COVID Question for the Medical Folks

[Half Fast]

There has been a lot of debate regarding what the real likelihood of contracting COVID-19 is, and also much debate over how many cases become severe or life threatening. So far the data has been quite questionable due to differences in testing, in reporting, sampling bias, etc. In some cases political agendas may have distorted the data.

But maybe we have some good data now as a result of the vaccine trials.

Preliminary clinical trials have just concluded for two vaccines. The trials included over 40,000 people, half of whom received a placebo. The participants represent a range of ages, ethnicities, and so forth. The trials, to be meaningful, had to be consistent in testing for the virus and had to have a consistent definition of what a "severe" case is.

So what did we learn from the placebo group? The accuracy of the reported efficacy for the vaccines can be no better than the accuracy of data on the placebo group.

Shouldn't we now have a good idea what the probabilities are for unvaccinated people to catch COVID, to exhibit symptoms, to require hospitalization, or to die?

I haven't seen these placebo results reported in the media, so I'm hoping some of you knowledgeable physicians, biochemists, and researchers might have read the trial results and be able to shed some light.

Anybody?

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I think the data from the trials is one good way to estimate that probability.

Another approach is just to take total new cases and divide by the population of the state. That is likely cruder as it allows a strong confound of the number of tests performed. Nonetheless, consider AZ, which has 5871 daily new cases on average over the last 7 days. Population of 7,286,000. So that is 0.08% per day.

If the exposure time of the Moderna group was 1 month plus two weeks, that would work out to 56 days, so one might expect 4.5% based on that average from Arizona, which is almost an order of magnitude higher than observed. Of course, these are in different timeframes.