Breakthrough Events, September 22, Age 5 to 11

There is beginning to be a bit of an indication that even in this young group, being vaxed may slightly lower risk of infection or hospitalization, but for all age groups, the fact that probably 90% of cases are unreported and that the level of incidental hospitalizations is very high, almost certainly over 50%, makes understanding relative risk difficult unless you assume that those factors affect all subgroups equally.

Dave’s notes:

1. The following charts illustrate the Covid cases and hospitalizations for the 5-11 age group. The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) does not publish breakthrough death data or booster data for the 5-11 age group. The underlying data for these charts was published on 9/22/2022.
2. This post is an update of the breakthrough charts for the 5-11 age group most recently published on 9/09/2022 here: https://healthy-skeptic.com/2022/09/09/breakthrough-events-september-8-ages-5-to-11/.
3. There are 6 charts in this set, 3 charts each for cases and hospital admissions. Each set of 3 charts consists of the actual events per week (cases or admissions); the rate per 100k each week, and the proportion of events compared to the proportion of the vaccinated or unvaccinated population.
4. Fig. 1: This chart plots the cases in the 5-11 age group per week among the unvaccinated and vaccinated but not boosted populations each week. The number of Covid cases among the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups continue to be very similar, with the number of unvaccinated cases being slightly higher than vaccinated cases for the past several weeks.
5. Fig. 2: This chart displays the case rates per 100k for each subgroup in the 5-11 age group. After the vaccinated actually having higher case rates than the unvaccinated for much of the spring of this year the rates are now nearly identical.
6. Fig. 3: This chart displays the proportion of the 5-11 population who are unvaccinated (solid blue) and vaccinated but not boosted (solid green). For each population group we also display the proportion of cases each week (dashed lines of same color). The way to interpret this chart is to compare the proportion of breakthroughs to the proportion of vaccinations for each group. For the week of 8/28/2022 40% of this age group was vaccinated (solid green line) while this group accounted for 33% of the cases (dashed green line). We would interpret this to show that being vaccinated did slightly reduce an individual’s chances of testing positive for Covid for that week.
7. Fig. 4-6: These charts display the hospital admissions, hospital admission rates per 100k, and hospital admissions proportions for the 5-11 age group, in an identical format to the case charts in Fig. 1 through Fig. 3. The vaccinated have generally had lower numbers of admissions throughout the pandemic than the unvaccinated, with some overlap in the curves (Fig. 4). Similarly, the admissions rate per 100k for the unvaccinated is generally higher than the rate for the vaccinated (Fig. 5). Fig. 6 shows that the small number of admissions makes it difficult to compare the proportion of admissions to the proportion of vaccinations. Generally it appears that being vaccinated does reduce the proportion of admissions.
8. All data is obtained from the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) Vaccine Breakthrough Weekly Update web site https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/stats/vbt.html. A data file on this site, vbtpedscirates.xlsx, contains all of the age group data.
9. MDH defines the fully vaccinated (what we have termed vaccinated but not boosted) as those who have not received a booster after completing their primary vaccination series, and had been vaccinated at least 14 days prior to testing positive.