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.

How many lives have the COVID vaccines saved?

 This really shouldn't be controversial.

In response to a worldwide pandemic, scientists built on decades of research in genetics and virology to design, create, test and deploy multiple COVID vaccines in record time. Three vaccines were approved for use in the US--Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer and Moderna. To date 214 million Americans--65%--are fully vaccinated and 93 million--28%--have gotten a booster. The vaccines and boosters are known to reduce COVID cases, severe illness, hospitalization and deaths.

The question is, how many deaths have the vaccines actually prevented--how many Americans are alive today who would be dead had they remained unvaccinated?

A doctor receiving a COVID vaccination

Credit: DOD

I know that many people's eyes glaze over when numbers are involved, and the next section includes a lot of numbers. For those with a numerical allergy, feel free to jump to the paragraph in bold that starts with "During the 39 weeks . . ."

The numbers:

To address the question of how many lives COVID vaccination has saved, I examined week-by-week US death rates by vaccination status between April 10, 2021 and January 1, 2022, and coordinated those with week-by-week numbers of Americans fully vaccinated.

During those 39 weeks the number of fully vaccinated Americans rose from 82.9 million to 207.4 million. As the pandemic waxed and waned, the weekly rates of COVID deaths among unvaccinated people ranged from 0.92 to 14.27 per 100,000 while the comparable rates for fully vaccinated people varied from 0.07 to 1.23 per 100,000.

The ratio of deaths per 100,000 comparing unvaccinated to vaccinated people ranged from 6.6 to 18 with an average of 11.85. That is, on average over those 39 weeks, unvaccinated Americans died from COVID at 11.85 the rate of their fully vaccinated peers.

The difference between the rate of deaths between unvaccinated and fully vaccinated people ranged from 0.85 deaths per 100,000 people during weeks when the pandemic was at a low ebb to 13.04 per 100,000 at its peak.

Knowing the number of vaccinated people in a given week and the death rate for unvaccinated people at that time, we can calculate the number of deaths that would have occurred among the vaccinated group if they had remained unvaccinated. We can calculate how many lives were saved by subtracting the actual number of deaths in the vaccinated group from the number of people in that group who would have died if unvaccinated.

Here's an example, using the week of December 18, 2021:

Number of fully vaccinated people: 205.3 million

Death rate among unvaccinated people: 92.5 per million

How many would have died at the unvaccinated rate: 205.3 x 92.5 = 18,990

Death rate among fully vaccinated: 8 per million

How many fully vaccinated people actually died: 205.3 x 8 = 1,642

Number of lives saved that week: 18,990 - 1642 = 17,348

We can then calculate that figure for each of the 39 weeks for which we have data and add them up. That gets us the answer to our question:

During the 39 weeks between April 10, 2021 and January 1, 2022, if nobody had been vaccinated we would have seen approximately 416,999 more deaths.

To put it differently, during those 39 weeks, COVID vaccinations saved approximately 417,000 American lives. That's an average of 10,692 lives saved per week, or 1527 per day.

If the COVID vaccines had not been available, the additional lives lost would have surpassed all American lives lost in World War II.

This conservative estimate of lives saved doesn't include those saved during the 20 weeks between the start of vaccinations in the US on December 14, 2020 and April 10, 2021, or the lives saved since January 1, 2022, or the additional lives saved among people who are fully vaccinated and boosted.

We can fill in those gaps at least in part. Researchers at the NIH and Rand Corporation used a modeling approach to estimate the number of lives saved by vaccines from December 14, 2020 through May 9, 2021. They arrived at a figure of 139,000 for that period. If we subtract the 10,436 deaths in the weeks where their figures overlap mine, we can add another 128,564 American lives saved by vaccines before April 10, 2021.

We don't have US COVID death rates by vaccination status after January 1, 2022, but we do have those numbers for two states, Texas and Washington. They show the same pattern, with unvaccinated people dying at between 7 and 18 times the rate of their fully vaccinated peers. It's safe to say that the number of lives saved by the COVID vaccines continues to grow.

So, even without counting the lives saved by vaccines so far in 2022, as a very conservative estimate COVID vaccinations have saved 417,000 + 128,500--more than 545,000 American lives.

What about the rest of the world?

Ten other countries report COVID deaths by vaccination status. You can find the details here. On average across those countries unvaccinated people died from COVID at 9.5 times the rate of vaccinated people, quite comparable to the 11.85 ratio seen in the U.S. over time. The average difference between the death rates per 100,000 for unvaccinated vs fully vaccinated people was actually greater than the comparable figure for the US. Thus it seems reasonable to use the lives saved in the U.S. to estimate lives saved worldwide.

This is supported by data from Europe. A study jointly published by WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control estimates that between the beginning of vaccination in Europe in December, 2020 through November of 2021, vaccines saved nearly 470,000 lives just in those aged 60 and older.

The 214 million Americans who are fully vaccinated represent slightly less than one-twentieth of the number of fully vaccinated people worldwide, currently estimated at 4.355 billion. If we multiply 545,000 lives saved in the US by a factor of 20, we get an admittedly rough estimate of how many lives the vaccines have saved worldwide--10,900,000.

That's a lot of mothers and fathers, grandparents and grandchildren, husbands and wives, workers and homemakers, friends and lovers, regular people who are still alive because they chose to get vaccinated.

Perhaps we should be thanking Anthony Fauci and other public figures and leaders who have encouraged and advocated vaccination rather than calling them mass murderers who should be jailed or executed-- tropes that far too frequently appear on right-wing news sources and saturate social media.

 

LOCKDOWNS HAVE WORKED TO CONTROL THE CORONAVIRUS--BUT ARE THEY WORTH IT?

If, as you've spent endless hours at home the last few months, you've wondered if the lockdowns and shelter-in-place policies that have upended lives around the world actually work, two major new research papers pretty much close the case.

Image credit: Prachatai/Flickr

Research teams at Imperial College, London and the University of California, Berkeley, used different methodologies to study the impact of the "non-pharmaceutical interventions" such as business closings, social distancing and home isolation that were put in place in different mixtures and different times in 11 European countries, and in China, South Korea, Iran and the United States.

The detailed findings are complex, but the bottom line is simple: lockdowns worked whenever and wherever they were applied. When implemented and followed consistently, within three weeks they successfully reduced the reproduction rate of the coronavirus below the critical number 1, flattened the curve of cases, and saved large numbers of lives.

The numbers that the two research teams calculated are impressive. The Imperial College team estimates that in Europe the lockdown and social distancing measures put in place in March prevented several hundred million Covid-19 cases and approximately 3.1 million deaths before the May 4 end of their data gathering.

The Berkeley group found that in the six countries they studied--including the US--the measures put in place prevented 62 million confirmed cases or an estimated 530 million actual cases.  
Assuming a case mortality rate of just one percent, that means that some 5.3 million lives were saved, again in the course of a few months.

"The lockdowns had a very large effect on cases and saving lives," says Solomon Hsiang, at the University of California, Berkeley.      "[Some people assert that] the lockdowns weren't necessary. This research nails that it was. Without them, we believe the toll would have been huge."

Researchers from both groups emphasize that some mixture of these life-changing but also life-saving measures needs to be continued, tailored to each country or region's population structure and economic needs. 

"We're just at the beginning of the pandemic," says Samir Bhatt, at Imperial College. "We're very far from herd immunity and the risk of more waves of the virus is very high. Care must be continued until a vaccine becomes available."

These two papers were published on June 8, at which point there have been more than 7 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 407,000 confirmed deaths worldwide. If most of the countries in the world had not taken the stringent steps they did to control the SARS-CoV2 virus, these two research papers show that those numbers would have been orders of magnitude higher.

Was it worth it? Clearly that's not a scientific question, nor should it be strictly an economic one. The answer depends on the value one places on human lives as well as on other important factors such as employment and economic well being. Both research teams are well aware of the huge economic impacts of lockdowns, social distancing, travel restrictions, business closures, and other measures taken to control the spread of the virus. But both of them emphasize that some mix of these measures will be needed for a long time. 

"There's no back to normal," says Hsiang. "It's a cost-benefit question--interventions of different kinds along with economic well-being. The longer you stay in lockdown, the fewer infections. If you undo lockdown, there's economic growth but more infections and death. Something still needs to be in place."

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You can download the full scientific papers from the journal Nature, here and also here.