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A comment on Covid vaccination linked to 'substantial reduction' in hospital admissions. Parent comment

Re:Covid vaccination linked to 'substantial reduction' in ho... by malandrew on Monday February 22, 2021 @01:33PM (#26228347)
Isn't there also a confounding factor that the vaccinations were largely introduced following the thanksgiving and christmas infection events. Even without a vaccine, I would have expected hospitalizations to fall approximately 1 to 1.5 months after the Christmas holiday.

Basically, we had many clusters of fresh unburnt tinder (the household covid pod) and the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday was a perfect event for many people to "just this one time" break quarantine protocol, leading to the many infections we saw. That's a 2-3 week increase in direct hospitalizations from those events, and then you have another 2-3 weeks of indirect hospitalizations impacting the remaining members of each covid pod. Anecdotally, I've personally witnessed this happen as I know fare more people that acquired immunity from becoming infected during the holidays than for most of last year.

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Re:Covid vaccination linked to 'substantial reduction' in ho... by bluGill on Monday February 22, 2021 @02:22PM (#26229180)
Depends on where you live, in the Midwest the peak was more around Halloween in October. You can hardly find Thanksgiving in any data (and then you probably have to squint and ignore proper statistics) By Chirstmas/new year things were clearly in decline. Other areas of course have different results.
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Re:Covid vaccination linked to 'substantial reduction' in ho... by malandrew on Monday February 22, 2021 @02:26PM (#26229246)
In those areas, has the rate of decline just been consistently downward? Has vaccine introduction had any measurable impact?
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Re:Covid vaccination linked to 'substantial reduction' in ho... by bluGill on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @08:49AM (#26237172)
Yes. I follow the daily numbers for my county.

The vaccines seem to have an impact, but it is hard to be sure. There are a lot less old (>65) in the new infected list, which used to dominate the list. The younger groups seems to be be about even by age group. However there are many potential confounding factors, and I haven't done a proper statistical analysis so I don't want to claim something.

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