Jabin said:
I am vaccinated and generally strongly pro-vaccine. However, some of the data starting to come out is concerning. What is this article omitting or getting wrong?
Horowitz: Irish county with 99.7% vaccination rate has highest COVID case rate - TheBlaze
I mean Ireland has a 91% vaccination rate overall - so it's not like there's a big difference between counties. There are a lot of variables that affect transmission and vaccination rate is just one of them. Given that COVID is destined to be endemic it's inevitable that it will spread at some level. Important things to consider are #1 what % of the vaccinations are Astrazeneca- similar to JNJ this vaccine has been less effective at preventing transmission and bad health outcomes than the mRNA vaccines. #2 what age demographic is transmitting COVID in the most - I would bet it's the sub 18 year old dempgraphic driving cases as they are not vaccinated (meaning the overall population is more in the ~70% vaccination rate than the 99.7% rate the article is quoting). #3 what is the population density of the county with the high number of cases relative to the other counties - I'm gonna bet it's a high population density county without doing any real research.
I'm really not sure what the point of this article is. Nobody is arguing the COVID 0 is a goal or even a real strategy. The reason vaccines are important is not only to mitigate some of your personal risk but to mitigate the systemic risk of COVID. As we enter winter in the northern hemisphere, cases are going to go up across Europe, Asia, and North America. It is inevitable. However the magnitude of the cases will be dictated by the herd's immunity level to COVID - the vaccines are a very large component of this. The key is we cannot have what happened last winter be the new normal even in spite of the mitigation measures we had, and the data clearly shows that these vaccines will prevent that from happening.
The way the article is written is problematic because it has an agenda and it molds the information to fit that agenda. The Singapore graph is a perfect example of that. Singapore has decided COViD 0 is no longer the goal with this delta variant. So it is comparing two distinctly different strategies to handle COVID with all sorts of different variables to brag about how smart they are on twitter.