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An Estimate of Excess COVID Deaths Resulting from Non-Vaccination
I’ve put together a calculation of the number of excess COVID deaths over the past month that have resulted from non-vaccination. Obviously, this calculation is only an estimate and relies on certain assumptions.
The algebra on this is fairly easy, though I won’t bore you with the derivation (which would be difficult to display without special text features anyway). If:
- n = number of deaths from COVID
- IRR = incident rate ratio for death from COVID (i.e. the ratio of the death rates among the unvaccinated and the vaccinated)
- PV = the percentage of the population that is vaccinated
Then the number of deaths among the vaccinated (DV) is: DV = n x PV / (PV + ((1-PV) x IRR)).
The number of deaths among the unvaccinated (DU) is: DU = n – DV
The number of excess deaths among the unvaccinated (DE) is: DE = DU (1 – 1/IRR)
The latest estimate that I’ve seen of the IRR is 11.3, from this CDC report. This means that an unvaccinated person is 11.3 times more likely to die from Covid than a vaccinated person. The CDC reports (here) that the national vaccination rate (PV) is 53.8% of the entire population, 64.9% of the population aged 18 or older, and 82.5% of the population aged 65 and over. As I suspect that Covid deaths continue to be concentrated among older people, I used two PV figures for my estimate: 65% and 80%. (Note that in these calculations, a higher PV figure results in a lower number for excess deaths among the unvaccinated, so these are conservative figures.)
Finally, I used Worldometer (here) as a source for Covid deaths, selecting the one-month period from August 12 to September 11. I calculated that a total of 39,384 deaths were reported in this period.
Here are the results, which do differ depending on the vaccination rate (PV) that I assumed for the calculation.
Assuming 65% vaccination (PV=0.65): Deaths among the vaccinated (DV) is 5,559; deaths among the unvaccinated (DU) is 33,825; excess deaths among the unvaccinated (DE) is 30,832.
Assuming 80% vaccination (PV=0.80): Deaths among the vaccinated (DV) is 10,296; deaths among the unvaccinated (DU) is 29,088; excess deaths among the unvaccinated (DE) is 26,513.
As a sensitivity analysis, I also ran the calculation for a somewhat lower death figure (38,000) and a somewhat lower vaccine effectiveness (IRR=10). This yielded estimates of excess deaths among the unvaccinated of 24,429-28,843. Obviously, these are estimates, so while I report the precise figures determined by my calculations (to the nearest whole number), I think that these figures should be interpreted as a reasonable range.
Based on these figures, I think that it’s reasonable to conclude that about 24,000 to 30,000 Americans died of COVID, during the month ending 9/11/2021, because they were not vaccinated. That’s about 8-10 times the death toll from the actual 9/11. Another way of thinking about it is that we’ve had a 9/11-worth of death every 3-4 days over the past month, due to individual decisions not to be vaccinated.
The vaccinations may have caused other problems, as there are some side effects, and there may be future side effects.
This death toll probably explains the President’s actions in mandating vaccination in a number of circumstances. You may or may not agree with his decision as a policy matter, but I think that it is important to understand the death toll that he probably considered in making his decision.
For the record, I disagree with the President’s decision about vaccine mandates. If people prefer to risk death from Covid rather than take a chance on vaccination, I would respect that decision. I respect the decision of the 24,000-30,000 Americans who, by my estimate, died during the past month or so as a result of their decision not to be vaccinated.
If I were in charge, I would not require anyone to be vaccinated. I would reopen everything including schools, put an end to all mask requirements everywhere, report the facts, and continue to offer free vaccination to any American who wants it.
Two other related points:
- The Worldometer graphs for both cases and deaths suggest that we’re past the peak of the current wave, and things are going to get better over the next month or two. No guarantees, but this seems to be the trend.
- There is some evidence that the efficacy of the vaccines diminishes over time. The CDC is now recommending a booster shot for those who received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, 8 months after their second shot, for people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised. FDA approval of this recommendation is pending. If this recommendation remains in effect, I will plan to get a booster shot myself, next January.
For those of you who are not vaccinated, I do urge you to do consider getting the shot, for the sake of your own health. Well, with some caveats. We don’t have a precise figure for risks and benefits, but my general sense is that you should probably get the shot if you’re over 40; that it’s a close call if you’re 25-40; and that you shouldn’t get the shot if you’re under 25.
However, each of you has to weigh the risks and benefits, and I will respect your decision. I hope that this information proves helpful.
Published in Healthcare
What is very clear to me is that there is still insufficient data to support vaccinating someone with potentially 40 more years to live. It certainly does not support vaccinating any of my kids, especially my 12 year old son.
What is very clear to me is that people who get Covid are sent to wait at home until respiratory distress with no treatment so that, by the time they are hospitalized, they might as well be dead.
What I have seen anecdotally (because “science” has made all else unavailable) is that people who treated their early symptoms with ivermectin or HCQ/AZ/Zinc independently of testing clinics and hospitals (because we only have jab nurses and ventilation technicians in hospitals these days) did fine. Ivermectin did better than HCQ among my friends.
I will stay so far away from the American modern health apparatus as is at all possible.
And I’m really tired of the 70 year olds on this site proselytizing vaccines to everyone here.
I will continue to do my part in being the control group for this global experiment in the hubris of mankind and their knowledge of good and evil.
How do you reconcile the data in the linked study with data out of Israel, which has better reporting, that shows the hospitalization rate for vaccinated and unvaccinated is similar? I assume the explanation is that the US does not keep good data on breakthrough infections.
I agree that the Delta wave peaked about Aug 22. Of course any mandate now well after the horse has left the barn–typical for government.
The 11.3 times figure…. Couldn’t tell if it means that you’re 11.3 times more likely to die if you get infected. Or, you’re 11.3 times more likely to die from the virus overall, measured from before you get infected.
This would make a big difference in how important a number it is.
Stina: What is very clear to me is that people who get Covid are sent to wait at home until respiratory distress with no treatment so that, by the time they are hospitalized, they might as well be dead.
What I have seen anecdotally (because “science” has made all else unavailable) is that people who treated their early symptoms with ivermectin or HCQ/AZ/Zinc independently of testing clinics and hospitals (because we only have jab nurses and ventilation technicians in hospitals these days) did fine. Ivermectin did better than HCQ among my friends.
Yep.
DonG: How do you reconcile the data in the linked study with data out of Israel, which has better reporting, that shows the hospitalization rate for vaccinated and unvaccinated is similar? I assume the explanation is that the US does not keep good data on breakthrough infections. ?
Yep. Furthermore an Israeli study has shown that people who have had COVID are 13 – yep 13 times – better protected from COVID than those who have been vaxed. But your study does not account at all for those who have already acquired immunity from COVID due to exposure, which actually is gonna be real hard, because other studies have shown that many people have already had COVID but were asymptomatic and so they did not know they had COVID. Meaning there are likely tens of millions of people here in the US that are walking around that already have immunity- so why do they need to be vaxxed with these very dangerous mRNA vaccinations?
Actually the inventor of the mRNA vaccines, Dr. Robert Malone and the Nobel Prize winning Virologist Dr. Luc Montagnier both warned that these vaccines would not create a public benefit protecting the population but would more likely create new strains of COVID, which has happened before in other vaccines. Not only that, Dr Malone and others warned that these COVID mRNA vaccine recreates in the body a very toxic pathogen- the Spike Protein of COVID – which could cause severe problems with those taking the vaccines and there is a tendency with these vaccines for this Spike Protein to reproduce and reproduce and reproduce essentially becoming a new “super Spreader” of the deadly Spike Protein.
So Jerry, there is absolutely no way to produce a scientific study that accurately forecasts an “excess of deaths” from the un-vaxxed and more likely there is greater public harm from these vaccines than a public good.
ZERO deaths are “due to” non-vaccination, or we would all be dead until vax’d. And at any rate, statistically, death is only re-scheduled by a particular cause. How many have died “early” due to impacts to life, health, and healthcare brought about by the ghastly lockdowns? It’s not zero.
One example would be people whose treatment or surgery was delayed or cancelled , and who did not make it out of the “dip”. Those numbers will never be added — that’s a whole category of “unseen” cost that will never be weighed against the obvious ones. Just because a number is harder to capture does not mean that it is less important.
Good to see some Bayes. As I said elsewhere, I do not believe the numbers coming out of our government. That makes it harder to do math, but (Praise Bayes!) not impossible.
Perhaps we can come up with a probability that the government is skewing reports to various degrees.
This, again, isolates one factor among many in death rates for covid. Lack of vaccination is a risk factor for covid. So is obesity. The CDC tells us that obesity triples the chance of hospitalization from covid. How many of those unvaccinated people who died would not have died if they weren’t obese? We could perform a similar statistical analysis and show that thousands of people die of covid every month because of their decision not to stop eating pizza and cheeseburgers. We could also do it with smoking.
Obesity is a risk factor for not just covid, but for a broad range of health problems, and accounts for something like 300,000 deaths per year in this country. (Likely a lot more, if we counted “died while fat” the way we count “died with covid.”) That’s almost 100 times the death toll from 9/11! Yet we in no way do we think those deaths justify government mandates or restrictions of freedom, no matter how “important” a politician might think them. It’s the same thing with covid. It’s a real disease that kills people, but is nothing like the unprecedented scourge that would justify the overblown reaction we have seen.
Regarding IRR estimates.
I suppose it varies. Scotland publishes some detailed mortality data by vaccination status and age.
https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/media/9031/21-09-08-covid19-publication_summary.pdf
Using that Scottish data I get something like 30X more likely to die if one is unvaccinated.
So far in 2021 there have been 298 Covid deaths among the fully vaccinated and 3101 among the unvaccinated. And there are roughly 3 million fully vaccinated vs 1 million unvaccinated.
So 11X seems like a fine estimate.
Caveat – this makes no adjustment for unvaccinated folks who have antibodies from a prior infection. We could probably come up with a guesstimate for those with antibodies from whatever course vs those without.
You’re probably right that lockdowns cost some lives, but nowhere near the numbers caused by the virus. And in the vast majority of the country the severe lockdowns ended more than a year ago. If Jerry’s analysis is correct, covid is currently killing nearly 40,000 per month, a couple of small towns worth of people. Plus, one of the benefits of widespread vaccination is that it removes the reason for lockdowns.
I’m always gratified when people respect my right to make my own decisions. Thank you!
It gets to be a lot of fun when you realize that people with only one shot and people who have only been vaccinated within the last 14 days all count as unvaccinated Covid deaths.
I would like to know how many were refused early treatment (all of them) and all treatment was withheld until they were desaturated.
I would also like to know how many of those vaccinated “unvaccinated” could reasonably be vaers cases… but won’t be.
They count as unvaccinated because they have not been vaccinated long enough to have built up an immunity. That is different from the Vaers system, where reports a based on having gotten the shot, not on the level of immunity the shot should have provided.
So basically the answer would be none of those that count as unvaccinated because they have only had one shot or had it recently would be excluded.
There really should be a 3rd category for the “partially” vaccinated, those that only had 1 of the 2 shots when looking at vaccinated vs unvaccinated deaths.
I think this is a fair OP. It shows the potential benefits of vaccination without supporting any mandates or lockdowns.
Based on the limited polling I have seen on this stuff, this is actually where the majority of Republican/Independent voters are on this issue. Vaccines are good, but so is freedom.
Good question. I’m not going to be able to answer it definitively. One of the confounding issues is age. The CDC study that I referenced calculated an age-standardized IRR. The small study from Israel doesn’t include information on age. This could be important because, if the proportion of the population vaccinated is higher among older folks, and older folks are more likely to be hospitalized, the calculation of IRR would be affected. If these assumptions are correct, calculation of the IRR for hospitalization, based on the overall population proportion of persons vaccinated, would result in an under-estimate of the actual IRR.
The article that you linked is a report, which itself links an article in Science. The article in Science is based on a very small reporting set — 514 Israelis hospitalized as of August 15, of whom 59% were fully vaccinated. The same article reports that 78% of the Israeli population aged 12 or over were vaccinated. The hospitalized were mostly elderly — the article says that of those who were both vaccinated and hospitalized, 87% were 60 or older.
My calculation of the not-age-adjusted IRR for hospitalization in Israel, based on the Science article, is 2.46 — that is, assuming uniform vaccination rates among Israeli age groups, the unvaccinated were 2.46 times less likely to be hospitalized than the vaccinated.
Moreover, this Science report seems based on very limited data. You can check out the Israeli Covid dashboard here, and the numbers have flipped on this, with higher hospitalization among the unvaccinated.
You have to look at the graph titled “Severely Ill – Immunization” and then select “absolute number” and “the whole population” on the drop-down menu. The figures that this gives are a bit different from those reported in Science, but close — as of Aug. 15, it has 531 Israelis “severely ill,” 58% of whom were vaccinated.
But as of Sep. 11, this has switched, and of the 413 Israelis who are “severely ill,” only 39% are vaccinated. That’s an IRR of about 5.4 — though again, this is not adjusted for age.
Except for “breakthroughs,” and “variants,” and whatever else they can think of.
It’s also important to note that Isreal only used Pfizer, and they didn’t give enough time between doses. More and more data tells us that more time is better between doses.
The vaccines work to prevent serious illness and death. There is no question about that.
The government has poorly handled the messaging on this. Get vaxxed, dump the mask, period. That’s all they should have said. But what they did was wring their hands and threaten and cajole and send a message to all you vaccine hesitant folks that you are right: they don’t know what the hell they are doing, and the vaccines don’t work.
But they do work.
You are all right to question the government, but I suggest ignoring the government. Ignore the knuckleheads. Ask your doctor. 96% of the time your doctor is going to recommend vaccination.
I haven’t seen any reason to believe that the doctor-on-the-street is specifically more informed and knowledgeable/trustworthy about these particular vaccines. What you’re more likely to get is just “vaccines good” because that’s what they’ve been taught.
Well, I don’t know who “they” are, but if there are people who want to impose lockdowns just for the hell of it, or for whatever nefarious schemes they have in mind, they’re doing such a terrible job that I’m not too worried about them. Their big opportunity was last winter, of course, after the holidays.
“believe what you wanna…”
Only since this pandemic have I heard from both left and right: “Your doctor doesn’t know anything…” It’s mind numbingly foolish.
There is no question in my mind that the government has misinformed us, to the point of lying. Their messaging on vaccines really couldn’t be worse. Every unvaccinated person should be unmasked and living a normal life, right now. That’s how you convince folks to get vaccinated. Not by telling every person who is vaccinated to take all of the same precautions as the unvaccinated. That’s how you say “The vaccines don’t work.”
ke davis may be wrong on vaccines and doctors, but he’s not wrong to distrust the motives of those who want to mask us and lock us back down.
Hospitalization & death rates from Covid are very age-dependent, AND, vaccination rates also vary greatly by age. Because of the interaction of these two factors, a proper analysis needs to stratify the population by age cohorts. See this analysis:
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-efficacy-vs-severe-disease-be-strong-when-60-of-hospitalized-are-vaccinated
For people 40-49, the Severe Cases per 100K population are 16 times higher for unvaccinated than for vaccinated.
You sure that link is right?
Eero Secure tells me it is not a secure website…
Excellent post on all points I am able to opine on. I didn’t even try to follow the math.
Until it doesn’t.
It’s not the vaccination I’m implacable against — it’s the tyranny.
The site is maintained by this guy:
https://www.dbei.med.upenn.edu/bio/jeffrey-s-morris-phd
…not sure why it shows up as ‘not secure’, I can access it via either Brave or Safari without any indication of security problems…(usually, these are about failure to have a current valid certificate for a site)
Unapproved information is sometimes labeled as insecure whether or not it actually is.
Jerry, I’m overall negative on a whole bunch of this nonsense, but I very much appreciate the work you put in, AND THE CLARITY you provided stepping us (unbeknownst-like) through Bayes.
If anybody is not familiar with the algebra Jerry is using, at my first (and second)glance, he is doing it right. That’s just Bayes formula, which is how to take three things to find out the fourth — but in the statistics world.
Talk to me about statistics some time (not you Jerry). Short version — exact answers are not true, and true answers are not exact. Statistics is the most correct way to treat anything that happens in reality, contrived examples (counting apples) notwithstanding.
One more point on the Israelis. It looks like the Israelis are leading the way in the booster-shot possibility. They’re administering a third shot to people, and it looks like they’re sharing their data.
This is a good thing. I think that Israel has been punching about its weight in fighting Covid, and deserve some thanks from the rest of us, though I imagine that they’re just doing what they think best to protect their own population. Even if their approach doesn’t work out as well as hoped, we’ll all learn something from it.
I don’t know enough to evaluate the accuracy of your post. But when I read an article like this one, I am not that impressed with the benefits of the vaccine. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2112981