Very untrue. COVID being much, much higher-risk in top age brackets means vaccinating the top age brackets everywhere first is a lot more beneficial than vaccinating country-by-country. Same reason why your country (whichever it is) likely made priority groups for vaccine distribution rather than make it a free-for-all.
And the first 15-20% or so of vaccines administered are CRITICAL. In true pareto principle, 80% of hospitalizations come from 20% of the population.
I'm in Belgium. We are facing a third wave. We're going back into lockdown pretty soon (it's almost certain). With just 400k more vaccines administered, we would not be in this mess.
Actually it would be better to vaccinate spreaders first - those in 20-40 range. Because they spread COVID more than elderly, and also in old countries (like EU) 20-40 is a smaller group than 60+.
Besides 20-40 range, also people that work at grocery stores, which are always open and can spread COVID. Elderly stay at homes have less contacts with other etc.
There was a preprint regarding that in the US, but everyone focuses on deaths and doesn't think of causes.
The US has like 30x as many people as Belgium. A better comparison would be Ohio, which has about the population of Belgium and is administering ~90k doses per day, which is sorta like vaccinating ~60k people a day (based off a guess that ~15k doses are the one dose J&J vaccine).
I agree that prioritizing the most vulnerable, regardless of nationality is the morally better choice.
What's your point? 400k is less than 4 percent of the belgian population. If we had vaccinated 4 percent more of our population, we would avoid a new lockdown, with all the economic implications it has on the country and Europe as a whole. Most other EU countries are in that same situation.
Doubling your vaccination rate is nowhere close to enough to avoid a lockdown. Germany has vaccinated 9% (half dose or better) of the population and we're going back into lockdown.
At 10%, there's still an endless number of old people left unvaccinated, and if you infect a large percentage of mid aged people, that alone is easily enough to wreck your health system.
The EU has received enough vaccine for everyone over 70-something. But it doesn't change anything about whether there's a third wave or not.
If you chose not to do a lockdown in the third wave because "older people are already vaccinated" that would just mean that your hospitals would fill up with younger people instead, since total number infected would be much higher than ever before.
No, hospital patients are not magically younger when the old ones are vaccinated.
If you vaccinate the old, hospitals don't just "fill up" with the young. There are just straight up less hospitalizations. The virus still spreads but the percentage of severe cases go way down. Which need i remind you is the reason why we do lockdowns at all: because without them, hospitals are overrun and there is a risk of a healthcare system collapse.
The aim of the lockdown was never to eradicate the virus. It was to keep the healthcare system working.
If you vaccinate the old, hospitals don't just "fill up" with the young.
That is exactly what would happen if you let the pandemic roll at R > 1. People aged 40-60 are about a third as likely to get hospitalised as people 60-80. So if you triple the amount of cases in a population while having zero cases in the old age bracket, your hospitals will be just as full.
... with triple the cases. I didn't claim hospitals would just be empty, but for the same level of cases they will be a lot emptier. It gives more buffer.
Models (for BE) point to this current wave being the mildest one yet, with a peak well below the previous two. And remember the population has more and more immunity built up over time regardless of vaccines. Getting to triple the cases we had at the peak of the previous ones is not really in the cards.
That's odd, models for Germany predicted a tripling of the rate in a few weeks (unless there is a stricter lockdown), and the observations of the past few weeks bear this out. B.1.1.7 is more contagious (and more lethal), we've seen this in the UK and in Denmark, and we're seeing it now in Germany, where it has become the dominant strain within a couple of months. I don't see why it would be different in Belgium.
You claimed we wouldn't need a lockdown if we had vaccinated twice as many people, which is just incorrect, for the reasons outlined above: we're still left with vast parts of the population with no immunity, enough of whom would be hospitalized to oversaturate hospitals.
Edit: just looked it up, and Belgium has already doubled compared to one month ago, and is at double the rate that Germany currently has.
@houterkabouter's models have been excellent since the beginning so this is definitely where I'd place the most weight. The situation in Belgium is different from Germany because the day-to-day measures have been different since October.
Sorry, hospitals in Poland started filling up with younger people.
Virus mutates and if it can't infect elderly it will infect younger and does.
Median age of hospitalized people is getting lower and we will soon see that vaccinating elderly wasn't the best choice (they don't spread COVID that much - don't take part in waves, are just victims to those).
Vaccines reduce but do not stop the spread, there is little evidence that vaccinating spreaders first would help much.
And median age of hospitalizations going down is a good thing lol. It means the vaccines are doing their job. Look at death rates and instances of severe illness per infection, those should be going down as well: the disease is less harmful if its highest risk groups are vaccinated.
(Are people here really having this hard of a time with basic statistics?)
> (Are people here really having this hard of a time with basic statistics?)
No, no one is disagreeing with the narrow point you're making that protecting the oldest leads to fewer bad outcomes given equal numbers of infections.
But that's just one part of the story. In most of the EU, most people have not yet been exposed, so the pandemic will need to be ended by vaccination.
The situation now is treacherous, since it may initially seem like hospitalizations don't track infections like they used to. But if the conclusion from that is to just open up, nothing will be gained.
This is clearly borne out by both complex models and back of the envelope calculations.
And that's ignoring that there are health issues other than death to consider...
Number of hospitalized young people is higher than it was in Autumn (with similar number of infections). Number of elderly obviously is smaller (because vaccinations).
Besides hospitalizations of younger population, their outcome is also worse - ratio of severe illness to mild is higher than it was before.
This is a trade-off, who should live, or how miserable the life of those that survive will be.
How much of this is due to the B117 variant in your country? I haven't looked at stats in poland but there is a counter-acting effect from that as the variant is outright more lethal and spreads more easily. Here in Belgium, for what it's worth, the vaccines still outrun the variant but I could see it being different for other countries.
One more thing, besides younger people (there are a lot of people in their their thirties).
A children (< 18 year olds) wards in hospitals in second larges city are full (number of released patients = newly added). Yes, children - those that wre mostly asymptomatic stopped being asymptomatic.
And the first 15-20% or so of vaccines administered are CRITICAL. In true pareto principle, 80% of hospitalizations come from 20% of the population.
I'm in Belgium. We are facing a third wave. We're going back into lockdown pretty soon (it's almost certain). With just 400k more vaccines administered, we would not be in this mess.
400k. The US vaccinates 3 million every day.