COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States (23 Feb, as of 06:00 AM ET)

CDC ^ | 23 Feb 2021 | CDC

[BeauBo]

Total Vaccine Doses Delivered: 82,114,370

Receiving 1 or More Doses: 44,544,969

Receiving 2 Doses: 19,882,544

[BeauBo]

For the 24 hours since the last update:

Doses Delivered: Almost 7 million - most ever. Most of this may be an administrative adjustment, restoring the nearly 4 million that dropped off a few days back.

People Receiving 1st Dose: 407,000 (a very low day - half speed)

People Receiving 2nd Dose: 445,000 (a very low day - half speed)

On hand inventory back up to 17 million - the low end of the normal weekly flux.

A new metric is now being reported, for the % of Population ≥ 18 Years of Age:

17% have gotten a first dose 7.6% have gotten a second

[Skywise]

In my state the infection rate has dropped 75% (from an average of about 3500 to 800 in 4 weeks) but the death rate has jumped from 1.5% to 5% - normally it was averaging just under 1.5% per infection rate for the entire last year.

So today’s new infection count was about 800 and the death toll is 44.

I was attributing that to initial catch up rates from the infection rate drop but this is consistent and NOT following the curve.

It leads me to believe they’ve fudged the rate numbers and we’re still getting 5x the infections under an old definition.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

It takes (on average) about two weeks for a case to resolve in either a recovery or a death. So deaths is always a trailing indicator. If you want something that’s somewhat close to an accurate rolling case fatality rate, you need to take the new cases from ~14 days ago against the deaths from today.

If you take new cases from today and compare it to new deaths from today, then you’ll always have a very low CFR when new cases are rising quickly and a very high CFR when new cases are falling quickly.

[WVNan]

I just watched a video by a Dr. explaining why we should not get the vaccine because it’s not a vaccine but a dna copy of the Covid 19. Just saying. I wasn’t going to get it anyway. Never have had Flu vaccine either.

[BeauBo]

2aProtectsTheRest raises an important consideration, in estimating the fatality rate.

When case numbers are falling quickly (like they are now), the ratio of today’s deaths to today’s new cases will rise, because today’s deaths are from (the higher number of) new cases a few weeks ago.

That being said, it seems to me that reporting has become somewhat more erratic since the inauguration.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

"it’s not a vaccine but a dna copy of the Covid 19."

This is false. The two vaccines currently available in the United States are third generation mRNA vaccines. They contain a small strip of messenger RNA which provide instructions for making a single protein to the cell's ribosomes. Ribosomes have only one job: take messenger RNA and build the encoded protein.

For the vaccines, the protein encoded is a surface protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus that allows it to enter cells. By itself, that protein is harmless, but the immune system recognizes it as foreign and mounts a normal immune system response to its presence. That immune system response makes you immune from any future exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is the virus that causes COVID-19.

If you're uncomfortable with taking a vaccine on the mRNA platform (which will likely be the platform used for just about all new vaccines very soon), Johnson&Johnson has a vaccine that's about to be authorized in the US. It's based on second generation technology using an adenovirus in a viral vector method. This is how most modern vaccines work. You should know that the J&J vaccine is about 85% effective versus 95% for the other two.

[Grampa Dave]

My wife and I are over the side effects.

I had chills Sunday night and felt blah yesterday.

My wife (with no fever) shortly after breakfast went back to bed and slept until about 1 pm.

We had zero energy, the rest of yesterday, no fever, no new aches and just feeling blah.

Both of us had a good night sleep and feel okay today. It is interesting that my injection site is sorer today than before. That is the only new ache/pain.

[Skywise]

And as I said in the OP that you’re hyperbolically responding too - the elevated rates have been going on for a month and the CURVE ISNT BEING FOLLOWED

[2aProtectsTheRest]

The case fatality rate also isn’t terribly useful outside of a clinical setting because it depends on how many cases you’re actually catching. Test more, CFR goes down. Test less, CFR goes up. It isn’t representative of the reality on the ground.

The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is far more useful as it’s independent from the amount of testing being done. So while the CFR for COVID-19 fluctuates anywhere from 1% to 4%, the IFR for COVID-19 is 0.65%. And that’s likely gone down as well since monoclonal antibody therapy and (to a lesser extent) Ivermectin have helped turn around some serious cases that would have resulted in deaths previously.

[Skywise]

Which you saw in the death rate numbers from November through December but NOT for January forward where they’re bucking the trend.

[Freedom56v2]

Not sure if you are stating your own knowledge or cutting and pasting from a source.

Can you please provide link or your expertise in this area?

Thanks!

[2aProtectsTheRest]

"you’re hyperbolically responding"

"the elevated rates have been going on for a month and the CURVE ISNT BEING FOLLOWED"

Despite the all-caps yelling, my previous point remains valid: if you do a today's-new-cases vs today's-new-deaths rate calculation, that number will always be wrong because it's comparing two events with a time dependency at different times. If you want an accurate number, you have to account for the two week gap between new case diagnosis and new case resolution. here, I'll do that for you:

Dates	New Cases	New Deaths	Case Fatality Rate
2nd/16th	143,098	2,273	1.6%
3rd/17th	136,485	2,145	1.6%
4th/18th	130,931	2,074	1.6%
5th/19th	125,531	2,017	1.6%
6th/20th	120,225	1,961	1.6%
7th/21st	117,372	1,980	1.7%
8th/22nd	112,619	2,042	1.8%

As we can now clearly see, there is no wild fluctuation. The variance seen (<0.2%) is due mainly to variations in reporting and the fact that I'm using a ballpark estimate for case resolution time.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

Always happy to provide links!

Here’s a simple animation showing how the mRNA platform works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCk7LyMslxo

Here’s a paper published in 2012 that goes into detail about the mRNA platform: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3597572/

And here’s an article giving a side by side comparison of the Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J vaccines: https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/02/comparing-the-covid-19-vaccines-developed-by-pfizer-moderna-and-johnson-johnson/

[2aProtectsTheRest]

December 1st/14th 165,993 2,643 1.6%
November 6th/20th 102,763 1,558 1.5%

Still the same numbers. Doesn’t matter if it’s November, December, January, February; any month you like, you get relatively the same numbers once you do the math correctly.

I should note that I’m using the 7-day moving average at each date to smoothe the reporting fluctuations (e.g. most jurisdictions don’t report their weekend numbers until Monday/Tuesday, so you get huge swings that are not reflecting reality).

[Skywise]

Not in my state, pal.

But you just keep on shilling.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

Which state is that? I'm happy to post the numbers for that one too.

What exactly am I shilling here? Math?

Oh no, watch out for this guy, he can do long division! We're doomed!

[Skywise]

Yeah - I’m sure you’d love to dox me too.

No thanks.

So show me the evidence for how triple masking is beneficial too Dr. Fauci.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

If I ran the numbers for all 50 states, they’d still work just the same. There is no state where the math doesn’t work.

The easier approach would have been to simply say: “oh hey, I hadn’t considered that I need to account for the lag between new case diagnosis and case resolution. It makes more sense now. Thank you!”

[BeauBo]

Last Thursday (18 Feb), in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, a Doc from John Hopkins (Makary) used Infection Fatality Rate from known cases (~.23%) and extrapolated that across the whole population, considering the total reported deaths (now around 500,000, ~1/600 or ~.15%).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731?page=1

Using that method, he estimated that about two thirds of Americans may have already been infected. He believes that new cases will taper down dramatically in April, based on herd immunity.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

I like the general approach, but the latest overall IFR I’ve seen is 0.65% (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios-archive/planning-scenarios-2020-09-10.pdf). That isn’t taking into account the latest life-saving treatments, particularly monoclonal antibody therapy (which is what President Trump got). But those are fairly new and only just reaching the general population. So for purposes of estimating how many Americans have been infected, I would use the IFR from previous studies.

That’s about 79 million infections in the US that have resolved using the official death tally. That number is actually a bit low, considering the missed deaths in New York and New Jersey in March 2020 when nobody knew what this was or what to look for and there was no testing available. Account for those, you get ~84 million cases with resolution. Add in those infected in the past couple weeks, you’re at ~85 million cases vs the 29 million reported.

The Herd Immunity Threshold is based on the R0 (1-1/R0). Old R0 for COVID-19 was 2.5 (April 2020 variant) or 60%. There are a lot of new variants from the UK one to the South African one to several in California. R0 estimates for those range from 4.3 - 5.7 for a HIT of 77% - 82%. 330 million Americans means 254 - 271 million inoculated before Rt drops to <1. Take the worst case at 271 million. We have 85 million infections and 45 million with at least one dose (which we now know is actually really effective). Assume there’s some overlap (people who were infected and also vaccinated), but that ~80% of vaccines went to never-infected individuals, so 36 million newly inoculated courtesy of vaccines. That leaves 150 million left.

Extrapolate new infections and new vaccine inoculations and I come up with July to reach HIT.

Who’s actually correct? Only time will tell. There’s some variables in there. For example, the South African variant is resistant to neutralizing antibodies from the April variant. People vaccinated with Moderna or Pfizer’s vaccines are likely still fine because of the intense immune response provoked. People who had mild or asymptomatic cases? They probably need at least one shot of one of the vaccines as a booster.

That could extend things a little, but I still think we’re out from under this thing some time in July this year.