The slow post-Labor Day decline in new U.S. COVID-19 cases continues. The U.S. is now at 13 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, down one from last week.
Deaths and hospitalizations are about where they were last week, at 330 and 4300 per day, respectively.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 10/6/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
So, while parts of Europe are starting their winter wave, and while the U.S had a winter COVID wave for the past two years, there’s really no firm sign of that happening this year. Yet. The South continues to see more rapid declines in new cases than other areas, as shown in my last post. Overall, cases continue to decline at a steady rate.
Flu Vaccine and all that: Figures don’t lie, unless they are figures about liars.
I keep seeing reporting stating that people fewer people are getting the flu vaccine this year. If true, I find that odd, given that nothing has changed about flu, or flu vaccine.
Only this week did the CDC start publishing any hard numbers on that. They really won’t publish anything substantial on flu vaccine uptake until the middle of next month.
But there are a few glimmers of information suggesting that yes, this year’s flu vaccine is off to a slow start compared to last year. As of early September, uptake was down by maybe one-fifth.
Source: CDC weekly flu vaccination dashboard, accessed 10/6/2022
I don’t know how that compares to prior years because I can’t seem to find that information on the CDC website. And, that said, those who are vaccinated by early September typically account for maybe 3% of the final year total. So I’d say it’s a little too soon to tell.
Weirdly, based on self-reported data — i.e., people who claim they got a flu shot — it looks like the fraction of the U.S. adult population getting a flu shot rose in the COVID era. (Note that this ends with the 2020-21 flu season. It doesn’t show last year’s uptake.)
Source: CDC fluview.
In the course of my career I used the data source for that graph above, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). You that you have to take those numbers with a grain of salt, because people lie about their preventive services use. A lot. Above, 75% of elderly persons claimed they got a flu shot in the 2020-21 season. If, by contrast, you look at claims (bills) for flu vaccine, processed for individuals in traditional Medicare, you’ll find that 58% actually got a flu shot in the 2020-21 season (Source: CDC).
If you look at what the CDC says, from presumably harder data sources than mere self-report, you can find this, regarding flu vaccination in the U.S.:
Overall, during the 2021-2022 flu season, about 51% of the U.S. population 6 months and older received a flu vaccine, which has changed little compared to the previous two flu seasons and even prior to the pandemic.
Source: CDC 2022-23 flu season vaccination kickoff.
And they publish the data to back that up:
Source: Link for 2021-2022 flu season coverage, from the CDC 2022-2023 vaccination kickoff
So, there has been an upward trend in people saying that they got a flu shot. But in fact, that’s just an upward trend in lying, not an upward trend in actually getting the flu shot.
Rephrasing: COVID-SHMOVID. Half of U.S. adults get the flu vaccine. Half don’t.
Apparently the only thing COVID-19 did was increase the number of bullshitters. Yeah, who would have guessed that?
I get the flu vaccine every year. That said, one of the biggest eye-openers for me, from COVID, was exactly how poor the flu vaccine is. In an average year, it’s about 30% effective at preventing flu infection. (It is almost certainly more effective at preventing hospitalization and death, but I can’t recall seeing hard numbers for that.)
Source: US Centers for Disease Control.
That’s all based on the somewhat-convoluted way in which the CDC estimates the effectiveness of the flu vaccine each year (see Post #741). If nothing else, the inclusion of asymptomatic cases in those results means the the CDC’s effectiveness estimate for flu vaccine isn’t directly comparable to its estimate for COVID-19 vaccine.
Finally, if you want the current COVID-19 vaccine numbers, for the new vaccine, you still have to dig those out of a data table on the CDC website. As of September 28, 7.6M people in the U.S. had gotten the new bivalent vaccine. That compares to 4.3M about a week ago (Post #1599). So the count is low, but it’s still growing rapidly.
