At current vaccination rates, the Australian population will be fully vaccinated in June 2022, and death rates in Australia continue to be appreciably lower than previous years. Some updates on some analysis I’ve looked at previously.
As Covid19 cases go up in Sydney, I find myself wanting to find data to analyse. So here are a few updates. First, vaccination rates in Australia. The Australian government is now releasing more vaccination data (I was one of many calling for better data in the last few weeks). Unfortunately it is being released in pdf form, which means that the many people tracking and analysing the data are forced to use screen scraping methods to analyse it. And the government has sneakily redefined full vaccination to being full vaccination of the population over 16 for their tracking. Which means that even if we get to 100% fully vaccinated (by Australian government definition), only 80% (20,619,959 of 25,789,285) of the population will have been vaccinated. And those under 16s can still catch Covid19 and infect others.
I get my data from one of the people who painstakingly screenscrapes the Australian analysis, and I’ve been tracking the projected date (on current weekly vaccination rates) when 100% of the Australian population will be vaccinated (I’m counting the children). It’s been moving around, as the rates increase slightly. Today, on the 6 July, my projection has 100% of the Australian population vaccinated (assuming vaccination of children is allowed by then) in 11 months time on 6 June 2022 (the earliest yet).
And an update on mortality also. The ABS is now releasing deaths and death rates in Australia monthly. With two colleagues, we did a paper on the statistics in Australia in 2021:
Overall, Australian mortality has been much lower than our model predicts, with around 3,900 (2.7%) fewer deaths in 2020 than predicted. This is driven by lower numbers of deaths directly attributed to respiratory illness (around 3,200 fewer than predicted). Higher than expected deaths from pneumonia at the end of March (likely undiagnosed COVID-19) have been more than offset by the much lower numbers of all respiratory deaths since mid-April.
Up to the end of March (the latest statistics) the picture is much the same, with age standardised death rates substantially lower than the range of death rates in 2015-2019. The combination of lower respiratory illnesses (due to all the various public health measures at the moment) and generally improving mortality in Australia is a good news story.
Links
An interesting follow up related to my last post, two epidemiologists point out that 80% vaccination of the population isn’t enough for herd immunity, but it will get us to a place where we can be much more open to the world:
Some vaccination programs alone can achieve herd immunity, or resilience, meaning the virus won’t spread easily and exponentially, in the absence of masks, contact tracing and the other measures we have used during the pandemic. But given the Delta variant means an average infected person infects five others without any other measures in place, and given vaccines are not perfect, Australia would need 90% of adults and children vaccinated to achieve herd immunity (through vaccination alone). This is unlikely…
…Put another way, 80% vaccination of adults pulls the effective reproductive rate down from 5.0 to 2.2, which is not enough to stop exponential spread. But a mix of mask-wearing, contact tracing and physical distancing will be enough to pull the effective reproductive rate to less than 1.0 — low enough to halt the spread of COVID-19.
As a few people have pointed, out the current situation in the UK lets us see what might happen in much more open economy, with substantial vaccination (but not yet to the kind of targets epidemiologists are talking about in Australia). Stuart McDonald from the UK Covid19 actuarial working group shows that even without the promised opening up on 19 July, hospital admissions are accelerating there, but with lower ages than previous waves and (hopefully) lower death rates.
A third wave of infections is underway in the UK. Case numbers are rising rapidly, particularly in Scotland and England. To date, as we previously highlighted, this has been a wave unlike those that came before – with vaccines meaning much better protection for higher risk groups, cases concentrated primarily in the young, and little impact on hospital numbers or deaths. Is that now beginning to change? Daily hospital admissions in England have been increasing since mid-May, indeed this was one of the reasons why Step 4 of the roadmap was pushed back from 21 June (as we advocated here). In recent days the pace of increase has accelerated – average daily admissions increased by 30% over the past week.
… In summary, it’s clear that it is no longer just cases which are increasing. Hospital admissions have risen sharply and, based on case numbers in the last week, are likely to continue to do so in the short term. How much further they could increase is difficult to predict at this stage.
The age profile of admissions is much younger than in previous waves and it looks like they result in shorter stays. Fewer admissions are resulting in deaths.
And for a change, an economic link. There has been a lot of puzzling over the disconnect between unemployment rates being back around where they were pre Covid, but employers complaining that it’s difficult to find workers (something I’ve experienced myself, as my planned rural Queensland holiday in May was cancelled due to the hotel’s lack of staff). This article suggests that it is because of inconsistent counting of labour force data.
when the ABS publishes its quarterly data, the detailed dataset includes all people who contribute to Australia’s economic activity. But when the ABS publishes its monthly data, the dataset excludes overseas non-resident workers who have been working in Australia for less than 12 months…
…employment for the usually resident Australian population surpassed its pre-COVID level this year. But the total number of people working in the economy (which includes short-term foreign workers) has not returned to its pre-COVID level. Why would that be?
Because hundreds of thousands of foreign workers have left Australia in the past year.
Normally, not counting a small part of the labour force (which is hard to find) makes little difference to the statistics, which are mostly about changes, rather than absolute numbers. But this last year, it has made a big difference.
Life Glimpses
This week is my second week of my second lockdown – by world, and even Australian standards, I’ve been pretty lucky with how little I’ve been locked down since the pandemic began. The household has quickly got back into routine – lots more walking outside (when the weather has been nice, which it usually is) and some more 500 games over zoom with friends. And I’ve been baking more with dessert three times in a row last week.
The big change for me (in thinking about lockdown), is that I’m more inclined to get a bit legalistic about the rules, if I don’t think they make sense. I haven’t broken any rules, but even with my limited lockdowns I feel a bit less patient with (for example) the fact that learning to drive isn’t a legitimate reason to leave the house, but buying some jewellery is OK. And I did go on a bike ride in search of icecream, which was definitely not an essential trip!
Bit of Beauty
We’ve had some wonderfully atmospheric fog this week in Sydney, even though it is hard to imagine today when the skies are bright blue!
Thanks, I appreciate your analysis of this confusing data.