A Quick Note on Relative Infections

Dave’s usual excellent work we be on display shortly on breakthrus, but as we passed a major milestone today in Minnesota I want to make a couple of quick observations that even DOH can’t hide.   We passed one million reported detected “cases” today.  In a normal world, 99% of these would be considered cases of a cold and we would ignore them.  And there likely are at least that many undetected cases; most recent estimates are that more like two to two and a half million Minnesotans have been “infected”.

But here is what is interesting.  According to the state’s own data, the total number of reinfections is only over 12,000.  That is around a 1% rate on detected cases and probably less than half a percent on total infections.

Meanwhile, we already have a 4% breakthrough infection rate, according to today’s data.  That is likely also an undercount, both because the state misses some vaxed people and because breakthrus may be mild and also undetected.  But let’s go with the state’s numbers.  At this high level, breakthroughs are either 4 times or 8 times more likely than reinfections.  So what is more protective against infection–prior infection, or vax?

Now again, these numbers should be age-adjusted, but let me just show you at a high level some case rates.  At just over one million total cases and 10,359 deaths, we have a mortality rate of about 1%.  And with over 50,000 hospitalizations, we have a hosp rate of over 5%.  Cut those in half if you want to include likely undetected infections.   (Again I am ignoring the absurd death and hosp. attribution methods.)

Now look at breakthroughs.  We have 133,065 breakthrough cases.  We have 5292 hospitalizations reported,  or a 4% case rate.  We have 1011 deaths reported, or a .76% death rate.  Again, make whatever adjustment you think appropriate for undetected breakthrough cases, but remember we likely aren’t catching all breakthrough hosps and deaths either.  My main point is that the breakthrough hosp and death case rates don’t look so different at a high level.

Now I always mention the big confounder–what is the overlap between prior infection and vaccination?  But I suspect if properly allocated, this would show the same or better protection from prior infection.  This is not to dismiss vaccines, they obviously are extremely protective against serious disease when you do a proper analysis, but people need to be aware of how either stupid or reckless people like our dumb-ass Governor and life-long bureaucratic hack Tony Fauci were when they said the vaccines would end the epidemic and it should cause the citizenry to be very skeptical of any similar pronouncements on anything relating to the epidemic from these jackasses.  Sorry for the insults, but I am fired up today by what we have done and are doing to our children, and how flippantly some people excuse it, like Paul Mirengoff over at Powerline.  He uses the usual “children are resilient” lame line, which is totally unsupported by any research.