Oh the fun on Facebook where anyone with an opinion gets to mislead others who are too lazy or too full of confirmation bias to bother to read the actual study that was posted.
So the covidiots are lathered up about a British study done on the death rates of the dozen or so Covid variants and one knucklehead finds a couple of cells in a chart that put her panties in a twist.
"Maggie Hartsfield
FULLY Vaccinated Group 679 Deaths out of 73,372 Positive cases while the Unvaccinated group has 390 deaths out of 183,133 Positive Cases “
But there is a problem, Maggie is either lying or she is too ignorant to understand the charts in the study showing the results. Now there is nothing wrong with being ignorant unless you are so arrogant that you don't know you are ignorant. Most of us are ignorant of many things in life but we do not pretend we are knowledgeable and speak on things we do not understand.
First, there were far more than the 183,133 cases for the unvaccinated and 73,372 “positive” cases she quoted, that last number was the number of people that had both vaccine doses and were two weeks past the last vaccination dose date. There were actually 386,735 total cases. That would mean around 47.3% of the patients were unvaccinated. But not understanding the chart alone means that one ought to view Maggie's opinions with extreme skepticism.
Worse, this study wasn't about the percentage of deaths; it was about the distribution of deaths around the variants of Covid found so far. That fact escaped Maggie because she didn't read the study or didn't understand it.
Look on Table 4 on page 16, the table lists the variants starting at Alpha, the original covid strain. They found 150,620 cases since Feb. 1st 2021, 1619 people died, around 1.1%. But, and it is a big butt, look at the cases where the people were less than 50 years old, around four times the number of cases were under 50 years of age, a given since statistically there will be more under age 50 than over age 50, but the death rate was 48 times higher for the over 50 patients, from .1% death rate for the under 50 cohort, to 4.8% death rate for those in the over 50 cohort. Now some of that, around one fourth, was due to the number of cases being larger, so settle out at around 12 times more likely to die if you were over 50 and caught the original strain of Covid. 67 deaths for those under 50, 1,552 deaths for those over 50 despite there being four times the number of under 50 years of age. Covid kills old people at a much higher rate.
As you go down through the variants the deaths are single digit for most variants, the mutations of the virus are less deadly than the original or less contagious, until you get to the delta variant. Now you have eight times as many younger patient cases than over 50 patient cases. The younger than 50 cohort have a one in three thousand chances of dying if they catch the delta variant. Those over 50 have a one in 44 chance of dying, 2.2% roughly if the catch the Delta variant.
The rest of the variants have single digit deaths, some times six deaths, sometimes just one death. That was the focus of the actual study.
Now go down to page 22, Table 5. You will see 386,735 delta cases in the study, not the 256,505 cases Maggie used in her misleading message. The cases in people over 50 are down to 12% with 88% of the cases being under 50 years of age. That is half the original Covid rate, more young people are catching delta which is a concern. Then look at the over 50 cohort that caught the delta, over 2/3rds had both shots, the under 50 cohort had around 40% with both doses, showing the decision to vaccinate the older folks before the younger folks in a population. Around 47% of all ages were unvaccinated, but only 3% of the unvaccinated were over 50 years of age. This is a problem of the younger people refusing to be vaccinated.
Now here is where it gets interesting and where it blows Maggie's opinion out of the water. At the bottom of page 22 you will see that 68% of the under 50 cohort wound up in the hospital, clogging up the system and taking much needed hospital beds and resources while only 29% of the over 50 years of age cohort needed hospitalization.
Then at the top of page 23 the same chart shows that 74% of the under 50 crowd of unvaccinated people required overnight hospitalization compared to 31% of the unvaccinated over 50 cohort. What this means is that the younger unvaccinated crowd are clogging up the health care system and that the delta variant hits younger people harder than older people.
And finally, the part that Maggie used to mislead people, the final death tolls. Here numbers showed there were 2.49 times as many unvaccinated cases with deaths being a 0.0021 death rate and for the vaccinated it was 0.009 which is nine in one thousand chances of dying compared to two in one thousands, pretty slim odds even if the vaccinated shows an increase in death rates. BUT, and again this is a big butt, Maggie mixed the over 50 and under 50 cohorts. The reality is that you have a 2.66 times increased chance of dying if you are unvaccinated, 72 unvaccinated dead to 27 vaccinated dead if you are under 50 years of age, and a 48% higher chance of dying if you were vaccinated versus unvaccinated at over 50 years of age BUT there were 6.7 times as many vaccinated over 50 as unvaccinated people
If you compare the unvaccinated over 50 years of age of 4891 cases with a death toll of 318 you get a death rate of 6.5% .
If you compare the vaccinated over 50 years of age of 32,828 cases with a death toll of 652 you have a death rate of 1.9%
Opps... Maggie's drawers as they would say in basic training meaning she completely missed the point of the study.
Where Maggie either goes wrong through ignorance or by design is that she is comparing apples to oranges. The delta variant is more contagious to the under 50 crowd that are unvaccinated, 178,240 cases to 40,544 cases but when she tries to compare the 679 vaccinated deaths to the 390 unvaccinated deaths she is ignoring the fact that the over 50 people are far, far more likely to be vaccinated so there were 2.59 times as many of them and that the over 50 crowd are far more likely to die from delta than the under 50 crowd. And worse, she is using the delta variant results only instead of the entire spectrum of the variants which in the end means her opinion is deeply flawed and useless.
Again, this study didn't try to compare unvaccinated death is to vaccinated deaths, it compared the variant of viruses death rates to each other and coincidentally added the unvaccinated/vaccinated data with wildly different percentages between under 50 and over 50 vaccination rates. The other thing to take away is that the original covid had a death rate of 1.1% in this study and the delta has a 2.2% death rate which is double.
