in this specific case study. 74% of those infected were fully vaccinated, and 4 out of the 5 people who were hospitalized in this cluster were fully vaccinated, so the severity of symptoms was not less than for the unvaxxed in this instance. So it will be really interesting to see if this cluster was a one-time weird fluke or if it’s representative of the virus behavior moving forward.

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Um. Maybe rethink that.

Well, apparently there were actually seven hospitalizations–two occurred out of state. Let’s assume that the out-of-staters were also vaccinated. So we have six vaxxed hospitalizations in an outbreak of 833 persons (as of a couple days ago, at least), 74% of whom (as of a couple days ago, at least) were vaccinated. That works out to about 0.9% hospitalization rate among vaccinated covid-sufferers from this outbreak–or, to put it a different way, 99.1% success in preventing hospitalization among vaccinated persons who got breakthrough infections. (CAVEAT: I am not a statistician, so there is every likelihood I’m doing the math wrong here.)

No vaccine is 100% effective. But the covid vaccines sure look to me like they’re doing what they have been said to do.

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Thanks! That’s the data point I needed.

Also @Otherbrother : There were seven people hospitalized so far, but only 5 were MA residents, and it is four of those five who were vaccinated. I don’t know if the two out-of-state hospitalizations were vaccinated or unvaccinated people. Anyone who can find that, I’d appreciate the info.

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It wouldn’t have to be extreme. I find it pretty easy to picture someone saying “I’m vaccinated, I can leave my mask at home and go the karaoke bar.” I care about some people exactly like this.

[edit: typo]

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I misread the name as Matthew Gaetz. It really baffled me that he was saying something this sensible.

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You and me both; I was wondering if hell had finally frozen over…

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Yeah, but if you do your exact same calculation for the unvaxxed group that works out to be 1/200 people getting hospitalized, or 0.5% of the unvaccinated population. It would be pretty darn silly to take that answer and claim that being unvaxxed “provides a 99.5% success in protection against hospitalization.”

So, again, you can’t draw firm conclusions from such a small number of cases and this is probably a one time statistical fluke but we’ll see in time.

Edit to add: to be clear, there are many high quality studies out there indicating a strong protective benefit from the vaccine. This small study certainly doesn’t prove them wrong. It’s just not saying quite the same thing that the other studies do, which is the whole reason that it’s making news in the first place.

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I’m still trying to figure out the “libertarian” billionaires funding anti-lockdown movements and manufactured junk science.

  • Total ideological brain-meltdown when faced with a public health crisis that really does require central planning and action.
  • Wanting to keep the wheel of capitalism turning and to hell with the workers.
  • The initial Blue State and continuing racist angle.

Now I’m wondering if they really do have some profit motive for their “kill grandma” strategies.

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There is?

More contagious, I’ll grant. That’s a positive selection bias. But where’s the positive selection bias for less lethal? It’s not as if Covid is dropping so many people so fast that they don’t have a chance to spread it.

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I wondered that same thing about 45, but doubt it will ever happen.

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Anything is possible, if enough people die needlessly.

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