Figures published yesterday in eLife, show that, during the Delta variant wave of COVID-19 in the summer of 2021, areas with a high level of vaccine take-up in the USA had a lower peak of hospitalisations and deaths, and a shorter duration of the wave, compared to areas where the take-up was low.
The summer of 2021 was of course when pro-Trump QAnon, antivaxxers and evangelical Christians were loudest in campaigning to mislead people about the severity of the pandemic and the effectiveness/harmful effects of the COVID-19 vaccine, as a direct consequence of then president Trump's incompetent response to the crisis where he was out of his depth, so sought to minimise it to justify his inaction and indecision, so setting the scene for his supporters in the far right Trumpanzee cults. Consequently, those parts of America where a large number of people, mostly Trumpanzee Republicans, were refusing to get vaccinated or take sensible precautions against catching the virus and passing it on to others.
Now figures are showing the harm that did to those who fell for the lies emanating from the White House, and so made themselves vulnerable to the potentially life-threatening condition.
As the eLife press release says:
US states with low vaccination rates bore the brunt of the COVID-19 surge caused by the Delta variant during the summer of 2021…The large team of scientists give more details in the abstract to their eLife paper:
The study reaffirms the importance of high vaccination rates in preventing COVID-19 illness and deaths during variant-driven surges. The results may also help improve future modelling of COVID-19 surges.
To help public health officials plan and mitigate the potential effects of COVID-19, modelling teams from across the US joined forces to create the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub in December 2020. The teams worked together to provide six to twelve-month nationwide and state-by-state projections of COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths.
This study details the projections we made as the more transmissible Delta variant emerged in the United States in the spring of 2021. Using nine different models and four defined scenarios, each team assessed how virus control measures, such as mask wearing or vaccination availability and uptake might change the trajectory of COVID-19 as the Delta variant spread at state and national levels.
We have learned a lot about this virus since the Delta variant, especially about waning of immunity and immune escape variants. The lack of these in the models had a major impact on our expectations of how large the resurgence could be.
Shaun Truelove, co-lead author
Assistant Scientist
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Baltimore, Maryland, US.While the timing of these projected surges was accurate, the real numbers during the Delta surge far surpassed what we projected. For example, in the worst-case scenario, the models projected about 516,000 cases during the first four weeks of the projection period (July 4 to July 31, 2021), but about 1.2 million occurred during this period.
Claire Smith, co-lead author
Doctoral Student
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Baltimore, Maryland, US.The models projected that cases would begin to rise in July 2021 and peak in mid to late September 2021, with the number of hospitalisations and deaths also rising. They also predicted that states with the lowest vaccination rates would see the most cases, hospitalisations and deaths.These estimates should be treated with caution however, because they do not include the impact of waning which reduces vaccine effectiveness, particularly against symptomatic disease. Our estimates of vaccine protection against severe disease (hospitalisations and deaths) are more robust. Overall, because of the underestimation of deaths associated with the Delta wave, the actual numbers of lives saved are likely much higher.
Efforts to increase vaccination rates are critical and will save lives before and during future resurgences.
Cécile Viboud, co-author
Senior research scientist
Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies
Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, US.
While their predictions about which states would see the worst surges were accurate, even these states saw more cases than anticipated. In their projections, most models did not include waning of natural or vaccine-derived immunity; this and other incorrect assumptions about the virus or human behaviour during the surge likely contributed to these underestimations. These results highlight the challenges of modelling an ongoing epidemic and may help improve future modelling efforts.
States that met higher goals for vaccination early in the Delta surge averted more than 1.5 million cases and 21,000 deaths, the teams suggest.
Abstract
In Spring 2021, the highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant began to cause increases in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in parts of the United States. At the time, with slowed vaccination uptake, this novel variant was expected to increase the risk of pandemic resurgence in the US in summer and fall 2021. As part of the COVID-10 Scenario Modeling Hub, an ensemble of nine mechanistic models produced six-month scenario projections for July-December 2021 for the United States. These projections estimated substantial resurgences of COVID-19 across the US resulting from the more transmissible Delta variant, projected to occur across most of the US, coinciding with school and business reopening. The scenarios revealed that reaching higher vaccine coverage in July—December 2021 reduced the size and duration of the projected resurgence substantially, with the expected impacts was largely concentrated in a subset of states with lower vaccination coverage. Despite accurate projection of COVID-19 surges occurring and timing, the magnitude was substantially underestimated 2021 by the models compared with the of the reported cases, hospitalizations, and deaths occurring during July-December, highlighting the continued challenges to predict the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccination uptake remains critical to limiting transmission and disease, particularly in states with lower vaccination coverage. Higher vaccination goals at the onset of the surge of the new variant were estimated to avert over 1.5 million cases and 21,000 deaths, though may have had even greater impacts, considering the underestimated resurgence magnitude from the model.
Truelove,Shaun; Smith, Claire P; Qin, Michelle; Mullany, Luke C., et al (2022)
Projected resurgence of COVID-19 in the United States in July-December 2021 resulting from the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant and faltering vaccination
eLife 11:e73584; DOI: 10.7554/eLife.73584
Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by eLife Sciences Publications Ltd. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license.
Just another example of how, starting from his incompetence and narcissistic inability to admit he didn't know what to do but couldn't accept the experts knew more than he did, Donald Trump initiated a campaign, dutifully taken up by his allies on the far right, especially the white evangelical churches, which resulted in the death and serious illness of predominantly his own supporters. These were people who, as one might expect from their voting patterns, were easily fooled by campaigns of disinformation and deliberate politicisation of the pandemic in the hope of political gain. To date, most none of them have had the honesty or personal integrity to put their hands up, apologise to the people they misled, and admit they were wrong, despite the accumulating mountain of evidence that shows they were.
In short, like the incompetent sheepdog in Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd, Donald Trump herded those he should have been looking after over a cliff, to their destruction, then expected to be praised and rewarded for his performance. Hopefully, there will never again be a POTUS as dangerously incompetent as Donald J. Trump.
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