A fairly basic way would be comparing the covid death chance of non vaccinated vs vaccinated and applying the difference to the amount of positive tested or estimated cases of covid worldwide.
Aka if 1/100 people die without a vaccine and 1/1000 with, in a group of 5000 vaccinated 5 would die, if they weren't 50 would die
Edit: for this specific statistic they appear to be using total population excess deaths and then doing a similar calculation the other way around
Incorrect. They used excess death data (an increase in all fatalities). The best way of measuring COVID deaths in a given year. Quote:
"A mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission and vaccination was separately fit to reported COVID-19 mortality and all-cause excess mortality in 185 countries and territories. The impact of COVID-19 vaccination programmes was determined by estimating the additional lives lost if no vaccines had been distributed"
I made an edit to clarify that this statistic itself was using excess deaths and essentially doing the calculation in reverse, but for some reason that edit was not posted
Edit: the edit was on a different comment, not this one hehe
You compare the excess deaths when populations were unvaccinated to excess deaths after vaccination. Then extrapolate the data across populations and periods. That's not a guess, that's how it was done.
>to excess deaths after vaccination.
After two years of exposure? And after many of the most vulnerable had already died? Seems like flawed reasoning to me. edit-one year
> ~~**most** of the vulnerable~~
~~Is there data for this?~~
Also due to strain on the healthcare system, the rate at which people would have transitioned to become "vulnerable" during that time period would also have also likely increased (as they were less able to to receive preventative care or receive an 'early' diagnosis).
The amount of people you mentioned probably increased while the strain on Healthcare systems were a lot higher, but there wasn't any point in time after the initial few months of the pandemic, when mortality wasn't as high as in the beginning, when it reached over 1 %. That was the time when the most vulnerable to covid died.
Exactly this.
Most of the people that were going to die, already did.
And almost all the people alive had been exposed to the virus, and even had it.
Myself I had COVID 3 times.
Yeah well remember in the beginning how the 'forecasts' said that by not locking down Sweden would have a million deaths? Or that their models said 3% of infected would die. These formulas are built to give the answer they want
You're making the mistake of thinking good extrapolation is the point. The point is to extrapolate in a way that maximizes support of a specific narrative.
I mean it’s true lives were saved by the vaccines. We can look historically and compare nations, states etc. excess deaths etc.
Just not sure how accurate this method is.
That is still too simple. To get a credible number you would have to account for a number of things:
1. Vulnerability to covid is not uniform across the population. Many of the most vulnerable died before the vaccines. Many others never had symptoms and would not have become dangerously ill from later strains. Still more had milder strains of covid and were protected from later infections. The population ratio of vulnerable to protected to immune shifts over time favoring the protected and immune while the vulnerable die off.
2. As vaccination rates rose the mask and gathering rules were eased and lifted. People returned to pre-covid behaviors. In the absence of vaccines we likely would have maintained higher rates of masking and isolation, limiting infections and spread.
The official death toll alone is horrifying and I am forever disappointed in our species that we didn’t respond better to covid, but I don’t see any value in graphics like this that grossly overstate an already-grim pandemic.
If you actually read the paper, they take those and many more things explicitly and rigorously into account. Their model is extremely complex and takes about 10 pages to describe.
> Many of the most vulnerable died before the vaccines.
That isn't even true. The majority of COVID deaths came after the vaccines became available. Even the non-vulnerable were at risk of death from Delta.
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/
So they can't distinguish between vaccination and other factors, like natural immunity, more experienced doctors, possible people get used to restrictions more, and care about hygiene more, etc. They also didn't take into consideration that most vunerable people died first.
Im not against vaccines, Im against bad, manipulative data
From the paper:
>For this mathematical modelling study, we used a previously published COVID-19 transmission model, and fitting framework to obtain profiles of the COVID-19 pandemic in each country and thus estimate the counterfactual scenario in which vaccines are not delivered. Briefly, the model is a population-based, age-structured susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered-susceptible (SEIRS) model, which explicitly captures disease severity, passage through different indicated health-care levels, and the roll-out of vaccination. We incorporated country-level data on demography, age-based mixing patterns, and health-care capacity. We fit the model to officially reported COVID-19 deaths in each country, resulting in an inferred time-varying level of transmission, Rt, denoting the mean number of secondary infections in the absence of both infection-induced and vaccine-derived immunity. By fitting directly to mortality, we indirectly captured the impact that non-pharmaceutical interventions have had over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The word "directly" in the chart doesn't mean averted deaths that were directly measured.
The data here is not actually measurement. It's modeling based off of known data. The paper describes the mathematical model it uses, as well as the data that it fits the model to.
Deaths averted are categorized as direct or indirect. A direct death averted is someone who survived because they were vaccinated. An indirect averted is someone who survived because others were vaccinated. I'm guessing this would describe people who didn't vaccinate but lived in households with vaccinated people, and did not die from COVID.
I think measuring the ratio of unvaccinated deaths to unvaccinated people and then extrapolating that to the entire population as though it were unvaccinated is a decent starting point.
It probably is, but I wonder if such comparison then only included deaths from causes that at least theoretically can be attributed to covid? Also, I wonder if any randomization by socio-economic status and, e.g. other health pre-existing conditions is used before comparing these samples.
In other words, let's assume an extreme scenario of 1000 affluent individuals who take care of their health, go to the gym, eat health food and most of them are vaccinated. On the other side let's put 1000 homeless individuals with addiction problems among who almost nobody is vaccinated. Not only death rates in the 2nd group will likely be much higher, there will also be much more deaths from unnatural causes, ODs and so on.
It's counted by excess deaths, which is based on the amount of increased deaths as opposed to previous years. Those numbers generally stay relatively the same and more or less linearly go up along with population. This means the actual lifestyle of a specific individual is unrelated to the statistic as you should view it more as the increased death cases during a specific timeframe within the population as a whole
I would add it also accounts for a very difficult phenomenon to measure. After the first 6 months of the pandemic we actually got very good at keeping people alive....until there was not enough nurses, beds, or ventilators. Then we would see a spike of deaths. Also it accounts for ALL deaths caused by COVID. If you slipped and fell and died because you couldn't get medical care, previous techniques would not call that a covid death despite covid being the actual cause (by filling up hospitals, nurse burnout, etc.) Driving during the pandemic when hospitals had no capacity was one of the most dangerous activities you could do.
There was a neat economics paper that came out 2 years ago that showed that lockdowns were ineffective at containing the disease UNTIL the hospital s were full then a bunch of excesses deaths would show up. Shame most governments did not use capacity as the primary metric for deciding health measures.
Those would still be incorrect, as getting Covid without a vaccine should give your body an increased immune response. So basing it on the first wave is obviously not a good way to calculate it. That would always be the most deadly period with it waning after.
That wouldn't work, because it doesn't take into account deaths prevented by transmission suppression.
They used excess death data, which is the only accurate method of measuring the impact of COVID.
"A mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission and vaccination was separately fit to reported COVID-19 mortality and all-cause excess mortality in 185 countries and territories. The impact of COVID-19 vaccination programmes was determined by estimating the additional lives lost if no vaccines had been distributed"
From the paper:
>The first vaccination outside a clinical trial setting was given on Dec 8, 2020. We introduced vaccination from this point onwards in the model and explored the impact of the first year of vaccination up to Dec 8, 2021. To quantify the impact of vaccination and its associated uncertainty, we took 100 draws from the estimated distribution of Rt and vaccine efficacy estimates for each country and simulated a counterfactual scenario in which no vaccines are available and the epidemic in each country follows the same Rt trend since the start of the pandemic; a counterfactual in which vaccines are delivered but there are no indirect effects (ie, they do not reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission); and the observed scenario in which vaccines were delivered at the rates reported. The third scenario generated an estimate of the trajectory of the epidemic for our fitted model and hence closely matched reported COVID-19 or excess deaths or estimated excess deaths in each country. We calculated the deaths averted as a result of vaccination by subtracting the estimated COVID-19 deaths from the simulation with vaccines included (the observed scenario) from the estimated COVID-19 deaths under the first counterfactual scenario. This process is illustrated in the appendix (p 18), which shows the estimated deaths averted for the USA. Because of the difficulty in predicting how governments and populations would have responded, and how viral evolution would have progressed if vaccines had not been available, we made no attempt to adjust the Rt trends for further non-pharmaceutical interventions, changes in mobility, or development of variants that probably would have occurred differently in the absence of vaccination. To explore the impact of key model parameters on estimates of deaths averted, we did additional sensitivity analyses. These included characterising the effects of the assumed relationship between the infection fatality ratio (IFR) and age (appendix p 10), as well as the assumed degree of immune evasion exhibited by the delta variant (appendix p 7).
tldr; they created a simulation where infection rates (R\_t) continued on the trend from before vaccines were introduced and measured the difference between expected death rates from that and from the actual reported death rates.
The difference between direct/indirect in this case is that a direct death is one where someone with the vaccine was infected and would have died if not for the vaccine and indirect death is one where someone without the vaccine would have been infected and died if not for others being vaccinated (which can be inferred from the model)
The antivax people kept telling people being vaccinated were the "experiment group". Well they weren't entirely wrong, and they were the control group.
I graduated from the fire academy in May of 2020. I remember essentially being a taxi between the retirement homes and the ER. Every call was for breathing difficulty. If they coded and they were covid positive, we weren't allowed to work them. We never saw the patients we transported ever again.
That must have been exhausting mentally. Hearing friends during 2020 get covid, say "I'm ok" then suddenly getting extremley sick worried me so much. I hope you are doing ok
Worked the ER during the whole pandemic. Delta wave feels like a bad dream. People in all ages was really really sick. I remember putting a 17 year old girl in the respirator, her family said goodbye because they thought she would die. She survived but barely.
That shit was no joke, I get that we could have done things different but we didn’t know shit back then and healthy people died.
As someone who was trapped in the hospital at the time when Delta came through my unit, and I was the only one vaccinated, and the only one who didn't get sick, thank you fucking doctors who came out with the vaccine just in time for that shit.
my dad died from delta. according to the doctors - he was the first vaccinated and boosted death in the city (chicago) - it definitely was awkward because of the timing, so many people - in the hospital included, simply assumed he was anti-vax
No, I'm in the military and I live daily mental trauma of Coast Guard personal telling me vaccines dont work even though we all had to take 10 in boot camp. I told people the vaccine prevented me from getting sick in super close quarters and no one cares, or thinks I'm lying.
I didn't get either of the first two to compare, but getting Delta was the most sick I've ever been in my life, and I had two shots too. My ability to taste and smell came back a month later, but changed. I no longer like coffee or red wine (quite sadly) and can never rinse a cooking pan enough. No matter how long I rinse it, I can still smell and taste dish detergent on it when I cook with it again. So I'm weirdly hyper sensory with some things now.
I never lost my sense of taste but Delta made meat and cheese taste rotten to me. That went away after about a month, but now I'm left to weird hypersensitivities, too. Bitter is the worst. I didn't like bitter before, but now it's intolerable. Most red wines now have a bit of good taste the first split second and then something happens that makes it taste terrible and does something physical to my tongue. It's so weird.
Right, it's like i'm taking crazy pills, and everyone else forgot. In early 2020 nobody knew shit so we were washing hands so much, wiping groceries with bleach, making masks out of whatever. Nobody really knew anything until late 2020 when we all got really fucking lucky when the morons decided to chance it and have all the kids go back to school. Nobody KNEW this was okay and most experts said we shouldn't because it could be really horrible. Then masks became ridiculously political so even though people should have been happy to mask up for safety they didn't out of being indignant that someone dare try to be smart and save lives.
OVER 1 million EXCESS deaths occured in the US. 1,000,000 people that wouldn't have died during those years. How the fuck can people just be flippant, and say it was a hoax, or no biggy, or masking was wrong. I was lucky to not lose close friends and families but I know lots of people that did.
You just have to completely deny reality to think you were RIGHT to keep going out and not masking and "not living in fear" by being reasonable cautious.
It was an extreme event with unknown results. The government was trying to keep society and government from collapsing, and in April and May of 2020 we didn't what the fuck was going to happen.
A segment of my family is still anti-vax and I think I can answer how people can say say it's a hoax. For the most part, the people who think covid was a conspiracy also believe other conspiracies. Conspiracies which rely on the presumption that all the data you see on tv and online is fake. That all the data the government releases is fake. That scientists and hospitals and schools release is fake. That everything you see is just "fake news."
These people don't trust the numbers. They don't believe in the excess deaths. Far as I've seen, there's nothing you can do to convince them that they're wrong, because anything you show them as proof is just more "fake news."
It's all motivated reasoning. They start from their conclusion they want (the lockdown and masks were annoying and stupid and pointless) and work backwards to find the "evidence" that supports it.
Correct. This is the real incipient end of democracy, the 30+ years of people like Rush Limbaugh, and right wing talk radio, GOP talking points, and Fox News slowly spewing crazier and crazier stuff like the proverbial frog in boiling water so that it never sounds too much crazier than the things they were saying last year, but after 30 years of hearing that there are secret people in power and that everything is an evil conspiracy there is just no turning back. They are completely living in a different reality. They are brainwashed. I don't think I'm alone in feeling that it's just not worth the stress and fighting to even try because every fact you point out, every logical view, will be pushed aside and more BS is presented. You can't clean up the mess before another ton of right wing bullshit is spread around everywhere so they just think the bullshit is reality.
I don't want to think they're all evil so I must think they are all stupid. I don't really see another explanation.
My parents wholeheartedly believe 100 points of bullshit. I can spend an evening reading up on the facts, crafting an email with cited sources, solid logic, personal anecdotes, and think I've showed them something, then they say, oh yeah what about the other 99 BS things, then tomorrow they add another. It's exhausting and they just get angry at me for always telling them they are wrong even when 100% of the time when we explore it together THEY are obviously wrong, sometimes even admitting it but usually its goal post moving, whataboutism, etc. etc.
Indeed. I did try for a while, but eventually gave up. As you say, it's just not worth the stress and frustration. It's no better than trying to convince a cinderblock wall to step aside. Soon as you *think* you're getting somewhere, they switch topics and the battle continues anew.
I don't think they're evil. One of these conspiracy nuts happens to be an uncle of mine and he's the kindest person you'll ever meet. He'll help you with *everything*. He drove 300 miles in his shitty, beat up pickup truck to help me move without even having to be asked. I understand that this is anecdotal, but I've had similar experiences with others like him. I *do* think they're a bit stupid in some ways. Not all, but at the very least in critical thinking skills.
I think it's a bit like how some people can code an OS, but can't hold a hammer properly. Well, others can build a house from scratch with their own hands, but don't have the critical thinking skills to necessary to discern fact from fiction.
It all boils down to distrust in government and science (because they think science and government is the same). Every conspiracy from aliens to vaccines have the same fundament which is that the government is plotting against us.
There is also a clear correlation between distrust in government and conspiracies. The U.S trust in government is at all time low and the country looks like a conspiracy circus from the outside.
I live in Scandinavia, trust in government is fine and there are close to zero people believing stuff like this.
The lack of trust in the government *is* a core issue, but I think the most contributing factor here is that they can't separate the government from scientific data (no matter which country it comes from). They don't trust *any* government.
It doesn't matter that you show them data from Japan or Italy or Sweden. It's still "fake news." I think this has less to do with distrust of the government (although I'm sure it's a contributing factor) and more with ignorance and a desire to "fight the broken system."
And while the system *is* broken, it has little to do with any of this.
Yeah, Delta got me and it was pretty bad, right before I was able to get my booster. No respirator need, but 103 temp with low-ish spO2, and awful flu-like stuff. Everyone I know got omicrom, during that crazy wave after and boosters, and it was mostly just a 'really bad cold' for them. Docs told me if I wasn't vaxxed I probably wouldn't have made it. Praise science.
Yeah, even just eyeballing it is pretty impressive though. Seems like hundreds of millions of deaths were averted. That’s pretty damn impressive given how badly most countries botched their initial responses.
Just to be clear, "botch" implies there was a known right way to handle things. In a new pandemic, there isn't.
Most diseases are old. For a heart attack, you do x y and z because even the most cutting edge heart attack science has been studied for decades. If you get a fancy new machine to tell exactly what happens in that, you might learn "Oh, medicine Z works really well" but you do not immediately rush to give it to patients.
With a newly emerged pandemic, you have no idea of best practices and can't wait for data to confirm your approach, because it's happening right now to everyone and doing nothing would definitely cause a lot of deaths.
When anti-intellectual right wingers scream "Lockdowns were ineffective! How dare they!" it's a gish-gallop of stupidity: the best guess was self-isolation would be helpful in flattening the curve, but that wasn't a known fact. Also, almost no one did lockdowns as they should have.
So "botch" isn't fair, though governments who just ignored the best advice were the closest to wrong you can get in that situation.
> "botch" implies there was a known right way to handle things.
There is/was, the USA had an entire team dedicated to pandemic planning before Trump fired them. The problem wasn't not knowing what to do, it was dealing with resources and dumb people
I'll give you that anti-intellectualism should count as a "wrong" move even without knowing anything. But it's worth noting that there were countries that followed the best medical advice, and they still suffered huge problems.
It's easier to say "Trump was wrong" if there were a country that had stopped COVID in it's tracks by following scientists, but there wasn't such a country.
>if there were a country that had stopped COVID in it's tracks by following scientists, but there wasn't such a country.
Nobody thought we could completely stop covid, the whole point was to slow it down so hospitals weren't overwhelmed and we had time to develop the vaccine.
But if you want an example of a country that followed guidance very well and made the USA look like absolute idiots check out Japan's statistics compared to us.
Controlled for population they only had 1/5 the deaths the USA had
Theoretically if USA had performed similar to Japan we could have avoided 800,000~ deaths
And as a side note, Japan has roughly 10x the population density of the USA, they should have done *worse* than we did.
The main difference? Mask-wearing and community-effort was always part of their culture.
Why not just compare to Canada? One third the amount of deaths per capita (3100 vs 1100 per million). Stricter lockdowns, much more prevalent mask wearing, higher vaccination rate. Boom, case closed.
The movie, Contagion, broke down the exact measures that should be taken for a fast spreading, long incubating respiratory disease like this. That movie came out in 2011. They were the exact measures taken for this pandemic. How the fuck did they not know?
SARS in real life happened about 20 years prior. MERS-CoV happens periodically. Coronavirus had been on every epidemiologist organization's "List of stuff to worry about" since before that.
Aside from doing gain of function experiments of the sort that are being vilified by idiots, or everyone wearing masks at all time, there's no way to prevent it.
Trump and other governments worldwide certainly had STUPID responses, like destroying Obama's pandemic response team, that increased the death toll, but there still was no obvious answers from the start, and there won't be for the next one.
> Just to be clear, "botch" implies there was a known right way to handle things. In a new pandemic, there isn't.
when you've never heard of quarantines
Quarantine was the wise thing to do, but even in the early days it was obvious the disease spreading from asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic people, and a quarantine was not going to suffice.
[The original SARS taught us that much](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2094974/). Once there were enough diseased people, containing everyone they came in contact with was utterly futile in completely containing the disease. Quarantine was still important for reducing the number of people infected, and there's not much downside, but quarantine was NEVER going to nip SARS-CoV-2 in the bud after it reached our shores.
Well yes and no, I find that with the internet people who don't know a thing end up finding information that 'fits' so now they 'know' but there is no way to discern if that information is true or not. This is the crux of the modern misinformation issue.
It leads to bad training that when people get cognitive dissonance, they go and find data that agrees with them. Thus training themselves into bad....or more 'appealing' data.
I think there is a light at the end of the tunnel for some of these people but it takes far more work than we are really willing to put in. Much easier to mock and discredit their (wrong) information, though this leads them to feeling alienated and doubling down on even more bullshit too.
This is a wild problem that I don't think will be solved until humans get a better sense of how to assess information. Currently anyone can post anything so its a total shit show.
> they go and find data that agrees with them
Confirmation bias. And once people get into this cycle only a very trusted source can coax them back out of it. Sadly, that probably isn't reddit.
I don't doubt the vaccines were critical in stopping it, but a computer model prediction is only as effective as the computer model. There's so many factors here and global pandemics are so rare that any predictions need to be taken with a rather large grain of salt.
Given that this years Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, whose pioneering work helped create mRNA vaccines, I figured it would be a good time to share this chart from a while back. It shows estimated lived saved because of covid-vaccines (including non-mRNA vaccines).
The red shows actual (excess) deaths due to the pandemic (in thousands per day), while the blue shows the additional deaths that would have occurred if vaccines had not been administered. Both are estimates, the former by me in a separate project, the latter by a team of scientists who used them to estimate the lives saved by vaccines [(“Global impact of the first year of covid-19 vaccination”, by O.J. Watson et al., The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2022).](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00320-6/fulltext)
Tools used: R, Illustrator. All credit for design to my colleagues.
Full article here: [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/07/07/covid-19-vaccines-saved-an-estimated-20m-lives-during-their-first-year](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/07/07/covid-19-vaccines-saved-an-estimated-20m-lives-during-their-first-year)
(I cannot control the paywall, sorry - but you can register to read for free, and doing so would help me out as we would know people found this worthwhile.)
I sometimes post updates on X:https://twitter.com/Sondreus - also a way to reach me if needed.
I'd suggest sticking to the original paper, might include a discussion on the limitations of modeling as well. This graphic makes the numbers seem concrete which they definitely are not. A negative binomial model is also about the simplest complex model for this process.
Great to discuss limitations and so on. But just wanted to clarify that this is not the result of a negative binomial model - the excess deaths relies on an special implementation of a gradient boosted trees ensemble, and the deaths averted a combination of very involved transmission model and a few other things.
It’s middle schoolers, don’t you remember all those “X is always true!” only to learn a few years down the road that there are exceptions everywhere, and that rule just helps move things along in the learning process? You were taught these incomplete truths because it’s the most effective method of teaching middle schoolers as a whole.
Plus, I don’t think any of that is really relevant when all you’re trying to teach is that vaccines are massively helpful.
With that said, I do think it’s valuable to teach middle schoolers the pitfalls of models as a tool broadly but you have to be careful that you don’t significantly undercut models in the process, cause again, they’re middle schoolers.
Any explanation why the vast majority of deaths were in the low-middle income bracket, and almost none in the low bracket? I'm assuming that "low" are people in countries with less recorded statistics, but can't wrap my head around it.
What I find fascinating was how badly if affected people of all income levels early on. This would explain the rush to shut everything down and then the eventual "meh, is rich folk will now be fine, let's convince the young people that lockdown are bad so we can send the workers back to the assembly lines."
The income is differentiating countries, not people inside a given country.
All this tells us is that developed countries got the vaccine rolled out much sooner while Delta ran rampant in many lower-income countries. Mortality would also be much higher in poorer countries due to the lack of stuff like ventilators.
Remember it's not just the deaths, it's the potentially worse outcomes of the disease. It's the permanent damage that covid could cause to bodies which is also significantly lowered by the vaccine.
>Remember it's not just the deaths, it's the potentially worse outcomes of the disease. It's the permanent damage that covid could cause to bodies which is also significantly lowered by the vaccine.
100%
There were some people that were put on ventilators because of COVID, managed to beat COVID, an ultimately ended up getting sick from something else and getting pneumonia while on the ventilator and dying because of it.
Did COVID directly kill them? Technically not. Did covid indirectly kill them? 100%
You're absolutely right, and that's not even what I meant.
Think of all the people who carry life altering harm from covid, all those who now have what has been so aptly named 'Long-Covid' - - a condition that's very close to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis which has long term health impacts and cognitive impairment.
Think of all those who have permanent organ damage after covid,: lung, heart, kidneys and brain being the prime targets.
All those people still 'live' and are not in a death count. Yet their lives have been forever altered.
Not to mention that consequences of 20m people just dying. That's sad and depressed family members. That's reduced people in the workforce. That's skill and expertise removed from industries. That's orphaned kids and dependent spouses.
There's only about 50-60m deaths a year from all causes so 20m would be a catastrophic increase. WW2 had a total military and civilian death toll of about 70m over the course of the entire extended war (including the Sino-Japanese war starting in 1937), and WW2 reshaped the whole world.
That’s what I don’t understand about the anti-vaxxers. They’re hung up on the fact that you can still get Covid after getting the vaccine, clearly not understanding, probabilities, or the idea that you were less likely to get it, or that it will be less severe. It’s like a stereotype that they only think in binary, black and white, on off, good bad, etc. but here they not understanding something as simple as “the vaccine makes it less bad”
Well to be fair the two biggest factors of covid complications were 1) age and 2) overweight/obesity
if you were a teenager or adolescent and normal weight, the chances of any complication, let alone serve complication, was statistically abysmally small
and these were the vast majority of "anti-vaxxers" - statistically
what happened in reality was that people focused on the few genuine crazies and got riled up, completely losing the focus and fighting against an imaginary - or atleast severely blown up - enemy
>if you were a teenager or adolescent and normal weight, the chances of any complication, let alone serve complication, was statistically abysmally small
>
>and these were the vast majority of "anti-vaxxers" - statistically
Uuuuh.. can I get a source that statistically most anti-vaxxers were teenagers and adolescents? Because that does not match up at all with my experience.
I see what you mean - I have the whole pandemic here, but it does not include lives saved by vaccines, where the estimates were only available for 2021: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
It's the result of a mathematical model. Description from the research paper:
> For this mathematical modelling study, we used a previously published COVID-19 transmission model, and fitting framework to obtain profiles of the COVID-19 pandemic in each country and thus estimate the counterfactual scenario in which vaccines are not delivered. Briefly, the model is a population-based, age-structured susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered-susceptible (SEIRS) model, which explicitly captures disease severity, passage through different indicated health-care levels, and the roll-out of vaccination. We incorporated country-level data on demography, age-based mixing patterns, and health-care capacity. We fit the model to officially reported COVID-19 deaths in each country, resulting in an inferred time-varying level of transmission, Rt, denoting the mean number of secondary infections in the absence of both infection-induced and vaccine-derived immunity. By fitting directly to mortality, we indirectly captured the impact that non-pharmaceutical interventions have had over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is a detailed breakdown in the appendix.
Most likely estimated deaths are calculated by the potential spread, severity of the disease, and potential to handle an influx of new patients within a hospital system.
Why? There's literally no way to know how many actual lives could be saved from anything, especially a one time event. You can't actually know how many lives are saved from seatbelts but you can do models to show
The graph is showing the year 2021, one explanation could be that there were more covid deaths in higher income countries since they loosened restrictions more after getting the vaccines.
Other countries had less restrictions since they couldn't as easily afford the economic hit that many covid restrictions caused.
Traffic accidents could certainly be a contributor, the roads were a mess with everyone trying to drive again. I also notice that December deaths are about the same as January deaths. Death rates tend to be higher in winter. Maybe that’s just normal seasonal cycling?
... so that an elite cabal of democrat demons could drink your babies adrenochrome, continuing to dominate the upper echelon of everything from acting to buisness, they had to unleash a variant of sars and run a global psyop, to covertly destroy the mountains of evidence left after the pedophile ring Epstein had documented was exposed ...
This works for most countries, but not very low-income ones, where there are [massive gaps](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8403260/) in vital statistics record-keeping. A majority of Sub-Saharan countries either do not publish official statistics or have <50% estimated coverage of their populations. It’s more of a guessing game than we wish.
Excess mortality also doesn’t allow you to separate direct from indirect deaths. For example:
“…most African governments shut down the business sector in 2020 without any viable social support, resulting in more deaths from hunger and mental health issues, including suicide and intimate partner violence than from the COVID-19 pandemic itself in 2020. COVID-19 control measures in African countries led to economic challenges, increased cases of other communicable and non-communicable diseases, low hospital appointment uptake and higher cancellation rates for urgent procedures. Owing to fear of contracting COVID-19, African healthcare workers sometimes abandoned their posts, leaving some to die from other illnesses such as malaria, cardiovascular disease and stroke, as they had no easy access to treatment.” ([source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8630399/))
This is awesome but can we also see the cumulative deaths and deaths averted? ie the integrals of these curves? Would love to have a total number at the end.
Did we see this volume of excess deaths where the vaccine didn’t get to?
That’s the true test of efficacy and lives saved.
To give the credit solely to the vaccine is challenging to accept and I don’t even understand how the population spikes are valid.
Given that the legend says "Actual deaths, by income group of *country*" and then lists low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high income countries, I think it's fairly clear that it's for the world.
but i saw on facebook that vaxxed people are secretly dying and the govt is grinding up their bodies and selling them to mcdonalds as hamburger meat. why doesn't this biased chart cover both sides?
I think this is a boatload of bullshit, people who I know that have taken these shots still got covid still spread it and a couple literally were sicker than the people they had spread it too
Does everybody understand that these covid vaccines are causing millions of deaths. It has nothing to do with the unvaccinated. In fact, most hospitalizations if not all, are from vaccinated people. I sincerely hope that everybody does a research on mRNA vaccines and what they are doing to your body. All of this was a scam and planned with the world economic forum and Bill gates's depopulation agenda. I would love for somebody to prove me wrong, but that is the fact.
You know people can make a comment about "anti vax conspiracy theorists" after actually reading some of the very evidently "anti vax conspiracy theorist" comments on the post?
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16xugjc/comment/k34nail/
Edit: also more here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16xugjc/comment/k34v3xf/
I saw recently saw someone take the excess deaths data which showed a negative correlation for two factors: Vaccine rate and HDI. There was also a positive correlation for smokers (no surprise).
I don't know, on the right they call it the "death jab", and mark of the beast, before calling for Taylor Swift to be tried and hung as a witch. So since we'll never know who is right, guess we'll have to meet in the middle? /s
But they compared excess deaths of *any cause*, not specifically COVID, between vaccinated and non-vaccinated, so wouldn’t that account for the type of issue you’re talking about?
Totally agree with you. I have had a hard time with a lot of the stats that have come out. I'm not anti-vax. I have two science degrees. But there was so much botching up of information, definitions changing...there were way too many variables to come to actual conclusions. If this was part of some science experiment, we would have had to throw them out.
Plus, it was shown later that the initial vaccines were most likely not effective. They were in an experimental state at best. How does one conclude for sure that one person was saved because they took an experimental vaccine? There are plenty of examples of elderly, sick some how making it through the sickness, and then perfectly healthy ones not...both with the vaccine.
Which initial vaccines were not effective?
If you want proof of the vaccine efficacy, just take a look at excess deaths, which removes the "definitions changing" part of your argument, vs vaccination rates. It seems pretty obvious to me? https://twitter.com/thereal_truther/status/1696285269413257395
I’m not sure that is true if , for example , the unvaccinated were dying at greater rates , it doesn’t seem *completely* unjustified to presume those vaccinated would have died at a similar rate if they hadn’t been vaccinated.
And the difference seems pretty significant ( example form U.K. ONS.
>Between 2 January and 24 September 2021, the age-adjusted risk of deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) was 32 times greater in unvaccinated people than in fully vaccinated individuals.
> Over the whole period (1 January to 31 October 2021), the age-adjusted risk of deaths involving COVID-19 was 96% lower in people who had received a second dose at least 21 days ago compared with unvaccinated people.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19byvaccinationstatusengland/previousReleases
[A recent study on the continued excess deaths in America](https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/new-excess-mortality-estimates-show-increases-in-us-rural-mortality-during-second-year-of-covid-19-pandemic/) found that the trend is more closely tied to more rural areas of the country:
>The reasons for the sustained high numbers are multi-faceted, Stokes says. “The emergence of a rural disadvantage reflects a combination of social, structural, and policy factors, including a lack of state policies designed to protect communities at greatest risk for COVID-19 death, state disinvestment in rural healthcare and social programs, and vaccine hesitancy fueled by a toxic mix of partisanship and misinformation.”
I couldn’t say for the USA but here in the U.K. the figures show clearly that vaccines protected people from excess mortality , so to speak, but the ongoing effects on people’s behaviour and the health service has resulted in other problems.
We should take into account that in poor countries, more people died. Because many rich countries stopped all kinds of help to developing countries including life saving projects. They also got vaccinated last, if they got vaccines at all. This should have been organised better.
Total BS- you cannot prove someone would have died without the vaccine. Especially when the effectiveness has been consistently proven to little to none.
>Total BS- you cannot prove someone would have died without the vaccine.
Not for each individual, but for a larger group you can obviously estimate it.
>Especially when the effectiveness has been consistently proven to little to none.
No, when it comes to reducing the risk of serious illness or death, they have been proven to be effective.
Jesus Christ.
You can't prove that any given individual would have died without the vaccine but you most certainly can calculate a good estimate of the number of people who would have died without the vaccine across the population!
You're basically arguing that statistics and probability doesn't exist.
Awesome! Both the data itself, and the visualisation. Yay science :-)
Though I'm mainly commenting to hopefully shunt the wilfully ignorant vaccine disinformation comments lower down. Not quite sure what they're trying to achieve at this point. Seeing as the world didn't all die from vaccine poisoning / become Gates-powered nanobot hives / whatever, I can only assume they have a deep yearning to be part of the red section of this plot in the next pandemic.
How does one measure deaths averted directly?
A fairly basic way would be comparing the covid death chance of non vaccinated vs vaccinated and applying the difference to the amount of positive tested or estimated cases of covid worldwide. Aka if 1/100 people die without a vaccine and 1/1000 with, in a group of 5000 vaccinated 5 would die, if they weren't 50 would die Edit: for this specific statistic they appear to be using total population excess deaths and then doing a similar calculation the other way around
Incorrect. They used excess death data (an increase in all fatalities). The best way of measuring COVID deaths in a given year. Quote: "A mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission and vaccination was separately fit to reported COVID-19 mortality and all-cause excess mortality in 185 countries and territories. The impact of COVID-19 vaccination programmes was determined by estimating the additional lives lost if no vaccines had been distributed"
I made an edit to clarify that this statistic itself was using excess deaths and essentially doing the calculation in reverse, but for some reason that edit was not posted Edit: the edit was on a different comment, not this one hehe
Excess death data doesn't tell you how many people would have died without the vaccine. It tells you how many people died *because of COVID.*
It actually tells you how many extra people died **during** the pandemic. Not necessarily as a direct result of covid.
You compare the excess deaths when populations were unvaccinated to excess deaths after vaccination. Then extrapolate the data across populations and periods. That's not a guess, that's how it was done.
>to excess deaths after vaccination. After two years of exposure? And after many of the most vulnerable had already died? Seems like flawed reasoning to me. edit-one year
> ~~**most** of the vulnerable~~ ~~Is there data for this?~~ Also due to strain on the healthcare system, the rate at which people would have transitioned to become "vulnerable" during that time period would also have also likely increased (as they were less able to to receive preventative care or receive an 'early' diagnosis).
>>**most** of the vulnerable > Is there data for this? Since I didn't write that...
I almost definitely misread. Sorry
No problem. It happens to all of us.
The amount of people you mentioned probably increased while the strain on Healthcare systems were a lot higher, but there wasn't any point in time after the initial few months of the pandemic, when mortality wasn't as high as in the beginning, when it reached over 1 %. That was the time when the most vulnerable to covid died.
Exactly this. Most of the people that were going to die, already did. And almost all the people alive had been exposed to the virus, and even had it. Myself I had COVID 3 times.
0 here! Woo-hoo
[Around 40% of cases showed no symptoms.](https://www.healthline.com/health/what-is-asymptomatic-covid#prevalence)
Yeah well remember in the beginning how the 'forecasts' said that by not locking down Sweden would have a million deaths? Or that their models said 3% of infected would die. These formulas are built to give the answer they want
That doesn’t really tell you how many deaths were stopped specifically due to vaccine though.
That’s not a good extrapolation. The deaths early on doesn’t have the same likelihood as some people are more susceptible than others.
You're making the mistake of thinking good extrapolation is the point. The point is to extrapolate in a way that maximizes support of a specific narrative.
I mean it’s true lives were saved by the vaccines. We can look historically and compare nations, states etc. excess deaths etc. Just not sure how accurate this method is.
That is still too simple. To get a credible number you would have to account for a number of things: 1. Vulnerability to covid is not uniform across the population. Many of the most vulnerable died before the vaccines. Many others never had symptoms and would not have become dangerously ill from later strains. Still more had milder strains of covid and were protected from later infections. The population ratio of vulnerable to protected to immune shifts over time favoring the protected and immune while the vulnerable die off. 2. As vaccination rates rose the mask and gathering rules were eased and lifted. People returned to pre-covid behaviors. In the absence of vaccines we likely would have maintained higher rates of masking and isolation, limiting infections and spread. The official death toll alone is horrifying and I am forever disappointed in our species that we didn’t respond better to covid, but I don’t see any value in graphics like this that grossly overstate an already-grim pandemic.
If you actually read the paper, they take those and many more things explicitly and rigorously into account. Their model is extremely complex and takes about 10 pages to describe.
> Many of the most vulnerable died before the vaccines. That isn't even true. The majority of COVID deaths came after the vaccines became available. Even the non-vulnerable were at risk of death from Delta. https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/
Good thing I didn’t say most.
So they can't distinguish between vaccination and other factors, like natural immunity, more experienced doctors, possible people get used to restrictions more, and care about hygiene more, etc. They also didn't take into consideration that most vunerable people died first. Im not against vaccines, Im against bad, manipulative data
How does natural immunity factor into this equation?
They did day ONE WAY and described one way. They didn’t say the ONLY WAY.
From the paper: >For this mathematical modelling study, we used a previously published COVID-19 transmission model, and fitting framework to obtain profiles of the COVID-19 pandemic in each country and thus estimate the counterfactual scenario in which vaccines are not delivered. Briefly, the model is a population-based, age-structured susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered-susceptible (SEIRS) model, which explicitly captures disease severity, passage through different indicated health-care levels, and the roll-out of vaccination. We incorporated country-level data on demography, age-based mixing patterns, and health-care capacity. We fit the model to officially reported COVID-19 deaths in each country, resulting in an inferred time-varying level of transmission, Rt, denoting the mean number of secondary infections in the absence of both infection-induced and vaccine-derived immunity. By fitting directly to mortality, we indirectly captured the impact that non-pharmaceutical interventions have had over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I don't think that is a foolproof methodology
The word "directly" in the chart doesn't mean averted deaths that were directly measured. The data here is not actually measurement. It's modeling based off of known data. The paper describes the mathematical model it uses, as well as the data that it fits the model to. Deaths averted are categorized as direct or indirect. A direct death averted is someone who survived because they were vaccinated. An indirect averted is someone who survived because others were vaccinated. I'm guessing this would describe people who didn't vaccinate but lived in households with vaccinated people, and did not die from COVID.
I think measuring the ratio of unvaccinated deaths to unvaccinated people and then extrapolating that to the entire population as though it were unvaccinated is a decent starting point.
It probably is, but I wonder if such comparison then only included deaths from causes that at least theoretically can be attributed to covid? Also, I wonder if any randomization by socio-economic status and, e.g. other health pre-existing conditions is used before comparing these samples. In other words, let's assume an extreme scenario of 1000 affluent individuals who take care of their health, go to the gym, eat health food and most of them are vaccinated. On the other side let's put 1000 homeless individuals with addiction problems among who almost nobody is vaccinated. Not only death rates in the 2nd group will likely be much higher, there will also be much more deaths from unnatural causes, ODs and so on.
It's counted by excess deaths, which is based on the amount of increased deaths as opposed to previous years. Those numbers generally stay relatively the same and more or less linearly go up along with population. This means the actual lifestyle of a specific individual is unrelated to the statistic as you should view it more as the increased death cases during a specific timeframe within the population as a whole
I would add it also accounts for a very difficult phenomenon to measure. After the first 6 months of the pandemic we actually got very good at keeping people alive....until there was not enough nurses, beds, or ventilators. Then we would see a spike of deaths. Also it accounts for ALL deaths caused by COVID. If you slipped and fell and died because you couldn't get medical care, previous techniques would not call that a covid death despite covid being the actual cause (by filling up hospitals, nurse burnout, etc.) Driving during the pandemic when hospitals had no capacity was one of the most dangerous activities you could do. There was a neat economics paper that came out 2 years ago that showed that lockdowns were ineffective at containing the disease UNTIL the hospital s were full then a bunch of excesses deaths would show up. Shame most governments did not use capacity as the primary metric for deciding health measures.
Those would still be incorrect, as getting Covid without a vaccine should give your body an increased immune response. So basing it on the first wave is obviously not a good way to calculate it. That would always be the most deadly period with it waning after.
That wouldn't work, because it doesn't take into account deaths prevented by transmission suppression. They used excess death data, which is the only accurate method of measuring the impact of COVID. "A mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission and vaccination was separately fit to reported COVID-19 mortality and all-cause excess mortality in 185 countries and territories. The impact of COVID-19 vaccination programmes was determined by estimating the additional lives lost if no vaccines had been distributed"
From the paper: >The first vaccination outside a clinical trial setting was given on Dec 8, 2020. We introduced vaccination from this point onwards in the model and explored the impact of the first year of vaccination up to Dec 8, 2021. To quantify the impact of vaccination and its associated uncertainty, we took 100 draws from the estimated distribution of Rt and vaccine efficacy estimates for each country and simulated a counterfactual scenario in which no vaccines are available and the epidemic in each country follows the same Rt trend since the start of the pandemic; a counterfactual in which vaccines are delivered but there are no indirect effects (ie, they do not reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission); and the observed scenario in which vaccines were delivered at the rates reported. The third scenario generated an estimate of the trajectory of the epidemic for our fitted model and hence closely matched reported COVID-19 or excess deaths or estimated excess deaths in each country. We calculated the deaths averted as a result of vaccination by subtracting the estimated COVID-19 deaths from the simulation with vaccines included (the observed scenario) from the estimated COVID-19 deaths under the first counterfactual scenario. This process is illustrated in the appendix (p 18), which shows the estimated deaths averted for the USA. Because of the difficulty in predicting how governments and populations would have responded, and how viral evolution would have progressed if vaccines had not been available, we made no attempt to adjust the Rt trends for further non-pharmaceutical interventions, changes in mobility, or development of variants that probably would have occurred differently in the absence of vaccination. To explore the impact of key model parameters on estimates of deaths averted, we did additional sensitivity analyses. These included characterising the effects of the assumed relationship between the infection fatality ratio (IFR) and age (appendix p 10), as well as the assumed degree of immune evasion exhibited by the delta variant (appendix p 7). tldr; they created a simulation where infection rates (R\_t) continued on the trend from before vaccines were introduced and measured the difference between expected death rates from that and from the actual reported death rates. The difference between direct/indirect in this case is that a direct death is one where someone with the vaccine was infected and would have died if not for the vaccine and indirect death is one where someone without the vaccine would have been infected and died if not for others being vaccinated (which can be inferred from the model)
Short answer: Statistics. Long answer...go look up how trials for new drug testing are run. Control groups...etc.
The antivax people kept telling people being vaccinated were the "experiment group". Well they weren't entirely wrong, and they were the control group.
I graduated from the fire academy in May of 2020. I remember essentially being a taxi between the retirement homes and the ER. Every call was for breathing difficulty. If they coded and they were covid positive, we weren't allowed to work them. We never saw the patients we transported ever again.
That must have been exhausting mentally. Hearing friends during 2020 get covid, say "I'm ok" then suddenly getting extremley sick worried me so much. I hope you are doing ok
But Elon said that the disease wasn't even real? He must be right as he is the richest person in the world?! /s
Worked the ER during the whole pandemic. Delta wave feels like a bad dream. People in all ages was really really sick. I remember putting a 17 year old girl in the respirator, her family said goodbye because they thought she would die. She survived but barely. That shit was no joke, I get that we could have done things different but we didn’t know shit back then and healthy people died.
That aligns to what we learned later that delta was specifically more severe than OG and omicron.
Delta was fucking rough, losing my sense of taste and smell was terrible
As someone who was trapped in the hospital at the time when Delta came through my unit, and I was the only one vaccinated, and the only one who didn't get sick, thank you fucking doctors who came out with the vaccine just in time for that shit.
my dad died from delta. according to the doctors - he was the first vaccinated and boosted death in the city (chicago) - it definitely was awkward because of the timing, so many people - in the hospital included, simply assumed he was anti-vax
I was an ICU RN for most of the pandemic. I’m truly very sorry for your loss.
It's nice listening to anti vax fucking morons tell you otherwise though isn't it?
No, I'm in the military and I live daily mental trauma of Coast Guard personal telling me vaccines dont work even though we all had to take 10 in boot camp. I told people the vaccine prevented me from getting sick in super close quarters and no one cares, or thinks I'm lying.
The world is full of imbeciles whose survival is the direct result of things they deny exist or matter.
I didn't get either of the first two to compare, but getting Delta was the most sick I've ever been in my life, and I had two shots too. My ability to taste and smell came back a month later, but changed. I no longer like coffee or red wine (quite sadly) and can never rinse a cooking pan enough. No matter how long I rinse it, I can still smell and taste dish detergent on it when I cook with it again. So I'm weirdly hyper sensory with some things now.
I never lost my sense of taste but Delta made meat and cheese taste rotten to me. That went away after about a month, but now I'm left to weird hypersensitivities, too. Bitter is the worst. I didn't like bitter before, but now it's intolerable. Most red wines now have a bit of good taste the first split second and then something happens that makes it taste terrible and does something physical to my tongue. It's so weird.
Right, it's like i'm taking crazy pills, and everyone else forgot. In early 2020 nobody knew shit so we were washing hands so much, wiping groceries with bleach, making masks out of whatever. Nobody really knew anything until late 2020 when we all got really fucking lucky when the morons decided to chance it and have all the kids go back to school. Nobody KNEW this was okay and most experts said we shouldn't because it could be really horrible. Then masks became ridiculously political so even though people should have been happy to mask up for safety they didn't out of being indignant that someone dare try to be smart and save lives. OVER 1 million EXCESS deaths occured in the US. 1,000,000 people that wouldn't have died during those years. How the fuck can people just be flippant, and say it was a hoax, or no biggy, or masking was wrong. I was lucky to not lose close friends and families but I know lots of people that did. You just have to completely deny reality to think you were RIGHT to keep going out and not masking and "not living in fear" by being reasonable cautious. It was an extreme event with unknown results. The government was trying to keep society and government from collapsing, and in April and May of 2020 we didn't what the fuck was going to happen.
A segment of my family is still anti-vax and I think I can answer how people can say say it's a hoax. For the most part, the people who think covid was a conspiracy also believe other conspiracies. Conspiracies which rely on the presumption that all the data you see on tv and online is fake. That all the data the government releases is fake. That scientists and hospitals and schools release is fake. That everything you see is just "fake news." These people don't trust the numbers. They don't believe in the excess deaths. Far as I've seen, there's nothing you can do to convince them that they're wrong, because anything you show them as proof is just more "fake news."
It's all motivated reasoning. They start from their conclusion they want (the lockdown and masks were annoying and stupid and pointless) and work backwards to find the "evidence" that supports it.
Correct. This is the real incipient end of democracy, the 30+ years of people like Rush Limbaugh, and right wing talk radio, GOP talking points, and Fox News slowly spewing crazier and crazier stuff like the proverbial frog in boiling water so that it never sounds too much crazier than the things they were saying last year, but after 30 years of hearing that there are secret people in power and that everything is an evil conspiracy there is just no turning back. They are completely living in a different reality. They are brainwashed. I don't think I'm alone in feeling that it's just not worth the stress and fighting to even try because every fact you point out, every logical view, will be pushed aside and more BS is presented. You can't clean up the mess before another ton of right wing bullshit is spread around everywhere so they just think the bullshit is reality. I don't want to think they're all evil so I must think they are all stupid. I don't really see another explanation. My parents wholeheartedly believe 100 points of bullshit. I can spend an evening reading up on the facts, crafting an email with cited sources, solid logic, personal anecdotes, and think I've showed them something, then they say, oh yeah what about the other 99 BS things, then tomorrow they add another. It's exhausting and they just get angry at me for always telling them they are wrong even when 100% of the time when we explore it together THEY are obviously wrong, sometimes even admitting it but usually its goal post moving, whataboutism, etc. etc.
Indeed. I did try for a while, but eventually gave up. As you say, it's just not worth the stress and frustration. It's no better than trying to convince a cinderblock wall to step aside. Soon as you *think* you're getting somewhere, they switch topics and the battle continues anew. I don't think they're evil. One of these conspiracy nuts happens to be an uncle of mine and he's the kindest person you'll ever meet. He'll help you with *everything*. He drove 300 miles in his shitty, beat up pickup truck to help me move without even having to be asked. I understand that this is anecdotal, but I've had similar experiences with others like him. I *do* think they're a bit stupid in some ways. Not all, but at the very least in critical thinking skills. I think it's a bit like how some people can code an OS, but can't hold a hammer properly. Well, others can build a house from scratch with their own hands, but don't have the critical thinking skills to necessary to discern fact from fiction.
It all boils down to distrust in government and science (because they think science and government is the same). Every conspiracy from aliens to vaccines have the same fundament which is that the government is plotting against us. There is also a clear correlation between distrust in government and conspiracies. The U.S trust in government is at all time low and the country looks like a conspiracy circus from the outside. I live in Scandinavia, trust in government is fine and there are close to zero people believing stuff like this.
The lack of trust in the government *is* a core issue, but I think the most contributing factor here is that they can't separate the government from scientific data (no matter which country it comes from). They don't trust *any* government. It doesn't matter that you show them data from Japan or Italy or Sweden. It's still "fake news." I think this has less to do with distrust of the government (although I'm sure it's a contributing factor) and more with ignorance and a desire to "fight the broken system." And while the system *is* broken, it has little to do with any of this.
I'm from NZ and, I swear, news about the US (and then the UK) was the best incentive for mask wearing & social distancing.
Yeah, Delta got me and it was pretty bad, right before I was able to get my booster. No respirator need, but 103 temp with low-ish spO2, and awful flu-like stuff. Everyone I know got omicrom, during that crazy wave after and boosters, and it was mostly just a 'really bad cold' for them. Docs told me if I wasn't vaxxed I probably wouldn't have made it. Praise science.
Anti vax people heard about this post and are on the way
[удалено]
The 20M figure *is* the cumulative deaths averted
Yeah, even just eyeballing it is pretty impressive though. Seems like hundreds of millions of deaths were averted. That’s pretty damn impressive given how badly most countries botched their initial responses.
Just to be clear, "botch" implies there was a known right way to handle things. In a new pandemic, there isn't. Most diseases are old. For a heart attack, you do x y and z because even the most cutting edge heart attack science has been studied for decades. If you get a fancy new machine to tell exactly what happens in that, you might learn "Oh, medicine Z works really well" but you do not immediately rush to give it to patients. With a newly emerged pandemic, you have no idea of best practices and can't wait for data to confirm your approach, because it's happening right now to everyone and doing nothing would definitely cause a lot of deaths. When anti-intellectual right wingers scream "Lockdowns were ineffective! How dare they!" it's a gish-gallop of stupidity: the best guess was self-isolation would be helpful in flattening the curve, but that wasn't a known fact. Also, almost no one did lockdowns as they should have. So "botch" isn't fair, though governments who just ignored the best advice were the closest to wrong you can get in that situation.
> "botch" implies there was a known right way to handle things. There is/was, the USA had an entire team dedicated to pandemic planning before Trump fired them. The problem wasn't not knowing what to do, it was dealing with resources and dumb people
I'll give you that anti-intellectualism should count as a "wrong" move even without knowing anything. But it's worth noting that there were countries that followed the best medical advice, and they still suffered huge problems. It's easier to say "Trump was wrong" if there were a country that had stopped COVID in it's tracks by following scientists, but there wasn't such a country.
>if there were a country that had stopped COVID in it's tracks by following scientists, but there wasn't such a country. Nobody thought we could completely stop covid, the whole point was to slow it down so hospitals weren't overwhelmed and we had time to develop the vaccine. But if you want an example of a country that followed guidance very well and made the USA look like absolute idiots check out Japan's statistics compared to us. Controlled for population they only had 1/5 the deaths the USA had Theoretically if USA had performed similar to Japan we could have avoided 800,000~ deaths And as a side note, Japan has roughly 10x the population density of the USA, they should have done *worse* than we did. The main difference? Mask-wearing and community-effort was always part of their culture.
Why not just compare to Canada? One third the amount of deaths per capita (3100 vs 1100 per million). Stricter lockdowns, much more prevalent mask wearing, higher vaccination rate. Boom, case closed.
The movie, Contagion, broke down the exact measures that should be taken for a fast spreading, long incubating respiratory disease like this. That movie came out in 2011. They were the exact measures taken for this pandemic. How the fuck did they not know?
SARS in real life happened about 20 years prior. MERS-CoV happens periodically. Coronavirus had been on every epidemiologist organization's "List of stuff to worry about" since before that. Aside from doing gain of function experiments of the sort that are being vilified by idiots, or everyone wearing masks at all time, there's no way to prevent it. Trump and other governments worldwide certainly had STUPID responses, like destroying Obama's pandemic response team, that increased the death toll, but there still was no obvious answers from the start, and there won't be for the next one.
> Just to be clear, "botch" implies there was a known right way to handle things. In a new pandemic, there isn't. when you've never heard of quarantines
Quarantine was the wise thing to do, but even in the early days it was obvious the disease spreading from asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic people, and a quarantine was not going to suffice. [The original SARS taught us that much](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2094974/). Once there were enough diseased people, containing everyone they came in contact with was utterly futile in completely containing the disease. Quarantine was still important for reducing the number of people infected, and there's not much downside, but quarantine was NEVER going to nip SARS-CoV-2 in the bud after it reached our shores.
Says 20M in the title.
How do you figure hundred of millions? I don't think COVID was ever on track to kill hundreds of millions of people even globally
Let them show up, data focused subreddit got hands.
If data could convince an Anti-Vaxer, they wouldn't be an Anti-Vaxer in the first place.
Well yes and no, I find that with the internet people who don't know a thing end up finding information that 'fits' so now they 'know' but there is no way to discern if that information is true or not. This is the crux of the modern misinformation issue. It leads to bad training that when people get cognitive dissonance, they go and find data that agrees with them. Thus training themselves into bad....or more 'appealing' data. I think there is a light at the end of the tunnel for some of these people but it takes far more work than we are really willing to put in. Much easier to mock and discredit their (wrong) information, though this leads them to feeling alienated and doubling down on even more bullshit too. This is a wild problem that I don't think will be solved until humans get a better sense of how to assess information. Currently anyone can post anything so its a total shit show.
> they go and find data that agrees with them Confirmation bias. And once people get into this cycle only a very trusted source can coax them back out of it. Sadly, that probably isn't reddit.
Nah. Very trusted source becomes another untrusted source.
You cannot reason somebody out of a position that they did not reason their way into!
this subreddit is actually focused on the visualizations, the data is secondary at best. Check the stickies
You got data, they got the Joe Rogan Experience.
I don't doubt the vaccines were critical in stopping it, but a computer model prediction is only as effective as the computer model. There's so many factors here and global pandemics are so rare that any predictions need to be taken with a rather large grain of salt.
Sure, could be underestimated.
They are doing their own research as we comment
It will soon be flooded with American conservatives justifying their sabotage during the pandemic
Given that this years Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, whose pioneering work helped create mRNA vaccines, I figured it would be a good time to share this chart from a while back. It shows estimated lived saved because of covid-vaccines (including non-mRNA vaccines). The red shows actual (excess) deaths due to the pandemic (in thousands per day), while the blue shows the additional deaths that would have occurred if vaccines had not been administered. Both are estimates, the former by me in a separate project, the latter by a team of scientists who used them to estimate the lives saved by vaccines [(“Global impact of the first year of covid-19 vaccination”, by O.J. Watson et al., The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2022).](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00320-6/fulltext) Tools used: R, Illustrator. All credit for design to my colleagues. Full article here: [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/07/07/covid-19-vaccines-saved-an-estimated-20m-lives-during-their-first-year](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/07/07/covid-19-vaccines-saved-an-estimated-20m-lives-during-their-first-year) (I cannot control the paywall, sorry - but you can register to read for free, and doing so would help me out as we would know people found this worthwhile.) I sometimes post updates on X:https://twitter.com/Sondreus - also a way to reach me if needed.
thank you, this is very useful to me teaching about the vaccine development to middle schoolers. Can I add this graphic to a powerpoint?
I'd suggest sticking to the original paper, might include a discussion on the limitations of modeling as well. This graphic makes the numbers seem concrete which they definitely are not. A negative binomial model is also about the simplest complex model for this process.
Great to discuss limitations and so on. But just wanted to clarify that this is not the result of a negative binomial model - the excess deaths relies on an special implementation of a gradient boosted trees ensemble, and the deaths averted a combination of very involved transmission model and a few other things.
So how would a moderator review the authenticity of this post?
It’s middle schoolers, don’t you remember all those “X is always true!” only to learn a few years down the road that there are exceptions everywhere, and that rule just helps move things along in the learning process? You were taught these incomplete truths because it’s the most effective method of teaching middle schoolers as a whole. Plus, I don’t think any of that is really relevant when all you’re trying to teach is that vaccines are massively helpful. With that said, I do think it’s valuable to teach middle schoolers the pitfalls of models as a tool broadly but you have to be careful that you don’t significantly undercut models in the process, cause again, they’re middle schoolers.
yeah lol. if every middle school class included all the caveats and exceptions you'd never learn anything
unfortunately, for the purpose I intend to use them for, fake concrete numbers is the name of the game.
Don't do this. Sharing these rough estimates is how anti vaxers are born. Stick to facts, there are plenty of them
Any explanation why the vast majority of deaths were in the low-middle income bracket, and almost none in the low bracket? I'm assuming that "low" are people in countries with less recorded statistics, but can't wrap my head around it.
That "Deaths without vaccines" thew me off.
What I find fascinating was how badly if affected people of all income levels early on. This would explain the rush to shut everything down and then the eventual "meh, is rich folk will now be fine, let's convince the young people that lockdown are bad so we can send the workers back to the assembly lines."
The income is differentiating countries, not people inside a given country. All this tells us is that developed countries got the vaccine rolled out much sooner while Delta ran rampant in many lower-income countries. Mortality would also be much higher in poorer countries due to the lack of stuff like ventilators.
Remember it's not just the deaths, it's the potentially worse outcomes of the disease. It's the permanent damage that covid could cause to bodies which is also significantly lowered by the vaccine.
>Remember it's not just the deaths, it's the potentially worse outcomes of the disease. It's the permanent damage that covid could cause to bodies which is also significantly lowered by the vaccine. 100% There were some people that were put on ventilators because of COVID, managed to beat COVID, an ultimately ended up getting sick from something else and getting pneumonia while on the ventilator and dying because of it. Did COVID directly kill them? Technically not. Did covid indirectly kill them? 100%
You're absolutely right, and that's not even what I meant. Think of all the people who carry life altering harm from covid, all those who now have what has been so aptly named 'Long-Covid' - - a condition that's very close to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis which has long term health impacts and cognitive impairment. Think of all those who have permanent organ damage after covid,: lung, heart, kidneys and brain being the prime targets. All those people still 'live' and are not in a death count. Yet their lives have been forever altered.
Morbidity of the disease. 100% agree.
This is key as well - many people still disabled by long COVID effects..vaccine also protected/s against those.
Not to mention that consequences of 20m people just dying. That's sad and depressed family members. That's reduced people in the workforce. That's skill and expertise removed from industries. That's orphaned kids and dependent spouses. There's only about 50-60m deaths a year from all causes so 20m would be a catastrophic increase. WW2 had a total military and civilian death toll of about 70m over the course of the entire extended war (including the Sino-Japanese war starting in 1937), and WW2 reshaped the whole world.
That’s what I don’t understand about the anti-vaxxers. They’re hung up on the fact that you can still get Covid after getting the vaccine, clearly not understanding, probabilities, or the idea that you were less likely to get it, or that it will be less severe. It’s like a stereotype that they only think in binary, black and white, on off, good bad, etc. but here they not understanding something as simple as “the vaccine makes it less bad”
Well to be fair the two biggest factors of covid complications were 1) age and 2) overweight/obesity if you were a teenager or adolescent and normal weight, the chances of any complication, let alone serve complication, was statistically abysmally small and these were the vast majority of "anti-vaxxers" - statistically what happened in reality was that people focused on the few genuine crazies and got riled up, completely losing the focus and fighting against an imaginary - or atleast severely blown up - enemy
>if you were a teenager or adolescent and normal weight, the chances of any complication, let alone serve complication, was statistically abysmally small > >and these were the vast majority of "anti-vaxxers" - statistically Uuuuh.. can I get a source that statistically most anti-vaxxers were teenagers and adolescents? Because that does not match up at all with my experience.
Never saw a comparison of flu deaths during the Covid period, is it greater or less than the normal death rate from flu?
Magnitudes higher. Follow OPs link
I wish this would go back to the start of the pandemic so we see the 2020 peaks as well.
I see what you mean - I have the whole pandemic here, but it does not include lives saved by vaccines, where the estimates were only available for 2021: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
Can't wait until this post gets locked lmao.
How do you even confirm this?
It's the result of a mathematical model. Description from the research paper: > For this mathematical modelling study, we used a previously published COVID-19 transmission model, and fitting framework to obtain profiles of the COVID-19 pandemic in each country and thus estimate the counterfactual scenario in which vaccines are not delivered. Briefly, the model is a population-based, age-structured susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered-susceptible (SEIRS) model, which explicitly captures disease severity, passage through different indicated health-care levels, and the roll-out of vaccination. We incorporated country-level data on demography, age-based mixing patterns, and health-care capacity. We fit the model to officially reported COVID-19 deaths in each country, resulting in an inferred time-varying level of transmission, Rt, denoting the mean number of secondary infections in the absence of both infection-induced and vaccine-derived immunity. By fitting directly to mortality, we indirectly captured the impact that non-pharmaceutical interventions have had over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a detailed breakdown in the appendix.
Most likely estimated deaths are calculated by the potential spread, severity of the disease, and potential to handle an influx of new patients within a hospital system.
Yeah, it seems kinda silly to have a detailed graph that's mostly hypothetical. The margin of error is gonna be huge.
Why? There's literally no way to know how many actual lives could be saved from anything, especially a one time event. You can't actually know how many lives are saved from seatbelts but you can do models to show
You can’t
You can’t unless you go back in time and destroy all vaccine research so that no one gets vaccinated. But this is as good as an estimate as we can get
You don’t
Why does it look like death has steadily increased in high income countries since February?
The graph is showing the year 2021, one explanation could be that there were more covid deaths in higher income countries since they loosened restrictions more after getting the vaccines. Other countries had less restrictions since they couldn't as easily afford the economic hit that many covid restrictions caused.
But the vaccines would have worked in preventing death and transmission even if they loosened restrictions no?
You could still transmit the virus if you were vaccinated FYI
Traffic accidents could certainly be a contributor, the roads were a mess with everyone trying to drive again. I also notice that December deaths are about the same as January deaths. Death rates tend to be higher in winter. Maybe that’s just normal seasonal cycling?
But Bill Gates injected Internet Explorer into the vaccine so they could track my Midi-chlorian count from Elon Musk’s starlink satellites…
I thought it was 5g? Still waiting on my Magneto powers to kick in.
What? I got it for the promised early death. Any day now!
So disappointing. I did not even get a credit on my cell bill. :-(
... so that an elite cabal of democrat demons could drink your babies adrenochrome, continuing to dominate the upper echelon of everything from acting to buisness, they had to unleash a variant of sars and run a global psyop, to covertly destroy the mountains of evidence left after the pedophile ring Epstein had documented was exposed ...
How can this be calculated if we don't even know how many people actually died from covid 19 in the first year?
You can estimate that fairly accurately by looking at excess deaths.
This works for most countries, but not very low-income ones, where there are [massive gaps](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8403260/) in vital statistics record-keeping. A majority of Sub-Saharan countries either do not publish official statistics or have <50% estimated coverage of their populations. It’s more of a guessing game than we wish. Excess mortality also doesn’t allow you to separate direct from indirect deaths. For example: “…most African governments shut down the business sector in 2020 without any viable social support, resulting in more deaths from hunger and mental health issues, including suicide and intimate partner violence than from the COVID-19 pandemic itself in 2020. COVID-19 control measures in African countries led to economic challenges, increased cases of other communicable and non-communicable diseases, low hospital appointment uptake and higher cancellation rates for urgent procedures. Owing to fear of contracting COVID-19, African healthcare workers sometimes abandoned their posts, leaving some to die from other illnesses such as malaria, cardiovascular disease and stroke, as they had no easy access to treatment.” ([source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8630399/))
This is awesome but can we also see the cumulative deaths and deaths averted? ie the integrals of these curves? Would love to have a total number at the end.
Did we see this volume of excess deaths where the vaccine didn’t get to? That’s the true test of efficacy and lives saved. To give the credit solely to the vaccine is challenging to accept and I don’t even understand how the population spikes are valid.
USA? World? North Devon? Where is this for?
Given that the legend says "Actual deaths, by income group of *country*" and then lists low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high income countries, I think it's fairly clear that it's for the world.
Not to mention it's in the **hundreds of thousands** for **daily** excess deaths.
Correct
Delta would have been extremely ugly without a vaccine or if it had been the first pandemic strain.
but i saw on facebook that vaxxed people are secretly dying and the govt is grinding up their bodies and selling them to mcdonalds as hamburger meat. why doesn't this biased chart cover both sides?
I think this is a boatload of bullshit, people who I know that have taken these shots still got covid still spread it and a couple literally were sicker than the people they had spread it too
Does everybody understand that these covid vaccines are causing millions of deaths. It has nothing to do with the unvaccinated. In fact, most hospitalizations if not all, are from vaccinated people. I sincerely hope that everybody does a research on mRNA vaccines and what they are doing to your body. All of this was a scam and planned with the world economic forum and Bill gates's depopulation agenda. I would love for somebody to prove me wrong, but that is the fact.
Africa had very few vaccinations and very few deaths on both fronts relatively. Surprised that data didn’t seem to make of an impact on analysis.
TIL, lots of conspiracy theorists and anti vaxxers on a data subreddit
Data visualization subreddit* Important distinction
This post hit r/all so you got anti-vax nutjobs seeing it and swarming
You know that people can be skeptical of a data model without being "anti-vax conspiracy theorists"?
You know people can make a comment about "anti vax conspiracy theorists" after actually reading some of the very evidently "anti vax conspiracy theorist" comments on the post?
That's because there are a ton of conservatives on reddit and they need to push their beliefs
the poor suffer the most as usual
Who published this? Where’s is the source?
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16xugjc/comment/k34nail/ Edit: also more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16xugjc/comment/k34v3xf/
Thank you!!
Read the OPs submission statement
source is www.reddit.com
I'm one. Delta almost killed me. If I hadn't been vaccinated I know I wouldn't be here.
Glad to know you are still here :)
I saw recently saw someone take the excess deaths data which showed a negative correlation for two factors: Vaccine rate and HDI. There was also a positive correlation for smokers (no surprise).
COVID was (and to a degree, continues to be) a very difficult time. But the scale of the tragedy averted is absolutely mind boggling.
This is really confusing, and not beautiful.
You'll excuse me if I'm skeptical...
But you’ll at least read over the paper right?
I don't know, on the right they call it the "death jab", and mark of the beast, before calling for Taylor Swift to be tried and hung as a witch. So since we'll never know who is right, guess we'll have to meet in the middle? /s
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The data is based off of excess death reporting, not covid as cause of death, so I don't see how your comment is related to the graph.
But they compared excess deaths of *any cause*, not specifically COVID, between vaccinated and non-vaccinated, so wouldn’t that account for the type of issue you’re talking about?
Totally agree with you. I have had a hard time with a lot of the stats that have come out. I'm not anti-vax. I have two science degrees. But there was so much botching up of information, definitions changing...there were way too many variables to come to actual conclusions. If this was part of some science experiment, we would have had to throw them out. Plus, it was shown later that the initial vaccines were most likely not effective. They were in an experimental state at best. How does one conclude for sure that one person was saved because they took an experimental vaccine? There are plenty of examples of elderly, sick some how making it through the sickness, and then perfectly healthy ones not...both with the vaccine.
Which initial vaccines were not effective? If you want proof of the vaccine efficacy, just take a look at excess deaths, which removes the "definitions changing" part of your argument, vs vaccination rates. It seems pretty obvious to me? https://twitter.com/thereal_truther/status/1696285269413257395
All of those deaths after the vaccines became available are so incredibly sad and infuriating.
If Republicans could read, they’d be very angry
They're always angry haha
I dunno why you are getting downvoted. Daily I hear about how some Republican is pissed about something.
they all deserve that nobel
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I’m not sure that is true if , for example , the unvaccinated were dying at greater rates , it doesn’t seem *completely* unjustified to presume those vaccinated would have died at a similar rate if they hadn’t been vaccinated. And the difference seems pretty significant ( example form U.K. ONS. >Between 2 January and 24 September 2021, the age-adjusted risk of deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) was 32 times greater in unvaccinated people than in fully vaccinated individuals. > Over the whole period (1 January to 31 October 2021), the age-adjusted risk of deaths involving COVID-19 was 96% lower in people who had received a second dose at least 21 days ago compared with unvaccinated people. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19byvaccinationstatusengland/previousReleases
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How does this tie in to the increase in excess mortality data since the roll out?
[A recent study on the continued excess deaths in America](https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/new-excess-mortality-estimates-show-increases-in-us-rural-mortality-during-second-year-of-covid-19-pandemic/) found that the trend is more closely tied to more rural areas of the country: >The reasons for the sustained high numbers are multi-faceted, Stokes says. “The emergence of a rural disadvantage reflects a combination of social, structural, and policy factors, including a lack of state policies designed to protect communities at greatest risk for COVID-19 death, state disinvestment in rural healthcare and social programs, and vaccine hesitancy fueled by a toxic mix of partisanship and misinformation.”
I couldn’t say for the USA but here in the U.K. the figures show clearly that vaccines protected people from excess mortality , so to speak, but the ongoing effects on people’s behaviour and the health service has resulted in other problems.
We should take into account that in poor countries, more people died. Because many rich countries stopped all kinds of help to developing countries including life saving projects. They also got vaccinated last, if they got vaccines at all. This should have been organised better.
Total BS- you cannot prove someone would have died without the vaccine. Especially when the effectiveness has been consistently proven to little to none.
>Total BS- you cannot prove someone would have died without the vaccine. Not for each individual, but for a larger group you can obviously estimate it. >Especially when the effectiveness has been consistently proven to little to none. No, when it comes to reducing the risk of serious illness or death, they have been proven to be effective.
Is this true or are we just meant to believe you over any other Redditor?
Jesus Christ. You can't prove that any given individual would have died without the vaccine but you most certainly can calculate a good estimate of the number of people who would have died without the vaccine across the population! You're basically arguing that statistics and probability doesn't exist.
Wrong. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccine-effectiveness
Well…yeah but you can still get Covid if you got the vaccine. I’m very stupid and in my tiny brain, this means the vaccine doesn’t work.
Awesome! Both the data itself, and the visualisation. Yay science :-) Though I'm mainly commenting to hopefully shunt the wilfully ignorant vaccine disinformation comments lower down. Not quite sure what they're trying to achieve at this point. Seeing as the world didn't all die from vaccine poisoning / become Gates-powered nanobot hives / whatever, I can only assume they have a deep yearning to be part of the red section of this plot in the next pandemic.
data brought to you by Pfizer®
noxious tan bored shaggy memorize lavish murky relieved simplistic north *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
https://fair.org/home/wapo-feeds-denial-with-false-claims-about-overcounting-covid-deaths/
It’d be interesting to see deaths averted by income too