Covid infections are up by 68%, over the past two weeks, in my county

[BumRushDaShow]

25. "Case counts are meaningless."

They are not "meaningless" from a statistics standpoint (which is a weakness of probably the majority of the population who are math- and science-challenged).

If you have a small city with a population of 100,000 and you know in general, there is say, a small infection (positivity) rate of "1%", then 1% of 100,000 = 1000. And of those (based on how the variant manifests), 0.04% might be hospitalized (which is what CDC calculated for the peak of the last Omicron wave], i.e., "38.4 per 100,000" ), that means "less than 1 person" is hospitalized ( "0.4" of a person ) out of 1000 infected, obviously a very small number.

But once that same crazy-spreading variant starts moving through a community with little or no mitigation - and that means not only hitting the unvaccinated (including children under 5 who are not eligible and even some older children 5 - 11 because they were only recently approved and unfortunately about 34% of them have actually had at least one dose), but is hitting the vaccinated (and boosted) as well as reinfecting some people, then there is a cause for concern.

So now say your infections are up to 20% - 30% of the population (which is what was happening during the peak of the last Omicron wave), and using the "low" number of 20%, that means instead of 1000 infected, you have 20,000. If you keep the same "0.04% hospitalization rate", you are now up to 8, and if that town is in a county with say 1,000,000 people who share a limited number of hospitals and that county also has the same "20% infections", you now might have 200,000 "cases" (positives), and could potentially have 80 hospitalizations that could fill up ICUs in that county's hospital system.

I.e., the more the "cases" the more the possibility of everything else that can go along with that. They call it a "multiplier effect".

And hospitalizations of vaccinated did occur and were much higher compared to earlier variants (from CDC - https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitalizations-vaccination).



Having a booster helped in that case -



So Omicron caused a surge of "breakthroughs" - just due to how the virus mutated. This doesn't mean the vaccines are useless but again is reflecting "raw numbers". The debate that suddenly had metrics shift to hospitalizations was due to a concern that many who were in the hospital during that last wave for other illnesses ended up testing positive for COVID. But the critical thing in this case would be for reported data to differentiate the "hospitalization caused by COVID" vs "hospitalization caused by something else but exacerbated by COVID".

It's like what happens in the summer during heatwaves and trying to differentiate people "dying from heat stroke" vs "dying from heart disease or other malady that was prompted by exposure to extreme heat".