Also, I'm a bit worried about children under 12, for whom there's not yet an approved vaccine. So far they are low risk, but IIUC, we don't fully know why that is, which makes me concerned that the erosion of that relative safety is just one variant away. I'd feel better if we could get them the same sort of highly effective immune system protection we're able to trigger in teens and adults.

sprout said:

Meanwhile, selecting just Vermont gives a lower percentage of Immune (62.7%) than the percent fully vaccinated (64.1%).  

Adding that "No data" for Recovered seems to be doing something quirky.  I think that formula and chart needs another round of QA.

Maybe the percentage is lower because they are taking into account that the vaccine is less than 100% effective?

Clearly, we need covid vaccine for children.   

Duterte threatens to vaccinate anti-vaxxers with jail time or a shot of Terp's favorite treatment: Ivermectin which in the Philippines is intended for pigs:

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-duterte-threatens-those-who-refuse-covid-19-vaccine-with-jail-2021-06-21/

jamie said:

Duterte threatens to vaccinate anti-vaxxers with jail time or a shot of Terp's favorite treatment: Ivermectin which in the Philippines is intended for pigs:

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-duterte-threatens-those-who-refuse-covid-19-vaccine-with-jail-2021-06-21/

 That's not completely accurate. Ivermectin is used in both humans and animals to treat specific parasites. Give that medicine the respect it deserves.

True about Ivermectin.  Also true that like almost all drugs, it has rare serious side effects, just like the vaccines.  You would think, per Terp, that because its an old drug it's as safe as drinking water. Not.

bub said:

True about Ivermectin.  Also true that like almost all drugs, it has rare serious side effects, just like the vaccines.  You would think, per Terp, that because its an old drug it's as safe as drinking water. Not.

 even aspirin has side effects.  Doctors are starting to backtrack from low-dose aspirin regimens to prevent stroke due to concerns about GI bleeding.

A major change for daily aspirin therapy

jamie said:

Duterte threatens to vaccinate anti-vaxxers with jail time or a shot of Terp's favorite treatment: Ivermectin which in the Philippines is intended for pigs:

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-duterte-threatens-those-who-refuse-covid-19-vaccine-with-jail-2021-06-21/

 now THAT is compelling people to be vaccinated.

can we all agree that NOBODY here has suggested anything close to compulsory vaccinations?

From government, All I've seen is a lot of bribing and begging to get people to vaccinate.  Is that an assault on freedom?  Is mere criticism from fellow citizens a violation of someone's constitutional rights?

meanwhile, there are indications that the rate of infections is rising in states where vaccination rates are low.

Coincidence I'm sure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-21/covid-rebounds-in-u-s-south-where-many-have-shunned-vaccines

drummerboy said:

meanwhile, there are indications that the rate of infections is rising in states where vaccination rates are low.

Coincidence I'm sure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-21/covid-rebounds-in-u-s-south-where-many-have-shunned-vaccines

 lol I like how the graphic for "Tracking COVID-19" starts off with stats you'd expect -- number of cases, number of deaths, that sort of thing -- then ends with MSCI World Index of global stocks and treasury bond yields. Know your readership I suppose.

The idea that one person got infected in the lab, due to a leak, and spread it to the entire world is the stuff of espionage novels. There’s no evidence to support that theory. It is far more likely that animals were infected and people picked up the virus from them. Sars-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. The very first cases in China came out of the wuhan market, in people who have stalls selling wild and illegal animals, and regular customers. Animals that are slaughtered in front of the customer. 
The Chinese knew the severity of the virus, and acted rapidly in shutting down the market immediately. They know what they eat. This virus can not be manufactured. It’s in bats and pangolins. Cats have it. For all we know it could have been taken to the market by someone who got infected from a cat. We are debating theories really. That market was thoroughly sanitized so whatever evidence is lost. China knew this thing was highly contagious and deadly, sadly we in the west think we know it all, and allow political garbage to get in our minds.

I was doing remote work with a kid via Zoom in the Fall of 2019. His family would go back and forth from China and New Providence (dad works for Astra Zeneca). They actually live near Wuhan. They were supposed to return in December but that was canceled. The kid and his mom were telling me about just how suddenly and comprehensively they shut down everything. They were taking it seriously. 

Jaytee said:

The Chinese knew the severity of the virus, and acted rapidly in shutting down the market immediately. They know what they eat. This virus can not be manufactured. --- snip---
China knew this thing was highly contagious and deadly, sadly we in the west think we know it all, and allow political garbage to get in our minds.

Further on the issue of heart issues, covid, and the vaccine:

Heart Problems After Vaccination Are Very Rare, Federal Researchers Say (NYT)

The heart problems reported are myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle; and pericarditis, inflammation of the lining around the heart. The risk is higher after the second dose of an mRNA vaccine than after the first, the researchers reported, and much higher in men than in women.

But overall, the side effect is very uncommon — just 12.6 cases per million second doses administered. The researchers estimated that out of a million second doses given to boys ages 12 to 17, the vaccines might cause a maximum of 70 myocarditis cases, but would prevent 5,700 infections, 2,215 hospitalizations and two deaths.
...
Most cases were mild, with symptoms like fatigue, chest pain and disturbances in heart rhythm that quickly cleared up, the researchers said. Of the 484 cases reported in Americans under age 30, the C.D.C. has definitively linked 323 cases to vaccination. The rest remain under investigation.

And:

Covid-19 itself may cause heart problems in young people. A large study of collegiate athletes showed that 2.3 percent of those who had recovered from Covid-19 had heart abnormalities consistent with myocarditis.

“It’s going to be manifold more common to get heart muscle inflammation from getting Covid than you would from getting a vaccine, even in young men,” Dr. de Lemos said.

In an ideal world, we could avoid any risk of heart issues altogether, avoiding both the small risk posed by vaccines and the much larger risk of severe outcomes (not just heart issues) posed by covid. Given how widespread and contagious covid is -- even more so with the emergence of the delta variant -- that's not the world we live in. We can choose if we're going to roll the die with the small risk of a bad outcome (vaccines), or the die with the large risk of bad outcomes (covid), but we don't get to choose to not play at all.

are we finally past the point where anyone honestly seeking good information and thinking through all the risks of COVID-19, and the risks and benefits of the vaccines would thoughtfully come to the conclusion not to be vaccinated?

Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated

Nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. now are in people who weren’t vaccinated, a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been and an indication that deaths per day — now down to under 300 — could be practically zero if everyone eligible got the vaccine.  

An Associated Press analysis of available government data from May shows that “breakthrough” infections in fully vaccinated people accounted for fewer than 1,200 of more than 853,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations. That’s about 0.1%.

fully vaccinated people in Israel are getting covid19.    https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_60d6661ce4b066ff5aba8faa

Jaytee said:

fully vaccinated people in Israel are getting covid19.    https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_60d6661ce4b066ff5aba8faa

 The tone of that article feels a bit alarmist and unhelpful to me. It's emphasis is on the fact that people who are vaccinated can still be infected. Contrast, for instance, with the same story in the NYT, which acknowledges that some of those getting infected have been vaccinated, but where the emphasis of the story is on localized restrictions happening against a background of very low rates of death and hospitalizations: "Despite the new outbreak, the country’s current death rate remains close to zero, and only 26 of 729 active coronavirus patients were hospitalized."

What I take away from these developments we are seeing in Israel and elsewhere is:

- the vaccines have dramatically reduced rates of infection

- "breakthrough" infections do occur, but are much less likely to be serious

- the delta variant is very contagious and bears close watch, and even small pockets of unvaccinated people in a population can lead to larger outbreaks -- and in those scenarios you're much safer vaccinated than not

- countries with the political ability to respond quickly and aggressively are doing so to avoid losing the progress they've made against the virus.

I have a hard time seeing the US reinstating any social distancing when the next big surge comes. I can imagine some areas, such as here in the northeast, reinstating mask mandates. I'd expect we'll see the next surge diverge very sharply in the way it plays out, with places that have a high level of vaccination seeing a small surge but other parts of the country getting hit pretty badly. We won't be unscathed here in NJ, but I can't imagine it approaching anything like as bad as previous waves.

The report from Israel concerns me.  It seem to undermine the initial, optimistic reports that full vaccination is 88% effective against Delta.  I hope I'm wrong.   The fallback question is does vaccination limit the seriousness of breakthrough cases involving Delta.

bub said:

The report from Israel concerns me.  It seem to undermine the initial, optimistic reports that full vaccination is 88% effective against Delta.  I hope I'm wrong.   The fallback question is does vaccination limit the seriousness of breakthrough cases involving Delta.

 I guess the important data to look at for the bottom line is the extent to which those vaccinated people who contracted COVID-19 Delta became ill. The hospitalization and death rates are getting more attention when it comes to describing the efficacy of the vaccines and their protection against the current and future variants.

Regarding the heart side effects in young men, I thought i heard in the first reports that the incidence after vaccination was actually not higher than the incidence in the general population.  Then reports stopped saying that.  Anybody know if it's true/false?  If true, the news media are dropping the ball big time.

Short term good news, take it for what its worth.  After an apparently Delta-driven spike to hundreds of daily new cases after a long stretch of low double digit daily cases, cases in Israel have been dropping for days and were down to double digits again yesterday.  We'll see how it goes.

Nothing alarming (yet) in the NJ numbers as far as I can tell.  Daily new case numbers bounce around in the low 100s.  The hospitalization and ventilator numbers continue to decline and are quite low.

A couple of articles from The Atlantic on recent topics on this thread. On myocarditis, a snippet from Doctors Are Puzzled by Heart Inflammation in the Young and Vaccinated:

The most reliable way to inflame the heart is to bother it with a virus. Many types of viruses can manage it—coxsackieviruses, flu viruses, herpesviruses, adenoviruses, even the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Some of these pathogens bust their way straight into cardiac tissue, damaging cells directly; others rile up the immune system so overzealously that the heart gets caught in the crossfire. Whatever the cause, the condition is typically mild, but can occasionally be severe enough to permanently compromise the heart, requiring lifesaving interventions including ventilators or organ transplants; in very rare cases, it’s fatal.

That is decidedly not what we’re seeing in the CDC’s recent reports. The agency has confirmed more than 500 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis—inflammation of the heart itself or of the lining that shrouds it—in people younger than 30 who recently received Pfizer-BioNTech’s or Moderna’s two-shot COVID-19 vaccines. These events are, so far, not matching the most terrifying versions of the condition, which have been observed with coronavirus infections. Rather, compared with more typical cases of myocarditis, the ones linked to the vaccines, on average, involve briefer symptoms and speedier recoveries, even with less invasive treatments. Still, the incidents are showing up in the few days that follow each vaccine’s second dose at higher-than-expected rates, especially in boys and young men, and no one is yet sure why.

And on the delta variant and the effectiveness of vaccines, from The 3 Simple Rules That Underscore the Danger of Delta (by Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the pandemic):

But even against Delta, full vaccination—with a heavy emphasis on full—is effective. Two doses of Pfizer’s vaccine are still 88 percent effective at preventing symptomatic Delta infections, according to a U.K. study, and 96 percent effective at preventing hospitalization. (A single dose, however, is only 33 percent effective at stopping symptomatic infection.) Israel, a highly vaccinated country, is experiencing a small Delta surge, but so far, none of the new cases has been severe. And while about 30 percent of those new cases have been in fully vaccinated people, this statistic reflects, in part, the country’s success at vaccination. Because Israel has fully vaccinated about 85 percent of adults, you would expect many new infections to occur in that very large group. “It does seem like the vaccines are holding their own against the variants,” Emma Hodcroft, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern, told me. “That’s something we can take some comfort from.”

Though, regarding the second article I quoted from, it ends with a warning that the longer the virus can circulate among unvaccinated people, the greater the chance a variant will emerge the current vaccines are not effective against. Even on that note, though, Yong still points out that "we’re unlikely to be as vulnerable as we were at the beginning of the pandemic. The vaccines induce a variety of protective antibodies and immune cells, so it’s hard for a variant virus to evade them all." That outcome most likely means booster shots, not that we'd be back at square one.

Is it really a small surge in Israel?  For  a while they were down to low double digit new cases per day.  It's been about 300 cases per day for four days straight.  Troubling.

bub said:

Is it really a small surge in Israel?  For  a while they were down to low double digit new cases per day.  It's been about 300 cases per day for four days straight.  Troubling.

What is the breakdown in new cases between vaccinated and unvaccinated people?  What is the breakdown in severity of illness between vaccinated and unvaccinated people?

For the anti-vaxxers, I wonder what level of dying would be sufficient to change their minds.  It seems to me that if the pandemic had started with the delta variant, our healthcare system would have collapsed in many, if not all parts of the country and law and order would have fallen apart in some parts of the country.

tjohn said:

For the anti-vaxxers, I wonder what level of dying would be sufficient to change their minds.  It seems to me that if the pandemic had started with the delta variant, our healthcare system would have collapsed in many, if not all parts of the country and law and order would have fallen apart in some parts of the country.

 For the ones who are actual vaccine hesitant, I imagine they will be more likely to get vaccinated. For those for whom being anti-vaxx is part of their core identity, the answer is probably "none."

PVW said:

 For the ones who are actual vaccine hesitant, I imagine they will be more likely to get vaccinated. For those for whom being anti-vaxx is part of their core identity, the answer is probably "none."

I would guess that the core anti-vaxxers (except maybe those with a long-standing religious basis) would become extinct if their children started dying in any numbers.

tjohn said:

PVW said:

 For the ones who are actual vaccine hesitant, I imagine they will be more likely to get vaccinated. For those for whom being anti-vaxx is part of their core identity, the answer is probably "none."

I would guess that the core anti-vaxxers (except maybe those with a long-standing religious basis) would become extinct if their children started dying in any numbers.

 Up until now, at least, most of the anti-vaxxers children have been protected from various diseases by the herd immunity achieved thanks to those who don't share their views. It remains to be seen whether that will be true for Covid.

bub said:

Is mere criticism from fellow citizens a violation of someone's constitutional rights?

 No