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A comment on Pfizer and BioNTech launch trial of Omicron-targeted Covid vaccine. Parent comment

Re:Pfizer and BioNTech launch trial of Omicron-targeted Covi... by kurthr on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @02:52PM (#30077087)
It would appear that a country that is over 90% vaccinated and 60% boosted is having ~440 deaths a day with roughly 15k admitted to the hospital (ignoring simple ER visits) that week. It's worth noting that the 10% unvaccinated (even though skewed younger) are ~5x overrepresented at ~50% of the hospitalizations. It's about half as high as the peak last Jan although ventilators are less in use and treatments are better.

From your dashboard: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

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Re:Pfizer and BioNTech launch trial of Omicron-targeted Covi... by iso1210 on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @03:15PM (#30077435)
Pre covid, the UK typically had 1400 deaths a day in the winter. It's a little higher at the moment, but nowhere near 400.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Be careful about who is in covid because of non-covid reasons that just happen to have covid, compared with those who are in hospital because of covid.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pfizer and BioNTech launch trial of Omicron-targeted Covi... by kurthr on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @03:33PM (#30077648)
Did you look at that plot on page 2?

Choosing what certainly looks like a single dramatic outlier point which is 2 weeks older than the dashboard certainly seems like cherry picking.

Just look at the current dashboard data it shows ~440 deaths per day for the last 2 weeks. Again:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

Also note that there almost aren't deaths from other flus over the last 2 years, likely because they don't have an R value >1 due to masking etc.

Look, I'm all for getting back to normal and letting the unvaccinated (and old, poor, sick) die off as god intended, but let's not pretend it's all due to a lack of joyful evenings in the pub.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pfizer and BioNTech launch trial of Omicron-targeted Covi... by kurthr on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @03:07PM (#30077311)
Actually, now I'm intrigued. It would appear that the total annual death rate in the UK is about 135k/yr or 370/day. So the last couple of weeks of the current Omicron wave exceeds the typical average death rate from all causes from 2010-2018 (scaled for population).

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

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Re:Pfizer and BioNTech launch trial of Omicron-targeted Covi... by MikeAmelung on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @03:29PM (#30077602)
Close, you're only off by ~465,000
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Re:Pfizer and BioNTech launch trial of Omicron-targeted Covi... by native_samples on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @03:38PM (#30077692)
Up to 70% of the "COVID patients" in UK hospitals at the moment are there for other reasons:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/20/call-scrap-daily...

"Call to phase out statistics comes as it emerges that up to 70pc of virus patients in hospital being primarily treated for other problems"

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