Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Sunday, August 29, 2021

An Epidemic of The Co-Morbid

 As I write this there is a stepped up campaign to set the American public against each other by no less than the US government via it's various arms. It has enlisted the MSM to carry out this propagandizing. You'll now see various "opinion pieces" about how the 'unvaccinated are killing people" and how the unvaccinated "need to be punished" and "not be accomodated" or "stop setting the terms" and the like.

This is all accelerationist rhetoric which WILL get people killed. We already had a security guard kill someone who was unmasked, though to be fair, that guard was a felon, prohibited possessor who also was a sex abuser. But still, having seen what is going on in places like Australia and France, I have no doubt that there will be violence if things continue along the path they are going. It's almost like the people pushing this stuff don't think that there won't be pushback of the personal kind at some point by people who simply want(ed) to be left alone.

But that isn't the point of this entry. This entry is to show that even by their own data, this is a pandemic of the co-morbid more than it is of any other category. That is, the propaganda that the "unvaccinated are filling up hospitals *because* they are unvaccinated" is a flat out lie.

I repeat. The following claim is flat out false:

Hospitalizations is driven by vaccination status.

So here's a report out of California.

"Hospitals are seeing a greater number of unvaccinated people who are younger and healthier fill up their beds, according to new data released by Los Angeles County.

Among adults and the oldest teenagers who are hospitalized with COVID-19, the median age of unvaccinated or partially vaccinated patients was 51. That’s notably younger than the median age of fully vaccinated patients in the hospital with COVID-19, which was 66."

 At no point in time is 51 considered "young". These are middle age people. In this group co-morbidities such as obesity and diabetes start to take a noticeable toll on the body. All the bad things done during the 20s, 30s and 40s come to a head, if they haven't before. It is also the case, unfortunately that too many people in this group, particularly among the 'unvaccinated" think they don't need to do anything. This is wrong. 

Anyway, in that article is a nice chart:


Also in reference to ages. Mathematically median is the middle number of a set of numbers.  Half of the numbers are below this and half are above that.  You could have a wide spread of numbers in this group but to have a median of 55 given a life expectancy of 85 (higher for women, lower for men) means that the ages skew high.  Continuing

 So on the left side of the chart are 'unvaccinated/partially vaccinated". I think it is a HUGE mistake to group these people. The reason is because it has been shown that people who are "between shots" are actually more susceptible to COVID than either "fully vaccinated" AND "unvaccinated" people. Hence, these "partials" are inflating the numbers of "unvaccinated". However; since I do not have a way to know how many are in the "one shot" group, I cannot separate them out so please keep that in consideration when looking at the numbers.

You'll note that in the "no comorbidities" line that "fully vaccinated" people are just under half the rate of those hospitalized.  That's good. It's also in line with the claims of reduced hospitalizations. However; when you move on you see a trend:

For those with 3+ comorbities (and these often come in groups). the hospitalization rate for the vaccinated is higher than those who are unvaccinated.

For those with Diabetes type 2, which is the one you get for eating shit for decades and sitting on your ass for decades so entirely your own fault, the vaccinated group again has a higher rate of hospitalization.

For those with high blood pressure, which usually comes along with obesity (which is oddly left out here) or having a high stress lifestyle (for whatever reason), the vaccinated group fares much worse than the unvaccinated.

There is no way to avoid the conclusion that it is comorbidity status rather than vaccination status that predicts bad outcomes with COVID.

Now someone is going to look at the upper part of the chart and point out that the unvaccinated have a higher ICU admittance rate and intubation rate. Sure. 3 and 1 percent respectively.  That's within the margin of error when you start dealing with very large numbers of people. But more importantly it doesn't account for the huge differences when looking at comorbidities. In both groups comorbidity status is far more of a predictor of bad outcomes than anything else with the smallest percent gap being about 16%.

One. Six. Percent.

Not 3 and 1 percent.

Those are the facts.