Premier in unvaccinated arithmetic
Quebec's pandemic strongman flexes his cross-multiplication muscles
When Quebec premier François Legault announced a return to lockdown on December 30th 2021, he attributed the intensity of the crisis entirely to the latest SARS-CoV-2 variant while ignoring that the province’s reported vaccine efficacy had dipped into negative territory. And as has become standard, he made the small minority of people who haven’t taken these vaccines into scapegoats, suggesting that if only they were vaccinated, we wouldn’t be in a crisis.
Legault’s scapegoating of the unvaccinated is based on dubious collections of data, and in some cases, outright falsehoods. When the premier claimed that 50% of COVID hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated, the true percentage had been bouncing between 30 and 40 for the preceding week. His 50% number is cherry-picked and rounded up from a day early in the month that happened to register 49%.
To top off this white lie our grandfatherly premier explained that when 10% of the population (the unvaccinated) make up 50% of COVID hospitalizations, it yields the province’s official 10-times efficacy figure through a “règle de 3”. Hein?
The rule of three was an historical shorthand version for a particular form of cross-multiplication that could be taught to students by rote. It was considered the height of Colonial math education and still figures in the French national curriculum for secondary education.
Legault’s Colonial math education let him down here. Cross-multiplying might be useful if we weren’t already working with percentages, but no rote application of elementary methods is required. Simply this: a hospitalization rate of 50% is 5 times the expected rate of 10%. For goodness sake.
Legault is often accused of “improvising” by his political opponents, but this is the first time we’ve seen him improvise a misunderstood arithmetic method to explain an unrelated statistical difference. The official figure of 10-times efficacy (which has since fallen to 7.4) is derived from age-adjusted hospitalization and vaccination rates. Otherwise, children who are still mostly unvaccinated and unhospitalized would dilute the stats. Perhaps someone should explain this to the premier sometime?
Anyway. Percent of hospitalizations is a poor metric for understanding the crisis, but thanks to Legault it’s become popular to cite it incorrectly in Quebec. Here’s what it actually looked like over the past months.
As you can see, unvaccinated hospitalizations were around 75% when there was no COVID crisis in the autumn, and now that there is a crisis it has dropped to around 30%. Those continuing to claim that it is 50% are spreading misinformation.
We shouldn’t leave off here without looking at a more useful chart, one that dispenses with the unhelpful percentages and simply shows the number of hospitalizations.
Are you hearing the bugle call to burn some crosses in front of unvaccinated houses, yet? Tens of hospitalizations per day might be eliminated, or shifted to the guiltless 2-dose category!
On top of the fact that these numbers don’t particularly support a scorched earth campaign to inject Pfizer into every last body in a province of 8 million people, there are a number of ways that Quebec’s COVID hospitalization numbers simply can’t be believed in the first place.
This week, we’ll do our best to make sense the implausible hospitalization figures that somehow motivate our government, and media’s, endless vaccination campaign.