Covid vaccines may have saved 2,000,000 American lives

 How effective are the Covid vaccines? Here's some new data:

A team of epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the California Department of Public health developed two different data-based models of the course of the Covid pandemic in California in the ten months after vaccines became available. They published their results in the April 22, 2022 edition of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

Projected Covid deaths without vaccination
(Image by Eric C. Schnieder, et al.)   Details   DMCA

Their first model estimated that during the ten months prior to October 16, 2021, Covid vaccinations in California averted 1.52 million infections, 72,930 hospitalizations and 19,430 deaths.

The second model estimated that during those same ten months, vaccinations prevented 1.4 million Covid cases, 84,330 hospitalizations and 22,620 deaths.

The researchers limited themselves to pointing out that these results "can be generalized across the United States." We can take a stab at doing that if we assume that the vaccines averted cases, hospitalizations and deaths at roughly the same rate across the country as they did in California. By the end of the study period, 23,800,846 Californians were fully vaccinated. At that same time 188,902,483 Americans had been fully vaccinated, or 7.94 times the number in California alone.

Multiplying by that factor, the vaccines conservatively averted 11,116,000 Covid cases, 579,064 hospitalizations and 154,036 deaths in the US in the first 10 months of their availability.

On February 25 of this year I posted an OpEdNews article providing a count--based on the actual differences between week-by-week death rates among unvaccinated and vaccinated people--of how many American lives the Covid vaccines had saved to that date.

My estimate was that 545,000 Americans were still alive because they had gotten vaccinated. It's important to note that those only represented lives saved directly by the vaccines, not infections, hospitalizations or deaths averted among the contacts of people who stayed healthy because they were vaccinated.

Similarly, the UCSF researchers note that their estimates only count people whose lives were saved because they were vaccinated--direct lives saved. They point out that many more Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths were doubtlessly averted among the contacts of vaccinated people. "The true numbers are definitely significantly higher," says lead author Sophia Tan, at UCSF.

To get a sense of how just how much higher, we have a new study by the Commonwealth Fund, a century-old private foundation that promotes effective and equitable health care in the US. They used a highly detailed model that, along with many other factors, accounts for contagion, hospitalization and deaths within people's contact networks. Their study provides estimates through March, 2022.

Those researchers estimate that Covid vaccinations have probably prevented more than 66 million infections, more than 17 million hospitalizations and more than 2 million deaths in the United States.

Given the high cost of health care in the US, we shouldn't be surprised that, according to the Commonwealth study, averting those millions of infections, hospitalizations and deaths saved some $900 billion--that's nearly one trillion dollars--in healthcare costs.

As of April 25, 2022, the US has suffered just under one million Covid deaths. If the 219 million Americans who are fully vaccinated had chosen not to, the number of US Covid deaths would have been much higher, perhaps approaching a shocking 3 million.

The Covid pandemic is at low ebb right now, but it has not disappeared. The vaccines are readily available and free. If you're among the one-third of Americans who have not yet gotten vaccinated, it's not too late to protect yourself and the people you are close to.

GOING CORONAVIRAL-- A COMMENT ABOUT EXPONENTIAL GROWTH

We humans are pretty good at understanding linear change. It's all around us:

--eat more, gain some weight; eat less, lose some weight
--press on the gas pedal, speed up; press on the brake, slow down
--turn up the heat, feel warmer; turn down the heat, feel cooler
--someone can't hear you, talk louder; someone moves closer, talk more softly
--and thousands of other daily experiences in which a small change produces a small result and a larger change produces a larger result.

However, some events don't behave linearly. There are situations where a small change can quickly produce a big effect. We're living through at least two of them right now--climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. We're failing miserably in understanding and dealing with both of them.

A sneeze--a few tiny droplets can cause massive disruption

Photo credit: CDC

Let's do a little math--please bear with me:

Step number     Linear growth (n x 2)     Exponential growth (2 to the n) 

         1                        2                                                    2                                       
         2                        4                                                    4                                         
         3                        6                                                    8                                         
         4                        8                                                   16                                       
         5                      10                                                   32                                       
         6                      12                                                   64                                       
         7                      14                                                 128                                       
         8                      16                                                 256                                         
         9                      18                                                 512                                         
       10                      20                                               1024 
       11                      22                                               2048                                     

Let's pretend that these numbers represent two different responses to the Covid-19 virus.

The steps might represent weeks. The first column might represent a situation where the virus is fairly well controlled (e.g. through some combination of social distancing, mask wearing, testing, tracing and isolating people likely to shed the virus). On average one infected person infects approximately one other person, with the result that the number of cases grows linearly. The third column represents exponential growth--where the virus truly is "going viral." All that takes is for one infected person to pass the virus on to more than one new victim.

Notice the enormous and rapidly expanding difference as the weeks tick by. At week three, exponential growth has infected just two more people than in the linear growth model, but at ten weeks the difference is more than 1,000, and one week later, more than 2,000.

So, our first takeaway is that when we're dealing with any situation involving exponential growth, at first it's hard to distinguish from a normal linear situation that we're used to, but sooner or later it takes off explosively.

Now let's examine that phrase "sooner or later."

      Week    Doubling stopped sooner           Doubling stopped later
         1                        2                                                    2                                     
         2                        4                                                    4                                       
         3                        8                                                    8                                       
         4                      16                                                   16                                       
         5                      18                                                   32                                       
         6                      20                                                   64                                       
         7                      22                                                 128                                       
         8                      24                                                 256                                         
         9                      26                                                 258                                         
       10                      28                                                 260 
       11                      30                                                 262
Total Cases:          198                                               1290

What a difference a delay makes.  This might represent two states, one of which sees the exponential handwriting on the wall after just four weeks, institutes effective controls and ends up with 198 cases, while the other delays control measures one month more and ends up with with 6.5 times as many cases. (Or these numbers could equally well represent deaths, in which case that one month delay would have caused over a thousand needless deaths.

Obviously the numbers above are meant to be an illustration; they don't match exactly with the real world. However, you can see this in the real world if you compare the impact of a one-week delay in responding to the pandemic in New York vs. California. Here's a zerospinzone.blogspot post from March 30:

In this comparison of coronavirus cases in New York vs California, you can see what difference even a few days lag in imposing strict stay-at-home orders makes. California--population 39.5 million, first state to impose strict controls: current # of cases 6358, deaths 132. New York--population 19.5 million, delayed a week before imposing controls: current # of cases 60,679, deaths 1063. The number of cases per population in NY is 19 times greater than in California, and the number of deaths per population 17 times greater. What a tragic difference a week's delay makes.

A lot has happened in New York and California in the subsequent three months, with start-and-stop openings and closings in both states. Through all that, however, California has managed to keep a tighter lid on the explosive potential of the coronavirus. As of today, June 28, New York has documented 416,769 cases and 31,483 deaths while Callifornia has had 215,575 cases and just 5,934 deaths. Adjusted for population, late-starting New York has suffered nearly four times as many cases and more than ten times as many deaths as California. Clamping down just one week earlier in California almost certainly saved tens of thousands of lives.

Our second takeaway, then, is that when dealing with the potential for exponential growth, getting control of the rate of growth as early as possible--before the number of cases explodes-- makes a huge difference.

It's pretty clear that we, as a species, aren't very good at dealing with things that have the potential for exponential growth, and so can blast out of control at any time.  We're seeing the results of this globally as we try to put a cap on the coronavirus. Similarly, experts have been warning us for decades that, because of a number of looming tipping points, climate change too has the potential to spin wildly out of control.

However, we don't have a good excuse for continued ignorance; it's not as though the potential for dangerous exponential growth has been a secret. Consider this old proverb, a version of which goes like this:

For want of a nail a horseshoe was lost,
for want of a horseshoe a horse went lame,
for want of a horse a rider never got through,
for want of a rider a message never arrived,
for want of a message an army was never sent,
for want of an army a battle was lost,
for want of a battle a war was lost,
for want of a war a kingdom fell,
and all for want of a nail.

Clearly we've had folk knowledge about exponentially large consequences from a small event for a lot time.

Even more ancient is a story from India about a chess-loving king who promised to reward a visitor with whatever he wanted. The visitor "modestly" asked for one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, 2 grains on the second square, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth, etc. It didn't take the King many squares before he realized he'd taken on an impossible task. Sixty-four doublings would have required some 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of rice, enough to cover all of India a meter deep.

That ancient king learned a striking and costly lesson about exponential growth. It seems as though we--and our current leaders--need to learn it all over again, and quickly. That is, if we don't want our kingdom to fall for want of an adequate response to this microscopic but immensely dangerous virus.

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REA

TO MASK OR NOT TO MASK, THAT IS THE QUESTION

Two new studies make this question much easier to answer than Hamlet's dilemma. If we all wear face masks in public, that alone will go a long way towards choking off the coronavirus pandemic.

Writing in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Academy A, epidemiologist Richard Stutt and colleagues at the UK's Cambridge and Greenwich universities modeled 18 months of the pandemic with different levels of mask-wearing effectiveness.

Students wearing face masks (and saving lives)

Credit: Gustavo Fring

Not surprisingly, the biggest impact on the virus came when 100 percent of the population wore masks that were highly effective both in keeping infected people from expelling virus-laden droplets and protecting healthy people from inhaling them. The models showed that that combination could push the infamous R-value--the number of infections an infected person passes on--below 1, and so snuff out the pandemic.

Even more encouragingly, even if the masks were just slightly more than 50 percent effective, or if only slightly more than 50 percent of the population wore them, that crucial R value could be pushed below the magic number 1.

Here's the striking bottom line of this study, assuming face masks that are 50 percent effective:

"We note that 100% facemask adoption without lock-down achieves a greater reduction in the final size of epidemic, a lower 'total removed' and a lower peak of active cases than lock-down without facemasks."

Let me repeat that. According to their models, if everyone wore face masks, that would be more effective in limiting the size and impact of the epidemic than a total lockdown. If we compare the social and economic impacts of universal face mask-wearing to a full-scale lockdown, there's no contest. Wearing a face mask is a significant nuisance, but it allows most activities to continue--as we see in many Asian countries where face masks are a normal part of life. Lockdowns, as we've seen, are immensely life-changing and economically devastating.

A second research team, reporting in the equally prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed the spread of the coronavirus in three of the worst-hit parts of the world, Wuhan, China, Italy and New York City. The researchers tracked the course of the epidemic in each location as different measures were put in place to try to control it.

Their conclusion was striking--mandated face covering was ". . . the determinant in shaping the trends of the pandemic." Renyi Zhang, at Texas A&M Univeristy, and colleagues, calculated that face masks alone prevented 78,000 COVID-19 cases in Italy between April 6 and May 9, and over 66,000 in New York between April 17 and May 9. Given the percentage of diagnosed COVID-19 patients who died in Italy and New York, wearing face masks likely saved more than 15,000 lives in Italy and New York City during those weeks.

This research team's bottom line:

"We conclude that wearing face masks in public corresponds to the most effective means to prevent interhuman transmission, and this inexpensive practice, in conjunction with simultaneous social distancing, quarantine and contact tracing represents the most likely fighting opportunity to stop the COVID-19 pandemic."

Again, note that wearing face masks in public, maintaining a safe distance from others, quarantining people who are infected and tracing their contacts, while challenging are still far less damaging to normal life and to the economy than lockdowns.


So, two separate studies using completely different methodologies came to essentially the same conclusion. Wearing face masks in public can be extremely effective in snuffing out this world-shaking pandemic.

I'm wearing my mask whenever I step out my front door. Please do all of the world a huge favor and wear yours too!

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Here's a link to another researcher who has reviewed the research literature and comes to the same conclusion. Jeremy Howard, a distinguished research scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, clarify that masks work by keeping most virus-carrying droplets from being expelled into the environment. Again, the more people who wear them, the safer we all are.

REA

WHAT DIDN'T HE KNOW AND WHEN DIDN'T HE KNOW IT?

What didn't Trump know and when didn't he know it?

Concerning Trump in general and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, the simple answer is that he knows nothing, always. Despite being "a very stable genius," perennial ignorance is his stock in trade. It lets him avoid responsibility across the board. Unlike President Truman, the buck never stops at Trump's desk (or if it does, like Macavity, Trump wasn't there. He never got the memo.)

Harry Truman, 1959--the buck stops here

Credit: Levan Ramishvili/flickr

Unfortunately for America, sometimes ignorance, especially arrogantly willful ignorance, has costs, real-world impacts that can't be erased by shifting blame to someone else (right now WHO's on first), smearing someone with a smarmy nickname, or filing a lawsuit.

MACAVITY'S NOT THERE

Credit: Pixabay

As I write this, 565,835 Americans have been sickened by the coronovirus, and 22,850 have died. That's more cases than the next three worst-hit countries combined, and more deaths than any other country. So much for MAGA and "we're number one."

Tragically, neither those deaths nor those yet to come will make a difference to Trump's core supporters; his approval ratings have ranged from 41 to 49 percent as the pandemic has raged.  Still, for those of us who at least try to live in the real world, it might be interesting to figure out what Trump could have known, and ought to have known, and when he chose to ignore it and go with his--also brilliant--gut.

We now know that multiple agencies were trying to alert Trump to the approaching tsunami starting in January. These included the National Security Council, Health and Human Services, the CDC, Homeland Security, the VA and the Pentagon--at least 10 high-level warnings between January 18 and February 25. Clearly enough of these early warnings got through to him to stimulate him to do what comes naturally to him--closing borders. On January 31 he banned most travelers coming from China. 

Domestically, however, Trump presented a very different face to the U.S. public. From January 20th through mid-March, Trump blatantly downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic. His consistent message was "no worries," "under control," and "it will disappear." Finally, in mid-March, and some six weeks too late, he began to take the pandemic seriously in terms of what should be done within the U.S.

What he could have known if he were capable of and willing to listen to experts, was that viruses like SARS-CoV-2 have the capacity to go viral--duh--for the number of people sickened or killed to increase exponentially.  If he had digested that bit of information, his native genius could have led him to the conclusion that days count. In a country the size of the US, putting effective control measures into place a week or two sooner could mean the difference between a few thousand deaths and a few hundred thousand deaths .

We can see this clearly if we compare New York and California. New York dithered while California took quick and serious steps to slow the spread of the virus.  As of 4/13/20, New York has registered 195,031 cases and suffered 10,056 deaths. California has just one-eighth as many cases, 23,428 and one-fifteenth as many deaths, 675. The contrast becomes even starker when you consider that California has twice the population of New York. So, per population, California has just one-sixteenth the number of cases and one-thirtieth he number of deaths. If California had failed to act as quickly and decisively as it did, 20,000 more people might have died.

What the experts tried to get across to Trump starting in January is that when you're dealing with the potentially exponential explosion of a fatal disease, there isn't room for half measures nor time for delay. Trump only heard what he wanted to hear, and reality steamrolled over all his magical thinking, political positioning and base-soothing blather to remind us that ignorance can be fatal. That makes Trump even more dangerous than we thought just a few months ago.

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REA

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6/28/20:  Just to add one more data point to the ongoing drama of what Trump didn't know and when didn't he know it, we now have the scandal of Russian intelligence paying a bounty to the Taliban for the murder of US soldiers. As usual, Trump missed the briefing, and the next briefing, and the one after that . . .

WHAT IF WE HAD A SOCIOPATHIC NARCISSISTIC AS PRESIDENT IN A TIME OF CRISIS?

If, God forbid, we had a sociopathic narcissist as President of the United States in a time of grave crisis, we might get a tweet like this:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!

As usual with Trump's tweets, there's a huge amount of nastiness, divisiveness, us-vs-them-ism, and a whopper or two to unpack. However, let's just focus on ". . . in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success."

In other words, what we do about the coronavirus pandemic should be determined by how it might impact him. That is pure narcissism.

Epidemiologists--experts who devote their lives to studying, understanding and modeling epidemics and pandemics--tell us that stringent steps now can beat this virus down to a manageable level in a month or two--as the Chinese and a few other countries have managed to do. That would allow our health system to continue to function, and researchers to develop treatments or a vaccine. This difficult-but-necessary choice might mean thousands of deaths in the US.

They also tell us that getting everyone back to work or "back to church" prematurely will let the virus expand exponentially. This is a concept Trump doesn't and probably can't understand, but maybe some of his followers can. Exponential means that today's 75,000 cases and 1000 deaths in a few months could be multiplied not by 10 or 100 or 1000, but possibly by 10,000. That's right, unleashed to rage unchecked through the US population, this coronavirus could kill 10,000,000 people.

You don't have to believe me. You can research this for yourself in these two crystal-clear articles:

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

Any normal person faced with the choice between his own needs and the potential death of millions of people would put all those lives first. But a sociopath wouldn't. Much less a sociopathic narcissist.

But we'd never elect someone like that as President. And even if we did, sensible people, the "adults in the room," would step in to protect us. After all, we have the Constitution, Congress and the  Courts--all those carefully crafted checks and balances--to save us. Right?

Right?

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REA