Let me make this brief, but I think that this illustration is going to be increasingly important going forward. From The Detroit News today (Michigan’s better newspaper, alas), but behind a paywall.
OK, before I get into the details, let me point out that the headline is already a lie. So the folks in the southern US (scroll down to map) recently became huge proponents of vaccination, then, apparently? No, it is the most obvious thing in the world that regional and seasonal patterns are easily swamping out anything the humans think they are doing to control the virus. Vaccination is, at best, a minor factor, especially when it concerns counting cases. So we’re already lying in the headline here.
And then the paragraph that made me want to comment:
Unvaccinated residents are more than three times likelier to have contracted the virus amid the ongoing surge than those who have been fully vaccinated. The number of cases among unvaccinated residents over the 30-day period amounted to 1.67% of the unvaccinated population. The number of breakthrough cases amounted to 0.5% of the vaccinated population.
Assuming those numbers are correct, here is what is actually true: “in terms of total population numbers, unvaccinated individuals were three times more likely to have a confirmed positive test”. But these authors rewrote that as “three times likelier to have contracted the virus”. At a minimum, they don’t know if that is true, and it probably isn’t.
It remains true, as it has for two years now, that you find cases where you go and look for them. If you have a “vaccinate or test” regime, which already exists to some extent, guess which group you’re going to test more often… so guess where you’re going to find more cases… now you’ve got it. That certainly doesn’t mean, as claimed here, that where you went and looked for cases is actually where most of them are. And you certainly can’t make that claim quantitative and walk the 3x number over from official testing and claim it also means 3x in terms of real disease prevalence! You’re getting some red comments on your lab report for that one. If you had randomized testing of both groups, maybe then you could, but the present situation is likely closer to biased testing of one group.
This is lies with statistics to serve a certain narrative. With two years, now, to understand that cases are significantly a function of testing, and also that regional and seasonal patterns easily swamp out human control efforts, legacy media seems dedicated to continuing to ignore both.
A quick Friday comment to remind you that the media is still lying to you with statistics
Taking on the headline alone: the virus is what propels a surge. The virus has no idea whether the people it infects have been vaccinated. It also reads as if the headline writer's ignorant about how the vaccines don't have much impact on infection or transmission volumes.
This is from my extremely left wing local tv station. https://wr.al/1LsYk “Unvaccinated people in NC are 25 times more likely to die of COVID-19…
Unvaccinated North Carolinians were also five times — or more than 500% — more likely to get coronavirus when compared to those who are vaccinated last week.”
My question is how are they defining vaccinated? Or it is it all lying with statistics?