Looking at Age, Hosp, Vaccines
My previous post looked at the timing of vaccinations versus hospitalization from a Year over Year perspective. I surmised that fading efficiency of the vaccines over time and a “re-entering” of unprotected status could explain why 2020 and 2021 starting trending differently starting ~mid-July.
This week I started looking a bit at the aspect of age & vaccination. From what I can tell, age stratified vaccination data is only available at the national level, so I am not able to drill down by geography. Hospitalization data is again from HHS, but this time I am using “previous_day_admission_adult_covid_confirmed” which is the data that is age stratified.
Of course, just to make life easy, the age categories between the two data sets are not the same (except for 40-49), so I will be mapping the two together in what I hope makes some logical sense:
So here are those age groups as well as a table showing the monthly fraction of hospitalizations YTD:
30-39 Hospitalizations in this group have never been very high, so we se the least variation over the 1st 9 months of the year. We see a general decline until mid to late June, corresponding with a ramp up in vaccination. However, from late June we see a spike, reaching highest point since January even though fully vaxx rate >45%.
40-49 Probably the most interesting group as the August peak is >30% above the late December peak. This was despite being 58% fully vaxxed. Also interesting is the bunny hill we see in late March/ early April. Could this be the post-1st shot bump that the Bad Cat and Alex Berenson have discussed? We see this bump in other age categories as well, if not as dramatic.
Ages 50 & up Generally seeing the similar pattern. Dropping from January to March, bunny hill, drop from April to June, then rising again through August before falling into September. Most interesting in these older groups is the most dramatic drop in the 70+ group. One might be tempted to credit the vax, but the 65-74 group has higher vax rates than the 75+ (again, bummer about the misaligned age groups). Instead, perhaps what we are seeing is that the 70+ population has been previously impacted the most and the remaining population is not as vulnerable? Not sure how we’d verify that.
Would really love to understand what is going on with 40-49. Anyone with any theories please comment.
Comment from your prior post:
Typically flu seasonal deaths are higher one year, lower the next, then higher, etc. Likely due to immune boosting from the prior year, and death of the most susceptible. Measles had a 3-4 year cycle like this, with low prevalence while the pool of susceptible young kids increased.
So two years of high excess deaths is highly unusual, if due just to the SARS-Cov-2 virus.
I wonder if the excess deaths in both years are due to the virus spike protein: from infection in 2020, from the vaccines in 2021. Any ideas about how to confirm or refute this?
The big problem with hospitalizations is that it is a fluid metric, of course. I've speculated that the UK increase in hospitalizations-per-"case" in the late spring (attributed to Delta) could be a reflection of loosened standards for admission after the winter wave, for example. Could be the same in US hospitals, after all the 70+ were discharged. Additionally, there were spring waves in the east coast, WA + OR, and Great Lakes states - combination of Canada spillover and Chauvin trial?!?! (no, probably just Canada).