As patients stream into a Covid
I.C.U. in Florida, hopes fade.
MIAMI — The resurgence of the coronavirus has burdened hospitals anew across the country, with a rush of patients fueled by the virus’s virulent Delta variant catching doctors off guard. Florida has reported the highest daily average hospitalizations in the nation, 36 for every 100,000 people over the past two weeks...
Health workers...at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, feel disbelief that they must endure another surge.
...
Jackson, Florida’s largest public hospital, had 232 Covid-19 patients on Friday, still half the 485 it had on July 27, 2020, its pandemic peak. But a sharp rise in recent hospitalizations prompted administrators to limit visitors and warn that more stringent measures could soon be necessary.
‘The war has changed.’ In just days,
the U.S. shifts tactics against the virus.
What a difference a week makes.
...
“This virus is in the driver’s seat and we are chasing it,” said Dr. Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and former C.D.C. scientist.
It was a sharp turnaround from the national mood in early July, when President Biden had promised Americans that a more normal life would resume in time for Independence Day parties, describing the holiday as the start of a “summer of freedom.” Instead, in one episode in Provincetown, Mass., an outbreak that began after the town’s Fourth of July festivities has grown to more than 880 cases — almost three-quarters of them among fully vaccinated people.
It is just one episode, one episode chosen by CDC for one study because of its prominence, the levels of full vaccination among victims and in the state, and the availability of good, hard data. I wondered about this last night: Is there reason to doubt generalizing from this "one episode"? CDC did not think so. "In just days" they shifted from vaccinations as their "most important strategy" to coequals, vax and masks. Is there reason to believe this one episode is aberrational? The infection rates among the fully vaccinated in Provincetown (Barnstable County) were truly astonishing to scientists and laypeople alike. Every other study has found the vaccines are extraordinarily efficacious in preventing 1) infection 2) hospitalization ("serious illness") and, 3) death from COVID-19 and only slightly less effective against the Delta variant. Yet, you can't prove that by the data from Provincetown-Barnstable County. In fact, that data proves pretty near the opposite: more, both in raw numbers and as a percentage, of infections among the fully vaccinated than in the "other" category. "Similar" viral loads; more hospitalizations (albeit with a very small, perhaps unreliable sample size). Staying firmly in our lane and dispensing with the "less" and "more", we encounter this solid bedrock from Provincetown-Barnstable County data:
It does not follow from the data on this one outbreak that vaccination is an efficacious strategy against Delta
The CDC paper on Provincetown-Barnstable County acnowledges that bedrock:
