Some further context for FL: our population of 65+ is over 4 million. The *entire* population of the state of Connecticut is around 3.5 million. So imagine CT, but the only people that live there are seniors.
There are, to date, about 600,000 unvaccinated seniors left in FL, and if you figure VE of what, a generous 80% (I'm pulling that number out of thin air)for those seniors fully vaccinated (and they were vaccinated early, as Brandon points out below, so effectiveness may be waning), you have about a million old people for the virus to bat around like a cat on catnip.
In short: FL is hard to pattern-match because its elderly population makes it an outlier state.
Two things you didn't address is that a very large proportion of new cases are in unvaccinated people and this variant is more transmissible. Imagine what these curves would look like without the vaccines.
Also the vaccine effectiveness wanes after about 8 months and earlier in the elderly. Israel is seeing the effects of their early and quick vaccination rate.
Part of the reason I didn't address this is because this is really hard to know. There are a lot of reports of "95% of hospitalization are unvaccinated" or something and I'm really nervous about those numbers because there is no centralized data repository that actually tracks this. All these reports are ad-hoc proclamations and that makes me very uncertain.
Added to this the fact that we can look at a place like Hawaii and they have basically universal vaccination among their elderly population (99%) but their elderly population is still being hospitalized with COVID at really high rates. That doesn't make me doubt the efficacy of vaccines, but it does make me question the "X% of cases / hospitalizations are unvaccinated" stories.
It probably various by state, but my state reports the vaccination status of new cases. As we move forward, there is an increasing number (though still small) of breakthrough cases suggesting reduced immunity. However, the hospitalizations and deaths are almost (99%) in unvaccinated according to our dept of health.
Some further context for FL: our population of 65+ is over 4 million. The *entire* population of the state of Connecticut is around 3.5 million. So imagine CT, but the only people that live there are seniors.
There are, to date, about 600,000 unvaccinated seniors left in FL, and if you figure VE of what, a generous 80% (I'm pulling that number out of thin air)for those seniors fully vaccinated (and they were vaccinated early, as Brandon points out below, so effectiveness may be waning), you have about a million old people for the virus to bat around like a cat on catnip.
In short: FL is hard to pattern-match because its elderly population makes it an outlier state.
Two things you didn't address is that a very large proportion of new cases are in unvaccinated people and this variant is more transmissible. Imagine what these curves would look like without the vaccines.
Also the vaccine effectiveness wanes after about 8 months and earlier in the elderly. Israel is seeing the effects of their early and quick vaccination rate.
Part of the reason I didn't address this is because this is really hard to know. There are a lot of reports of "95% of hospitalization are unvaccinated" or something and I'm really nervous about those numbers because there is no centralized data repository that actually tracks this. All these reports are ad-hoc proclamations and that makes me very uncertain.
Added to this the fact that we can look at a place like Hawaii and they have basically universal vaccination among their elderly population (99%) but their elderly population is still being hospitalized with COVID at really high rates. That doesn't make me doubt the efficacy of vaccines, but it does make me question the "X% of cases / hospitalizations are unvaccinated" stories.
It probably various by state, but my state reports the vaccination status of new cases. As we move forward, there is an increasing number (though still small) of breakthrough cases suggesting reduced immunity. However, the hospitalizations and deaths are almost (99%) in unvaccinated according to our dept of health.
I don't want to be cynical, but just eyeballing the curves, they seem consistent with the hypothesis that vaccines don't do much.
I appreciate getting these “every state’s Covid numbers” wrap ups. Very useful in understanding what is going on.