Have digested the latest excellent technical briefing from @PHE_uk on variants and Delta (the variant formerly known as B.1.617.2) in particular. as ever, all findings are context dependent and should be interpreted with care, but this is serious and deserves a wide audience 1/?
-
-
The data on vaccine effectiveness in the report is not broken down by vaccine unfortunately, but the assessment specifically states this. I can see several sources of bias and wouldn't call either way on this now. But nailing down the answer to this is going to be important 7/?pic.twitter.com/1UwMmRIU1S
Show this thread -
It is also possible that the reduced effectiveness might be consistent with much milder infection in vaccinees. But we don't know right now. Quite a lot of younger people in the UK, and indeed people in general in some places, are yet to receive any shot! 8/?
Show this thread -
Next thing. Early data, but consistent between England and Scotland, suggests Delta is more likely to lead to hospitalization than Alpha. This is less secure than the other findings and as yet does not seem to have been broken down by vaccine status 9/?
Show this thread -
This is going to take time to unfold and people should be patient. It takes time to resolve infections and see what happens in the course of disease, and the situation is changing quickly. We're not even 28 days from a lot of these diagnoses 10/?
Show this thread -
(for those really paying attention, for the English data a stratified Cox proportional hazard regression was used that *did* adjust for vaccine status among many other things, but I think more work is still needed on this) 11/?
Show this thread -
Reinfections don't seem to have been noticeable so far at least
#OptimismSpa. This is good news, but the cohorts being followed for reinfection are far smaller than the total cohorts receiving vaccines, and so I am unsure how detectable a difference would be. Time will tell 12/?Show this thread -
This figure highlights schools as a common exposure in contact tracing. This should be interpreted in terms of local context I can't provide, but I believe that infection control in high schools in particular has been patchy and recently relaxed. Please read the next tweet 13/npic.twitter.com/FcCgols3X5
Show this thread -
Note that before saying whether or not schools should be closed, you need to think about how you can mitigate transmission within them, and the consequences of transmission from kids to adults who may be vaccinated. Again, the nature of breakthrough disease matters a lot 14/?
Show this thread -
To all involved in producing this. The significance for the UK depends on how well the current vaccines protect (I'd guess quite well against severe illness) but elsewhere we need to be vaccinating more 15/?Show this thread -
I'd note too that I will revisit this as data comes in for the UK! The accelerated delivery of 2nd doses is certainly wise at the moment. let's not see how many times Delta can double before it runs out of people to infect 16/n
Show this thread -
Finally this is awesome news, but there are *far* more than 80m people needing vaccines in the world. Once your community is highly vaccinated, please remember others that have not been as fortunate https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/3/biden-details-plan-sharing-80m-vaccine-doses-world/ … 17/end
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.