Kbg wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 11:45 pm
Challenge Tortoise...dig in and dispute the LA County stats. Or at the end of the day does it all boil down to your opinion on the issue? Honestly, I have zero hostility toward you, but I am calling you out to clearly state where you stand and A) admit, yep it's just my personal opinion or B) here's my stand based on the following evidence. For evidentiary disputes I'm happy to defer to WiseOne's call on credibility (though she's smart and probably wants nothing to do with our jousting LOL).
Thanks for the thoughtful recent posts and the olive branch, Kbg. I appreciate it. I'm getting a better sense of your personality now. I'll try to keep your background and personality in mind the next time one of your elbows smacks me in the face seemingly out of nowhere.
First, I'll point out that my position on the Covid vaccine has always been that people who are at high risk for Covid complications (e.g., elderly, obese, and/or immunocompromised people) should almost certainly take the vaccine. I've never disputed that, nor have I ever disputed that the Covid vaccine is effective in reducing Covid risk for those high-risk people. The elbows that I occasionally throw in this thread are usually to push back on media, institutional, or government efforts to goad almost
everyone, regardless of personal risk factors, into taking the vaccine.
My posts
here and
here were asking why there is such a huge discrepancy between the LA and UK stats:
Tortoise wrote:
How is it possible that in the UK, 40% of Covid hospitalizations are fully vaccinated people, yet supposedly in L.A. County only 1.3% of Covid hospitalizations are fully vaccinated people? How might we explain that massive discrepancy?
You and jswinner then both pointed out that as more people in a population become vaccinated and the absolute number of hospitalizations drops, a larger proportion of the hospitalizations (relative number) will be vaccinated people since the vaccinated pool is growing and the unvaccinated pool is shrinking. Absolute vs. relative. Understood, and I get it. That was a very good, counterintuitive point.
However, I still wasn't convinced that that effect fully explains the
massive difference between the UK's 40% and LA County's 1.3% since both places have fairly high rates of full vaccination. As you said, the UK's is somewhere between 80-90%, and according to
this site LA County's is about 62%. Not as high as the UK's, but still well over the US and CA averages of around 50%.
Because I wasn't fully convinced, I got a little suspicious about Covid testing protocols. So I dug a bit into the LA County stats on Wednesday and posted about it
here. Specifically, I went to the LA County Department of Public Health website, looked up their Covid testing protocol, and noticed that they recommend screening tests for people who are not fully vaccinated and do
not recommend screening tests for people who are fully vaccinated. (See
my post for the quote and reference. To reduce screen clutter, I won't copy it again here.)
What about the UK? Well, in response to your challenge above, I went a bit further just now and went to the UK's Department of Health and Social Care website to look up their
Covid testing protocol. And I found this interesting nugget:
Who should get a test
You should get a test for COVID-19 if you:
- live in targeted locations within one of the areas listed on this page or are contacted by your local council
- are in the targeted age group
You should get a test even if:
- you have no symptoms of COVID-19
- you’ve had a vaccination for COVID-19
- you’ve tested positive for COVID-19 previously (but not within the last 90 days by a PCR test)
So to bring this all together: Per LA County's Department of Public Health website, they
do not recommend Covid screening tests for people who are fully vaccinated, and per the UK's Department of Health and Social Care website, they
do recommend Covid screening tests even for people who are fully vaccinated. It seems mathematically unavoidable that that important difference in testing protocol is likely resulting in LA County's stats having fairly large
sampling bias.
If you disagree that my suspicion has merit based on the evidence I just presented, feel free to ask WiseOne to adjudicate as you suggested.
Again, let's be clear that I'm not claiming the Covid vaccine is ineffective or that high-risk people should not take it. Quite the contrary. I'm just pushing back on what I suspect may be biased data. The Covid vaccine issue is already socially divisive enough; throwing biased data into the mix just makes it worse.