Keep following the data

It’s been awhile since I took a deep look at the data for COVID infections and vaccinations in St. Clair County and in Michigan, so here we go:

  • According to Bridge Michigan, case numbers have fallen to a point in Michigan where the state will now only update their statistics twice a week. During most of the pandemic, MDHHS had daily updates; they stopped reporting on Saturdays a few weeks ago, and now will only update on Tuesdays and Fridays. The July 2 update showed 101 new cases, up from 40 the week before, but still very low. To compare, at the peaks in December 2020 and in mid-April 2021, the state was reporting over 7,000 new cases per week.
  • Unvaccinated people account for almost all new hospitalizations from COVID-19, as well as nearly all deaths from the virus. In a study released by the Cleveland Clinic, of the 4,300 COVID patients admitted to their facility between January and April of this year, 99.75% were unvaccinated against the virus. Also notable: “The study also looked at 47,000 Cleveland Clinic employees who had received one shot, two shots, or no shots. Among those, 1,991 tested positive for the coronavirus in recent months. About 99.7% of those who contracted COVID-19 weren’t vaccinated, and .3% were fully vaccinated.”
  • In another study at the Cleveland Clinic, over 52,000 employees, those who had already had COVID and those who hadn’t but had been fully vaccinated had almost no chance of getting COVID. Specifically, “The cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection remained almost zero among previously infected unvaccinated subjects, previously infected subjects who were vaccinated, and previously uninfected subjects who were vaccinated, compared with a steady increase in cumulative incidence among previously uninfected subjects who remained unvaccinated. Not one of the 1359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study.

Here’s the U.S. map from covidestim.org for July 3:

Missouri, Arkansas, and northeast Texas are dealing with a flare-up, but the rest of the country, including Michigan, is fairly quiet.

The Rt values for several states are above 1.0 again. Rt is the average number of people who will become infected by a person infected at time t. If it’s above 1.0, COVID-19 cases will increase in the near future. If it’s below 1.0, COVID-19 cases will decrease in the near future. Michigan’s Rt number has remained steady at around 0.85 for several weeks. It will be interesting to see if the number rises after the Fourth of July weekend; if it does, it could be concerning, especially for hospitals and clinics that could see a small surge in COVID cases. If it doesn’t rise significantly, however, it would be an excellent sign moving forward.

Per covidestim.org, St. Clair County’s Rt number is 0.62, lower than the state number despite only about 49 percent of county residents being fully vaccinated (52 percent have had at least one dose of the two-dose vaccines, which still provides good protection). 46 percent of St. Clair County residents have had COVID already, again per covidestim.org. While there’s still much to confirm, if you add the percentage of those who’ve already survived a bout with COVID to those who are fully vaccinated, you start to approach 100 percent of the county having at least some protection against the virus (admittedly, some people have both had COVID and gotten the vaccine, so a simple addition – which would result in a 95 percent number – is too simplistic). But you start to see why numbers remain low, even when vaccination rates are much lower than you would hope and no one seems to be wearing masks in public, vaccinated or otherwise.

The vaccines work. Even Jim Justice, Republican governor of West Virginia, knows what’s up.

Still, lots of people, including many of our elected representatives, are either stupid or intentionally pandering to ignorant people (why not both?):

None of the above guarantees that the Delta variant – or some future variant – won’t be a problem. But working with existing data, I think it’s important to avoid the cherry-picking of bad stories, some of which are anecdotal in nature, that we keep reading in the news every day. Yes, people will continue to get sick from COVID, and some will get seriously ill and die, but at this point that seems to be almost exclusively limited to those who cannot – and more importantly, have chosen not to – get vaccinated.