Did you ever get people screaming in your face "do your own research!"? Well I do, so I decided to listen to them. And did my own research.
The facts (01/07/2021)
- In Czech Republic the covid-19 vaccine has been offered to the oldest generation first, then the younger one, then even the younger one, etc.
- Full vaccination is considered at least 14 days after the second dose.
- Vaccination in Czech Republic is already in high numbers in the older (65+) population: 62.98%
- Vaccination in younger population (65-) is drastically smaller: 12.80%
The hypothesis
- If the vaccine is working against current covid-19 variants, then we should see lower daily incidence (normalized per X people) in older population than in the younger one.
The math
Let's put the official data from official sources into one table. Those shall be concidered undisputable for the sake of this excercise.
| Age | # Population | # Vaccinated | # Daily Incidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 65- | 8,562,309 | 1,096,096 | 121 |
| 65+ | 2,131,630 | 134,2487 | 3 |
Now let's do some elementary school level math:
| Age | % of population | % Vaccinated | % Daily Incidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 65- | 80,07% | 12,80% | 97,58% |
| 65+ | 19,93% | 62,98% | 2,42% |
One can easily see that the incidence in the older population is way lower than the one in younger generation. But let's put that into absolute numbers normalized per 100k:
| Age | # Daily Incidence per 100k |
|---|---|
| 65- | 1,41 |
| 65+ | 0,14 |
Conclusion
Given the data we used in this excercise the hypothesis seems to be valid.
Public Service Announcement
Don't do this. Seriously, don't just play around with some numbers like I did over here pretending that you know what's going on. In today's world anyone can get any number of however skewed data points and come to their own even more skewed conclusions. Will horse-round-kicking a calculator for long enough produce numbers you've been looking for? Most probably yes. Will those be actually useful? Almost definitelly not. Doing statistics right is hard. Interpreting that data from said statistics is even harder.
But you just did exactly that!
Well you just told me to do it.
So the numbers here are fake!
They stem from real world publicly available data sets. So assuming that those are correct, you can always check the math and conclusions here.
You completely ignored X!
See the first paragraph of this PSA. Yes I did, because I'm not educated statistician, nor educated epidemiologist, nor scientist. This serves as an extremely rough estimate of a very complex system.
I think your math is wrong!
Very well, happy if you can show me a better way to interpret those numbers.
I still don't believe you
Fair enough, it's your right. I just did what you asked me to do. So sorry that the outcome is not what you expected.
Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash