The Covid19 outbreak in NSW continues to grow despite a gradually tightening lockdown. The current doubling time is about 11 days, meaning that my simple model is projecting 1,000 cases a day by the end of August. It seems the only way out is vaccination. How much vaccination? The DohertyContinue Reading
What factors seem to lead to higher or lower vaccination rates in NSW? I’ve adjusted the NSW location vaccination rates for the age mix of each location. The strongest correlation is with income levels – the higher the income, the more likely the population is to have had at least one dose of vaccine. Surprisingly, the percentage of the population who speaks a language other than English doesn’t seem to make much difference. Continue Reading
With the delta variant widespread, Australia needs to aim for around 80% vaccination of the whole population before widespread opening of international borders to avoid lockdowns and unacceptably high deaths from Covid19, based on my use of The University of Melbourne’s Covid19 modelling. We could open up in a limited way at earlier levels (at least 50% of the population vaccinated), but to avoid frequent lockdowns, we would have to limit international arrivals until vaccination is close to population wide. And even when opening up happens, many of the non pharmaceutical measures (like masks, contact tracing, regular testing etc) we have grown used to since Covid19 came to Australia will still be with us.Continue Reading
As Sydney grapples with the Delta virus and our second week of lockdown, I thought a look at Taiwan might be instructive. Taiwan is nearly two months ahead of Sydney with its first real Covid19 outbreak of the whole pandemic. And while everyone is looking at Melbourne, other places inContinue Reading
At current 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.Continue Reading
Australia has had very little Covid19 compared with the rest of the world, due to very strict border controls and lockdowns. But with the rest of the world opening up as their populations are increasingly vaccinated, how does Australia do the same? I look at some initial modelling from the Burnet Institute. My key takeaways? The better the vaccine efficacy (particularly against any form of infection and transmission) the more we can open up without serious Covid19 disease. And waiting until a reasonable proportion of the population is vaccinated (say 40%) makes a real difference to the incidence of severe disease and death.Continue Reading
I wanted to do some interesting analysis of who is getting vaccinated in Australia, in the different categories, now that more than 4 million doses have been delivered. But I can’t. Why not? Because unlike every other rich country I have randomly googled, very little data is publicly available. So instead, I’ve looked at what data other countries have been tracking, and why it would help our rollout.Continue Reading
How do we balance the risks of vaccines and the benefits of our population being vaccinated? How do we balance the individual risks and benefits and the collective risks and benefits?
My view is that we should be asking people to take remote individual risks (such as vaccination complications) for the collective benefit (ultimately population immunity against Covid19). And we need to have this conversation as a society as population immunity becomes closer.Continue Reading
Here in Australia, Pfizer and Astra Zeneca have been approved and are being rolled out. So how effectively they will create herd immunity? Early indications are the Pfizer vaccine has a good chance of getting a population to herd immunity, but the Astra Zeneca vaccine, is far less likely to get us there.Continue Reading
Just how effective is the Astra Zeneca vaccine? Better than a flu vaccine, but not as good as Pfizer or Moderna. The Australian government is quoting efficacy of 82%, which is the results of a subset of the clinical trial results – what happens with two standard doses, at least 12 weeks apart. Because it’s only a subset of the full clinical trial, the range of possible outcomes around that 82% is quite wide – 63% to 92%. I would take it if it was offered to me.Continue Reading