michaelm wrote:I know that Israel are revaccinating health workers at 6 months, which means I will get myself revaccinated at that time since my over riding concern is to make my risk of transmitting the virus to patients as low as possible which is a strong concern for most health workers of my acquaintance; this is my personal opinion and attitude, and anecdotal of course, I don't give health advice over the internet. I have been required to be vaccinated against Hepatitis B for decades, and so should I be, and it is a requirement to provide proof of immunity against measles, rubella, varicella etc to work in public hospitals in my part of the world.
There are "nuances' as you are wont to put it in regard to Israel. They didn't really vaccinate as high a proportion of their population as was implied, given they didn't vaccinate children under 16 and have a young population, and hence really only vaccinated 68% of their population, with the delta variant infecting children more easily and spread by them which wasn't overly the case with the original version of the virus; thankfully they still have a low rate of severe illness. Orthodox Jews had a low vaccination rate and have been over represented in the recent/current wave of hospitalisations and deaths. There also now appears to be involvement of Simpson's paradox, given that if you have a high rate of vaccination sure those hospitalised will include vaccinated patients, but the large majority of vaccinated patients are not hospitalised. The death rate is also much lower than with the initial wave anyway.
In Israel they vacicnate from age 12, not 16, 50% of ages 12-16 are vaccinated, most countries don't vaccinate
https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general?tileName=vaccinatedByAgeThe rest of the age groups are 80-90% That is very high vaccination rate, 40% of the whole population have ben vaccinated 3 times, they are having one of the worst waves in the world right now.
michaelm wrote:Singapore has an astonishingly low death rate, but always have had which has puzzled me; no doubt they do have a good health system. There is some speculation that they will come out of the current wave with strong herd immunity due to the hybrid immunity which has been discussed by others. There are some who have considered their figures rubbery all along because they have tended not to count their migrant worker population.
Why is death rate important? the mandate is to stop transmission from unvaxxed to vaxxed.
michaelm wrote:I believe vaccines more broadly active against corona viruses in general are likely to come out of all this, and a clinical trial has already commenced in the UK of a vaccine directed against an element of corona viruses less mutable than the spike protein. The current vaccines can also be tweaked against the new variants of concern, which arose from rampant spread of the virus in unvaccinated populations btw.
Also btw the UK tried a herd immunity approach for a few weeks in the initial stages of the pandemic, with disastrous results, and that was with the less infectious and probably less lethal original version of the virus.
Sweden has almost no COVID now, their age adjusted death rate is better than many countries who did lockdown.
Vaccination is totally voluntary there.
