CV and mad panic behaviour

[Mav]

Interesting article in the SMH: The truth about what vaccines are achieving, from a country getting it right
The opening 2 paragraphs and the last paragraph are:

By now you’ve probably heard Scott Morrison’s argument, which goes something like this: Australia can’t yet talk about a post-pandemic future because we still don’t know whether vaccines guarantee a return to normality.

To illustrate the point, the Prime Minister regularly notes COVID-19 cases are climbing in Britain even though 85 per cent of all adults have been given one dose of a vaccine and 62 per cent the full two.

...

The Prime Minister is entitled to defend his strategy. But he also has an obligation to not cherry pick the facts about a vaccination program far more successful than his own.

It makes these points:

• Infections were always going to increase as the UK came out of lockdown.
  
• While infections are up, deaths are much lower than previously for comparable cases.
  
• Of the 92,000 people infected with the Delta variant since Feb, only 7.8% involve those who were double vaccinated.
  
• Nobody in England aged under 50 and double jabbed has died from the Delta variant this year.
  
• It’s believed the vaccines have prevented about 7 million from being infected.
  

The fact that the double vaccinated are still being infected and some are dying is due to the vulnerability of older people:

David Spiegelhalter, the chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge, and Anthony Masters, a statistical ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society, have a simple explanation for why so many fully vaccinated people died: the vaccines are not perfect and older people will always be at most risk.

“The risk of dying from COVID-19 is extraordinarily dependent on age: it halves for each six to seven year age gap,” they wrote in The Guardian. “This means that someone aged 80 who is fully vaccinated essentially takes on the risk of an unvaccinated person of around 50 – much lower, but still [it’s] not nothing, and so we can expect some deaths.”

This highlights the need to vaccinate the workers at aged care centres as well as the residents.