As we saw in the last post, the Legault government is hell-bent on blaming the unvaccinated for its latest cycle of failure and misrepresenting their own statistics in order to do so. Since the vaccines are showing negative efficacy in infections, the hospitalization numbers have become the last refuge of the needle pushers.
As a first pass, let’s look at the vaccines effect on hospitalizations at the highest possible level. In December 2020, everyone in Quebec was unvaccinated. In December 2021, 88% of the over-12 population was doubly vaccinated and 95% of those over age 50. The vaccines were showing 15 times efficacy at the beginning of the month and 9.5 times efficacy at the end. (Already, a bit of a red flag.)
So a treatment was administered to nearly everyone, with 10 times efficacy against hospitalizations, and yet at the end of December 2021 weekly hospitalizations were almost double their volume of a year before. How is this possible?
It’s possible because the number of infections is that much higher. A year ago, new hospitalizations were about 5% as large as the new infections count. This year, new unvaccinated hospitalizations are about 5% as large as the new unvaccinated case count. This is what you would expect, if we’re measuring consistently. The problem is that SARS-CoV-2 infections are so much higher this year, the number of unvaccinated infections alone this December was similar to the number of infections within the entire population last December.
This is a reminder that the vaccines’ fall into negative efficacy against infections has consequences on hospitalizations, too. Both risks are relative and since the absolute risk of infection is much higher than that of hospitalization, a small relative increase in infection risk can easily outweigh a relative decrease in hospitalization risk.
After all this, we can guess that our hospital crisis would not look much different whether whether we had vaccinated ten percent or ten percent less of the general population. South Africa, birthplace of Omicron, still seems to be a country despite having less than 30% of its population doubly vaccinated. And US states with lower vaccination rates than ours are able to manage their hospitalizations without curfews. Without closing grocery stores on Sundays. Without… going crazy.
SARS-CoV-2 hospitalizations are apparently not a great measure of how badly things are going in hospitals, and in societies. What, actually, do they represent?